Slashdot Mirror

>He was a glorified script kiddie

He co-wrote an operating system, which is way above "script kiddie" level.

It fascinates me that they added Aero as eye candy that no one needed in Vista, then in Windows 8 they not only took it away but also took away the minimal, though longstanding, eye candy of rounded corners. So do we need eye candy or don't we?

Personally, I think this Win8 hack would be a good design to go with. It keeps the clean lines of the new interface, while restoring transparency to increase visual interest and make overlapping windows a bit more usable.

That said, I'd be fine if they just went back to the Win7 Aero interface. But I do want to see glass transparency in some form – this isn't just eye-candy, it does serve a useful purpose when multi-tasking. (Apparently Microsoft has forgotten that some people actually use their PCs for work.)

Now that sf.net has been compromised, what alternative are there?

http://www.berlios.de/ - Has been around forever, and is somewhat popular.

Or you could check the list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities

Since this is an OSS project, can you suggest any tools similar to Understand that don't cost $995?

Eclipse CDT has a very powerful index (when it works) with which to search who calls what, or who depends/inherits from who.

It is still a crapshot when the code is atrocious (or complex/large enough that even good coding efforts are not enough.) Slowly but surely identify what look like important functions. Screenshot the call/type graphs in Eclipse and put them on a document.

Sometimes I (grep|awk|find|sed|tr)+ the crap out of source files looking for types and functions/methods, massaging them into submission until they can look like a CSV file. Then I load them into Excel or Access.

Sometimes, not always, but sometimes you can glimpse a lot of knowledge when you look at code structures (functions and types) in a tabular format (in particular when dealing with CORBA IDL elements and their C/C++ implementations for instance.) Another advantage is that sometimes (again, sometimes) you can take those elements, and massage them into a DOT file from where to generate a graph of sorts.

Similarly, I've generated DOT-based graphs of file dependencies, object dependencies, etc. You can run nm or objdump to generate a list of "things" included in the obj files, and generate a sort of component dependency graph.

But the cheapest way to go about it, if you are using the GNU compiler suite, is to use gprof. If you have a set of test cases that can exercise a substantial portion of your code, you might be able to get a partial call graph. The call graph might be dependent on the test scenario, but it is something that can get you going in the right direction.

Sometimes a code coverage tool like lcov, running in tandem with gprof, can help as well. It might give you an indication of dead code (if your tests are comprehensive enough) or code that still needs inspection (if your tests are not comprehensive.)

It is all manual and thus prone to error. That is the price of not using a good code navigation tool (which unfortunately the ones worth a spit are commercial-based.)

But with some good elbow grease, spit and diligence, you can go a long way by clobbering something together using existing tools (gprof, lcov, nm, objdump, grep, awk, sed, tr, perl, excel, etc.)

The only thing I could find was source navigator NG, but I have zero experience with it.

Since this is an OSS project, can you suggest any tools similar to Understand that don't cost $995?

The only thing I could find was source navigator NG, but I have zero experience with it.

Freenx is a great solution for less shitty X11 forwarding. It compresses and caches stuff and doesn't need nearly as much bandwidth.

High latency/low bandwidth can be fixed using X11 with schemes like NX, which are very effective:

http://freenx.berlios.de/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoMachine
http://www.nomachine.com/

Here is your answer: http://www.nomachine.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoMachine http://freenx.berlios.de/

And it is still X11, and it really works. So yes, it can be done.

Documentation always suffers for most software and x2go is no different I guess.
x2go's website has been both in migration to a new site, a new platform all while the x2go server/client architecture has been under a rocketing development of new features & capabilites in the past 12 months or so.
Best advice is to join either the x2go user or x2go dev mailer's until the new website gets more updates.
- x2go-user@lists.berlios.de
https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/x2go-user
- x2go-dev@lists.berlios.de
https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/x2go-dev

Documentation always suffers for most software and x2go is no different I guess.
x2go's website has been both in migration to a new site, a new platform all while the x2go server/client architecture has been under a rocketing development of new features & capabilites in the past 12 months or so.
Best advice is to join either the x2go user or x2go dev mailer's until the new website gets more updates.
- x2go-user@lists.berlios.de
https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/x2go-user
- x2go-dev@lists.berlios.de
https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/x2go-dev

Some cool Apple ][ trivia ...

- Karateka was one of the first games to have cut-scenes. Here is the end-game music in MIDI format =)
http://michael.peopleofhonoronly.com/dev/applewin/karateka/karateka_end.mid

- Conan: Hall of Volta by Datasoft (*) was the one of the first games to use a 1-bit stencil buffer!
http://michael.peopleofhonoronly.com/dev/applewin/conan/conan_stencil_buffer.bmp

- Broderbund games (Drol, Spare Change, Captain Goodnight, Choplighter, etc.) offered smooth animation because they used the (initially) undocumented V-SYNC: (Vertical Blanking) !
RDVBLBAR = $C019 ;not VBL (VBL signal low)

I highly recommend AppleWin for finding out old Easter Eggs =)
http://applewin.berlios.de/

* To see the stencil buffer you need
a) disk image
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II//images/disk_utils/cracking/the_saltine/Conan%20A.dsk
b) Mount disk A in the first drive in AppleWin
c) press F2 to boot
d) at the intro. screen press F7 to enter the debugger
e) in the debugger type the following commands to view the HI-RES pages 1 or 2 respectively
HGR1
HGR2

Give LinCity a try.

This isn't another juvenile does-it-run-on-linux rant, but I think its reasonable to point out that remote full screen GUI access via X windows has been around since the mid 80s. A LONG time before any remote GUI windows app or even Windows itself existed.

Yeah, and unless you're connecting over a LAN connection, it's 100% terrible. That's why projects like FreeNX and x2go exist...to clean up the massive bloat and waste the X11 protocol introduces.

I run Debian 6 on both physical hardware and VMs that have less resources than you've described, and it works perfectly fine. For desktop environments, I use either plain Gnome or XFCE. For the VMs, I access their desktops by running FreeNX, and on both my LAN and over the Internet it's almost as fast as a native desktop. These machines are routinely used for web browsing, email, and office documents.

There is also FuseCompress which supports LZMA, ZLIB, and bzip2 compression formats.

The problem I see with these features not being part of the filesystem is that if you wanted to access said data in another system (say, at a friends house using a usb disk) you will be screwed as you need to install the extension on each computer.

Like Schillix, as I just noticed ^^ http://schillix.berlios.de/pmwiki.php/Main/HowtoCompile

That has long been one of my thoughts. For example, PG'OCaml looks very promising.

Anyone here who could offer a full mirror of the data.

Well, unless someone does something else, we (or maybe the BerliOS guys) could create a torrent of whatever we can get from http://developer.berlios.de/docman/display_doc.php?docid=2056&group_id=2 for now. Granted, things being a torrent, it will be pretty inaccessible, but at least it will still be "alive" and available somehow until some people figure out what to do with it. Hard to tell whether the former BerliOS staff will still be reachable and have a copy, otherwise...

Or would Archive.org be an option?

I doubt it. They're not preserving all of the web's files. Mirroring version control repositories and mailing lists and all that in full is probably not something they want to do. But you could ask them...

I didn't start out with an Arduino, but instead got an evaluation kit for an ARM microcontroller from Atmel: SAM7S-EK. It connects to your computer through USB, it's possible to compile a program for it using gcc/binutils and upload it to the microcontroller using OpenOCD. The evaluation board has some built-in LEDs and buttons to play around with. As a fun starting project you can turn it into a HID-compliant USB keyboard or something.

I've been using Daemon Tools Lite, Cygwin with CDrecord or Power ISO for the better part of this decade now to get me what seems to have always been native under *NIX. It'll be nice to have such a feature, but just has useful it'll be in comparison to these other tools remains to be seen.

The unpaper link has a typo. Try this link instead.

Have you heard of unpaper and Tesseract? If you put these two tools together you get really really good OCR, and its all free software.

I ripped my collection to FLAC, and when I listen on a computer that's what I play.

When loading it onto a DAP, I transcode everything to OGG Vorbis at -q2 (~96Kbps) using SoundConverter http://soundconverter.berlios.de/

Works great, and I routinely transcode 10's of GB to our DAP's and phones.

I've got a LeafLabs Maple. And a Cortino. And an ARMimte Pro. They're all ARM processors on an Arduino footprint board.(There's also Xduino, but I haven't tried one.)
The Maple aims to be as Arduino-like as possible; even to the extent that you should eventually be able to copy running code from the Arduino IDE, paste into the very similar Maple IDE, hit compile and upload and you're good. It's not quite there yet, but if you're just developing for the Maple it's nice now.
The Cortino is a much more traditional embedded system. It's got an uploader. (Windows executable only.) And, well, that's it. Find your own compiler and runtime. I think I remember finding that the upload protocol was something standard, but I ended up using OpenOCD and soldering in the JTAG header. One brick wall of a learning curve, but I was so pleased at getting it to blink morse!
The ARMite PRO is the Arduino-footprint offering in a range of boards. They are preloaded with a BASIC interpreter, but solder on a jumper and you can upload via a FTDI USB serial cable. I think it's just the same as the Arduino lilypads.
Fun to play with; I need to get an Xduino now!

I like MikeOS

The original article Shlomi Fish wrote (and the parent poster was referring to) was not trolling at all.

http://better-scm.berlios.de/docs/nice_trys.html

It was very insightful -- if I were shopping around for solutions, I would personally give it a try instead of the Common Lisp based approach the parent poster is advocating, precisely for the reasons outlined. As for the rebuttal page of the parent poster, I was not convinced at all -- regardless of the rebuttal's whining about technicalities, I would still never resort to installing an uncommon language just to do source code control. And while the original article got some facts incorrect, the general reasoning that lead to the decision is still sound. It was not even posted at a forum to get a rise out of people (it was not in an "enemy camp's" forum thread -- it's simply a justification page for the project's existence), so it cannot be characterized as "trolling" at all.

The above poster, on the other hand, is doing a near-exact definition of trolling, "getting a rise out of people in a thread devoted to discussing an unrelated view". It was rife with the tactics of trolling -- taking quotes out of context, resorting to false generalizations, using unpleasant language, and tried to derail the conversation from the topic at hand into an ad hominem and personal attack. Yet the post got modded "informative".

Good job. Kaz, you earned my respect. You really did.

I totally hear what the article author is saying about the Playbook.
Just to give BB credit, where it's due, development and deployment for BB _handsets_ is actually free. The only thing you have to pay for is for inclusion into the BB app store. And this, only after the 10th release currently.
For the handsets you need a key to sing your apps if you want to use BB API. The keys registration fee was lifted just recently. To deploy you can put your app on any web-server and share the link for installation.
Unlike iPhone there is no jailbreaking needed for "out of app store" install.
I have just written a BB app and offering it for free under GPL for installation here

Every time a story like this is posted, everyone begins reminiscing about the "good ole days" when they had to enter their programs using toggle switches or paper tape.

Fortunately, most of the platforms of old are still around and anytime I get to feeling nostalgic about a particular machine I used to work on, I just fire up one of the many emulators available. After about 10 minutes of playing around with it and the reality of how much dealing with the limitations sucked, I simply shut it down and get back to my current 8Gb Quad-core machine and I'm happy again.

For those of you who haven't checked these out and are feeling nostalgic, here's a few links that may bring back some memories...

http://applewin.berlios.de/ (Apple IIe emulator)
http://www.discover-net.net/~dmkeil/ (Various TRS-80 emulators Model I, III/4, Coco 1,2 & 3)
http://www.altair32.com/index.htm (Greate Altair 8800 emulator - complete with front-panel)
http://www.viceteam.org/ (Various Commodore emulators - C64, C128, VIC20, PET)
http://fms.komkon.org/Speccy/ (Sinclair ZX)

For the greybeards out there
http://www.hercules-390.org/ (IBM System/370/390/z emulator)
http://www.ibmsystem3.nl/emulators.html (IBM System 3 emulator - anyone remember this baby!)

And for the "whitebeards"...
http://members.optushome.com.au/intaemul/Emul1401.htm (IBM 1401 emulator - Autocoder anyone?)


Go ahead, get it out of your system so you can stop pining for the "good ole day", that were, in truth not really as great as they seem in restrospect.

Enjoy...

Do you ever turn your computer off?

I don't. And my drives seem to be (pretty much) fine for the last 6 years (1 year for WD green 1TB).

By the way, palimsest (branded as "Disk Utility" in Ubuntu) is an easy way to get SMART disk failure predictions. There's also GSmartControl, which is more advanced.

Click here to install in Debian/Ubuntu.

It is not really that far fetched of a feature to request. You could simply have different layers at different resolutions and it would already work, you could also go the next step and simply keep all brush strokes vectorized or use some clever in between. I wrote an app that could do that once, not practical as it wasn't optimized at all and thus got slower with increased image complexity, but fun to toy around with.

Linux Format is nice... but a bit expensive if you live in the US (about $16-17) and also focuses on newbies. It was a great introduction to Linux, but I really don't see an advanced coder really appreciating it as much.

If you are new to Linux I don't think I can recommend another magazine as highly as Linux Format, but if you are an advanced coder it might not be that interesting to you. Though I do like one of the projects from one of the authors of it, its called MikeOS, it is an OS entirely coded in assembly and is really easy to reprogram and is well documented. http://mikeos.berlios.de/

one link further: airquake 4 for teiQ see also Telejano Quake Engine 3.Beta

After I started using NX ( http://freenx.berlios.de/ and http://nomachine.com/ ) I never looked back at VNC. NX provides near local speeds for remote X11 desktops.

Here is the X48 emulator home page. I fire this up when I don't have my real 48SX with me.

Many newer cell phones actually include a GPS antenna / chip. It's actually not that hard or expensive; you can source them for somewhere between 20 and 40 dollars each from what I recall.

As for battery, the problem is not that the GPS is such a large burden on the battery, but that smartphones are battery hungry on the best of days. So you really can't rely on them for a week at a time without something clever like a USB solar panel. But if you have one, then it's probably lighter and cheaper carrying that than carrying separate phone and GPS gadgets.

From Super Star Trek

"The short-range scan gives you a considerable amount of information about the quadrant your starship is in. A short-range scan is best described by an example."

          1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
          1 * . . . . R . . . . Stardate 2516.3
          2 . . . E . . . . . . Condition RED
          3 . . . . . * . B . . Position 5 - 1, 2 - 4
          4 . . . S . . . . . . Life Support DAMAGED, Reserves=2.30
          5 . . . . . . . K . . Warp Factor 5.0
          6 . K . . . . . * . . Energy 2176.24
          7 . . . . . P . . . . Torpedoes 3
          8 . . . . * . . . . . Shields UP, 42% 1050.0 units
          9 . * . . * . . . C . Klingons Left 12
          10 . . . . . . . . . . Time Left 3.72

"You may abandon the Enterprise if necessary. If there is still a starbase in the galaxy, you will be sent there and put in charge of a weaker ship, the Faerie Queene.

The Faerie Queene cannot be abandoned.""

Wow, way to miss the entire point of the damn article. The poster askes for multi-head power tools, and you post a comment about a WM whose author stated (link):

Ion does not support runtime changes in display configuration, and
_won't_ get it "right" even over restarts if the displays are shuffled
around a lot. I have no plans of writing that support. Xinerama sucks
anyway, being incompatible with every other extension, and multihead
in general is a fucking waste (of energy etc.) most of the time too.

As an aside, the guy sounds like the Theo de Raadt of the window manager world.

Yes, everyone has heard of ZFS on FUSE. I'm not sure I would call that a 'port'-- a port would run natively on a filesystem. ZFS on FUSE is a hack, and would probably never be trustworthy enough to run a Production or Enterprise storage system, or host backup data, or anything outside the hobbyist realm.

That project looks abandoned (No releases in over a year, no news or updates on the blog in over a year). I wish people would stop referring to it until the project becomes active again.

Oops! Current maintained version of gringotts is at http://gringotts.berlios.de/

Random tip: if you just want to run a single app from the remove machine, ssh -XC
The X tells ssh to forward X and the C means compress. One particular app I used to run (connecting from anywhere to my Linux box at home, which was behind a 256k up DSL) launched in 30 seconds with -X and 10 seconds with -XC.
Of course, different people's definitions of "usable" differ. :-)

Otherwise, I hear good things about http://freenx.berlios.de/ .

NX is compressed X11 protocol with reduced number of round trips, so it's fairly responsive even over slow connection. You can create full-desktop sessions like VNC, floating window sessions like SSH with X11 forwarding, and also connect to existing full-screen sessions running on the remote computer like RDP. The server installation creates an "nx" user with a special NX shell. The NX client simply SSH to the server and manipulates the session with the NX shell, as opposed to listening on a TCP port.

No Machine is proprietary, but they let you use the NX client for free (as in beer). The NX free server (running on the remote computer) restricts the number of connections, but Google has released open source NeatX for the server replacement. It's probably easier to install the NX server first, then replace the NX shell with that implemented by NeatX. For me, I just stick with the proprietary NX free server because the restriction is not a problem for me.

NX does have a free open source server and client implementation, FreeNX. I haven't tried it, but you could.

Syncinc to vblank is trivial with (closed source, but unfortunately still the top performer) NVidia drivers, it's a simple checkbox in nvidia-settings. But as you mention UXA I gather you have an Intel chipset, and at the moment they kind of blow in Linux. Granted, I haven't tried the latest kernels/drivers with UXA, so perhaps the situation has improved. But you might want to try this, it removes tearing for me.

Remote X is a perfect example of just the bloat X contains.

Your "bloat" is a feature I use every day.

By the way, I always use remote VNC, and not Remote X. It has advantages like being usable over a WAN (not like X protocol)

I've yet to see a raster remote desktop protocol that's tolerable over anything slower than 10 megabit ethernet. Sure, in a pinch, I could use VNC , but it's painful. On the other hand, NX works just fine.

Solved?

People will just be playing on private battle.net servers. http://pvpgn.berlios.de/

I'm sorry, but do you really think someone will "hack in" LAN a couple hours after release?

Couple hours may be pushing it, but a couple days, perhaps, they'd likely do it by adding support for it to PvPGN bnetd's spiritual successor.

All I have to say is... http://pvpgn.berlios.de/.

You might want to try No Machine's NX instead of RDP. It works exceptionally well. There's a free version (FreeNX) which also has an Ubuntu PPA. There's Ubuntu documentation here.

There are Windows, Mac, and Linux clients and a Linux server. We use it to allow windows users to run Unix software.

Assembly can be fun with very well documented code. I had a week or two of fun by playing with Mike-OS ( http://mikeos.berlios.de/ ) because it is very, very, very well documented. However, if it weren't for all the helpful comments in the source, I would have been lost. Assembly is not a good first language because it doesn't really -teach- you how to program for anything other than a certain computer. Sure, Ti-86 assembly is kinda fun to write games in to pass the time away in Algebra, but most of those skills become useless when you go to a different language. I would start new programmers off with Python then move up to C and finally Java.

Just run a local PVPGN server (once they support it, that is).

http://pvpgn.berlios.de/

Agreed. And If you go this route, you'll be interested in this list, since it tells you which GPS units are likely to work well the gpsd on Linux or *BSD.