twelve71 (Alan Francis) writes "Apologies in advance for overuse of the word 'pragmatic,' but Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt together form a company called The Pragmatic Programmers, and published a book I'm sure many of you have read, titled The Pragmatic Programmer: from Journeyman to Master. The Pragmatic Programmer (or 'PragProg' as it is usually referred to) is a wonderful grab bag of 'good old common sense,' but its main strength (covering a very broad range of subjects) means that the authors have left a few holes around some important details. To plug some of these holes, and provide a good grounding for those just starting out, they have recently published 'The Pragmatic Starter Kit' - a set of books covering in detail some of the basics mentioned in PragProg." Read on for Alan's review of the latest book in the kit.

grd000 writes "I have been using Olero Software's Object Relational Mapping and Code Generation Tool (ORM) for Microsoft .NET for the last year or so with great success. I'm delighted to say that yesterday, the Olero folks decided to release their $495 tool as open source. I'm not sure what prompted the decision. Sluggish sales? In any event, this is a boon for .NET developers. ORM speeds up development by generating a C# or VB-targeted object based on a given database schema. Inserts, updates and deletes can be performed using simple or complex criteria in just a few lines of source code, and with transactional support."

Martin writes "Angelo Ovidi from XFDeb project released the first unofficial deb kernel packages supporting Global File System (GFS recently open source from RedHat) on a 2.6.8.1 vanilla kernel and all the set of utilities for GFS clustering (GULM, CCS, etc). The kernel was patched using the most recent CVS stuff from RedHat and it seems stable. I have tested on some servers. It has GNBD integrated in a monolithic way and it's ok. You can find all the stuff at xfdeb.sourceforge.net." In particular, here are kernel packages and GFS related packages.

bedouin writes "I occasionally telnet to some BBSs that are very rich in ANSI graphics. While I can usually navigate fine through message areas and file boards, playing classic door games like Food Fight is almost unbearable. For about a year I've been searching for a Mac OS X terminal emulator that can accurately draw ANSI graphics just as they would appear on DOS systems with ansi.sys, but haven't found anything yet. Any suggestions? A native (and free or shareware) Mac OS X app would be prefered, but I'm willing to use an X11 or maybe even classic alternative as well. So far I've experimented with iTerm, GLterm, and aterm with unimpressive results."

tricaric writes "Another asteroid passed, last March 31st, close to the Earth. This time it was only about 2 Earth radii from the Earth. The observation have been published only a few days ago, because 'Although the observed arc is only 44 minutes, the orbit is quite determinate and, given the exceptional nature of this close approach, the object is now receiving a designation.' Check out the ORSA animation!"

SeanCier writes "The SIGGraph 2004 conference showed off a lot of trends: high-dynamic-range (HDR) displays and video, suddenly ubiquitous general-purpose GPU programmability (it's not just for polygon shading anymore), 3D and high-colour displays, ever-more-refined fluid dynamics, crowd animation, and point-based graphics, to name just a few. But there was an unspoken undercurrent, a trend that's waiting to happen in the visual effects community, and happen in a big way: Open Source." Read on for more.

Cheese Source writes "As previously mentioned on Slashdot, HP's latest and greatest calculator is the HP49g+. While it sports a very powerful (for a calculator) ARM9 cpu, it is only 3 times the speed of the 49g, running at 4MHz. This is because it has to emulate an older processor. Of course, some calculator geeks are now writing adapting a free, open-source C compiler for it. Based on GCC, you can now make programs that run natively on the CPU between 12 and 203MHz. 1000 factorial is calculated and displayed in the blink of an eye (the built in command takes 30 seconds). It will also allow for some great games."

An anonymous reader writes "As discussed on Slashdot recently, Internet footage of Olympics events are being censored for US citizens. Wired.com is covering the issue in a recent story, discussing ways of defeating these measures. Duane Wessels, developer of the Squid caching proxy, and Len Sassaman, Mixmaster anonymity software author, are interviewed. Are they correct? Is geolocation content censorship impossible?"

sixstring355 writes "Intel has released the first functional version of its Centrino/IPW2200 chipset driver. for Linux (kernel 2.6.4+). Posts to the ipw2100/2200 developer mailing list report connection speeds of 450KB/s. See the feature list for more details."

Gentu writes "OSNews posted some exclusive screenshots of a new project in the Mono community: Cocoa#. Apparently there are a couple of Apple engineers helping out the project that allows developers to create graphical Cocoa applications under Mac OS X using the C#, Python or Basic language. Mono seems to be doing well in the Windows land too, allowing developers to use GTK# instead of Windows.Forms to create multi-platform apps."

prostoalex writes "Wireless LANs seem to be enjoying the tremendous amount of interest lately, if you judge by the number of book covers and articles written on the topic. It's no wonder that this year the sales of WLAN equipment will grow 20% and generate $2.1 billion - everyone seems to be installing a wireless network in their office, their apartment complex or their own backyard. With extending the network into the radio world one is always extending the opportunities for unwelcome visitors to become part of the network. This book is a hands-on guide on hacking wireless networks followed by the recipes and principles to protect WLANs." Read on for the rest of prostoalex's review of Wi-Foo .

thedude13 writes " Infoworld is running a story about a major security hole in AOL ® Instant Messenger(TM) and how it handles away messages. AIM is vulnerable to a buffer overflow via the auto-response away message mechanism. Yet another reason to switch to, IMHO, a better client such as gaim."

TioHoltzman writes "There's a new 0-6-5 release available of the VCF, aka the Visual Component Framework. This release has a slew of new features, and it looks like it could become a real contender against Trolltech's Qt toolkit. It currently runs on Win32 platforms with an active Mac OS X port underway. There's still lots to do, but it can run some of the samples now on OS X. There are some screenshots here (1), here (2), and here (3)."

sympleko (Matthew Leingang) writes "In Volume I of The PHP Anthology, Harry Fuecks showed some of the basic PHP functionality to solve a few simple problems, including how to object-orient your code, how to use PHP's hundreds of built-in functions, and how to use well-developed existing classes, be they from PEAR or other sites. In Volume II, he intends to 'blow your socks off by tackling some traditionally complex problems with the same principles--to great effect.' It's summertime and I'm sandals-only for the time being, so my socks remain safely in the top drawer. But the volume is nonetheless exciting." (Read on for the rest of Leingang's review, and check out last week's review of Volume I.)

Acidus writes "While researching for an embedded systems project (a magstripe enabled Coke machine), I was shocked by the lack of magstripe information: Programs/code that would run on a modern OS were all but nonexistant, articles that were 6-10 years old, etc. Further research proved hard, because I had become google's authoritative source. So Stripe Snoop was born, and is now at 1.5 . Stripe Snoop is a suite of research tools that captures, modifies, validates, generates, analyzes, and shares magstripe data, with an ever-growing database of card formats. Decoding everything from driver's licenses to banking cards, its features can analyze non-standard cards, such as NYC's Metrocard."

An anonymous reader writes "While there's been a few postings on events happening at DefCon 12, one event seems to have been overlooked. A new wireless packet injection tool was quietly released (unleashed?) during DefCon: AirPwn. Here's a write-up of the tool as deployed by its author and crew at DefCon 12."

jefftp writes "CERT announced today that there are several vulnerabilities in libpng, one is a buffer overflow which could potentially cause a PNG image file to execute arbitrary code. Libpng release 1.2.6rc1 addresses the problems covered by this CERT announcement, and can be obtained from the libpng Sourceforge project. A fully tested version is to be released in the next few weeks."

Noksagt writes "P2P isn't just for government documents anymore! Bibster assists researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic data in a peer-to-peer network. This project shows great promise to researchers who currently search for citations through centralized servers (Google, Scirus, CiteSeer, ISI. and many others). By making it decentralized, researchers can share bibliographic data with no subscription costs and avoid typing this data in by hand. It can import and export citations using bibtex. The project is GPLed and free clients for windows and Linux are available. There's also a Sourceforge page for Bibster, so you can checkout from the CVS if the Bibster site is slow."

HandyAndE writes "For everybody out there who has been waiting for Enlightenment 0.17 or been thinking what alternatives are there to Gnome/GTK and KDE/QT this is an important day for you. The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) today have an (albeit pre) release named Asparagus. From the E site: 'We are pleased to announce the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries Preview Release, codenamed "Asparagus"! After years of work, we've come to a place where it is time to start opening these powerful tools to the wider world to use.' " Read more for more information.

Adam K writes "It had to happen eventually. CPAN has finally gotten the sloccount treatment, and the results are interesting. At 15.4 million lines of code, CPAN is starting to approach the size of the entire Redhat 6.2 distribution mentioned in David Wheeler's original paper. Could this help explain perl's relatively low position in the SourceForge.net language numbers?"