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."

Robby Russell writes "Paper books have a tendency to accumulate dust, take up large amounts of shelf space and be a painful reminder that you need to get rid of stuff when moving time comes and you find yourself packing up the same Pascal book for an eighth time. Granted, the book provides a level of self-accomplishment and it's always great to have your best books out in direct sight of anyone who may come over to your home or office. You know the type; the ones who are observant and notice the books that you want the world to know that you've read, as if you were to say, 'Been there, done that.' You can't tell me that you don't put some of them up intentionally. ;-)" Russell is taken with O'Reilly's floating-rental system called Safari; read on for his review of the system.

cascadefx writes "There is a great article on writing a Vector Space Search Engine in Perl over at the Orielly Network's Perl.com site. Most search engines, such as Google, use a reverse keyword index algorithm. The article, complete with code, proves yet again that there is (definitely) more than one way to do it. Try your hand. Add improvements and you may have a handy search engine for your site or... the next Google-killer."

TheTheologian writes "In his InfoWorld column, Chad Dickerson says 'there is a level of quiet discomfort between the "scripting" versus "programming" factions in some corporate development environments in which I have participated. In some instances, executive-level technology management has held scripting languages in disdain as not being "real" languages for day-to-day problem solving, which has discouraged highly talented scripters on staff from practicing their craft. In such an environment, scripters are relegated to the lower ranks ... ' He goes on to say that some companies will assign Java and C++ programmers tasks that take them weeks but could be done by Perl or Python programmers in a few hours. Is it true that some companies are so overcome with code bias they'd assign weeks of unnecessary work rather than give it to the scripting untouchables?"

seldo writes "The BBC has an article up about blogging from your mobile phone. The idea is not really news, but the interesting part is the host of links to interesting new (free) software that lets you do it, including: Manywhere Moblogger (Java), WAPBlog (Perl), and KABLOG (J2ME mobile Java, runs on devices like Palms, the Treo and Blackberries). All three of these interface to also-free server side tech which you need to set up yourself (KABLOG interfaces to the popular MovableType server and compatibles). The article also mentions the proprietary foneblog service which seems very easy to use, but it is software intended to be run by cellphone companies for their users."

Leeji writes "Here is an interesting read about one geek's project to build and launch a weather balloon. The flight recorder is a small $200 Soekris Engineering computer running Bering Linux. It also uses a Garmin GPS, HAM packet radio, an automated Aiptek Pencam Trio digital camera, army surplus batteries, and lots of geek duct tape."

Hirsto writes "Found this interesting story about breakthrough research on next generation drives. Here is a link to the NSF press release on this technology which supposedly enables storage densities of greater than 1 terabit per square inch. Devices might be on the market in 7 years, give or take."

An anonymous reader writes "OpenDarwin released a 'fixed' version of the Darwin 6.0.2 ISO (the OpenDarwin-20030213 Binary Release) for both x86 and PPC. It is currently installing, so I can't tell you all what works now, etc. Hopefully I can use my old PC box as a server with this..." Apparently, it is mostly a recompile, without local OpenDarwin modifications. It doesn't include perl, pending integration of perl 5.8 ... could this mean Mac OS X will finally have a current perl in the next Mac OS X release?

1010011010 writes "A moderator on the AVSForum website has been deposed in the lawsuit against SonicBLUE. He says, "Never forget that the internet is as huge as it is tiny. Your off-the-cuff remark on some website you don't even remember visiting may someday be presented to you on a sheet of paper with an exhibit number." He goes on, "Right now, the RIAA has shown that it is perfectly willing to sue individual users who are believed to be sharing copyrighted material over the internet. I believe that it is certainly possible that copyright holders may seek to make their point directly to the users of ReplayTV by suing those users who are believed to be using the Show Sharing in a manner that they believe infringes on their copyrights." And, "I present this scenario, along with my first comment, in order to make sure that people understand what could possibly be at stake in this case. I know it seems unfathomable that you could buy a consumer electronics device at Best Buy and then be sued for using all of its features. There was a time when I would have said "what would they do, sue everyone?" But now I realize that the answer is that they don't have to sue everyone. They just need to sue a few to make the point." This worries me, as I've written my own software client (I'll decline linking to it here, thanks) for the Replay, so that I can perform the digital equivalent of saving shows I like on VHS tape, just like the Boston Strangler. I wonder if I will be re-living the CueCat vague-legal-threat experience, except that this time it won't be so vague? Maybe this should be an Ask Slashdot -- "Where does the RIAA get off?" As jleavens, the moderator who was deposed, goes on to say, "Join the EFF or simply donate a few dollars (http://www.eff.org/perl/join)." I would like to add, "Do not support the RIAA and other greedy organizations actively working to screw you." Yeah, seems obvious. Do something about it. Don't just not buy their CDs. Do everything you can to let people know how awful they are. And, if they want to use the legal system -- well, that's a sword with two edges. How do we get the RIAA outlawed? I think it's come to, "What's bad for the RIAA is good for America.""

UVwarning writes "I submitted a review to Slashdot about a month ago complaining about various problems with Philips' streamium MCi-200 (an Internet micro hi-fi system). The main gripes being that Philips controls which Internet radio stations you can listen to and that the PC-link software (which is used to serve MP3s from your PC to your Streamium) only runs on Windows. I managed to fix both of these problems by reverse engineering the PC-link protocol and writing my own pc-link server in perl, which can be run on practically any OS, *and* can trick the Streamium into playing any Internet MP3 stream that you want! This is a must-have for any Streamium user. Here is a more detailed article along with the perl script and an outline of the PC-link protocol."

usr122122121 writes "A Macintouch User has discovered that iTunes maxes out at 32,000 songs." I did test this myself (a one-liner perl script to give each file a unique artist/album/title), and it's apparently true. How much it matters is an exercise left to the reader.

Kevin writes "This story is a follow up to yesterday's part 1 (hence the name) on the changes in Perl 6. Damian Conway (design team member): "There will be some learning involved, but it isn't like learning an entirely new language," he said. "It's more like adding a few new words to your vocabulary." It seems the perl intrepreter is getting overhauled as well."

Kevin writes "This story highlights some of the features being included in Perl 6. "There will be substantial changes in the move from Perl 5 to Perl 6. We've been hamstrung for a while by the need to maintain backward compatibility all the way back to Perl 1. There are some things we want to remove, because they seemed like good ideas when they were introduced but they're more trouble than [they're worth] now."