Olivier Langlois's blog

For those who don't know yet. Apricot is another Open Project starting… this time it's a game, the Blender and Crystal Space communities joining forces to realize an awesome and industry standard 3D game experience! The plan is to have 6 people for 6 months in Amsterdam working full time on a game. The complete game sources and binaries (for GNU/Linux, Windows, and MacOS/X), artwork, tutorials, documentaries will be made available as a download and as a DVD (more on that below). Everything will be published under the Creative Commons license so you will be able to use the art work and code in your own game.

This project has several goals:

• Test and enhance the game pipeline using Blender and Crystal Space.
• Extend Blender and Crystal Space to make this possible.
• Provide tutorials and documentation for people who want to make their own games.
• Have a nice and playable game that will look as if it came out of a commercial game company.

Some of the enhancements in Crystal Space that we are planning for Apricot are:

• New advanced character animation system with support for animation blending and more.
• New renderer system with support for advanced features that require render to texture and better lighting techniques (dynamic shadows).
• Improved physics plugin (using Bullet).
• Imposters and tree generator.

To make all of this possible we need your support! We need money to pay those six developers for six months. They need a regular supply of pizza's and coffee and they need to sleep somewhere. Please pre-order the DVD at this link:
http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info.php?products_id=102.

In doing so you ensure that we can really keep this project alive for the full six months. Why is this important for you? If you are already a Crystal Space user then this project will make sure Crystal Space gets better and you'll get more documentation and tutorials. If you are not yet a Crystal Space user but you are interested in making a game (Open Source or not) then Apricot will prepare the road for you.
It will enable the creation of tools and enhance Blender and Crystal Space so that you will have an easier time creating such a game. And of course, we will try to make the game as fun as possible.

You can get more information about Apricot at this url:
http://apricot.blender.org.

This is a good book as it does a good job covering the different sources of software insecurities:

• The classical buffer overflows on the stack and on the heap
• Canonical issues on input
• The least privilege principle
• There is a brief overview on how store a secret

On the last point, the authors know well the topic. If you are using cryptography to protect something in your software but just store the private key in a global variable then you are helping tremendously the job of hackers as all they will have to do is look into your executable binary to search for something that looks like a key. A security measure is as strong as its weakest element and no hacker is foolish enough to attack a cryptographic algorithm that is proven strong. Even if you store the key in a secure place, all that is needed to retrieve the key is to perform a memory dump at the right time just before the software use the key. At least, you can make hackers job harder as there is nothing you can do to make your software 100% safe against hacker if the software is valuable enough to motivate them to hack your software. All you can do by improving your software security is to buy you some time before your software is hacked. All that to say that there is no bullet proof solution against hackers but the book gives solid leads to improve software security in that aspect.

In this book, there is a strong emphasis on Microsoft security technologies. The Windows Crypto API and the Microsoft OSes privileges API are described in length. If you develop on Windows and want to make your software more secure then this is an excellent book for you. If you develop on another platform, there is still something for you in this book as there are a lot of code snippets that are platform independent to improve software security such as input validation for file names to protect yourself against canonization bugs.

This is a very good book about software security but I do not recommend it simply because there is a new edition of it.

I have slightly revamped the fractal section of my website. More specifically, I added menus to help the navigation in it.

However, there is also a small addition. There is a new page with an embedded player that allows you to watch videos of fractals.

It has been a while since I have played with fractals but if you have never looked at my fractals, it might worth it for you to take a look.