NPK - Network Project for Knowledge

NPK - Latest news [NOTE: This section has moved here.] In this section, you will find the latest news about the Network Project for Knowledge, our programming tasks, and other activities. If there is something you think that should be published here, such as the news of a new C compiler for a C-less operating system, or the appearing of a new free operating system, just email us, and we certainly will publish it here. 3rd March 2002 ----------------- There have been a lot of changes around here. Now, we are at Sourceforge.net, an OpenSource temple. There have been several development-time releases and the core for NPK-MLE is already designed. It is not conceived to support scripting/batching, however. But its organization allows easy implementation of new features/commands. We have new ideas for NPK-MLE at every moment. We try to join as more developers as we can to help on this project. And we are doing everything multilingual. Because everything we do, we do it for everyone. For free, of course! :) 14th October 2001 ----------------- Well... It seems that it won't be possible to implement 'go` as an individual program under unix. It worked well on DOS, but unix only alows us to chdir() to the process itself - when our program terminates execution, the shell will have the same working directory it had right efore we executed the program. We are going to implement NPK MLE as some kind of a shell that reads and executes commands. We are certainly going to loose a lot, because we won't be able to process batch files with NPK commands, among other usefull features that shells use to have. 16th September 2001 ------------------- Note.c has been checked out because of the use of hidden objects. Now it is more transparent. Notes will always be visible. I beblieve it is good idea to create an NPK MLE command similar to dir/ls that will ignore notes and room descriptions... I'll try not to forget it. 16th September 2001 ------------------- Look.c has just been finished! Ok.. this is a real day. Easy stuff, I know, but it still makes me happy :) 16th September 2001 ------------------- Well... 'npk-run` seems to work fine when the command that we call doesn't call also an external program. It means that something like 'npk-run npk-run npk` may not work very well under some systems. I still don't know exactly why this happens, but, at this time, this doesn't seem to be a big problem for NPK MLE, and the loss is not bigger that the gain of having this new command. 16th September 2001 ------------------- Good news... i guess! I (NPKapper I) have written a small prog, named 'npk-run`, that runs an NPK MLE command. It tries to run an exexcutable located at NPK's BIN directory. Under Unix's, it will be '$HOME/.NPK/BIN/`. Under DOS, it will be 'C:\NPK\BIN\`. And now the bad news... i guess! Using hidden objects was taking portability from the NPK. So, I decided that we would, at least for now, keep everything visible. The main problem was when NPK MLE runned on a unix platform with a FAT partition available, or with FAT floppies. As hidden files are not reprresented the same way in every system, it is better not to use them at all. This will mean some more garbage in rooms, but...well, almost nothing is perfect. Any sugestions are welcome! 15th September 2001 ------------------- Bad news... I found an executable named 'look` on my Linux platform. It means that there'll probably be any incompatibility with our 'look` under Linux or other Unix's... A possible way to avoid this could be the creation of a shell for NPK MLE. Another way is to create a indirect execution way for NPK-MLE commands: an NPK program that would just run the specified NPK MLE command, even if there is another program with the same name in that system. 15th September 2001 ------------------- Exit.c is already done and we have compiled it under Linux/DOS/BeOS/QNX. Apparently, it works fine. Krypt/unkrypt are really awfull...They just don't work. 1st August 2001 --------------- We moved out from nether.net servers. They have been down almost all time, and we want this site running 24 hours a day. Test pages are already at http://www.npk.f2s.com and soon will be the entire NPK site. 29th July 2001 --------------- There'll be two other commands in NPK MLE, named krypt and unkrypt. They will kryptonise/unkryptonise objects or object clones. Kryptonising is a process that makes a file unusable. Kryptonite was a material that Superman did not like a lot. Kryptonised objects are objects that people won't like a lot. By other words, it's kinda encryption process. 28th July 2001 -------------- We have already the development tools for QNX and we will distribute also binaries for x86 running this operating system. However, we decided to stop distributing SunOS binaries, because most SunOS machines have a C compiler available and it is relatively easy to import all the NPK MLE tools. NPK - Everything we do, we do it for everyone.