Dr. Dobb's Journal September 2001
The Walkthrough Project, led by Dinesh Manocha and Turing award winner Fred Brooks, is designed to create computer models of architectural plans that users can inspect as if they were inside the structure. The University of North Carolina project began in the 1980s, and has driven dynamic graphics engine development and the discovery of new methods for tracking position and orientation, as well as provided information about the behavior of people in simulations. The researchers say their long-term goal is to develop a personal, portable system that works with models "of meaningful complexity," and provides constant sensory feedback (at rates of over 25 updates a second).
Examples of models the team has created include gardens, houses, power plants, and spacecraft. The Double Eagle Tanker ship model, for example, consists of 82 million triangles, and is navigable from stem to stern. While the team is happy with its interactivity techniques (such as collision detection and proximity queries), it continues to search for faster display techniques, prettier models, and handier interfaces. The university hopes the Walkthrough Project will have applications in teleconferencing, movies, and games, as well as in architectural design. For more information, see http://www.cs.unc.edu/~walk/.
USENIX has named the GNU Project (and its contributors) and the Kerberos network authentication system (and its developers) as recipients of its Lifetime Achievement Award. The GNU Project was started in 1984 by Richard M. Stallman to provide software that is freely redistributable and modifiable. Kerberos was created by a team of contributors from Project Athena at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It, too, is freely available and has been incorporated into both commercial and noncommercial operating systems. For more information, see http://www.usenix.org/directory/awards.html.
Frank Klassner at Villanova University has issued a call for volunteers "to help a worthy national education-tool development effort." Said effort consists of providing Mac PowerBook IR port support for LEGO's Mindstorm RCX. Currently, the only tools available for remote control of an RCX are PC based, and generally not scriptable or compatible with high-level programming languages.
Consequently, Villanova researchers have developed "a programming library of remote-control functions that one can embed in a Lisp program to run in the freeware Xanalys LispWorks package running on Virtual PC." They're now looking for beta testers, as well as PowerBook programmers for other packages. The next project involves modifying the Mac-native Common Lisp environment to include support for communicating with various ports. A long-range goal is to support communication between multiple RCX robots controlled by a Mac — something else existing packages can't handle, says Klassner. For more information, see http://www.pbsource.com/features/LEGO_and_Macs.shtml.
"If most of the world is really betting on XML and XML Schema...enormous amounts of time and money will be wasted," says Stefan Decker, visiting professor at Stanford and researcher in the DAML (short for "DARPA Agent Markup Language") Project. Decker, a proponent of the Semantic Web proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, believes the Internet must change from a system designed to display data to humans into a system designed to deliver information to machines. According to Semantic Web proponents, XML should be used in service to an ontology framework — a taxonomy and set of inference rules. Humans should get information from the Web not by entering search terms and looking through a collection of pages, but by sending intelligent agents to determine the answers to their queries.
DAML is a markup language designed to be readable by such agents. The latest DAML specification builds on the European Ontology Inference Layer and the Simple HTML Ontology Extensions developed at the University of Maryland; DAML is also designed to work with XML and the Resource Description Framework. The DAML program is creating prototype tools for the Semantic Web — including APIs, markup editors, DAML-aware browsers, and new applications — and nonprofit organizations are forming to promote free ontology tools and expertise. For more information, see http://www.daml.org/ and http://www.semanticweb.org/.
Sandia National Labs has released its Cplant cluster software under an open-source license. Cplant (short for "Computational Plant") reportedly comprises the largest known sets of Linux clusters for parallel computing: The largest cluster within Cplant comprises more than 1500 Alpha nodes. Cplant software is modeled on the system software developed for the ASCI Red supercomputer, built for Sandia in 1997, which for several years was the world's fastest computer. For more information, see http://www.cs.sandia.gov/cplant/.
Jim Ellis, who helped to create Usenet, died on June 28th after a two-year battle with nonHodgkins lymphoma. He was 45.
Ellis worked for the Super Computing Center in Pittsburgh and, most recently, for Sun Microsystems as a security consultant. He received numerous awards and honors, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award and the Usenix Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Navy's Space and Warfare Systems Command has awarded a $1.2 contract to develop security extensions to the FreeBSD operating system under the guise of the Community-Based Open Source Security (CBOSS) initiative. NAI Labs, the research arm of PGP Security (a division of Network Associates) has been granted the contract, but will work with with members of the FreeBSD developer community to assure tight system integration and rapid technology transfer. In practice, this means that the project will be led by NAI Labs scientists Robert Watson and Lee Badger, working with members of the FreeBSD development community such as Kirk McKusick, Poul-Henning Kamp, Jonathan Lemon, and Eivind Eklund. For more information, http://opensource.nailabs.com/initiatives/cboss/.