Those of you who have sent in your disks and dollars over the past few months have shown that you do care and that we can make a difference. Thanks to you, the DDJ "Careware" project has already helped hundreds of people throughout the country and we hope to help many, many more. Briefly, "careware" is software developed by Dr. Dobb's authors and distributed to readers. Any money sent in for the software is donated by the authors to charitable organizations of their choosing.
Credit goes foremost to contributing editor Al Stevens who launched the Careware project with D-Flat, the C library he developed and sends to anyone who mails in a formatted diskette and self-addressed stamped mailer. All Al asks in return is that if you care, enclose a dollar or two that he can give to the Brevard County Food Bank in Florida. Over the past year, you have generously donated nearly $3000 to the Food Bank.
With his X-Sharp 3-D animation library, contributing editor Michael Abrash followed Al's lead. Michael sends his toolkit to anyone who mails in a diskette and SASE mailer and, if you include a couple of dollars, Michael forwards it to the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. In the past month alone, you've donated over $100 to this fine organization.
Now that 386BSD is available, Bill and Lynne Jolitz are the most recent participants in the Careware project. Bill and Lynne will be providing "Tiny386BSD," a minimal implementation of a UNIX-like operating system for 386/486 PCs. With Tiny386BSD, you can boot your PC and experiment with a UNIX-like operating system by performing some minimal UNIX-like operations. In reality, Tiny386BSD is the 386BSD boot disk-- a single floppy that lets you configure the PC's hard disk and load the binary floppy distribution (if you have it).
To get a copy of Tiny386BSD, send a high-density 3.5- or 5.25-inch diskette and SASE mailer to Tiny386BSD, DDJ, 411 Borel Ave., San Mateo, CA 94402. Again, if you care to enclose a dollar or two, Bill and Lynne will donate it to the Children's Support League of the East Bay, a clearing house that benefits disadvantaged children. Some of the agencies receiving assistance from the League have taught disabled children to learn and play through computers, given respite weekends to abused children, and set up after-school programs in depressed neighborhoods.
The complete 386BSD system is available over the Internet at both reyes. stanford.edu and agate.berkeley.edu in the /pub directory as well as numerous other ftp sites. We're also planning to make 386BSD available via M&T Online and the DDJ Forum on CompuServe.
For those of you who have been asking for DDJ source code listings via the Internet, they're available for anonymous ftp from site ftp.mv.com in the /pub/ddj directory. Login as "anonymous" and give your network address as the password.
The DDJ handwriting recognition contest is rapidly moving forward. By the time you receive next month's issue, the test harness with sample data will be complete and available. Currently the code has been tested on the Macintosh, SPARC, and DOS platforms.
But the really exciting news is that, thanks to Apple Computer, the first-place prize for the contest will be a Macintosh PowerBook 100 notebook computer.
Remember--you don't need a pen computer to participate in the contest. The test harness is platform-independent. You simply plug in your C function and check the results.
Turn to page 168 of this issue for more details on the contest and watch next month for an in-depth description of the harness and rules.
Once again, I'm pleased to announce that we're accepting applications for our annual Kent Porter Scholarship, an award for computer science majors enrolled in accredited colleges and universities. Kent was a longtime DDJ columnist, editor, and programmer who passed away in 1989. In his memory, we established a scholarship and, over the past couple of years, have awarded half a dozen grants.
The purpose of the scholarship is to recognize academic achievement and potential, and to financially assist continuing students in the pursuit of their educational goals. At the request of Kent's family, special consideration is given (but not limited) to students raising children while attending school. Scholarships will be awarded in increments of $500 for the coming year.
To apply for a scholarship, request in writing an application from: The Kent Porter Scholarship, Dr. Dobb's Journal, 411 Borel Ave., San Mateo, CA 94402.
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The Kent Porter Scholarship