ComputerUser: “Postal Service spokesman Gerry Kreienkamp said that there is a certain irony to the fact that the agency has sealed a
marketing deal with Microsoft while the Justice Department and state attorneys general are locked in settlement talks with
the software company over antitrust charges, but said there is no conflict.”

CoreSense, Inc. a software company located in Troy, New York has created a comprehensive eCommerce and business management package built on all open source technology. Running on Linux, MySQL and PHP through the Apache Web Server, CoreSense provides Fortune 500 eCommerce Functionality at a price that a small to midsize business can afford. CoreSense enables businesses to compete in the global marketplace by managing the complexity of multi-channel sales, order fulfillment logistics, product catalog management and customer relationship management from a single, central system.

BBC: “At the moment applications are built very much in a
tightly-coupled, monolithic fashion that isn’t very
flexible,” Mark Greatorex, director of Microsoft’s .Net
developer group, told BBC News Online.

By contrast programs built
with .Net, and rival initiatives
such as Java Enterprise
Edition (J2EE), will happily
swap data across networks
from the moment they are
created.”

Cacao writes: “For all of you who want to improve your Linux security, stability and performance, Dr. Ricardo Galli, member of UIB – Balearic Islands University (Spain) and President of
Bulma (the lug at Balearic Islands) has written an article called “Journal File Systems in Linux“ “This is a lightly modified version of a couple of articles published in Novática (Spanish) and Upgrade (English) where we explain the implementation of all journaling file systems available for Linux.”

Ricardo Galli includes, in a plain manner, its basics, characteristics and implementation (The Linux Virtual File
System, Linux Page-cache and Buffer-cache, Integration of page and buffer cache, Journaling File Systems, B-Trees,
ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, Ext3, Performance and Conclusions), including several links to Resources and Benchmarks.

Spanish version of the document also available.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Clustering is getting more popular as virtual machines are enabling regular
people like you and me to run clusters on the desktop (see Grant Gross’ story
about User-mode Linux.) Here’s a site that caters to parallel computing freaks
and other ultra-high-tech dudes. If you’re into Fortran, there’s somethere here
for you.

LinuxHPTC.com is new, with the first headlines appearing in December 2001. It
specializes in high performance technical computing (hence the HPTC), with an
emphasis on beowulf clustering. The site posts links to items like “Build a
large, cheap Linux file-server” and news about a LinuxWorld session about
“clusters in the enterprise.”

HPTC has sections for community, training
(though that page wasn’t working when I visited), and a really spiffy page full
of docs and faqs — like the “Cluster Quick Start,” and the “Beowulf
Installation and Administration How-To.” The Cluster Quick Start was written in
1999, and assumes a Red Hat 5.1 or 5.2 installation. But it can be useful for
newer setups, and there’s some great background on what a cluster really is, and
what the difference is between a cluster and a network of workstations. By
following other links, you’ll find out about COCOA (Cost Effective Computing
Array), Flat Neighborhood Networks, and
YABIH (Yet Another Beowulf Installation How-to).

There are also handy pages of links to appropriate hardware and companies that
sell it, software companies who do clusters (like Turbolinux, TeraPort, Myricom,
and Linux NetworX), and a small page of projects. The events page, sadly, was
also broken when I was there.

LinuxHPTC.com is incomplete, but appears
to be frequently updated, and the information it does carry is informative if
you want to learn more about clusters.

It’s at kt.zork.net. “Welcome to KC KDE! It is bound to be a wild week as CVS is open for binary incompatible commits right through until Friday, January 25. Final
changes, shifts and decisions are being made in preparation for that nervy moment when the project decides that the code in CVS HEAD is
what will be KDE3. Since KDE3 will most likely have a shelf life of at least a couple of years this is no small decision.”

Anonymous Reader writes “A vehicle-based embedded Linux system with nationwide wireless networking and GPS is a big task, right? Make it approachable by starting with the Earthlink SPARK system, as explained by David Beckemeyer in this online article at ELJonline.”

Adam Wiggins writes “I wrote an essay about my employer’s recent transition to open source on the desktop. Read it here:

http://people.trustcommerce.com/~adam/office.html”

No Starch Press is pleased to announce the winners of the SDL GAME DEVELOPMENT CONTEST. Michael Speck won first place with “LBreakout 2,” an Arkanoid-genre game. Andreas Roever came in second place with “Tower Toppler,” a tower climbing game. And Bill Kendrick won third place with “Vectoroids,” an incarnation of Asteroids. All 25 entries are now available for download: http://www.nostarch.com/game_contest_results.htm.

With an open call to the gaming community, contestants were challenged to create a computer game under 1 megabyte using the Simple DirectMedia Layer. Contestants responded with a wide range of game types, including clones of Asteroids, Arkanoid, Missile Command, Bomberman, and Connect Four. Original concepts include “Wok”, a highly unconventional ball tossing game, “54321”, a mind-twisting 4-dimensional puzzle game, and “E-Type”, a typing tutor program.

John Hall, a contributing author of PROGRAMMING LINUX GAMES ($39.95, 1-886411-49-2, No Starch Press, http://www.nostarch.com/?plg) wanted to create a forum for resident game developers and newbies alike. “There is no lack of talent and creativity in the free software world, but sometimes people need a little motivation to put their ideas into code. The goal of this contest was to motivate amateur game programmers to bring their projects nearer to completion, and with several previously unseen game submissions, I believe we succeeded.”

The contest was sponsored by NO STARCH PRESS ( http://www.nostarch.com), publishers of PROGRAMMING LINUX GAMES, a Linux Journal Press book, LINUX JOURNAL ( http://www.linuxjournal.com), the leading Linux magazine, and LOKI SOFTWARE, INC. ( http://www.lokisoftware.com).

Media Contact: Amanda Staab, 415-863-9900,
amanda@nostarch.com

From The Register:
“After arranging a tete a tete between two representatives of the Linux
kernel team and AMD, Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins has drawn some
initial conclusions on the bug affecting Linux users on AMD Athlon AGP
systems.”