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It would be easier to get some of that Darpa money sent over to Pynie and it will all run on Parrot (multithreaded stable as of last month apparently). Then you will be able to call Perl6 and Befunge when you get tired of indenting all the time (ducks)

I was specifically criticizing Java for things other than security.

First of all, it's not genuinely free software. A freer alternative implementation, Apache Harmony, was killed off by patents. Why marry a language when there are limits, both practical and theoretical, to what you can do with it? Some of Java's security problems are directly related to Java's relative closedness and bad will with the hacker community.

Secondly, it fails both as a high-productivity language and as a high-performance / systems language. People could always build better software more productively by using a scripting language like Python or Ruby, and then rewriting performance-critical modules in C. Unfortunately Ousterhout's Dichotomy never caught on in large bureaucracies, the excuse being that they wanted one language for a balance of productivity and performance, which, with enough statistical torture, Java could be shown to be. Until recently.

Many things have changed in the last decade to make real (compiled to machine code) programming languages competitive with bytecode VM's: better platform-independent build tools, faster compilers (plus network distributed compiling), sandboxing / OS-level virtualization, etc. We've had languages like D, Go, and now Rust that would offer better productivity than Java, and should in theory eventually come closer to the performance of C. (Haskell sucks.) And the language that in my opinion currently does the best job, both in terms of syntax and performance, is Nimrod.

--libman

You're giving credence to a rant from 2008 by someone who doesn't even know how to turn off Apache directory indexing on his own user directory? FWIW, Bitbucket did a complete redesign of their site and released it on October: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/10/09/introducing-the-redesigned-bitbucket/ .

Wondering what else I could do with the stuff I assembled in Hugin, I put together a quick interactive version of the panorama. Requires a recent browser with WebGL support - uses the open-source Pannellum as the viewer.

So, it sounds like:

a) You use mercurial,
b) You want the functionality of github or at least most of githubs functionality,
c) You need some sort of private repository or repositories,
d) You might only have a few developers on your team,
e) You are having trouble convincing your bosses enough for them to pay for something...

Have you looked at bitbucket.org?

The free plan gives you unlimited private repositories, and up to 5 collaborators for those private repos. And you can create either hg or git repos. By being free, you presumably don't need to convince your boss to pay.

And you can get a few extra free users at the moment too:
http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/09/18/refer-a-friend-to-bitbucket-for-free-users/

Generally I prefer github overall (only slightly though), but they have no free offering with private repos and in general they can be more expensive. I find bitbucket is "good enough".

Codify allows you to develop for the iPad.

Except for the restrictions noted here:

https://bitbucket.org/TwoLivesLeft/codea/wiki/FAQ

This is more of a macro or scripting system than a development platform for iPad, and it is limited even for that. You might as well claim that this is a system for developing software for Windows:

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

You might want to check out a program called Checkride. It is an open source program developed in Lazarus. It is basically a preconfigured portable VNC and stunnel package. To use you configure it to connect to your computer and give it to the person you are trying to help. The executable you send them starts VNC server and then connects to your computer via stunnel. Your PC then starts VNC viewer on your side and connects to their desktop via the secure stunnel connection.

Checkride

What you say works well in a UNIX-like environment. Windows, on the other hand, doesn't see #! lines; instead, it looks in a registry that maps the end of a filename to an application. It took until Python 3.3 for PEP 397 launcher to get implemented and added to Python.

If anyone's interested, I'd be more than happy to share the code and experiences with someone to measure the effect of blocking the websites on bittorrent participation. See https://bitbucket.org/vdham/dutchpirate for the code that was used in the dutch measurements.

A problem with measuring this is that we did not have a good view of the "before" situation, so if this still works, than you can do a good measurement now. Send me a message if you want to know more or need help.

Don't use SharePoint or CodePlex. Try this: http://github.com/ or this http://launchpad.net/ or this http://bitbucket.org/

here have been small pushes in this direction (e.g. the Ubiquity add-on for Firefox [mozillalabs.com] would let you type commands (like "map XXX" or "email page to XXX") and get immediately useful results), but for it to really work, from a user perspective, it has to be available in every application so that it's worth the cost to learn the new style.

I thought exactly the same when I saw the video, this is ubiquity for the whole OS. I have been a ubiquity user for a long time, in fact if you want to try it out there is still a version in development, and I simply can't live without it. So my advice would be to try out the system and *then* criticize the hell out of it, it might be great.

Also, I think that since most users of linux are already CLI power users, this seems like a great tool for the real users of Ubuntu, not the objective market that M. Shuttleworth thinks he has, but for the real one: linux users who don't want too much hassle when configuring the desktop.

Nice plugin for visualizing said undo tree: http://sjl.bitbucket.org/gundo.vim/

3) This guy was banned for only a month because he was responding in a very hostile way. He was told he would be unbanned at that point. However, he seems just like an angry individual in general, and I hope he gets counseling or something in order to help with anger management issues.

I've read his comments on his repository and I'd say he's putting up a pretty good front for such an angry guy. Also angry guys/hostile individuals rarely version control their own comments like this guy did.

He was not banned because he forked Growl, I think that's kind of neat actually and the point of being open source.

You might be a better man than I am then, and it's not because I dislike forks. If it were me, I would have been slightly annoyed that a person that I would have considered "poisonous" would have forked my code. I know that logically, such an emotion doesn't make much sense, it's just that I generally have trouble remaining emotionally objective about someone's actions after I've judged that person to already be "poisonous".

He was being a poisonous person, and was removed as such. I will not discuss this any further, but wanted to address this here.

I'm sure there is no denying your perception of those events and the weird entitlement issues that some internet users, you don't even know, may have over your time. That being said, at no point does he call you names, in the present form, nor in any of his past comments (which luckily have been version controlled for us to see). Don't you think you may have been a little bit too quick to judgement over this guy? So yes, he seems to have been a little bit frustrated over the fact that he didn't have access to the source, but all these labels you've placed on him just don't seem to fit him at all.

An angry guy would have responded to your comments by now, and would only have gotten himself deeper. Looking at his posting history, he just doesn't seem to fit that profile (and in a way, I'm not surprised he hasn't responded in that manner yet, I doubt he ever will).

4) We will be providing source in the form of our chosen vcs. If you do not know how to use a vcs but you work with oss, or want to work with oss, not learning a vcs is doing yourself a disservice. Future employers, or current oss projects, will find your knowing a vcs up front an asset, and we want to promote that. Tarball distributions will be ended as of 1.3.

Has any one actually complained about having to go through your version control system? Or was this just an assumption on your part when people were asking for your tar balls? Even the "poisonous" guy you banned seems to be relying on his version control system for everything. So he couldn't be the one who complained about that. Right?

3) This guy was banned for only a month because he was responding in a very hostile way. He was told he would be unbanned at that point. However, he seems just like an angry individual in general, and I hope he gets counseling or something in order to help with anger management issues.

I've read his comments on his repository and I'd say he's putting up a pretty good front for such an angry guy. Also angry guys/hostile individuals rarely version control their own comments like this guy did.

He was not banned because he forked Growl, I think that's kind of neat actually and the point of being open source.

You might be a better man than I am then, and it's not because I dislike forks. If it were me, I would have been slightly annoyed that a person that I would have considered "poisonous" would have forked my code. I know that logically, such an emotion doesn't make much sense, it's just that I generally have trouble remaining emotionally objective about someone's actions after I've judged that person to already be "poisonous".

He was being a poisonous person, and was removed as such. I will not discuss this any further, but wanted to address this here.

I'm sure there is no denying your perception of those events and the weird entitlement issues that some internet users, you don't even know, may have over your time. That being said, at no point does he call you names, in the present form, nor in any of his past comments (which luckily have been version controlled for us to see). Don't you think you may have been a little bit too quick to judgement over this guy? So yes, he seems to have been a little bit frustrated over the fact that he didn't have access to the source, but all these labels you've placed on him just don't seem to fit him at all.

An angry guy would have responded to your comments by now, and would only have gotten himself deeper. Looking at his posting history, he just doesn't seem to fit that profile (and in a way, I'm not surprised he hasn't responded in that manner yet, I doubt he ever will).

4) We will be providing source in the form of our chosen vcs. If you do not know how to use a vcs but you work with oss, or want to work with oss, not learning a vcs is doing yourself a disservice. Future employers, or current oss projects, will find your knowing a vcs up front an asset, and we want to promote that. Tarball distributions will be ended as of 1.3.

Has any one actually complained about having to go through your version control system? Or was this just an assumption on your part when people were asking for your tar balls? Even the "poisonous" guy you banned seems to be relying on his version control system for everything. So he couldn't be the one who complained about that. Right?

exactly, its not like they couldn't work out of one of the many hosted public code repositories.

Microsoft's IDEs are very good.

...

Note that while VS is not FOSS, this project *is*, which means users can take and extend its functionality as needed

WHOOSH!

Ubiquity is now a community project. You can find the community updated version at https://bitbucket.org/satyr/ubiquity/downloads

Well said. They also dislike software patents, and their dragonfly (developer tools) project is open source https://bitbucket.org/scope/dragonfly-stp-1

There is a project called Minetest-c55. It is not as featureful as Minecraft, but written in C++ (using Irrlicht) and licensed under the GPL2 (or – as I remember – at your option, any later version). You can check it out on Bitbucket.

Disclaimer: I maintain a fork called Minetest (Minetest Delta) with some added features (new block types etc.), which can be found on GitHub. Look at the screenshots.

I would pay good money for a PowerShell implementation on Linux, and even more if Linux internals were exposed in the same way that WMI objects are on Windows.

And this is from a thirteen-year Linux veteran.

It's surprising that a thirteen-year Linux veteran wouldn't have discovered Python, which also is based on the idea that everything is an object, and has run on Windows and any kind of *nix for many years before PowerShell showed up. Its standard library has a huge amount of functionality built in and PSI - Python System Information looks like an easy way to get at system information. The enhanced interactive shell IPython has a lot of time saving features compared to the default one. Even on Windows, I'd rather use Python than PowerShell, since it has easy access to all the same COM and WMI objects that PowerShell does.

FYI, Boxer is simply DosBox with a different frontend. Behind the pretty buttons, the entire emulation engine is DosBox 0.74: https://bitbucket.org/alunbestor/boxer/src/e21bfcb1d3a0/DOSBox/

You may have already known this and were simply suggesting Boxer as a good frontend for Mac (as per DosBox's own website, under FrontEnds: http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1

In this case I apologize. I've just had this argument before for Mac supporters stating that "Boxer is a superior emulator to DosBox". >

You two aren't even trying.

... On the other hand, git and mercurial just don't have the tooling (GUI) that subversion has with TortoiseSVN, SmartSVN, the Eclipse SVN Handler... There might be equivalents, but they are not as good.

I've used TortoiseHg for a while now, and it seems to be complete. Is it just that I'm a Mercurial Noob?

Just for starters:

http://hg.icculus.org/icculus/aquaria (official repository, with post-Humble Bundle patches from several people)
http://bitbucket.org/_Agent/aquaria
http://achurch.org/cgi-bin/hg/aquaria

(Not to say the others aren't undergoing development as well; Aquaria is just the only one of those four that really captured my interest.)

I noticed this the other day: http://bitbucket.org/djlyon/smp-driverless-car-robot

I think most people here are not understanding the target audience for this tool (hint: it's not for your typical linux environment). It's not about package management or having a universal installer... it's about being able to run your application in a different environment where you don't have admin rights.

In a lot of university clusters or compute grids researchers have access to a large collection of compute nodes, but they usually don't have any rights to those machines. In fact, most of the time the programs are ran in a sandbox and have a restrictive environment. To run their codes reliably, researchers often have to perform some sort of static linking or package up all of the dependencies with the executable. apt-get or yum are not options in these environments... you may not even be able to ssh into them. Ideally, you could ask the system administrator that controls the cluster to install certain packages, but again, this is not always possible particularly if the researcher requires a niche package used in their domain.

Moreover, the cluster may be composed of heterogenous set of machines with different versions of Linux. Package management does not help you here. The only way to reliably execute your programs on such a heterogenous cluster is to statically link or include your dependencies. If you are wondering who would use such a maddening environment where you have no admin rights... google Condor, OpenScienceGrid and Globus. This is how a lot of research computation is done.

Of course, the hot new thing is virtual machines and clouds... but firing up a VM each time you want to run an application is very heavyweight... especially if your applications has a short run-time.

TL;DR: this isn't for your typical ubuntu or fedora install; it's for scientific research that is done on restrictive computing clusters and grids.

As a side note, I made and use a much cruder tool http://bitbucket.org/pbui/starch/ that packages everything up (executables, libraries, and data) in a self-extracting tarball which can be executed on remote hosts. It's not as slick as CDE, but it's been used with success by various research groups that I collaborate with.

many developers have been using sparkle to handle updates. Yes, it would be nicer if the OS checked and listed updates in one fell swoop (I use Coruscation to do it), but the existing situation isn't bad.

You should give Mercurial a try. The thing that got me to use it in 2005, when it was pre-1.0, was how clean and obvious the command line interface was. I don't generally use graphical tools for development work, so I can't gauge the various GUIs available for it, but I do know that a lot of people like TortoiseHG.

I've used Perforce as well, and it has its strange quirks and complexities too, though I agree that git's command line interface leaves a great deal to be desired in comparison. I think Mercurial's command line interface is more intuitive and clearer than Perforce's.

I've run into the same problem with cmake. I don't really have that problem with python tools as python's virtual environment tools seem to handle things nicely. Tools such as pip natively handle virtual environments, automatically installing into it when one is active.

Also, there are lots of nice wrappers to work with python's tools, for developers, such as gogo.

You're a webdev? I know you said you don't want to keep doing that, but what else are you happy doing?

Right now, GNU Octave is looking to rebrand itself and is starting a website to rival Matlab Central. The The Octave-Forge pages also need help, and a hot new designer star just recently came along who is helping us with logo and brand image design. His name is Fotios Kasolis.

You could do a lot of good if you got involved with us. Plus, Octave itself is interesting if you're into mathematics and numerical analysis.

I prefer to download video files and play them from VLC. Browser cache, youtube-dl, wget, etc. Haven't been able to get Hulu, though.

Or use youtube-dl.

also there is youtube-dl.


Given the topic of the summary, anyone who clicked on that without double checking where it went should reflect on the consequences of clicking on links randomly.

I wrote a small utility for detecting duplicate files in Go back when it first came out. I haven't really kept it up to date so I'm not sure if it compiles with the current version.

It's an interesting language. Apart from its lineage, which is interesting and great if you're into Plan 9, it seems to me to be an old-school procedural shot across the bow of the current crop of compiled functional languages (ML, Haskell). It's hard to place the language in any camp, because it does furnish functional programming and object-oriented features without really committing to the dogma of either one. It gives you a ton of interesting features that seem to work really well in concert, but it's also missing some core functionality. I can live without exceptions but I'm not sure I can live without type genericity in this day and age. And a lot of other programmers have their own little nits with it.

Overall, it seems great. But I seldom need code compiled to the machine, and I'm conversant with and fond of the compiled FP languages so I tend to rely on them for these kinds of utilities. I suspect at Google this will eventually become the de-facto language for implementing protocol buffer servers. If and when that happens, the language will have a guaranteed niche for a long time to come, whether or not it wins over hearts and minds outside the giant.

If that's really the only reason let me introduce you to youtube-dl, found here: http://bitbucket.org/rg3/youtube-dl/wiki/Home . It certainly beats installing flash on my desktop (linux) so firefox can view the file. I use it like this: ./youtube-dl -b -t $url. The bash script is "/usr/bin/youtube-dl.sh -b -t %1" so you can do "$ youtube $url" ;)

Essentially what I'd want would be a Task List on steroids, allowing for hierarchical subtasks, attachments, and prioritization

mylifeorganized.net - awesome windows task list app.
This app addresses your stated problem directly. I use it myself for professional and personal tasks. You can export as XML and sync with outlook too.

Clearcontext - an outlook addin
Adds many features to outlook making it much better at handling lots of shifting work. It takes a bit of learning and setting up, worth a look though.

TaskFreak! web based task manager / todo list written in PHP

www.Gtd-php.com
A surprisingly full-featured GTD system done with PHP.

Here's a list of groupware/collab/project management tools I've either used for work or had a good play around with.
Most are commercial, since I'm sure that all the OSS stuff will already be posted here. Some of them have local hosted options

COMINDWORK - my personal favourite
Central Desktop - has outlook plugin + bookmarklets etc.
Zoho Projects - v2 is very fast and responsive
activeCollab
Assembla - would appeal to the slashdot crowd IMO
Group-Office groupware - Very slick. Also has outlook plugin.
Teamwork Project Manager
Mercurial hosting — bitbucket.org

Please check out such books as Mercurial: The Definitive Guide and Real World Haskell. They were freely available when being written and remain such, but in the same time both books were published as usual (on paper) by O'Reilly:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596800673/
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514983/

The source code used to create the books is also available. So you may use the same work flow.

I recently found the DownloadHelper extension for Firefox

youtube-dl is what I use. A command-line (python) script, that can be used to build one's collection of YouTube clips without a GUI...

they even let people download the original video

youtube-dl - you can grab the HD videos too.

I use lynx for everything! Even youtube!

Same here. Just replace "lynx" with a commandline Python script that downloads the Flash video from the YouTube page, which I then watch with MPlayer.

It's so much safer, less burden on my computer, and so much less annoying.

For the love of god do not use tortureforge.

There are plenty of alternatives, use one that doesn't make your devs and users scream in agony every time they have to use it.
Sourceforge is so bad, it's not remotely funny. Not only are the "Forums" and "Bugtrackers" utterly unusable and useless. Even supposedly trivial (read: baseline!) stuff like downloading a release tarball is a sea of pain, requiring 2-3 clicks through useless spoiler-pages (more ad impressions, eh?). God forbid someone just wants to quickly wget a release to give it a shot, OSDN might not profit!

Generally avoid any provider that carries "forge" in its name. Most of them took the abysmal tortureforge interface and somehow managed to make it worse.
Also beware of tortureforge in disguise! Some, like berlios, copied everything except the name. Same poison, different bottle.

So, here are some sane choices (randomly picked, there are more):

• LaunchPad
• BitBucket
• GitHub

And if you are serious and have a bare minimum of linux-skills then you can always set up your own instance of RedMine (not trac, mind you) along with a SVN, Git, bzr or whatever server. It's not rocket science. I'm sure there are even hosters that sell it prebundled for a few bucks a month.

It puzzles me that some people still pick TortureForge for their projects in this day and age. But normally that's at least a surefire sign that the project is not worth the diskspace it occupies... (for *new* projects that is, not counting legacy projects here that started on sourceforge years ago and are just too lazy to move).