Health: Canadian Pharmacy FUD debunked: ”After nearly a year of sharp warnings about the dangers of prescription drugs from Canada,’ the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, ‘U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials cannot produce a single U.S. consumer who was killed or injured by inferior medications from Canada.’ Neither can its Canadian counterpart.’
Month: December 2003
xscreensaver, the default (and greatest) screensaver on most free UNIX distros, may contain R-rated content, as this mail to the Fedora discussion list notes.
Much to my surprise, I stumbled across it drawing an ‘erect penis’ when I returned from lunch today. So I did some investigating:
$ strings /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/glsnake | grep penis erect penis flaccid penis
—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
Hash: SHA1
Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 13:45:35 -0500
From: Sean Millichamp (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Potentially objectionable xscreensaver module (GLSnake)
I just wanted to let everyone know that the xscreensaver module “GLSnake” has two object displays that some folks might feel is inappropriate or objectionable.
Much to my surprise, I stumbled across it drawing an “erect penis” when I returned from lunch today. So I did some investigating:
$ strings /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/glsnake | grep penis
erect penis
flaccid penis
$ rpm -q xscreensaver
xscreensaver-4.14-2
Some folks who are planning on (or have) installed Fedora Core at home or in conservative office settings might want to check and make sure glsnake isn’t enabled by default.
If I end up deploying Fedora Core 1 to any desktops at my clients I will clearly have to sanitize or remove this module in some fashion.
I hope that the heads-up helps someone…
Sean
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fedora-list mailing list
(spam-protected)
To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
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Software: How Funcom Squashed Bugs With Bugzilla (GamaSutra, free reg required).
There’s some differences between the commercial and free-software development styles; writing games is probably one of the most extreme of the commercial development environments, with extremely aggressive schedules and a single, long-term product development arc building up to one really big release.
A really good way to use bugzilla is to track development — essentially, using it to track work instead of bugs. In other words, when work is planned, a bug is created to track that work’s progress and provide a forum for discussion of the work’s design, implementation details, etc.
This article gives a great overview of the additions Funcom have made to Bugzilla to do this, including time estimates, MS Project integration.
Quickies: I like Thanksgiving! A holiday based around a roast fowl and some booze; can’t go too far wrong with that. Thumbs up.
FrodoPalm — run C=64 games on your Palm handheld. Insanely cool. (via /.) I wonder what the controls are like, though — that can totally kill a game’s playability.
Escape From Woomera — nice press-grabbing idea, but I can’t imagine that the game will be too hot, though. (via Boing Boing)
The Bearer of This Card is a Genuine and Authorized Tsar, via Blather Shitegeist.
ABC.net.au: push for ‘open source’ biotech. I was just thinking about this last week; interesting to see this happening.
‘Biotechnology, the way it is right now, is needed in the developing world like a screen door on a submarine,’ said Jefferson. ‘What it really needs is what good science can do in biology, in biotechnology. And that means a different agenda and a different group of innovators.’
‘He added such tools could also help us understand and improve agricultural management systems such as organic approaches. An example of this would be the development of new ‘bioindicator’ plant varieties that would tell farmers about their soil nitrogen levels.’
Fantastic idea. I hope this takes off…