Canada’s Financial Post reports that Corel Corp.’s two quarters of profit, plus the acquisition of a competitor and the launch of new graphic design software have investors slowly getting interested in Corel again.

Arnaud LAPREVOTE writes about SigLab, a graphical signal calculator: The Free&ALter Soft company is ditributing its softwares under the GPL licence, among others SigLab, that can be freely downloaded from the CVS Sourceforge server.
Introduction
SigLab is a calculator specially designed for working on signals. You may load, save or generate signals, do various operations on and between the signals (addition, …, log, abs, sin, …, filtering, convolution, fft, correlation).
SigLab was designed for being able to handle results of simulations or measurements. It means it can handle signals with millions of points in just keeping in memory a small piece of each signals. However, to keep good performance, it caches in memory portions of the signals.
SigLab was specifically thought for Ptolemy users. You will then find stars ready to use. SigLab will start at the end of the simulation and show all signals that you asked.

Requirements
You need a working copy of SciLab 2.5 beta for having SigLab working. You also need tcl/tk 8.xx (just tested on 8.0). SigLab was tested under Solaris, Windows and Linux.

Licence
SigLab is now under GPL. Siglab is originally a sponsorware. It was developped thanks to the support of the C2R (Research Center on RadioDiffusion and RadioCommunications) of TéléDiffusion de France (a subsidiary of France Telecom) and thanks to Philips Semicondictors Rennes. You can thank these companies for having accepted to share the tools they use with everybody. We are still looking for sponsors to improve SigLab (improvement of integration with SciLab, filter design interface, management of multidimensionnal signals, …).

The downloading site: http://siglab.sourceforge.net/
The site of the Free&ALter Soft company:
http://www.freealter.com

Advogato.org has an appeal by the maintainer of the KDE Usability Project for people to get involved with usability reports.

eWeek reports that the second coming of the Code Red worm was a bigger flop than “Caddyshack II.” CBS News tells a different story.

DaemonNews.org has an article about general security issues for FreeBSD. “The funny thing about security is that we actually have quite a lot of it in the UNIX paradigm. We have users, groups, chroot,
secure levels, and jails. The only problem is that we don’t use any of it by default. Most services are run as root – pop3, ftp,
ssh, ident, sendmail, talkd, named, ntpd, and even the ones that aren’t, such as apache, barely touch the first layer of
security offered in FreeBSD: each runs as its own user and group but doesn’t bother with anything else. Even when
programs such as named have security-minded options, they tend to not use them by default.”

“So you’ve heard a lot about the power of Linux and want to try it out for yourself. Where do you start? Whether you’re a
long-time Linux user or a total newbie who needs to obtain Linux software for that first install, it is easy to become
overwhelmed by the vast amount of Linux information available. Finding the best approach to getting help on a particular
problem is no simple task. Here’s an attempt to outline the most efficient means of getting help with Linux.” More at FreeOS.com.

BBC: “A decoy computer network set up to record every
attempt to crack it open and subvert it has revealed just
how active and determined malicious hackers have
become.

Statistics gathered by the
network show that computers
connected to the web are
scanned for weaknesses up
to 14 times per day and that,
on average, an attempt will
be made to break into a
net-connected computer
every three days.”

Wired: “New legislation, hailed by the music and movie industries, would create a standard for hearing and viewing digital content. It’s about time, right? Well, critics worry that too many rights would be trampled in the process.”

The Register: “Three versions of the long-awaited Puma upgrade to Mac OS X – version 10.1 –
appear to be in circulation, according to BetaNews, and some fairly authoritative
reports confirm that the speed improvements demonstrated by Steve Jobs at
Macworld Expo New York are very real.”

Kirill Tikhonov writes: “Russian news site Compulenta has a story about new powerful supercomputer MBC-1000M launched in Moscow’s Joint Supercomputer Center. According to the Russian Minister of Industry, Science and Technologies, Russia now holds the third place among the world’s manufacturers of high performance supercomputers. Which means that all European countries and China were left behind. The peak performance of the system is 1 Tflops, the value that makes up the estimated performance speed of the human brain.”