John A. Magliacane Issue #75, July 2000 A look at the development and use of an open-source satellite-tracking and orbital-prediction program. When Sputnik 1 was launched into orbit on October 4, 1957, the space age was born and the fields of science, engineering and technology were changed forever. At last count, there were over 8500 payloads from over 30 countries ...

Dan E. Kelley Peter S. Galbraith Issue #75, July 2000 This scripting language avoids integrating analysis and display capabilities and instead focuses on providing precise and flexible control over the display of technical material. Like other computer users, scientists sometimes find themselves torn between simple tools and complex tools, between ease of use and power. Take writing, for example. The ...

Best of Technical Support Various Issue #73, May 2000 Our experts answer your technical questions. Who Goes There? I have taken over a Linux system for a company. The company uses the box as an Internet server. The problem is that the person I have taken over for left without providing the root password for the box. Is there any ...

David Abramson Issue #73, May 2000 Get ready for parallel processing with the University of Michigan. After nearly 20 years of research and development, there still has not been a wide-scale uptake of parallel computing technology. However, with recent advances in PC-based hardware and networking products, it is now possible to build a parallel computer from industry-standard, commercial, off-the-shelf products. ...

Ibrahim F. Haddad Issue #73, May 2000 And God said “Let there be light”! This article will introduce the basic concepts in building a graphical user interface in X and Motif. I’ll go into a quick introduction to the X Window System and its programming model, then introduce Motif and illustrate some concepts with a sample program. Finally, we’ll go ...

Ivan Pulleyn Issue #73, May 2000 Python provides a clean intuitive interface to complex, threaded applications. Developers often make use of high-level scripting languages as a way of quickly writing flexible code. Various shell scripting languages have long been used to automate processes on UNIX systems. More recently, software applications have begun to provide scripting layers that allow the user ...

David Santo Orcero Issue #73, May 2000 Debugging code is never fun, but this tool makes it a bit easier. Soon after C was born without function prototyping, it was agreed that code debugging was an excessively complex task. As a result, a very powerful tool, lint, was created which was able to make a large number of static verifications ...

Best of Technical Support Various Issue #72, April 2000 Our experts answer your technical questions. Partitioning and Cylinders I am installing Red Hat Linux 6.0 on a partition. When I try to make my partitions for Linux, it gives me an error saying “boot partition too big”. I tried to use fdisk and it says my hard drive has 1655 ...

Marjorie Richardson Issue #72, April 2000 Internet appliances are the next wave of computers to be bought by the public. Mr. Eid tells us how his company is serving this market. I talked to Mr. Eid Eid back in December of 1997 when he was President of Corel Computer Corporation. Today, he is the head of his own start-up company, ...

Michael Stricklen Bob Cummings Stan McClellan Issue #72, April 2000 The authors describe their implementation of a demonstration environment for differentiated Internet services (Diffserv) using Linux-based routers. Our Diffserv implementation is relatively simple, but highlights many of the strengths and flexibilities of Linux, which we believe are especially important in the era of Internet-centric computing. To make this a more ...