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What's wrong with assembly and its sibling, C?

cgic is very mature (1996-2014), and very stable (version 2.05 released in 2011, version 2.06 in 2014).

Bah. Wasteful bloat and unneeded garbage. Plus, not cross-platform. Correct fix is here, or possibly here.

(I'm half joking, half telling you kids to get off my lawn and take your w3 with you.)

It's been done. A lot.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6863
http://www.boutell.com/cgic/
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/cgic.html

FTP

But how would people discover the hostname of the FTP server with Firefox? The old Firefox ads never gave the hostname of an FTP server, just the hostname of a web site that could be visited with an existing web browser (in this case IE). One could Google get firefox without IE to find this guide, but that too would require using IE.

USB flash drive [...] external hard drive.

Which requires bootstrapping. It's like finding someone to make a Free McBoot card for your PS2. What's the best practice for finding someone else who can provide this?

CD ROM, DVD

If you mean pressed discs, the official Mozilla store is by invitation only; I just checked today. If you mean recordable media, these have the same bootstrapping problem as above.

Posted without bonus.

Try editing a photo with the command line. Sure, you can do it, but why would you?

Seriously? I'd love to leave it a "Because you can." You're not thinking creatively enough or you must not do much programming. You see the results of it around you every day online! How do you think thumbnails are generated on many websites!? Packages such as Image Magick or GD are powerful command line programs. You may not be aware that photo editing software features command line options for situations where batch jobs make sense.

A scenario would be removing EXIF data from photos (like the latitude and longitude embedded by many devices by default, not so hot if you're a clown distributing pictures of their super secret grow op...). Irfanview is a great example of a GUI application exposed with command line functionality. Say you've got a bunch of photos of a client's (frequently rotating) products featured both in print advertisements and their online store.

Another real life example this last week I wrote a script to automate creating various graphic assets for our user created apps on the various platforms we support (iOS, Android variants) with files users uploaded directly to our web server. If you notice most professional software packages support scripting functionality because it's extremely useful (Maya, Cinema 4D, CAD, Photoshop (macros) etc.).

Please don't interpret this as subtle advocacy supporting command line elitism. Simply put I enjoy being productive, I get more done and my clients/employers as well as I benefit immensely from this. Daily there are times where GUIs are the way to go. For example I find editing documents using a mouse much faster for most situations, multiple copy and paste jobs are night and day faster for instance.

Yes.

Step 1) Download Firefox using FTP: instructions.

Step 2) Use Firefox to download Opera.

(you can probably use the method above to directly download Opera, but I'm too lazy to figure out how right now)

O RLY?

I love it when people call "moron" when they're completely wrong.

If they remove IE what will I use to download Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari so I can then ignore IE? A thumb drive it is then.

You can use command line ftp; here's how to get firefox without IE. I don't think this is practical for your average user, however.

Maybe the BEA coder declared a fixed-length array of 4000 characters either on the stack or an instance variable, to hold the HTTP Post URL.

Why 4000? Well I noticed that in the exploit code. It's also mentioned here,
as the internal URL limit enforced by Apache.

There are so many dynamic pages on the net now that one web site, like slashdot as an earlier poster commented, can contain literally millions of pages. People use programs like modrewrite, isapirewrite and linkfreeze to manipulate spiders into crawling pages that are near identical. For more than one customer I've made meta, title and content randomization, serialization and or URL rewriting schemes to make damn sure spiders index every possible dynamic page, and it works. I have a single dynamic page that must have been indexed hundreds, maybe thousands of times with slightly different content, and they are all in the index.

Google tries to detect a dynamic page by looking for ampersands and equal signs, as well as looking at the content of the page, it is really quite easy to fool.

e.g.: http://somesite.com/itemlist.php?listmode=1&category=beds&orderby=7
when 'rewritten' shows up as
http://somesite.com/items/1/beds/7.html

So 1 billion web pages could be, and I know a few thousand pages like this, just a few hundred thousand dynamic pages. Not that the pages don't have relevant information, some of the stuff can be redundant though. For instance, when the spider crawls across "Records per page = 10" > "Records per page = 20" > "Records per page = 30" etc.. or when lazy programmers don't use cookies and databases to store information but try and concatenate the URL with the user's selections. Thank god for that GET limit. People need to use POST!

If someone knows how to stop this message board from creating links out of false URLs please, let me know.

I wrote my first CGI programs in C, using the cgi-c library. In fact, it is still online for download!

I know, this is not the same, but that's what I thought when I read the headline.

The other big "office suite" programs--word processing, email--have Unix alternatives that use a plain-text paradigm. The spreadsheet, at least to my knowledge, has no such Unix alternative. The closest things I can think of are awk and Gnuplot, but unlike LaTeX's ability to replace a word processor, I can't imagine using awk and Gnuplot in place of a spreadsheet.

sc, spreadsheet calculator is exactly that. http://www.boutell.com/lsm/lsmbyid.cgi/000282

This will provide the final push to make me start producing all my new web code using cgic:

http://www.boutell.com/cgic/

When I was looking for a weblog analyzer i could find packages in two categories: $800+ visitor trail analisis software (really cool, but far too expensive for my clients) and free packages that only give very basic information (analog, webalizer).

Wusage gives me very detailed statistics, most followed trails, keyword effectiveness, history of data that goes back infinitely, far more than webalizer or AWstats ever gives you, for $25.

Looks totally uncool though, with a tables and frames based interface. It hasn't updated for quite some time. But it is by far the most functional I analyzer i have ever fond for less than $300.

http://www.boutell.com/wusage/

Oh, and he refers to inventing the Internet as inventing the world-wide-web which is not the Internet.

Leonard Kleinrock (US): Was the first person to write about packet switching.

J.C.R. Licklider (US): Had the first idea of what would become the Internet (He called it the Galactic Network)

Larry G. Roberts (US): Created the first long-distance network in 1965 (Called ARPANET)

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf (US): Created the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) which we all know the Internet uses as it's primary protocol.

Between what all these guys did plus the work of U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (NASA) The Internet was created.

You can read about it at the two following links.

http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/history/inventednet. html
http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/cerf.shtml

So, the Internet was in fact created in the US. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee.

http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/history/fbrowser.htm l

Unless you're reading this on Lynx or "WorldWideWeb," please STFU until you know what you're talking about, son.

I'm sure some people out there would prefer a graphics editor without a GUI.

I run the Boutell search engine on my Company's internal website.

Depending on your needs you may use different programs for different tasks.

* Ploticus (http://ploticus.sourceforge.net/) was alredy mentioned, but I could not overemphasize its conceptual beauty and rich functionality. You may use it from a command line, which IMO is a great advantage.
* GNU plot. Old but viable solution
* If you need to do some things that are unavailable in other charting programs you may take a look at low-level libraries, such as GD (http://www.boutell.com/)

The problem with PHP is that it is ASS SLOW. If your projects are successful, you will eventually find yourself considering whether to purchase super-expensive machines, rewrite it, or spread the load across many servers, etc.

Perl is about 10 times faster. Also, Perl has more libraries and example code available, and thus may give you a more marketable skill.

But C is about 10 to 100 times faster than perl (which is already 10 times faster than PHP). My advice is buy Kernighan and Ritchie's book, print out or buy the GNU C Library manual and examine the examples on safe string handling (asprintf instead of sprintf, for example), and then use Thomas Boutelle's cgic library to do your web programming. Your stuff will be fast, there is nothing you can't do . . . if you find something PHP does that you like, just look at the PHP source . . . after all it is written in C, so just use whatever library or code they use. Future employers and clients will know you can learn any language, because you know the one that they are all written in.

Hooray! The gd FAQ says that GIF support will be returning to the gd library. Thanks Tom!

Nintendo Powerglove. Yes, it does work under linux (link)

...is anyone surprised?

What I AM worried about, is what sort of long-reaching implications this has for GD. I use GD regularly in order to manipulate images via the web, and something like this would most likely cause JPEG support to be entirely removed from the project until the worldwide patent expires.

They did it with GIF.

This sucks, because usually I've come to expect future versions of software to have MORE functionality, not less. I hope the Joint Photographic Experts Group really does have prior art.

Thanks for providing a link to The Supreme Court. Now I can visit its site to find out what it is. Good thing posters on on Slashdot privide hyperlinks to every page on the World Wide Web that they reference. Otherwise we'd all be confused idiots.

Well, there it is - my first rudely sarcastic post.

*cragen.

Starting in 1993, shortly after moving to Seattle, I more-or-less-consulted for a previous employer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At the time I lived alone, and I did find it hard to get motivated in the morning. Telecommuting via transcontinental telnet over a 14.4kbps modem was a hassle. The time difference from my employer was also a problem; starting work when they did (5am my time...) was not an option. Fortunately I lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, which is very pedestrian-oriented, and I discovered that walking to Espresso Vivace every morning for a latte allowed me to "come to work" afterwards in a psychologically helpful way. Yes, I invented a commute for myself, but it was a very pleasant one!

In 1994 I took a job with Progressive Networks (later renamed RealNetworks. That took me out of my studio apartment and back into the workplace for a year. It wasn't a bad place to work during my time there, especially by mid-nineties tech company standards, but I felt I'd done most of my best work during the early months when I was the only programmer on staff. Back then I was a lot better at innovation than at maintenance, and I wasn't crazy about taking direction or meeting the often perfectly reasonable demands of my supervisor, either. I decided it was time to strike out on my own.

Meanwhile there was a lot of interest in the Mapedit imagemap editor, a web statistics package called Wusage, the old WWW FAQ list, and the GD library. But neither Mapedit nor Wusage was set up as a proper revenue-earning product, and I didn't have enough time to work on GD or the FAQ, either. I wanted to start my own company and make an independent living at it, but I didn't want to starve in the process. In 1995 I landed a deal for a book on CGI programming with Addison-Wesley, which provided me with an advance to live on, and I went back to working at home.

I set Boutell.Com up in partnership with my wife Michele. Another person in the living room/office was a helpful motivator to get a reasonable amount of work done. During those first nine months or so I completed the book, wrote a version of Mapedit that (a) was easy to use and (b) expired unapologetically when not registered after 30 days, and created the first commercial version of Wusage.

Fortunately, just as my checking account was scraping the bottom of the book advance, the software started to sell. Shortly after I was able to rescue my sister from temping for Microsoft and put her to work as my office manager. Filling the room with sensible women helps keep a guy on track.

In 1997 or so, my sister moved to Oakland with my soon-to-be brother-in-law, and we needed a new office manager. Michele and I hired Chris, an old friend from college. These were the fattest years for the company, and I was also able to employ Stephen, another old friend. Unfortunately I didn't provide Stephen with much guidance and support; one of his projects should have been recognized as too late in the gaming marketplace he wanted to enter, and the other needed more timely help from me or possibly outside investment to make it as a web-based calendaring solution. These days I can admit that his second project would have been better off with a larger company.

But back to what my workday looked like: make that agonizing commute all the way up the stairs, start the coffee, go out and fetch bagels, come back and sit down... and some weeks I worked hard, others I played way too much Quake. I was still getting the hang of maintaining a good thing if that's what is profitable for you; I kept pushing out new projects that were

Starting in 1993, shortly after moving to Seattle, I more-or-less-consulted for a previous employer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At the time I lived alone, and I did find it hard to get motivated in the morning. Telecommuting via transcontinental telnet over a 14.4kbps modem was a hassle. The time difference from my employer was also a problem; starting work when they did (5am my time...) was not an option. Fortunately I lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, which is very pedestrian-oriented, and I discovered that walking to Espresso Vivace every morning for a latte allowed me to "come to work" afterwards in a psychologically helpful way. Yes, I invented a commute for myself, but it was a very pleasant one!

In 1994 I took a job with Progressive Networks (later renamed RealNetworks. That took me out of my studio apartment and back into the workplace for a year. It wasn't a bad place to work during my time there, especially by mid-nineties tech company standards, but I felt I'd done most of my best work during the early months when I was the only programmer on staff. Back then I was a lot better at innovation than at maintenance, and I wasn't crazy about taking direction or meeting the often perfectly reasonable demands of my supervisor, either. I decided it was time to strike out on my own.

Meanwhile there was a lot of interest in the Mapedit imagemap editor, a web statistics package called Wusage, the old WWW FAQ list, and the GD library. But neither Mapedit nor Wusage was set up as a proper revenue-earning product, and I didn't have enough time to work on GD or the FAQ, either. I wanted to start my own company and make an independent living at it, but I didn't want to starve in the process. In 1995 I landed a deal for a book on CGI programming with Addison-Wesley, which provided me with an advance to live on, and I went back to working at home.

I set Boutell.Com up in partnership with my wife Michele. Another person in the living room/office was a helpful motivator to get a reasonable amount of work done. During those first nine months or so I completed the book, wrote a version of Mapedit that (a) was easy to use and (b) expired unapologetically when not registered after 30 days, and created the first commercial version of Wusage.

Fortunately, just as my checking account was scraping the bottom of the book advance, the software started to sell. Shortly after I was able to rescue my sister from temping for Microsoft and put her to work as my office manager. Filling the room with sensible women helps keep a guy on track.

In 1997 or so, my sister moved to Oakland with my soon-to-be brother-in-law, and we needed a new office manager. Michele and I hired Chris, an old friend from college. These were the fattest years for the company, and I was also able to employ Stephen, another old friend. Unfortunately I didn't provide Stephen with much guidance and support; one of his projects should have been recognized as too late in the gaming marketplace he wanted to enter, and the other needed more timely help from me or possibly outside investment to make it as a web-based calendaring solution. These days I can admit that his second project would have been better off with a larger company.

But back to what my workday looked like: make that agonizing commute all the way up the stairs, start the coffee, go out and fetch bagels, come back and sit down... and some weeks I worked hard, others I played way too much Quake. I was still getting the hang of maintaining a good thing if that's what is profitable for you; I kept pushing out new projects that were

Starting in 1993, shortly after moving to Seattle, I more-or-less-consulted for a previous employer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At the time I lived alone, and I did find it hard to get motivated in the morning. Telecommuting via transcontinental telnet over a 14.4kbps modem was a hassle. The time difference from my employer was also a problem; starting work when they did (5am my time...) was not an option. Fortunately I lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, which is very pedestrian-oriented, and I discovered that walking to Espresso Vivace every morning for a latte allowed me to "come to work" afterwards in a psychologically helpful way. Yes, I invented a commute for myself, but it was a very pleasant one!

In 1994 I took a job with Progressive Networks (later renamed RealNetworks. That took me out of my studio apartment and back into the workplace for a year. It wasn't a bad place to work during my time there, especially by mid-nineties tech company standards, but I felt I'd done most of my best work during the early months when I was the only programmer on staff. Back then I was a lot better at innovation than at maintenance, and I wasn't crazy about taking direction or meeting the often perfectly reasonable demands of my supervisor, either. I decided it was time to strike out on my own.

Meanwhile there was a lot of interest in the Mapedit imagemap editor, a web statistics package called Wusage, the old WWW FAQ list, and the GD library. But neither Mapedit nor Wusage was set up as a proper revenue-earning product, and I didn't have enough time to work on GD or the FAQ, either. I wanted to start my own company and make an independent living at it, but I didn't want to starve in the process. In 1995 I landed a deal for a book on CGI programming with Addison-Wesley, which provided me with an advance to live on, and I went back to working at home.

I set Boutell.Com up in partnership with my wife Michele. Another person in the living room/office was a helpful motivator to get a reasonable amount of work done. During those first nine months or so I completed the book, wrote a version of Mapedit that (a) was easy to use and (b) expired unapologetically when not registered after 30 days, and created the first commercial version of Wusage.

Fortunately, just as my checking account was scraping the bottom of the book advance, the software started to sell. Shortly after I was able to rescue my sister from temping for Microsoft and put her to work as my office manager. Filling the room with sensible women helps keep a guy on track.

In 1997 or so, my sister moved to Oakland with my soon-to-be brother-in-law, and we needed a new office manager. Michele and I hired Chris, an old friend from college. These were the fattest years for the company, and I was also able to employ Stephen, another old friend. Unfortunately I didn't provide Stephen with much guidance and support; one of his projects should have been recognized as too late in the gaming marketplace he wanted to enter, and the other needed more timely help from me or possibly outside investment to make it as a web-based calendaring solution. These days I can admit that his second project would have been better off with a larger company.

But back to what my workday looked like: make that agonizing commute all the way up the stairs, start the coffee, go out and fetch bagels, come back and sit down... and some weeks I worked hard, others I played way too much Quake. I was still getting the hang of maintaining a good thing if that's what is profitable for you; I kept pushing out new projects that were

Starting in 1993, shortly after moving to Seattle, I more-or-less-consulted for a previous employer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At the time I lived alone, and I did find it hard to get motivated in the morning. Telecommuting via transcontinental telnet over a 14.4kbps modem was a hassle. The time difference from my employer was also a problem; starting work when they did (5am my time...) was not an option. Fortunately I lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, which is very pedestrian-oriented, and I discovered that walking to Espresso Vivace every morning for a latte allowed me to "come to work" afterwards in a psychologically helpful way. Yes, I invented a commute for myself, but it was a very pleasant one!

In 1994 I took a job with Progressive Networks (later renamed RealNetworks. That took me out of my studio apartment and back into the workplace for a year. It wasn't a bad place to work during my time there, especially by mid-nineties tech company standards, but I felt I'd done most of my best work during the early months when I was the only programmer on staff. Back then I was a lot better at innovation than at maintenance, and I wasn't crazy about taking direction or meeting the often perfectly reasonable demands of my supervisor, either. I decided it was time to strike out on my own.

Meanwhile there was a lot of interest in the Mapedit imagemap editor, a web statistics package called Wusage, the old WWW FAQ list, and the GD library. But neither Mapedit nor Wusage was set up as a proper revenue-earning product, and I didn't have enough time to work on GD or the FAQ, either. I wanted to start my own company and make an independent living at it, but I didn't want to starve in the process. In 1995 I landed a deal for a book on CGI programming with Addison-Wesley, which provided me with an advance to live on, and I went back to working at home.

I set Boutell.Com up in partnership with my wife Michele. Another person in the living room/office was a helpful motivator to get a reasonable amount of work done. During those first nine months or so I completed the book, wrote a version of Mapedit that (a) was easy to use and (b) expired unapologetically when not registered after 30 days, and created the first commercial version of Wusage.

Fortunately, just as my checking account was scraping the bottom of the book advance, the software started to sell. Shortly after I was able to rescue my sister from temping for Microsoft and put her to work as my office manager. Filling the room with sensible women helps keep a guy on track.

In 1997 or so, my sister moved to Oakland with my soon-to-be brother-in-law, and we needed a new office manager. Michele and I hired Chris, an old friend from college. These were the fattest years for the company, and I was also able to employ Stephen, another old friend. Unfortunately I didn't provide Stephen with much guidance and support; one of his projects should have been recognized as too late in the gaming marketplace he wanted to enter, and the other needed more timely help from me or possibly outside investment to make it as a web-based calendaring solution. These days I can admit that his second project would have been better off with a larger company.

But back to what my workday looked like: make that agonizing commute all the way up the stairs, start the coffee, go out and fetch bagels, come back and sit down... and some weeks I worked hard, others I played way too much Quake. I was still getting the hang of maintaining a good thing if that's what is profitable for you; I kept pushing out new projects that were

I've been using TWiki for collaboration notes, and one of its features is a plugin for charting. It manages to draw jpegs and pngs using the perl GD module and the gd library.

Of course, you'd need to write your own server side to generate the chart you want, but these tools put you easily along that path.

But more relevant to the "instantly familiar" part is that when the New Left radicals started to idolize him, this one image of his face began to appear over and over on posters, t-shirts, magazine covers, everywhere, all variations of this one picture of him. It became a ubiquitous bit of pop-art for several years, and for probably 10 years or so, just about anybody in the U.S. could have seen a rendition of that one image, and known it was Che.

And it showed up in about a million different variations -- and apparently some of them are still around.

Sorry, not yet. As noted on the GD website , the patent doesn't expire internationally until July 7th of next year. So no GIF support in the GD library for another year. :-(

As noted on the GD website, the patent doesn't expire internationally until July 7th of next year.

No worries, mate. Just use the simple cgi email handler. It's very simple to install and it works great (requires unix, apache, and cgi script support).

Regardless of the program you use, try to store the data in XML format. Why? Because then you can use one XSLT for conversion to HTML for web use, another XSLT for conversion to PostScript for printing, another XSLT for conversion to Excel spreadsheets -- you get the idea. While I hate to say so on this site, SQL Server 2000 offers some particularly nice functionality that can be used to implement this -- such as automatic transformation of tables to XML documents.

If you require graphics as well as text, check out the gd graphics library. The Webalizer is an absolutely delicious example of how gd can be used to create slick PDF graphs on the fly.

You mention that you'd like to integrate with J2EE... I'm somewhat of a Java guru and can say without wavering that Java is not a first-choice solution for text-based reporting. If your reports are being generated by a Perl or PL/SQL script and you're just outputting the results from Java, it's fine ;), but text processing and transformation isn't too hot in the standard Java APIs. Now if you want to pay for a third-party API, you may be able to get around this...

For graphical reporting, however, Java is one of the best solutions. There are a plethora of Java charting tools available, although the decent ones will cost some dough...

Anyhoo, if you provide some more details on your specific task I can give a better recommendation.

--

If only Spiderweb Software would recognize that they should have more of their games ported to Linux...They were originally Mac-centric and have since been doing Mac->Windows ports.

Mosaic WAS NOT the first WWW browser. Mosaic was the WWW browser that got the whole WWW revolution started. The first WWW browser I recall using was a command line thing at CERN. You had to telnet there to use it.

There is a FAQ that might shed some light on the subject.

What I'm blocking out so far is:

our company's internal IP traffic

images

funky robots like Keynote-Perspective that the old webmaster had let loose on our sites.

This gives us some numbers I have confidence in (even though they're 10x less than the numbers the old guy was producing through Webtrends), but I'd like to find out what others are doing for making their own web stats.

Thanks,
Steve

Not only do I vote for third party Green candidates, sometimes they actually win. The City of Seattle has five Green Party of Seattle members in its ranks (although one of them joined the party just for the endorsement and has turned out to be a coporate whore anyway). Although Seattle's City Council is unlikely to put an end to the injustices of the DMCA anytime soon, they have made several progressive moves.

It doesn't take the president to change the law. Check out your local elections, and support your local progressive party (the one that is most likely to support the geek cause is probably the same one that wants to end corporate dominance). Let's get some progressive candidates in at state and local levels, then we can work up to the House and the Senate. There is a movement at work, and geek support can make a difference. Just start at the roots.

wusage is another you might want to check out.

right here.

Man, it's a good thing you're not a lawyer. The Free Software Foundation and Tom Boutell would get their ass handed to them in court with your theory.

I don't think it's possible to create a gif without it

It is possible to create a gif without using LZW, you can use RLE (as did Version 1.3 of gd), but it will result in larger gifs.

If I understand this correctly, Unisys doesn't expect you to get a license just for using GIF images, but rather if you develop software that includes LZW compression technology. So if you write a software package that produces GIFs with LZW, Unisys thinks you have to have a license. For this reason, Tom Boutell was forced to remove the GIF-generating functionality from the gd library.

If I understand this correctly, Unisys doesn't expect you to get a license just for using GIF images, but rather if you develop software that includes LZW compression technology. So if you write a software package that produces GIFs with LZW, Unisys thinks you have to have a license. For this reason, Tom Boutell was forced to remove the GIF-generating functionality from the gd library.

WebAnalyzer is nice....but I still like Wusage better.