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make to compile this
package.
junkbuster
configfile & where configfile is
the name of the Junkbuster configuration file. To make the
Junkbuster execute on startup of the machine simply put the
junkbuster configfile &
line in the appropriate start up script for your
system. Once installed you have to tell your browser to use
the proxy. This is a fairly easy step with graphical
browsers such as Netscape which lets you configure the
proxies by a menu. With a console based browser such as Lynx
you have to set the HTTP_PROXY environment variable to use
the proxy.
junkbstr.ini
is included with the distribution). This file allows you to
configure the various options for the program and allows you
to specify the location of the other files such as the
blocklist, which contains details of what the proxy
will filter out and the cookielist which tells the
proxy which cookies to accept and reject. The Junkbuster has
many configuration options and it is advised to read the
documentation to make the most of this product. At this
point I have to point out that the blocklist supplied with
the official distribution is very basic and if you want the
Junkbuster to block almost all adverts then I suggest you
download the extensive blocklist from http://waldherr.org/blocklist
which does a good job at blocking nearly every banner ad on
the net.
junkbstr.exe
is included with the source distribution as
many Windows users don't have access to a C
compiler.
Waldherr.org offers a modified version of the
Junkbuster which sends a transparent GIF image (1 x 1) when
a blocked URL is requested. The normal Junkbuster just
blocks the request so you get the broken image symbol, this
modified version makes it look like the adverts have
disappeared. Apart from that it is the same as the official
Junkbuster in every way so uses the same blocklists and
configurations files. You can get this version from
http://waldherr.org/junkbuster/
Not an alternative but if you're after a caching proxy (one that caches pages you've previously visited) then try Squid http://squid.nlanr.net/ - it is possible to chain the Junkbuster and Squid together so you can both filter ads and cache pages.
Although many people use the Junkbuster on their own machines there's nothing to stop an ISP offering this service or a company/University offering it on their local network. However if you do decide to offer the service you should always make it optional as not everyone will appreciate having their adverts blocked and there's always the chance that a very extensive block list will sometimes block something that wasn't intended to be blocked. It would be a good service for an ISP to offer as it would speed up their customers Internet access and many would see that as a good thing. On a corporate or academic network it would help to reduce network traffic and for people who have to pay for transatlantic traffic (such as members of JANET - the academic network) real cost savings can be made especially if it is chained to a caching proxy server.
So if you hate waiting for adverts to download, or you're concerned about your privacy then this is the product for you.
glibc2 (aka libc6) or higher. An Intel Pentium (or
Compatible) CPU - I recommend a PII - 300 or greater
(although it is usable on a 233) and a minimum of 64MB
RAM. VMware supports SMP but only in the 2.2 series
kernels.
A Windows NT version will be available soon which will require NT 4 with service pack 3 or higher installed, it has similar hardware requirements to the Linux version.
You also need a copy of the guest operating systems you wish to run (as well as the appropriate licenses if your going to run a commercial OS).
~/.vmware. If you don't have a valid license
then you won't be able to use the product. After obtaining
your license you can download the required files from their
website, and untar them into a temporary directory. You then
just run the supplied installation script which asks a few
questions and then installs the product for you. Once the
product is installed you can go about setting it up and
installing the guest operating systems. This task is made
easy by the included 'wizard' or if you prefer you can set
it up manually which is the preferred route (well it is
my preferred route anyway!). Each virtual machine
that is set up with VMware can be allocated its own virtual
ethernet card with its own IP and ethernet address (up to a
maximum of 4) which means you can network your virtual
machines and your host OS together to share files and if
your host machine has a network connection you can also make
your virtual machines visible to the network. Of course this
involves some networking knowledge but even a basic
knowledge of networking with the operating systems concerned
should be enough. If you don't need to share data between
the operating systems and all you want to do is run
applications on a particular OS you don't need to bother
with networking.
The specifications of the virtual machine will be different to the actual specifications of the physical machine particularly in respect to the network card and the display. This will cause problems particularly with plug and play operating systems such as Windows 98 if you intend to use it on the virtual machine and then reboot and use it as the primary OS later. The best solution is just to use Windows within the virtual machine running in Linux if you have a powerful enough machine. However some DirectX and 3D games don't work through VMware at the moment and neither does MIDI support so you may want to run Windows natively for these purposes. If so you can create hardware profiles for both configurations. You can then select the appropriate configuration depending on how you are running Windows.
If you want to run Windows applications on your Intel-based Linux box (as well as some other Intel-based UNIXes) you could consider WINE which allows you to run Windows software under Linux without the need to run Windows (and therefore you don't have to pay for or own a copy of Windows either). However WINE is still under development and there are still many Windows applications that won't run (or are unstable) with it. However WINE has recently got the support from Corel who are assisting some of their developments. More information at http://www.winehq.com/.
Bochs is a PC emulation project which allows you to run PC Operating Systems (e.g. Windows, Linux, etc) on non PC platforms. Bochs is commercial software although the source code is available. More information and licensing details are available at http://www.bochs.com/.
For me it wouldn't be worth buying VMware as I don't need to use Windows. I could use it to test different Linux versions simultaneously or to run FreeBSD or Solaris x86 but it probably isn't worth the license fee alone. However if you're often seen rebooting between different operating systems then this product is worth it for the convenience it offers. But don't buy it if you only use Windows for games as DirectX isn't fully supported yet. However check the website as it will be supported in future releases.
Arnold Robbins
O'Reilly & Associates, January 1999
66 pages, $6.95 US
ISBN 1-56592-497-5
(Review by Jim Webber)
Do you remember how in the old days, before you had the entirety of you favourite text editor commands commited to memory? Of course, you had some scraggy piece of paper pinned or taped somewhere to hand. It had to be, you'd have been lost without it.
O'Reilly have taken this venerable tradition and given it some gloss. The Vi Editor pocket handbook really is an excellent replacement for the rapidly fading Vi crib-sheets that are still liberally scattered around any Unix-intensive environment. It's small, weighing in at less than 70 small pages, concise, and well laid out. The fundamentals of Vi are placed at the beginning of the book(let?) and more fanciful topics such as Vile, Vim, Elvis and Nvi, placed towards the rear.
Whilst the book certainly won't serve as a tutorial for Unix newcomers, (this is the function of the companion Learning the Vi Editor) it's just right for anyone who uses Vi infrequently. So, if your crib sheets are looking a little worse for wear, you could well see yourself investing in a copy of this little gem - or some form of laminating device.
Robert Eckstein, Marc Loy and Dave Wood
O'Reilly & Associates, September 1998
1221 pages, £29.95
ISBN 1-56592-455-X
(Reviewed by Crispin Miller)
Java books tend to fall into two categories - those aimed at the complete novice, and those which provide reference material for experienced programmers. It is difficult to find books which successfully pitch themselves in the middle somewhere, discussing the design and implementation of larger applications and GUI components. This is particularly frustrating given the nature of a language such as Java, where poor design can rapidly result in Ravioli code that is hard to understand and harder to make extensible. This is often particularly true with GUIs, which tend to have a large number of closely interacting objects.
Given the number of Java books that exist, there is a surprising gap in the market which could really do with being filled. Once again O'Reilly (publishers of the excellent Nutshell series) have come to the rescue: Java Swing is an excellent book which places itself directly in this gap. It is also good for ones general physique and stamina, weighing in at just over 1220 pages.
The book assumes a general understanding of core Java concepts such as the AWT Event model, threads and layout managers and proceeds with a detailed but compact explanation of each of the Swing components. There are enough code examples to decorate the text, and, unlike many Java books, they are free from typos and actually look like they have been compiled and run.
The book comes into its own when it discusses the more sophisticated components such as JTables and JTrees, and the way model-view-controller architectures are used to separate data from the GUI components which are used to display it. There is a nice example of using Table Models to provide data to a custom Pie Chart object, which makes the point well.
Multithreading is another source of potential pitfalls when using Swing - the GUI should only ever be updated from the Event thread. Java Swing explains why this is so, and explains how programs should be written so that they handle multithreading correctly.
There is a good (but perhaps over-complex) section on writing your own components, a section on look and feel, and a number of chapters on document models, views, actions and editor kits.
The only major omission is drag-and-drop - an important, but tough bit of Java. Admittedly, it is not part of Swing (and the book is already big enough to use for hand-to-hand combat), but given its close relationship with GUIs, this is an unfortunate omission. For the intermediate programmer who is looking to write well designed GUIs using Swing, or the experienced programmer coming to Swing for the first time, Java Swing is an excellent book.
Crispin Miller is a PhD student (soon to be an MRC Fellow) in Bioinformatics at the University of Manchester.
Scott Oaks and Henry Wong
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., January 1999
320 pages, $32.95 US
ISBN 1-56592-418-5
(Reviewed by Mark Little)
The authors set out to give the reader a thorough background in using threads within the Java programming language. Using threads is becoming more of an occurrence for programmers, particularly within Java where they are an integral part of the language. This is the second edition of the book, with updates meant to cover the changes to the Java language since the first edition (JDK 1.2 now, JDK 1.1 in the first version).
Unfortunately, both the second edition and the first edition suffer from serious "bloat", and seem extremely padded in places, as though the authors could not find anything more to write about. It is true that writing multi-threaded programs does raise important issues which programmers should be aware of, and this book does cover them. However, the essential items could easily have been condensed into about 80 pages, rather than the 300+. The examples used labour over points, sometimes endlessly, and do not really add much to the text.
Since the first edition, the Java language has changed quite
a bit, particularly in the area of the threading
classes. However, despite what the book claims, it does not
cover all of these changes. Some of the omissions (or
oversights?) may make the development of applications in JDK
1.2 more complex than necessary, e.g. the omission of the
ThreadData class may make programmers implement
their own similar functionality when it is not required.
Finally, despite being claimed as a book for programmers, it is not really possible to use this book in isolation. The fact that the classes described do not occur in their entirety anywhere in the book means that a programmer working "off-line" may require further texts to write threaded programs. When class methods are described, they are typically incomplete and simply used to illustrate points the authors wish to make. More detailed descriptions, such as the exceptions thrown and why, are omitted. Most of what programmers really need to know about programming with threads in Java can be obtained from the Web, from the documentation which accompanies the JDK, or from the language specifications.
(Reviewed by Lindsay Marshall)
Once again O'Reilly hit the ground running with the hot stuff on the latest trendy issues! This is a collection of essays from luminaries of the Open Source movement (and I must stress that I mean the Open Source movement, not the open source movement) - Torvalds, Raymond, Stallman, Perens, Wall, they are all here. As you would expect the production of the book meets the high standards that usually come from O'Reilly, and, of course, the quality of the writing is high (Larry Wall's is probably the best piece). If you are interested in being up on what the Open Source movement thinks then you need to read this book, (though since it is now several months old all the positions will probably have shifted a little...) O'Reilly have now in fact open sourced the book itself so you can get the whole text on the web.
But.
And It's a big but.
It seems to me (dons flameproof suit) that this is a book by and for people who subscribe to the Open Source idea, not the open source idea. The authors are a little, US-based clique who have very definite (not to say rigid) ideas about what and what isn't open source - though they certainly don't all agree with each other. The book feels to me like one of those awful American business booster books - the Seven Executive Minutes of the Successful Networker's Art of the Sale or something. It's full of soundbites and entrepreneurial bullshit -"Hey, we found out how to make money out of free stuff aren't we great?" The bottom line is that open source is an interesting idea, Open Source comes laden with various political baggage that I don't want, or need.
The other big no-no about open source is that in at least one critical aspect it doesn't work. Why do I say that? Well, when open source got to be a trendy meme there were all kinds of proposals for new open source projects that were going to build bigger, better mousetraps. Did any of them get off the ground? Not that I know of - all the websites created for them are pretty well moribund. And why did they all peter out? Because there was nothing to work with.
All the successful open source projects started out with a good central core of material that was created by a single programmer or by a small closely knit team. Once this critical mass was in place and was solid, people started to hook in and help and the projects grew and developed. None of the new proposed projects had this core nor had they the dedicated teams or individuals who were prepared to build it. Take the FreeCase project - it is spiralling off into grandiose discussions of conceptual models rather than getting down to making something. no matter how simple, that people can use now.
Most people haven't got what it takes to do this kind of work - they may be great at building addons and debugging, but not that first initial hard slog. (In fact, another problem is that open source encourages people who haven't got any skills at all to "get involved" - have a look at some of the truely awful KDE applications that have been written!) The other important thing is that the core has to be good - look at what has happened with Mozilla: the Netscape released code was so gob-smackingly ghastly that they have thrown most of it away and the project has not produced anything usable yet. (Several people who were going to work with the code simply threw up their hands in disgust and went to do other things when they saw it.)
Don't get me wrong, open source (not Open Source) is a great idea and all my software is open, but it is not a panacea. Just being open source doesn't make quality software - you have to have something that people want and that they are willing to improve. For instance, if Microsoft were to open source Word, I very much doubt that anything would come of it. it would be just like Mozilla. Which is not to say that there isn't a need for a good open source word processor. Anyone fancy starting up a project? I can set up a website...
Charles Dye
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
550 pages, $39.95 US
ISBN 1-56592-432-0
(Reviewed by Mark Little)
This book is an excellent description of the Oracle distributed database system, its aims, and its administration. At over 500 pages, it spends time describing in some detail the different components of Oracle 8, the latest version of the system, and how it has changed over recent years. It then describes how to create and manage Oracle databases, and the issues involved therein. For example, Oracle 8 supports database replication for availability and performance; however, replicating the database may adversely affect certain applications. Therefore, this book carefully considers the potential advantages and disadvantages, making important recommendations to help the user make the right decisions.
There are many other components within Oracle which this book gives similar consideration to, such as tuning SQL*Net and Net8, the key communication protocols which Oracle uses, and how to manage security in a distributed Oracle system.
Although this book is excellent at covering its subject matter, it is hard to believe that a system such as Oracle does not ship with documentation like this. If similar documentation does not exist with Oracle, then this book is an important addition for anyone wanting to administer such a system, and for anyone wishing to use Oracle. Including a complete API reference section for Oracle's built-in distributed system packages, it can easily be used in a stand-alone fashion for most application programmers.
(Reviewed by Phil Docking)
This is, as the title implies, a quick reference book, which means that you shouldn't expect anything of great depth from such a publication. This is largely true. The book is 407 pages long, consists of 21 chapters, plus appendices, and covers nothing in any great depth, which is fine for people who have a good general knowledge of the topic already, and just need to see the guts of the beast exposed. The book does it's job well.
It starts with a small section devoted to introducing the concept, history and practise of Active Server Pages on MS Internet Information Server which is about 24 pages long, with copious example code and reference to scripting languages. This is followed by the built-in Object Reference section which takes up the next 121 pages of the book.
By far the largest section is the Installable Component Reference which makes up the remainder of the book. This section contains the reference for ActiveX Data Objects, Collaboration Data Objects and the file access components, and other "bundled" components which come with IIS Each object within these sections is detailed with a standard format consisting of a description of the objects' function, comments and troubleshooting options pertaining to the object, followed by the "collections" and "methods" sections for each of the objects.
My one objection regarding the layout of the book occurs here. Each object is given it's own chapter, which is fine, but within the chapter the layout is completely linear, so there's quite a lot of page-turning to reach the part you want, despite each section being alphabetical. It would have been nice (but wasteful of paper, I suppose) to have each Collection/Method starting at the beginning of a new page.
The Object Reference section takes a look at the following objects: Application, ObjectContext, Request, Response, Server and Session objects, with a final section on the use of pre-processing directives and the use of the Global.asa file. The Installable Component Reference section deals with these components: ActiveX Data Objects, Ad Rotator, Browser Capabilities, Collaboration Data objects for Windows NT server, Content Linking, Content Rotator, Counters, File Access, MyInfo, Page Counter and the Permission Checker component.
The longest chapter of this section is the 70-odd pages
devoted to ADO, which is enough to get a relatively
computer-literate developer off the ground in terms of
database access, and is probably worth the money spent on
the entire book. All of the Object reference sections are
supplied with example code, which is a nice touch, even down
to the redundancy offered by the inclusion of a page of code
for such mundane methods as (ADO) .close, just
in case you didn't want to look at any other methods in the
section.
Throughout the book there are numerous references to a forthcoming book Developing ASP components by Shelley Powers, which I am looking forward to reviewing, merely because of the sheer frustration imbued in me by not being able to refer to it while I was reading this book. Yes, it's a good reference book, but if I were looking for a book about ASP in a bookshop, I would probably be looking to buy a much larger book which combines this reference book with something like the apparently fabulous forthcoming Developing ASP components.
Phil Docking is a System Administrator in the Department of Computer Science, Birkbeck College
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