Publications I have written for.
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Other publications I wrote for.
(My articles are not online.)

Articles published in 2005:

Linux Pipeline
Anti-Virus Gets An Open Source Boost
12/28/05
Given the speed at which modern malware attacks spread and what's at stake for firms targeted, anti-virus software is more important than ever. And while the anti-virus software market has long been the preserve of sophisticated, and highly proprietary, software vendors, one of the most highly-regarded new malware-fighting tools is actually an open-source software project: Clam AntiVirus.
[Read the rest]

Linux Pipeline
Embrace And Extend -- The Firefox Way
10/17/05
"I noticed that I'm not good at typing in URLs -- I'll type '.rog' instead of '.org," recalls Ben Karel, a freshman at the University of Delaware. "One day I thought, 'Wouldn't it be cool if Firefox could fix those stupid little mistakes for me?'" So he wrote an "extension" for the Mozilla Foundation's open-source Web browser to do just that.
[Read the rest]

Gamasutra
Wideload Games' Alexander Seropian on Outsourcing for the Living Dead
9/29/05
In 2003, Alexander Seropian founded Wideload Games, Inc.; and he and his initial staff of ten people (most of who, like himself, once worked for Bungie Studios) in Chicago, Illinois went to work on a game built upon the Halo  engine. Two years later, their result has little in common with the hard-core science fiction world of Halo; Stubbs the Zombie flaunts a decidedly eccentric premise. It's a third-person, comedy-horror actioner.
[Read the rest] (Requires free registration at Gamasutra.com)

Linux Pipeline
Big Game Hunt: Can 3D Graphics Give Linux An Edge On The Desktop?
9/16/05
3D graphics are a low priority in the enterprise server market. Yet among Linux supporters, high-end graphics support creates a classic Catch-22. The ability to run the latest 3D graphics cards is a key feature to an important segment of the consumer PC market -- and they, in turn, represent a major draw for the developers who create games and other graphics-intensive applications.
[Read the rest]

OSDir.com
A GIMP In Photoshop's Clothing
9/13/05
There is a love-hate relationship for The GIMP. Whether it's deserved or not, the biggest criticism that this open-source, freeware image editor has gotten is over its user interface. The comparisons often lead to Adobe's Photoshop. Scott Moschella (a user of both Photoshop and The GIMP) decided to give the latter a make-over with the former's user interface.
[Read the rest]

O'Reilly LinuxDevCenter.com
The Ur-Quan Masters
8/11/05
When the original developers of Star Control 2 contacted the online Star Control fan community, they presented an enticing question: if they released the source to the 3DO version of Star Control 2 under GPL, would anybody be interested in porting it to modern-day computers?
[Read the rest]

Gamasutra
Interview: Ritual's Robert Atkins on Console Life, PC Death
6/30/05
"Hired guns" is a more than apt job title for Ritual Entertainment. For nearly ten years, the Dallas, Texas-based developer has built a rep as being the go-to guys when a game needs to ratchet up its multiplayer, or to otherwise add such a gameplay feature. FPSes and third-person shooters are the company's specialty.
[Read the rest] (Requires free registration at Gamasutra.com)

O'Reilly LinuxDevCenter.com
The Irrlicht Engine
6/2/05
To hear Nikolaus Gebhardt explain it, there's nothing hard about programming 3-D graphics--it's just an extra dimension added to 2-D. Simple as that. To prove it, he created his own engine, which he called Irrlicht.
[Read the rest]


Make: Volume 02
R2-DIY
5/12/05 (on newstands beginning 5/17/05)
Just in time for the premiere of Star Wars: Episode III, my article on Star Wars fans who build their own droids makes the cover of Make magazine. (Is it a coincidence or a craftily planned ploy timed with the release of Episode III to sell more copies? Hmmm....) The publication is available at various bookstore chains including Borders.
[Make website] [Cover] [Photo 1] [Photo 2]

O'Reilly LinuxDevCenter.com
MusE: MIDI Sequencing for Linux
5/12/05
Frank Neumann, a 36-year-old computer scientist from Karlsruhe, Germany, and one of the developers of MusE, sums up the current state of music production applications for Linux: "It's always a nice warm feeling when you show an application like MusE to people and they just go, 'Whoa--I didn't know Linux audio stuff was already this far!'"
[Read the rest]

Linux Pipeline
New Yahoo Music Service Wants To Play Developers' Tune
5/11/05
An already crowded field of music download services got a little more crowded today, as Yahoo unveiled a beta version of its new online music offering. The service comes with an interesting twist--an open architecture that invites developers to create plug-ins and custom features--but its use of Windows-only file formats could slow Yahoo's efforts to attract tech-savvy users.
[Read the rest]

Linux Pipeline
Linux In Your Living Room?
5/2/05
Could personal video recorder (PVR) software be the "killer app" that launches Linux into millions of living rooms? A growing number of Linux-based PVR products are giving couch potatoes new choices--and new freedom--even as proprietary PVR vendors continue to impose rules limiting where, when, and how viewers use their products.
[Read the rest]

O'Reilly LinuxDevCenter.com
Professional Sound Editing with Audacity
4/14/05
Need to do sound recording or editing, but find most audio software daunting due to complicated interfaces or price? Then take a look at Audacity: it's free, open source, and packs a bunch of professional-level sound editing features, all under a very intuitive, friendly user interface (Figure 1). By design, Audacity is a user-friendly but still powerful alternative to other sound editors that tend to be complicated to use. What's more, it comes in Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows versions.
[Read the rest]

DevSource
The Sharp Design Philosophy Behind Paint.NET
4/13/05
Paint.NET gives commercial photo editing programs some serious competition, which is all the more impressive since it began as a classroom project. This free program was developed by a team of computer science students at Washington State University, under a partnership with Microsoft.
[Read the rest]

Gamasutra
Interview: Frugal Fragging with .kkrieger
4/12/05
Big things come in small packages, as the cliché goes. But that's exactly the best way to describe .kkrieger. It's a playable first-person shooter at only 96  kilobytes in file size.
[Read the rest] (Requires free registration at Gamasutra.com)

Linux Pipeline
JBoss Turns Open-Source Risk Into Business Opportunity
4/7/05
The ongoing SCO-IBM legal quagmire, as well as other Linux- and Unix-related patent disputes, have raised concerns among enterprise customers about using open-source software. Yet where many software vendors see a problem, JBoss, Inc. sees a business opportunity: The open source middleware vendor, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, USA and Neuchtel, Switzerland, in 2003 began to offer indemnification to its customers.
[Read the rest]

OSDir.com
Multi Theft Auto: Hacking Multi-Player Into Grand Theft Auto With Open Source
3/29/05
Multi Theft Auto adds networked multi-player to the Windows versions of Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. This ingenious "giant hack" illustrates just how far a commercial game can be extended beyond a typical "mod," even if one does not have access to the original source code. The developers sum up what it took to create their unofficial mod: open source software (RakNet and Crazy Eddie's GUI System), along with lots of time, persistence and junk food.
[Read the rest]

O'Reilly ONDotnet.com
Miguel de Icaza Explains How to "Get" Mono
3/21/05
It's perhaps the most controversial project in the open source world, but this mostly stems from misunderstanding: Mono, the open source development platform based upon Microsoft's .NET framework. Immediate reactions from many dubious Linux developers have ranged from confusion over its connection with .NET to wondering what the benefits of developing under it are.
[Read the rest]

O'Reilly LinuxDevCenter.com
Inside GnomeMeeting
3/17/05
Damien Sandras says his programming philosophy is "the UNIX way:" designing individual programs that do unique tasks well and interoperate with one another, instead of one program that attempts to do several tasks that other programs already do. His GnomeMeeting is a voice-over-IP (VoIP) and video-over-IP application for Linux that builds upon open source libraries and open telephony standards.
[Read the rest]

OSDir.com
The Spam Assassin Behind SpamAssassin
3/3/05
When most of us get email offering questionable herbal alternatives to Viagra or dubiously low prices on Adobe software, we simply delete it, having accepted long ago that receiving at least some unsolicited email comes with the price of using the Internet. But for Daniel Quinlan, it motivates him to figure out how to stop it -- for not just his sake but everybody else's. It's his job: He works as an anti-spam architect for an email security provider. And his paid work also carries over to his contributions to SpamAssassin, of which he currently chairs this free software's Project Management Committee.
[Read the rest]

InternetWeek.com
Blogging About Work Is Risky Business
2/25/05
Blogging about work has become very risky, particularly if you value your job. Long before people started posting online personal journals called blogs, employees have griped about their jobs. The difference now is that blogging creates a record that is shared with the world.
[Read the rest]

O'Reilly LinuxDevCenter.com
Inside the Multiple Emulator Super System
2/24/05
Developing code to emulate the hardware and functionality of any computer system is a challenge. Multiply that by over 150 systems and you now have some inkling as to what development is like for MESS, the Multiple Emulator Super System.
[Read the rest]

Make
Taking the "Video" Out of Video Game
Volume 1 (First Quarter, 2005)
Most people program video games. Niklas Roy built one, literally. The 30-year-old from Berlin, Germany constructed a fully mechanized facsimile of one of the grand-daddies of video games, Pong. [Buy/Subscribe]

1UP.COM
Fan Theft Auto
2/23/05
What would an online version of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City be like? What if there had been a Grand Theft Auto game for the Nintendo Entertainment System back in the days when this system reigned? For fans of Grand Theft Auto, they don't just dream these what-ifs -- they bring them to life.
[Read the rest]

InternetWeek.com
Interactive Taxi Gives Passengers A Ride On The Internet
2/3/05
The next time you take a cab ride in an unfamiliar city, you might not have to ask the driver for his recommendations about what there is to do. Instead, using a touch screen installed behind the cab's front seats, you'll be able to look up information about local tourist spots, restaurants, hotels, bars, nightclubs, car rental, weather and news. With your credit or debit card, you will even be able to book reservations for a hotel room or restaurant, or buy tickets to a movie or show.
[Read the rest]

OSDir.com
JHymn Goes Behind Atoms and Apple To Bring DRM-Free Music
1/27/05
Like all matter in the universe, MPEG-4 files are also made of "atoms" -- it's the term given for the set of nested data that comprises the structure of an MPEG-4 file. Atoms are key to the way the audio and video data within an MPEG-4 file are accessed. They figure in how Apple's digital rights management (DRM) scheme is used to protect music file purchases from its iTunes Music Store. (Apple uses the AAC file format; AAC is the audio layer in MPEG-4 files.) Atoms also factor in how hymn is able to "scrub" protected AAC files of Apple's DRM.
[Read the rest]

O'Reilly LinuxDevCenter.com
Freevo: Freedom For Your TV
1/27/05
"Freevo, for me, stands for freedom and the power to do whatever I'd like with a TV interface," says Rob Shortt, a 29-year-old system administrator from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada. Shortt is one of the main developers of Freevo. Freevo is a media platform that brings together various applications for video recording and playback. Under its open format, the user can fully customize Freevo to suit his media viewing needs. Its main feature is its ability to schedule and record television broadcasts.
[Read the rest]