Slashdot Mirror

FileRunner is Copyright (C) 1996-1999 Henrik Harmsen.

Wow I've gotta get my hands on that! It appears to be *cough*olderthandirt*cough* an awesome file manager!

No words about the text editor choice just like no words about your religion faith.
I don't like dig as well as the old-fashioned nslookup because of the tight coupling with BIND. I prefer the independent host (read chap.3), an historical DNS tool.
Finally, if I'd need to do some tests in TCP/UDP I'd choose either netcat or GNU-netcat.
Of course there is no perefect choice in a absolute sense. I simply have found these tools more effective than the other ones.

Windows 98 can be shrunk to ~4MB, and has plenty of drivers. And I kid thee not, I have seen Windows 95 used as an embedded OS in some very expensive products. Scary.

Metal expands when heated. Here's what can happen: http://www.charmec.chalmers.se/railtech/suncurves. html

I have been using Linux and various other Unices for years. I actually never used windows seriously until my current job, I went straight from DOS to Unix, then to Solaris, and then to Linux, with couple of BSD flavors for short periods of time sprinkled here and there.

In my current job I have a windows laptop for my office computer. I suffered for a while with the user interface and lack of any decent software, but after a while I found and installed bunch of programs that made it actually possible for me to get my work done. Curiously enough, lot of them are the exact same programs I have been using on Linux for years. Now most of the time, my windows box feels sort of like my linux box at home, as long as I don't try to do something special, and as long as I don't need to interact with the actual system (configure things, etc.). The worst problem is keybindings. It seems that in windows, the system reserves many key combinations so I cannot use them for my custom keybindings. Unfortunately, many of those seem to be exactly the combinations I have been using for years in my own custom FVWM setup.

Here are the applications I use on windows:

1) cygwin. From that, I mostly use rxvt, bash or zsh (I am a zsh junkie, but bash seems to work better for me on windows), and grep, less and couple of similar basic commands. Oh, and ssh and ncftp.

2) VirtuaWin with several modules for desktop switching and some basic window managment. Can't be compared to FVWM, but at least makes the system usable.

3) TXMouse (http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/) for focus follow mouse and X11-like cut and paste. This is absolutely wonderful application, which I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion yet.

4) proTeXt (http://www.tug.org/protext/) for my TeX distro. I used TeXLive before, which had more packages, but proTeXt integrates with windows better, and is based on MikTeX. For some reason, almost all windows applications that use TeX in any way expect to find MikTeX, and come preconfigured for it. With TeXLive, I usually had to do whole bunch of changes.

5) Vim with LaTeX-suite. I have been using this for a while on Linux, and I was very pleased to discover that it works just as well on Windows.

6) IPE (http://ipe.compgeom.org/) for my drawings. Again something I have been using on Linux for a while.

7) LyX (http://www.lyx.org/) when I don't feel like editing TeX by hand. I used to use LyX quite a bit before discovering LaTeX-suite for vim. Now I find using vim much faster and more flexible, but I think LyX should definitely be mentioned in this discussion.

8) Treeline (http://www.bellz.org/treeline/) for quick outlining, planning, to-do lists, notes etc. This is the only program which I didn't use on Linux before, and which I picked specifically because it works on both Windows and Linux.

9) Gimp and Inkscape for any graphics work. I have those installed, but rarely use them on Windows. For some reason I prefer to wait till I get home. I guess for this type of work, the windows user interface still gets too much in the way. Maybe it's also because it's a laptop. Also, the MathMap plugin for Gimp doesn't work on windows, and I use it a lot.

Anyway, with these, I can get most of my work done without the os getting too much in the way. If I need something extra, or something unusual, I just wait and do it at home.

Here are a couple in the past I know about not related to TopCoder:
http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/icfpcontest/res ults.html
http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/default.htm

like Linux-style mouse focusing ...in windows powertoys is seriously broken, to the point of being unusable. Ditch it and get txmouse instead. It still have few glitches, but generally it works. I wouldn't use windows without it.

I just add a bit on that list from top of my head.
Although I think the listed app goes beyond what the so called 'average pc user' wants, but there goes...

1. Konqueror ( http://www.konqueror.org/ )

2. Email - Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ )

3. I think Evolution is more like in this place.

4. Lately "Sound Juicer" is taking more attention too

5. VideoLAN aka VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ) and Ogle ( http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/ ) [and Goggles ( http://www.fifthplanet.net/goggles.html ) for Ogle GUI wrapper] for DVD watching.

6. There are plenty way to do this, but the typical ones could be 'Jinzora' ( http://www.jinzora.org/ ) and 'MusicPD' ( http://www.mpd.org/ ), even plain Apache does it fine too, in a way.

8. If you want easier to manage iptables wrapper, Shorewall ( http://www.shorewall.net/ ) and there are other wrappers too.

9. KOffice ( http://www.koffice.org/ ) and by individual components, Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ), Gnumeric ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ ), Gnucash ( http://www.gnucash.org/ )

10. Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) or Sodipodi ( http://www.sodipodi.com/ ) for vector graphics.

11. Miranda ( http://miranda-im.org/ ). Windows only.

13. Hmm , Samba? ( http://www.samba.org/ ), WedDAV (Look parent post), FTP (plenty ftp daemons, ex : http://www.proftpd.org/, http://vsftpd.beasts.org/ etc)

16. GPhoto ( http://www.gphoto.org/ ), EOG ( http://www.gnome.org/ ? ), GQView ( http://gqview.sourceforge.net/ ). The latters are for just viewing mainly.

20. FreeNX ( http://www.nomachine.com/ , http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) http://www.poptop.org/ ), L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpd ), RP-L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/ )

24. Postfix ( http://www.postfix.org/ ), Sendmail ( http://www.sendmail.org/ ), Exim ( http://www.exim.org/ ), Cyrus ( http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/ ), Xmail ( http://www.xmailserver.org/ ), qmail ( http://www.qmail.org/ )

25. Spamassassin ( http://spamassassin.apache.org/ )

26. Same as above.

27. XSane ( http://www.xsane.org/ ) for sane frontends.

30. Buzzmachines ( http://www.buzzmachines.com/ ) I could be wrong...

31. 'various GUI frontends' - X CD Roast ( http://www.xcdroast.org/ ), K3B ( http://k3b.sourceforge.net/ )

32. Don't know any opensource ones...

I've been using free-software only for about 10 years now...the freedom and power that gives me is far more valuable than an hour and a half of the latest car crash scenes.

Umm.... MPlayer, Xine, or Ogle, with libdvdread and libdvdcss work fine under Linux to play any and every DVD I've ever tried.

I've been using free-software only for about 10 years now...the freedom and power that gives me is far more valuable than an hour and a half of the latest car crash scenes.

Umm.... MPlayer, Xine, or Ogle, with libdvdread and libdvdcss work fine under Linux to play any and every DVD I've ever tried.

Two years ago I started attending a computer engineering program at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. I bought a laptop with wlan when I started, but I sold it about a year later. Why? There were computers available in abundance everywhere and I got tired of toting around a 3kg laptop and my regular books in my bag. I could not afford a lighter laptop at the time. But on the other hand a lighter laptop would probably have a screen that was too small for my taste.

I decided to get a new desktop machine at home and kept my home dir in school in sync with a folder at home using unison. That worked great in both the WinXP and Red Hat environment that the school is using.

Here's the connection stats, seems there's no problems at all:

http://stats.cdg.chalmers.se/Statistik/mrtg/GigaSu net/goteborgchalmers_srp.html

http://www.etek.chalmers.se/~almir/Humanoid_3_link .jpg

In this picture the robot is clearly taking a dump.

Actually, it'll be interesting to see how the server holds up. The Chalmers U. network (http://www.cdg.chalmers.se/Natverk/chalmers_bbng. gif) isn't too shabby with Gigabit Ethernet internally, and a 15 GBit/s Internet link (http://www.nordu.net/maps/map_nordunet.png).

I've struggled with the same question as a computer consultant -- do images always convey anything useful just because they are based on scientific data? I've created a lot of really cool graphs and 3-D animations, but as far as analyzing the data, most times the computer is a lot better at processing multi-dimensional data than our old Mark-1 eyeball

Well, I've taken a slightly different tack in my research. While the computer might be better at actually analysing the data, visualisation can be a great tool in getting the results of that analysis to the user. In my case I've visualised the states of self learning intrusion detection systems so that the user can 'see for himself' why the system operates the way it does. Making under and overtraining and false alarms visible to an extent they weren't before.

But I agree. Even though I started out (PDF) doing straight up visualisation, I've come to believe that it's the combination of computer analysis and visualisation to better match the capabilities of the human operator and the machine that's the interesting field to explore.

I've struggled with the same question as a computer consultant -- do images always convey anything useful just because they are based on scientific data? I've created a lot of really cool graphs and 3-D animations, but as far as analyzing the data, most times the computer is a lot better at processing multi-dimensional data than our old Mark-1 eyeball

Well, I've taken a slightly different tack in my research. While the computer might be better at actually analysing the data, visualisation can be a great tool in getting the results of that analysis to the user. In my case I've visualised the states of self learning intrusion detection systems so that the user can 'see for himself' why the system operates the way it does. Making under and overtraining and false alarms visible to an extent they weren't before.

But I agree. Even though I started out (PDF) doing straight up visualisation, I've come to believe that it's the combination of computer analysis and visualisation to better match the capabilities of the human operator and the machine that's the interesting field to explore.

I've struggled with the same question as a computer consultant -- do images always convey anything useful just because they are based on scientific data? I've created a lot of really cool graphs and 3-D animations, but as far as analyzing the data, most times the computer is a lot better at processing multi-dimensional data than our old Mark-1 eyeball

Well, I've taken a slightly different tack in my research. While the computer might be better at actually analysing the data, visualisation can be a great tool in getting the results of that analysis to the user. In my case I've visualised the states of self learning intrusion detection systems so that the user can 'see for himself' why the system operates the way it does. Making under and overtraining and false alarms visible to an extent they weren't before.

But I agree. Even though I started out (PDF) doing straight up visualisation, I've come to believe that it's the combination of computer analysis and visualisation to better match the capabilities of the human operator and the machine that's the interesting field to explore.

Why did God create blondes?
The sheep couldn't fetch beer from the fridge!
Then, why did God create brownhaired girls?
Neither could the blondes...
Then, why am I studying automation
To build me a god damn robot, so I finally can get that beer fetched for me!!!

Maybe we could start, while we're busying downloading the bzip2'ed iso, a petition for the author of cdrecord to open the source to the DVD-capable version of CDRecord. Now that Sun has (or at least claims to have) released the source to what is its second most-valuable asset, Joerg has less reasons to hold on to his binary-only version of cdrecord. Not that there are no alternatives to cdrecord. But as far as optical media writing on *n*x is concerned, cdrecord is the gold standard.

The fundametal laws of physics (quantum physics of elementary particles, general relativity) are CPT symmetric. Thermodynamics, and most macroscopic processes are clearly not. Eggs do not unbreak and such. Still, the macroscopic laws such as the second law of thermodynamics are statistical results of the fundamental laws. That is an interesting difference. Here is an article on the subject:

http://fy.chalmers.se/tp/TimesArrow.pdf

Basically, the direction of time can be explained by boundary conditions. The fact the universe started with in a specific state (big bang) means entropy has to increase from there.

I'm studying a course in 3D Computer Vision right now, at TUHH. It's part of the Erasmus exchange program I'm having here - the eigth and last semester (excluding the thesiswork) of my master of engineering in automation and mechatronics at Chalmers in Gothenburg. I can easily say this course is the most difficult one of all I've been taking for all of my study time, hopefully the three weeks I have between that exam and the last of my others, will be enough to learn what doesn't stay in my head during the lectures...

In fact, I have the course book right beside me. To begin, the description of it would be more or less along the lines "an orgy in linear algebra, mathematical statistics, with some flavouring of image processing, geometry, optimization and algorithms". Basically, it's 30-40% mathematical formulas, 650 pages, some containing things not even all MSc even learn like tensor notations etc. Not something I'm even sure is a good thing to recommend to very many slashdotters, even. You'll get its name though - "Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision", by Hartley & Zisserman. ISBN 0-521-54051-8.

What I see as problems in the book, is that almost everything is working on corner detection. This is great, if you want to make 3D-models of houses or other man-made objects (at least half of the examples in the book are architectural, I would say). It's not so great if you want to image bushes, rocks and other things with not so obvious corners on them. Also, the process involves quite heavy processing - both image processing, finding all those corners, statistical processing (to sort out outliers, which there will be), and optimization to find the best fitting backprojection of the image planes). I don't have a sure grip on the needed processing power but I doubt, when considering realtime demands in a car, that it'll hardly be easy to get it working.

Also, it's still to a big deal itself an area under research. The situation with using 5+ images (from different cameras och just consecutive images from the same, moved camera), isn't very well known. Using more images, of course would mean a bigger chance to get a decent 3D model of the scene...

And still, you would at least need two cameras to do anything useful. You can't reconstruct 3D space without having at least two images of the object to reconstruct. And probably you will need more - you would probably want to reconstruct all the way around (ie more cameras on the sides and backwards), and add extra sensors like radar etc for extra checks.

And then you really haven't solved the problem of driving the car. You have only built a decent mapping of the 3D surroundings of it. You have to add AI/some kind of steering logic, which only in itself is a demanding task. Just look at all FPS games out there - if it would be easy to construct good AI, with a known 3D-world, tailormade for the figures, would we really be seeing that many games with crap-AI? I'm happy I ain't taking an AI course too, for sure!

It only took a month from the Nano Tube '05 Conference for this to hit the regular press, but Motorola announced this technology back in 2003.

True Launch Bar is a great quick launch replacement with menus and many plugins.

True X-Mouse Gizmo Gives you X-windows like cut and paste in windows. a bit buggy IMO. I use a macro enabled mouse now for the same functions.

AutoHotKey Script Windows GUI, just plain Great!

Stardock friends at work use some of their tools. Looks like you can redefine just about anything with their toolset.

There is some related work which I find much more convincing. It's the work on Grammatical Framework (GF). GF is a programming language for writing multi lingual grammars. In GF you can if you wish specify the relation between a natural language and a programming language and write programs in the natural language. But that would not be idiomatic GF. Instead they have an editor where you can construct your natural language text out of a number of choices which makes sense in that particular context. The GF guys have also made successful experiments with converting OCL specification to and from several natural languages such as English, Swedish and German.

But the MIT people seem to have one big talent for making publicity. And I'll give them credit for that.

I personally prefer Transpiranto, pioneered by the Swedish publication Grönköpings Veckoblad.

Show me one example where O'Caml beats C++.

ICFP contests:

2004 (ocaml 1st); 2003 (ocaml 1st); 2000 (ocaml 3rd, C++ 5th); >2001 (ocaml tied 3rd place with C);

Others winners: 1998 C derivative, 2002 python (I think C++ actually beat OCaml this year)

More proof that NASA is filled with these guys.

Check out Lava at Xilinx, Lava at Chalmers, Hawk, the Hardware Design and Synthesis section of Haskell Application Papers on readscheme.org.
The links above lead to programs that are used by companies like Xilinx and Intel to help designers build better chips with existing technology. There are more interesting hardware approaches being investigated with Haskell. Two that come to mind immediately are quantum computing and dataflow-based simulations more related to the Lustre and Lucid languages. Though I do know of some unfinished research in the dataflow/hardware design area, I can't find any published papers at the moment.

One day I'll get around to buying a PCI card with a FPGA and use Haskell to turn it into a reprogrammable coprocessor. So many cool things to learn, so little time...

Damn fine DVD player here Never had any problems installing it.

If you're using Fedora Core, and have set up apt with Fresh RPMs as a source, you can just apt-get ogle-gui.

It's specific enough that I doubt there is any. Anybody know of software that traces geographically incoming connections, 'cause I don't.

You mean like XTraceRoute?

This is a clear case of prior art. This patent will not last very long in any courtroom.

USPTO shows up again! These people either are very uninformed or blind. How can they patent a thing that was used and invented a long time ago by other people. I remember I was using a visual traceroute program on win95 back in the 90's. I'm (still) proud I live in Europe, even if Romania (my country) is not yet a member of EU. I think I saw a visual traceroute program running on linux some years ago too... xtraceroute. Look on their web page here and scroll down to see when it was last modified. This gives you a clue how old the program is yet they didn't request a patent for that.

Michael Page, a quite-big finance-orientated recruiter/headhunter, wrote a very excellent piece on actually getting work as a quant, which people reading the comments on this story may find useful.

The link if chalmers.se because that's what Google gave me (didn't have the story bookmarked, had to search for it) - sorry don't have an original Michael Page URL. Please survive.

Why not use it to colorize, Or to rebuild the logs in HTML.

I published a paper, with GPL source code (you need Python etc) a few months back using visualisation (colorisation) to lend the user insight into the operation of a Bayesian classifier.

It actually works pretty well, and the idea could be applied to other uses of the Naive Bayesian classifier.

Why not use it to colorize, Or to rebuild the logs in HTML.

I published a paper, with GPL source code (you need Python etc) a few months back using visualisation (colorisation) to lend the user insight into the operation of a Bayesian classifier.

It actually works pretty well, and the idea could be applied to other uses of the Naive Bayesian classifier.

growisofs from DVD+RW tools.

Here's the missing link, sorry. Check before you post, duh.

Humanoid means "shaped like a human".

Wrong, it means "like a human", no reference to shape involved. What you're thinking of is "anthropomorphic".

ASIMO is anthropomorphic but doesn't have a truly humanoid gait (yet).

Asimo was the first to do that.

You mean "the first I heard about". ASIMO has certainly done much to popularize the field, but - and I quote - "One of the first functioning bipedal robots was developed in the 1970s by Kato (Kato and Tsuiki, 1972)." ()

1. CPSSkins

Run one of the videos. If you have Plone give it a try. Slick.

Since the submitter talked about a giant pinball machine, here's the world's smallest pinball machine

Its sometimes useful to see how the formats are handled by current software. Take a look at this page about DVD+/-RW on Linux for more info.

You should already have DMA, since it's on by default in scsi emulation (I used to turn scsi emulation on for just that purpose). Still, you're better off w/o scsi emulation, it can do weird things with the device nodes. Check your lilo.conf or grub.conf for the line 'hdc=ide-scsi' and remove it.

If you want better speed, upgrade to the latest DVD+/-rw-tools. There's a ton of recently fixed speed bugs with newer drives. Install from source is easy. just make && make install as root and it'll copy itself in /usr/local where k3b will find it (you'll have to go in and tell k3b to use the new binaries). I couldn't set my speeds correctly until I upgraded, and was left choosing between 8x (not happening on my 4x media) or 1x. Once I upgrade everthing just worked.

See Linux DVD+R/W page and search for "Book type".

In my case setting book type to DVD-R for a DVD+R dvd allowed it to play fine in a drive that would not accept plain DVD+R disk.

Commersial program to remove components from Windows XP http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html

Free programs to reduce the size of Windows XP before installation: http://nuhi.msfn.org/ and http://jdeboeck.msfnhosting.com/

And of course, my project that reduces the size of Windows 98 to less than 5MB http://www.etek.chalmers.se/~e8gus/nano98/ ;-)

You mean something like this...
http://www.tfd.chalmers.se/~valeri/EMP.html

Easy way around this: use dvd+rw tools. Despite the name, they work fine on dvd-rw drives. I use them to record DVD-R often. The use the stock mkisofs to make the image, and then pipe it directly to the writer, or they can write images that are pre-made.

Ogle
VCL

Both of which support menus surround sound and all the usual bells and whistles, but are also region free and allow unrestricted skipping of commercials and copyright warnings :)

Just wondering; have you tried Ogle or Xine? IIRC they both support DVD menus...

First public release! (8-May-01998)

"If I recall, there was an alternate windows manager called the Cube, that worked similar to this... what ever happenned to it?"

There's the 3D-CUBE project which includes 3Dwm (site appears to be down at the mo).

Personally, I agree with you - a 3d window manager won't work very well on a 2d screen. The is some real innovation in 2d window managers however, look at WindowLab and Ion.