With TiVo's release of the much anticipated Home Media Option (anticipated by me, anyway), I renewed my quest to find a way to integrate my computer's media files with my TV. TiVo's solution is not an option for me, because I don't have a Series2, and even if I did, the TiVo solution doesn't work with DirecTV units (for now, anyway). So I looked into something I saw a few months ago on ThinkGeek: QCast Tuner for PlayStation 2.

Anonymous Coward writes "I'm pleased to annouce the tentative schedule for YAPC::NA::2003 (Yet Another Perl Conference, North America). Please visit the website to view it. It should only change if conflicts arise, or speakers can't make it. If this happens, slots will be filled with other great talks. Don't forget to register so you don't miss out! Visit the website for other new information on a regular basis!"

Alan Eibner submitted this review of Addison-Wesley's Open Source Web Development With LAMP. He writes "The number of books about Web development technologies is astounding. Some claim you can learn everything you need to know in 24 hours. Others require several complementary volumes in order to learn the subject. Why another web development book? And what sets this one apart from the rest?" Read on for the rest of Alan's chapter-by-chapter review. Update: 04/11 18:22 GMT by T : I'd called this an O'Reilly book rather than Addison-Wesley; sorry, now fixed.

Saint Aardvark writes "According to this article, a honeypot was recently set up on two wireless LANs. 25% of the connections observed were deliberate, and 71% of those were to send spam. Even more reason to take care of your ether." These statistics should be taken with a salt lick...

Gabor Szabo writes "For anyone interested in Perl, Yet Another Perl Conference is coming to Haifa, Israel on May 11th. Registration is now open. Though the schedule is not final yet the list of presentations is already finished. There are going to be a quite some excellent presentations including Perl and .NET. This is a great way to get involved in the Perl community."

ggoebel writes "Extending and Embedding Perl is, as it boldly states on the cover, 'The definitive guide to XS, embedding, and the Perl internals.' This book is well organized and information dense. One could spend days sifting through the available perlapi, perlcall, perlembed, perlguts perlxs, perlxstut, and h2xs documentation. After which you'll probably understand very well references to nethack's 'You are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike.' Or you could get yourself a copy of this book and find your way out of the maze." Read on for the rest of ggoebel's review.

ggoebel writes "Programming Web Services with Perl is principally a book on implementing solutions using XML-RPC and SOAP in Perl. It also covers complementary and alternative standards such as WSDL, UDDI, and REST in some detail. And on the periphery, it finishes with a whirlwind tour of developing message routing, alternative data encoding within XML, security, transactions, workflow, internationalization, service discovery, extension, and management techniques and specifications." Read on for ggoebel's full review.

signlink writes "A new online workshop starts today, March 30th, and the first topic is posted. We are running a free perl workshop which will take place over the next ten weeks at http://linux.biondosmith.com . Although free, registration is required - you need to use a valid email address. This will be an interactive online workshop - we will learn to install, read and modify freeware cgi-scripts, and using the skills this teaches us we will write our own. Emphasis will be on the reusability of code, and the course will complete a class project - we will write a form-mail program that executes some user-validation features."

Roland Piquepaille writes "A University of Toronto researcher has developed a flat lens that doesn't respect the "normal" laws of nature and could significantly enhance the resolution of imaged objects. "The creation of an unusual flat lens may finally resolve a long-running controversy about the existence of materials that have metaphysical qualities -- so-called "metamaterials" -- that transcend the laws of nature. The lens could lead to amplified antennas, smaller cell phones and increased data storage on CD-ROMs. As says George Eleftheriades, the Toronto professor, "This is new physics." Check this column for more details and other references to metamaterials."

These are LinuxWorld columnist Nick Petreley's answers to your questions about the (somewhat controversial) Evans Data Survey he helped analyze that shows Linux is taking more market share from Windows than from Unix.

Wee writes "Linux Server Hacks is not a book which will teach you system administration. In fact, if you aren't already familiar with how to set up and run Linux, this book will likely confuse you. It is also not a book which will teach you how to break into Linux servers. The word 'hack' in this case is not a pejorative. What LSH will do is show you how to fully tweak that Linux box you already run. It will show you new (and possibly better) ways to do the things you already do. The book will probably not make you a better admin, but it will almost certainly save you some time or give you at least one 'Why didn't I ever think of that?' head-scratcher." Read on for the rest of Wee's review.

honestpuck writes "It has been quite a while since I have come across a book I'd label 'essential.' The last for non-programming computer users was Robin Williams' The Mac Is Not A Typewriter which I bought for a number of new Macintosh users." Now, though, honestpuck has found another book which he says is required reading for modern computer users -- read on for his review of O'Reilly's Google Hacks.

Connectix recently released version 6 of Virtual PC, the standard for emulating Windows on a Mac. With version 5, the main feature was Mac OS X compatibility. With version 6, the focus is on better performance and Mac integration.

Xoanon (from TheOneRing.net) writes "I was recently privileged enough to view a lecture by Milton Ngan. As far as IT stuff goes, Milton has a pretty good job. You see, he is the Digital Operations Manager at Weta Digital. He is basically the architect for all the technical side of things at Weta. Last night he came and gave a 1 hour lecture at Victoria University outlining the hurdles and obstacles that needed to be overcome to produce the stunning 3D graphics lying in each of the Lord of the Rings movies. The lecture itself was full of lots of facts about Weta, the IT side of things and it also included some very cool behind the scenes shots of The Two Towers. The following is a detailed report from the event, where Ngan gave us an amazing behind-the-scenes look at WETAs infrastructure, their mainframes and various workstations. There is also a TON of info in regards to the special effects process, and news about MASSIVE. Take a look."

Slashback tonight brings a few followups to recent Slashdot postings on the fate of model rocketry in the new, hypercautious America; a few Python gatherings for those who prefer that language to Perl; and a response from Los Alamos to recent claims of lax security. Enjoy!

data64 writes "The latest Apocalypse talks about subroutines. Looks like we finally get type signatures which are way more powerful than the rudimentary prototypes available with Perl5."

Anonymous Coward writes "Registration for YAPC::NA is in process. It will be held in Boca Raton, FL June 16-18. YAPC is a low-cost ($85USD) conference, but still has high quality speakers and topics. Although submissions for talks is still going on (ends March 15), many terrific ones are already in the queue. Register today!"

minaguib writes "For anyone interested in Perl, Yet Another Perl Conference is coming to Ottawa, Canada May 15th and 16th. Pre-Registration is now open and the calendar is not completely finalized, as they are still accepting presenter entries. This is a great way to get involved either as a presenter or an attendee."

Barry mentions his "sender pays" spamfighting plan more than once in his answers to your questions, and discuessed it at length in an InternetWeek.com article published on Feb. 20. Is Barry's plan workable? Do you have a better idea? Or should we all just get used to spam as part of the online experience, and learn to live with it and block it as best we can?

A reader writes:" Persistence for object-oriented systems is an incredibly cumbersome task to deal with when building many kinds of applications: mapping objects to tables, XML, flat files or use some other non-OO way to represent data destroys encapsulation completely, and is generally slow, both at development and at runtime. The Object Prevalence concept, developed by the Prevayler team, and implemented in Java, C#, Smalltalk, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Delphi, can be a great a solution to this mess. The concept is pretty simple: keep all the objects in RAM and serialize the commands that change those objects, optionally saving the whole system to disk every now and then (late at night, for example). This architecture results in query speeds that many people won't believe until they see for themselves: some benchmarks point out that it's 9000 times faster than a fully-cached-in-RAM Oracle database, for example. Good thing is: they can see it for themselves. Here's an article about it, in case you want to learn more."