jvm writes "The former game developer Pumpkin Studios has released the source for their 3D real-time strategy game Warzone 2100 under the GNU General Public License. (Direct link to the source archive.) Previously released just for Microsoft Windows and Sony PlayStation, this source release permits this 1999 game to be ported to other platforms, such at GNU/Linux and MacOS. You can join in the developer discussion at the RealTimeStrategies Warzone 2100 Redevelopment Project forum. Note that only the source has been released; an original copy of the game is required to obtain the other parts of the game (graphics, sounds, etc.)"

linhux writes "A reported on Gnuheter (in Swedish) and elsewhere, OpenOffice.org has been translated to Swahili in a joint collaboration effort of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) and a company called IT+46, and funded by the university and Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. Neither Microsoft Office nor Windows supports Swahili. Currently, only the Tanzanian dialect has been completed, but Kenyan, Congo and Ugandan dialects are on their way. It's called Jambo OpenOffice and is part of the Kilinux Open Swahili Localization Project."

MROD writes "The KDE Project has announced the release of KDE 3.3.2 with what looks like lots of fixes for the HTML engine and kmail. So, it looks like the Sun SPARC machines at work will be chewing on the source for the next week or so to get a running version."

latroM writes "Finally, after many years of waiting, the Hurd has got support for partitions larger than 2GB. The patch is told to be very stable and its development was started about a year and a half ago. Michael Bank writes: 'I hacked the Debian package so far that I make it build a statically compiled ext2fs with Ogi's patch (20041029) for partitions > 2GB. For now, I decided to just copy libpager, libdiskfs and ext2fs to libpager-ogi, libdiskfs-ogi and ext2fs-ogi, apply his patch and dump the result as a new patch. Another patch modifies the Makefiles accordingly.' I did some basic tests with those packages and they work fine for me so far. Any comments on how they work for people and how to possibly improve the packaging and integration of the patch are very welcome."

cellulama writes "Is virtual reality back? A commercial vendor has started developing for Croquet, which is an open-source tool for collaborating and sharing data, with an emphasis on 3D visualization. The system was developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for research and "co-creativity," but a company named 3Dsolve is looking for military applications. What's next -- open-source America's Army?"

Effugas writes "I've completed an applied security analysis (pdf) of MD5 given Xiaoyun Wang et al's collision attack (covered here and here). From an applied perspective, the attack itself is pretty limited -- essentially, we can create 'doppelganger' blocks (my term) anywhere inside a file that may be swapped out, one for another, without altering the final MD5 hash. This lets us create any number of binary-inequal files with the same md5sum. But MD5 uses an appendable cascade construction -- in other words, if you happen to find yourself with two files that MD5 to the same hash, an arbitrary payload can be applied to both files and they'll still have the same hash. Wang released the two files needed (but not the collision finder itself). A tool, Stripwire, demonstrates the use of colliding datasets to create two executable packages with wildly different behavior but the same MD5 hash. The faults discovered are problematic but not yet fatal; developers (particularly of P2P software) who claim they'd like advance notice that their systems will fail should take note."

mAriuZ writes "In many ways, it seems like Python and Parrot are from different planets. In Python, the general approach seems to be to reduce everything possible to a canonical form as early as possible, and then deal with everything consistently. In Parrot, the general approach seems to be to leave everything in its original form as long as possible, and then deal with everything separately."

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 is now available for download on Mozilla's FTP server." Here is the press release announcing the release. Virtual folders and RSS integration, coupled with the recent hype surrounding Firefox, might give this sucker some serious momentum.

prostoalex (Alex Moskalyuk) writes "After the Presidential election process and U.S. foreign policy directions, outsourcing is a topic guaranteed to stir up heated debate. Bill Blunden's Offshoring IT is not a 'how-to' guide, as one might expect from the title. It's a collection of stats, figures and opinions on outsourcing information technology to foreign providers." Read on for the rest of Moskalyuk's review; watch out too for my upcoming review of N. Sivakumar's Debugging Indian Computer Programmers: Dude, did I steal your job?.

Uberhacker.Com writes "HP has given up on trying to bring key parts of Compaq/DEC's Tru64 operating system into HP-UX. They had once planned for the Tru64 goodies to arrive this year and made a big deal of this quick turnaround when it first acquired Compaq. Ironically, HP also announced today that it is expanding its Alpha RetainTrust program for Tru64 UNIX customers." The linked article also notes that HP has decided that it will proceed forward with purchasing some of the technology from Veritas.

Amit Upadhyay writes "KDE's award winning integrated development environment KDevelop, has integrated support for Ruby, an excellent and easy to use object oriented scrpting language. If you are looking for a good programming tool for quickly developing a professional one off application, Ruby (with KDE bindings) maybe just the thing for you. There is a quick tutorial and an online book to get you started. You may also want to read a quite informative comparison of Python with Ruby. If you are web developer or write enterprise applications with JAVA etc, take a look at Ruby on Rails(api), they have a nice blog too. KDevelop provides a GUI builder and Debugger for rapid application development(RAD) with Ruby, which is getting better. There is a nice tutorial on using KDE libraries with Ruby. And if you have lots of code in C/C++, extending Ruby to use them is easy.
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Jeferey Bakins writes "In an effort, by Jean-Francois Brousseau (jfb@openbsd.org), to rid the OpenBSD CVS tree of GPL'ed licensed code, OpenCVS is now officially part of the OpenBSD project. For more details, see the OpenCVS homepage; http://www.openbsd.org/opencvs/"

CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an interview by Steve Bourne with Bruce Lindsay, responsible for a lot of the SQL and RDBMS we use today, in which they discuss error detection and recovery. My favorite part other than the photos is the definition of Heisenbugs - those problems that disappear only when you explicitly look for them."

An anonymous reader writes "Spotted over at the Economist: 'Sliding-block puzzles look easy, but they can be tricky to solve. The best known is the 15 Puzzle, which became hugely popular in the late 1870s. This involves square tiles labelled with the numbers 1 to 15, which must be arranged in the correct order inside a four-by-four frame.' While we've all tried these puzzles, the inventor of Quzzle set out to design the easiest looking - yet most difficult puzzle around and turned to CS to find it. While the original article touches on it, at the puzzle's site you'll find Jim Lewis, the inventor, wrote a program in Haskell, a functional programming language to find the best design."

A8 writes "The biggest European Hacker Conference 21C3 from 27th to 29th Dec., organised by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), just released version 0.9 of the Fahrplan (programme schedule)."

Tim writes "Tim Bray and Microsoft's Joe Marini are doing a back-and forth on Open Source. Tim serves (open everything), Joe returns (secret-source is good business) and Tim volleys (the closed-source niche is shrinking)."

Jonathan Edwards writes "The Lightweight Languages Workshop (LL4) will be webcast live from MIT tomorrow. Previous years have seen lively discussions between the proponents of languages like Perl, Python, and Scheme. Check out the program at the website."

slipandfall asks: "I just started work at a 100% Windows shop (no chance of changing this) and would love to implement Bugzilla for issue tracking but statements like this - 'Making Bugzilla work on Windows is still a painful processes.' in the OS-Specific installation notes don't make it seem reasonable. Since there is no chance of using Linux/UNIX here, can I get people's experiences using Bugzilla on Windows or experience with a tool (open source or not) on Windows with similar notification, discussion and issue tracking features?"

norburym (Mary Norbury-Glaser) writes "As the title suggests, Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization is intended for the range of users between novice and professional. It may seem difficult for one book to suit such a wide readership without losing readers on either end of the spectrum, or perhaps without providing adequate coverage to any particular audience, Apress has done what many other publishers have failed to do by providing an excellent series of 'novice to professional' books. An example of their dedication to detail and perfection is the inclusion of top-notch technical reviewers (Mike Hillyer, in this case, often found haunting Experts Exchange as one of the top MySQL experts) who provide expertise to the series. Authors Jon Stephens and Chad Russell have extensive combined PHP and MySQL experience that shows in the content of this volume. Readers with some MySQL experience who desire a broader range of instruction will gain much from this book. Experienced users will find quite a lot of valuable information that will extend their existing knowledge base. Concepts in design are better learned from the beginning to avoid repeating poor programming mistakes, but it's never too late to learn good practices." Read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.

Niek writes "The Netherlands Forensic Institute (part of the Dutch Ministry of Justice) has open sourced one of their high-profile software frameworks, TULP2G. With this BSD licensed framework, one can extract and decode all data from GSM SIM cards, e.g. called phone numbers and received SMS messages. This was previously only possible with commercial software. Dutch press release, Powerpoint presentation. Earlier this year, the Dutch government GPLed their online election software."