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The PebblesPC part of the package basically sets up a conduit between a PDA application and PC application. Because the projects goals are more research-oriented, there aren't many commercial applications (that I know of right now). But there definitely was some noise made about SlideShowCommander. SlideShowCommander allows the user to control and communicaate with PowerPoint from the PDA, which is useful while giving a presentation. It was pretty neat. You could navigate through the slides, draw on them, etc. It was picked up by Synergy Solutions and is sold through them. Google provides the link here, but it appears to be down.

In any case, the Pebbles project is a free download. Or, you can buy the SlideShowCommander from Synergy, and give *me* some (small) amount of money. <<BIG GRINS>>

The PebblesPC part of the package basically sets up a conduit between a PDA application and PC application. Because the projects goals are more research-oriented, there aren't many commercial applications (that I know of right now). But there definitely was some noise made about SlideShowCommander. SlideShowCommander allows the user to control and communicaate with PowerPoint from the PDA, which is useful while giving a presentation. It was pretty neat. You could navigate through the slides, draw on them, etc. It was picked up by Synergy Solutions and is sold through them. Google provides the link here, but it appears to be down.

In any case, the Pebbles project is a free download. Or, you can buy the SlideShowCommander from Synergy, and give *me* some (small) amount of money. <<BIG GRINS>>

It once cost a substantial amount of money to buy an AIBO devkit from Sony; I now think they're wising up by opening up the SDK and allowing GPLd libraries like Tekkotsu to exist.

It once cost a substantial amount of money to buy an AIBO devkit from Sony; I now think they're wising up by opening up the SDK and allowing GPLd libraries like Tekkotsu to exist.

now I don't even have to be a 7337 AI hAx0r to win RoboCup? Sweet!

I program AIBOs at school now. AIBO already walks, of course, and it has an accelerometer that may be able to deterimine when it's about to slip off your back. Combining them both is a simple matter of programming. For all the trouble it gives me, it'd be nice for AIBO to give a little back in return.

Once things get less busy (i.e. perhaps in the summer), I may try coding this up. Shouldn't be too difficult.

BTW: if anyone has an AIBO and is frustrated with trying to program it, check out our new development framework. If I ever do get that massaging AIBO to work, maybe mention of it will turn up on that website.

--Tom

In all, my experience has been very good with tablet pcs and I wonder when the open source community is going to think about developing such a product.

Perhaps when 'the open source community' becomes one of the largest software companies in the world with a 90% market share.

Or at the very least when 'the open source community' figures out a way to make 'open source hardware', and produce it in 'open source factories' with 'open source workers' using 'open source materials'.

Actually, you know, I asked the open source community, and he said "You know, I never thought of that. I'll get right on it."

If the open source community does not begin innovating instead of playing catchup to microsoft, it will never succeed.

Yeah, somebody brought that up at the last Linux shareholder's meeting down in Fairyland, but since everybody there was just there for the free beer, it didn't really take.

Here is something (the tablet pc) completely new that everyone I show asks "where do I sign to get one"?

Right on the line that says "I hereby bequeath my (left testicle, first born child, kidneys), that I may have expensive clipboa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Tablet PC"

But you have to recoop R+D.

I'll cut the sarcastic crap and just say : Bullshit. Microsoft doesn't have to recoup shit, they spend boatloads on R&D anyway, and the manufacturers know they have to make huge margins while the hype is still around. Pen-screens are expensive, but there's no technical reason they can't sell one for less than half of what they're going for now.

Where are the voice recognition and handwriting recognition in the open source community? Are there any efforts?

They're in line, after the unified GUI, the unified sound architecture, the a11y and i18n, and other things that users actually want and need. Also, what good are voice and handwriting interfaces to people who use the command line most of the time?

But, since you asked :
Sphinx, open source (BSD-License) speech recognition.

XScribble,
uni-stroke character recognition for Linux on PDAs.

Are we going to let microsoft reinvent the pc while we sit back and simply say... ah... they'll pull it in a year.

Who is 'we'? If you're so threatened by Microsoft 'reinventing the pc', then why the hell did you buy one?

They may thorw millions into marketing though which they haven't yet.

Um...yeah. So, how do you get electricity in your cave?

Do your homework before advocating decisions for the open source community.

If you care so much, then why don't you do something about it?

-dr.badass

Lisp is backwards compared to how mathematics is done therefore making it difficult (relatively) to translate things back and forth.

And the lack of readable "blocking" of code is more annoying than useful, Lisp requires insane amount of parenthesis where most languages would have nice readable plain blocks of code.

Any of y'all that have programmed LISP know that it takes a long time just to make sure you get your parentheses lined up right

I've looked over a lot of other's code and never had much trouble understanding it. As a matter of fact, my pet project right now is getting several thousand lines of code from a decade old interface toolkit to work under a new constraints solver and generally cleaned up - so far I haven't had any trouble with the Lisp code (now constraint solvers, that's another thing...).

A good rule you should always keep in mind is that an s-expression is a car and a cdr, so just open a paranthesis for a function call and close it after the arguments are over. I only really need to use Emacs' highlighting when going through my own spaghetti numeric expressions. This isn't a problem since s-expressions let you have real macros, and I can just use the inline arithmetic one. With a C-like (or pretty much any non-trivial in-order) syntax this would require essentially writing a new parser for each macro.

Right now the server is still fast.... but if that changes:

I grabbed the large versions and set up some torrents for use with BitTorrent (a P2P download system that helps reduce bandwidth usage for servers). You can grab the full-sized figure 1 with text here and the the full-sized figure 2 with text here.

Hopefully this will work properly ;)

Right now the server is still fast.... but if that changes:

I grabbed the large versions and set up some torrents for use with BitTorrent (a P2P download system that helps reduce bandwidth usage for servers). You can grab the full-sized figure 1 with text here and the the full-sized figure 2 with text here.

Hopefully this will work properly ;)

I don't know anything about what this key looks like (I assume it's just a short string), but I wonder if it could be expressed as an image, song, sequence of DNA in the human genome, etc. as deCSS has been...

Illegal prime number, anyone?

Unfortunately, you have two issues to deal with. First and foremost is simply getting access to your data, and the second (and harder) is making that data usable to whatever os/apps you may be using.

For example, I use Konqueror on my Linux box(en), but use Mozilla on Mac OS X. How do you get bookmarks from one browser to work on the other?

As for the first problem, NFS works enough for LANs, but I sure wouldn't want to use it over the public 'net.

Coda seems promising, but I've never found a distro that actually supports it, and there's a fair amount of manual stuff you have to do to use it. I've never managed to get it working properly, but from what I understand, it's somewhat similar to CVS in that you have to update/commit. This has the advantage of working when disconnected.

InterMezzo also has some promise, but I haven't played with it as of yet.

USB keys seem like a better idea, until you realize that if you lose the little sucker, you're SOL. So, keep backups. Also, I keep a ridiculous amount of stuff in my home directory - multiple GBs - so being able to move a few hundred MB at a time just doesn't work for me.

the great steak experiment

Does anyone have any experience with ACAP, the Application Configuration Access Protocol? It's somehow related to the Cyrus IMAP project, and claims to be able to store bookmarks, address book, etc. in a central location. Are there any ACAP clients?

Take a look at this.

That's a whitespace encoding of css-descramble.c source within an otherwise ordinary text-file that just happens to describe the encoding format (hence, the somewhat oxymoronic, or, as I prefer to view it, ironic, "self-documenting staganography" moniker given to the "hidden" css-descramble.c file).

I did that quite some time ago as a fun hack.

"Ohh, oooohhhh, Mr. Kotter, Mr. Kotter! Ooooh, prior art. Prior Art!...," "Shut up Horshack: we don't do patents around here."

Like this?

Check out InsightConnector. You can try it out for 14 days, pretty cheap and it works with the Cyrus IMAP server.

...is far from new, but it's still in its infancy. Check out the Software Engineering Institute at CMU for a wealth of literature on precisely why software can be engineered. As for whether programmers are engineers, it depends solely on their training. As a fresh graduate in Computer Science at Oregon State, I can say that graduates from OSU are less scientists and more engineers everyday. Unfortunately, students in CS will eventually be split into the construction workers and archiects of the 21st century. (I'll leave it to you to figure out who the programmers are). Long gone are the days of building a bridge without statistics, design, and blueprints. You might do it in your backyard, but no one will use it. The same is true for the "field" of programming.

Well, CMU already did this long ago. They use Neural-Nets and they can cruise the highway at 70 mph. The test run is completely automated. Of course there's someone at the driver seat in case that there's something wrong. Interestingly, although the AI system successfully cruising the road, the detection sometimes mistaken a white tree bark for the road divider....

The standards exist, but no one has written the server.
You can't really blame them since the Calendar Access Protocol (CAP) which is going to be the IMAP+SMTP of Calendaring, providing synchronous calendaring to clients is on it's 10th draft. Read this email if you have lost hope that the IETF would have calendaring anytime soon. Appearently draft 11 is coming soon and it will be the last one. So it looks like CAP will be finalized RSN. (Thank God, this thing was becoming like Duke Nukem Forever)

You could poke a stick at the OpenCap Server project and see if you get a response. But I haven't heard anything in months.

I don't know what's up with the Libical guys. The mail archive has been dead since December 16. Of course some of them are working on Free Association which is supposed to be a server and client. Since the mailing lists for libical seem dead I couldn't tell you what the status of CAP support currently is. My understanding was that they had been keeping up with the drafts, but since the 10th one was released about a month ago, I have no idea what the current status is.

Mozilla should be getting Calendaring in 1.4. IIRC, the calendaring uses libical. The College of Charleston computing dept has taken on enhancing the client (Go Cougars!). Hopefully they'll be putting CAP support in.

If anyone wants to know what it would take to write a calendar server and put an end to the Notes/Exchange duopoly in groupware, visit the Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group of the IETF. These are the guys that have brought you iCAL (RFC2445), iTIP (RFC2446), iMip (RFC2447), iCal Locating and LDAP (RFC2739) and the Guide to Internet Calendaring (RFC3283).

Read the iCalendar Guide then all the other documents at the site. Next go write the server. Then make sure Mozilla's Calendar client works with it, and email me so I can go replace exchange servers with it.

If you find a solution that does not use CAP, beat the authors with a ClueStick till they give in and write something that uses IETF protocols so we can interop with it.

Personally I'd really like to see the Cyrus IMAP server get a CAP piece put in. Combined with OpenLDAP and Mozilla as the client, it would be a Notes/Exchange killer.

While I'm sitting here making demands from the Open Source messaging community, why the hell doesn't Mozilla get SIEVE (RFC3028) support so we can have a standard for server-side email filtering rules, Cyrus supports it in the IMAP server. Oh, and I also want write support for LDAP address books in Mozilla.

To answer the original question, I think it's coming, slowly, but coming. Lord knows, I've only been waiting for 4 years or so.

Dave and Andy's!

Yup, I can vouch for this excellent setup. I use Postfix with Cyrus. Cyrus is an amazingly fast IMAP server, which is a good thing, seeing my mail server is a pokey 200 MHz machine.

On the client side, I use Mozilla mail whenever I'm behind my own desktop machine. When I'm logged in remotely, I'll use Pine (which supports IMAP) or through a browser with Squirrelmail, an excellent webmail client, which also talks IMAP. I also have my IMAP port open to the world, so I can use Mozilla mail when I'm at one of the computers at my university.

I have all my mailfolders the same everywhere, which is really nice. Now if there only was a nice way to share bookmarks and address books...

Cheers,

Costyn.

I wonder if there were any Russians scientists on board the ISS who said, "I told you so, comrade, I told you so."

What they need is free, open-source (read: adaptable) voiceware, so that people who are already on disability don't have to pay for it...

Speex is a speech compression codec, not dictation or recognition software. CMU has a few speech projects that include a speech recognizer and text to speech engine. It isn't part of Xiph's mission to even touch speech regonition.

...that in times like this, people always have to resort to this kind of submissions and waste otherwise better served research money...

I had good experience with the following tools: cacti
It's based on RRD the successor of MRTG (not much developed anymore, but still a good tool). Thanks Tobi btw.
OpenNMS is a really powerful realtime monitoring tool
Nagios also...
Don't forget snort for your IDS needs and add acidlab for good visualization of snort's results.

Here is a link to the DeCSS program, defined as a prime number.
DeCSS is illegal under the DMCA. Is the prime number that defines it then also illegal? How is a number illegal, exactly? Do you have to skip it when you are counting and if you don't you get arrested under the DMCA?
Of all the arguements I've heard, this one is the most obvious to me on how broken the DMCA is. It's lunacy. I think I'm breaking the law just linking to the program.

I tried to submit a story about this same subject a while back. Instead of some corporation creating it though, it's slashdots favorite hard disk speaker creating Ghetto modder Afroman with his version. Good instructions if you want to make this pad DIY. (I wonder if splashpower reads afrotech as well?)

Scott invented :-) so maybe his computational challenge idea will gain wide acceptance as well.

Theoretically, you could build a beanstalk out of any material just by varying the thickness in exact propotion to the amount of force exerted by the portion below (multiplied by some safety factor). If you solve the differential equations for it, you get an exponentially increasing thickness as you go up from the bottom to geostationary orbit. (The shape of the counterweight that goes up from geosynchronous orbit is much less restrained as it does not have to reach a particular point or become particularly thin.)

I don't have the equations in front of me, but I vaguely recall that a beanstalk that was 1 millimeter in diameter at the surface of the earth would have to be many kilometers wide at geostationary orbit if made of steel, and many meters wide if made of kevlar. This 1981 Omni Article by Robert L. Forward and Hans Moravec suggests that a beanstalk made of "crystaline graphite" would have a taper factor of 10:1 (presumably a cross sectional area ratio of 100:1). Presumably, it is hoped that if carbon nanontube cables ever become practical, that they will have even greater tensile strength, allowing a smaller taper factor.

for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=3DC;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8) %2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2);

The real instructions only used up about a third or so of the available opcodes, and while most of the rest simply froze the processor, there were others that had interesting and predictable effects, and were in fact used by some of the C64 games. See this for the exciting low down.

So, I've been writing a 6502 Ada compiler just for the heck of it, and it's much more fun than targeting these new-fangled, regular instruction sets. Clearing space on the stack is great. The fastest way to do it depends on how much space you need; with one or two bytes, a couple of PHPs, three to six or so and you transfer SP to X, decrement the appropriate number of times, then send X back to SP. More than sixish, and you should TSX, TXA, SBC, TAX, TSX.

You'd be astounded at the machinations required for addressing variables on the stack, and mortified at the way a simple CMP instruction has the arrogance to affect the overflow bit. Unfortunately, this comment is to small to go into it.

Meeeeeemmmoooorrrrriiiiieeeeeeeeeees ....

We were hoping AT&T would do a better job than IBM at supporting their voice synthesizer. IBM pulled the Linux version of ViaVoice off the market without so much as a peep to their adoring fans on Slashdot, and wiped all mention of the Linux version from their web server. (Goggle isn't even allowed to cache it.) After IBM milked the slashdot linux fanboy publicity for all it was worth, they appearently didn't see any purpose in actually SUPPORTING the product -- so once their libraries stopped working against the latest Gnu/Linux libraries (happy birthday RMS!), they dropped their Linux voice synthesizer product like a hot potato instead of bothering to recompile it and issue an update.

So we hoped AT&T would show more comittment to the promises they made on their web site about their flagship voice synthesizer product, but...

Has anyone actually tried buying a single user copy of Natural Voices from AT&T? YOU CAN'T ANYMORE! They used to sell the synthesizer for workstations and voices for competitive prices (in the 100s of dollars range). So we bought a few voices to evaluate, and sent some simple technical questions into the email address they provided for support, never receiving a reply.

After several weeks they never answered any of our questions, but we decided to buy some more voices to evaluate anyway. But by then, AT&T had pulled the consumer single user version of Natural Voices off of the market (and it took weeks of phone tag to find that out because they don't give out "technical" information on the phone, and they never answer their email support address).

Now if you want to buy a Natural Voice from AT&T, you have to buy the server edition for tens of thousands of dollars. Had their support not absolutely sucked, it might have been worth us paying such a high price, but no way we'd ever consider going with AT&T, after they demonstrated such horrible unresponsive service.

Actually it's a good thing we didn't go with AT&T's voice synthesizer, because we need support for voice authoring tools, and AT&T is incompetent in that regard, since they refuse to give out technical information over the phone, and never answer their email. No support whatsoever. Zilch. Nada. Forget about it.

Fortunately we found some excellent open source software that works together (and whose authors are MUCH more responsive than IBM or AT&T): the Festival Speech Synthesis System, the FestVox voice authoring tools, the small fast Flite runtime speech engine, the Edinburgh Speech Tools, the CSLU speech tools, the OGI Festival tools, and the MBROLA Multilingual Speech Project. This is state of the art research software, where IBM and AT&T got their ideas.

The quality of the commercial voices comes more from throwing lots of time and money into the production process -- the commercial software is not any more advanced than the open source research projects -- in fact the research projects inspired the commercial products!

-A speech synthesizer user who's been jerked around by AT&T and IBM, and is now happy to have no other choice but to use excellent open source software.

Yeah, you tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better.

Fine then, I'll tell myself that. Meanwhile, I'll be ordering another round of CDs from CD Japan pretty soon, for instance the SaiKano OST and the GitS:SAC OST which I "borrowed" from a friend since I wasn't a big fan of the show, only the music (amongst other CDs that I have mp3s from.

Why bother, when downloading it is so much easier

I only have one reply to this: snort. I'm really sure its "so much easier" to deal with the drek, people who never let you fetch stuff, and other crap on kazaa and the like. And thats if anyone else out there actually had my interests in music.

Now, I'm completely against the people who do as you describe and resell the burnt CDs for 500% profit (at this point, I would call it "bootlegging"). But you have to face it: Today's US music industry relies on people not hearing the crap on the disc ahead of time, so that they might be fooled into buying it. Since they have managed to get their industry into such a run-down state that the only way they can manage to sell anything is by accident or deceit (wouldn't you call filling a CD with two good songs which get radio advertising time, and the remainder with remixes or other crap deceit?) they have to force people to not preview the music. So they push for laws against it.

You know what really makes me feel better? It's not telling myself that I'm going to buy the stuff I like, because I know that to be true. It's that I look out and see civil disobedience performed against the gross misuse of a once-honorable law (copyright law, to be specific). Once upon a time it let people be creative and get money for their creations. Now, the music industry (amongst others) has shifted the power of the law from protecting authors to protecting the publishers. Once upon a time, an author granted permission to a publisher to publish the work. Nowadays, the publishers use work-for-hire loopholes and other tricks to take the work by force and leave the author with nothing but debt. For instance, if you read the text of the DMCA, you'll notice that there are no rights assigned to authors of a work. If I record a song in a DRM-enabled format, I have no right to remove the DRM from it, because the DMCA protects the DRM, not my work. (And before you claim "bullshit", take a look at this where legal threats were made against a person who wrote his own tool for fixing the "don't embed" bit for fonts he created himself. It hasn't gone to court, apparently, but given that the DMCA repeals rights of due process, that doesn't matter much, does it?)

So do the American thing. Protest the commercialization of your government and download an mp3 today.

ALVINN - Autonomous Vehicle Navigation using Neural Nets (CMU)

ALVINN uses neural networks to learn visual servoing. It watches a person drive for five minutes, and can then take over driving. ALVINN has been trained to drive on dirt paths, single-lane country roads, city streets, and multi-lane highways. Click here for images of the vehicles and videos of ALVINN in action. The sucessor to ALVINN, called RALPH, was the core of a system that drove a vehicle autonomously all but 52 of the 2,849 miles from Pittsburgh to San Diego, averaging 63 miles per hour, day and night, rain or shine.

ALVINN - Autonomous Vehicle Navigation using Neural Nets (CMU)

ALVINN uses neural networks to learn visual servoing. It watches a person drive for five minutes, and can then take over driving. ALVINN has been trained to drive on dirt paths, single-lane country roads, city streets, and multi-lane highways. Click here for images of the vehicles and videos of ALVINN in action. The sucessor to ALVINN, called RALPH, was the core of a system that drove a vehicle autonomously all but 52 of the 2,849 miles from Pittsburgh to San Diego, averaging 63 miles per hour, day and night, rain or shine.

ALVINN - Autonomous Vehicle Navigation using Neural Nets (CMU)

ALVINN uses neural networks to learn visual servoing. It watches a person drive for five minutes, and can then take over driving. ALVINN has been trained to drive on dirt paths, single-lane country roads, city streets, and multi-lane highways. Click here for images of the vehicles and videos of ALVINN in action. The sucessor to ALVINN, called RALPH, was the core of a system that drove a vehicle autonomously all but 52 of the 2,849 miles from Pittsburgh to San Diego, averaging 63 miles per hour, day and night, rain or shine.

Contrary to public belief, this has in fact been done many times in the short history of AI. ALVINN was the first system that I learned of in my college AI classes, but a quick search on google returned many more.

CMU ALVINN

US VISTA

Temple Report on Autonomous Vehicle Systems

ALVINN (Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network) ... is a neural network that has performed quite well in a domain where other approaches have failed. It learns to steer a vehicle along a single lane on a highway by observing the performance of a human driver. ... The results of the traning are impressive. ALVINN has driven at speeds up to 70 mph for distances up to 90 miles on public highways near Pittsburgh. It has also drive at normal speeds on single lane dirt roads, paved bike paths, and tow lane suburban streets.

References:

• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
• ALVINN

if slashdot.org is so low on news, that they're willing to advertise sites, and call it news, well then... someone please tell me where to sign up!

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To say that "no one understands how the hippocampus encodes information" is to admit to not even glancing at the research literature. Physiological work dates back to the 70's, revealing mechanisms of hippocampal place cell formation and episodic (declarative) memory formation (e.g., "cognitive map" theories, O'keefe, Nadel, Dostrovsky...). There is definitely some understanding of the Hebbian-like rules (correletional activity strengthens synaptic connections.. or "neurons that fire together wire together") which are critical to the formation of autoassociative memories. Most notably, the modeling and physiology research into "spike-timing dependent plasticity" has been enormous over the last decade at least. This is the idea that the strengthening and weakening of synapses (in cortical and parahippocampal systems) depends on the interval between the firing of the presynaptic and the postsynaptic neuron.

There is also great recent literature on the role of the theta and gamma cycles in hippocampal memory formation (for modeling, see John Lisman at Brandeis, Mike Hasselmo at Boston U.; for the physiology see e.g. Matt Wilson at MIT). The general idea here is that dentate gyrus provides heteroassociative feedback to hippocampus (CA3 region, specifically) on the gamma cycle while the recurrent architecture of CA3 itself provides the autoassociative capabilities necessary for partial-pattern completion (both of which are necessary for declarative sequence learning). Hippocampal place cells (google for more info) are a form of contextual encoding which has been extensively modeled, in general, by e.g. Levy at U.Va (at whose lab I've worked the last few years.)

One of the most important hippocampal functions, though, is its role in memory consolidation, which involves a complex dialog of sorts with neocortex during slow wave sleep. The artificial hippocampus (it's hard to tell if they're replacing the entire thing or just one of the layers) would need to correctly carry out this "teachback" process (which is not understood very well at all). Long story short, even as a relatively contained system, building a silicon replacement hippocampus is not something a budding neuroprostheticist should realistically concern him/herself with.

As kennorman said, the long- and short-term plasticity of the system (i.e., how synapses and neuronal properties change with experience) is far too complex to implement in silicon. I mean, even computational modeling of the system still has a long long way to go. Every researcher has their own model with its own plasticity rules, and as far as most neurobiologists are concerned they're all wrong. Brute-forcing all of the input-output functions of the different cell types is kind of ridiculous for several reasons: 1) most of these i/o functions have been already mapped out by cell physiologists and described by linear-nonlinear models (like double-E's use), 2) the precise architecture (connectivity, topography, etc) of the hippocampal neural networks is "part" of the computation, and 3) hippocampal behavior is dependent on many external factors such as whether or not the brain is sleeping, what hormones happen to flitting around at the moment, etc. Fixed input-output functions will only isolate the behavior of the prosthetic, when it should be a civil member of the society of the brain (otherwise who knows what could go wrong?).

At least though, we actually do know a good deal about hippocampal memory formation, but it's all still just a candle in a dark room.

It's well worth checking out Mike Hasselmo's articles, and especially the review article on hippocampal models that he did with Jay McClelland (who I got the chance to meet a few weeks ago, and is the coolest/smartest guy in the field).

Hear, hear...

Far too many of the 'anti-tcl' element have no experience whatsoever with the language.
I've been using it for some years now on quite a few large(-ish) projects, and sure, it has it's drawbacks (typing, anyone?), but the advantages more than make up for it.
Any performance (speed)-critical bits get done in C or something, and the 'glue' and GUI are Tcl/TK.
Also, the ease with which extensions can be built and added (Think SWIG!) helps a lot.

Since everyone's so anti-, here's my Anti-Perl link for the day: (flame away!!)

Here..

Ugh! call that a language??

This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's [cmu.edu] School of Computer Science [cmu.edu]. It has been a remarkable experience that I would lik e to share with the Slashdot community. Here's an account of my experience.

Week 1, Sunday: I moved in today. My roommate, a sophomore CS student, had already moved in tw o days before me. The floor is already completely covered with garbage. He also smells. I think he might be gay too. He's already asked me if I like the color he painted his toenails. This should be interesting. I am almost completely settled in. Techno music is playing in every room in every floor of my dorm. There are computers and other types of trash out in the common areas. What a mess. Tom orrow, I am going to go sign up to get my network connection.

Week 1, Monday: I got hooked up to the CMU network today! I jacked into the network, only to f ind that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increm ent the network numbers a few times. I am really eager to get on.

Week 1, Tuesday: I am still looking for a free IP address. Can't anybody here properly configu re their systems?

Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have i t, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly be en developing a headache since I first arrived. Everywhere I look there are these Lucent Technologies wireless access points. I wonder if that's the problem.

Week 1, Saturday: I sat down at my computer today. My desktop wall paper is now the goatse.cx guy. Pleasant. Scattered over every directory on my C: drive are thousands, possibly millions, of fi les titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have liv es? Maybe they need laid or something. It'd take days to clean this out. I mentioned to my roommate that I needed to reinstall Windows, and immediately he jumped up and shouted: "NO! Do NOT use Window s!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each tout ing an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, Re dHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have shower ed since he was born was touting "Linux From Scratch", saying that only losers used pre-made distros. A crowd of people in the back kept quiet about how I'd be sorry if I used Linux instead of BSD on the network. Who the fuck are these people? Classes start next week. Hope I have my computer working s o I can do my assignments.

Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling m y that my hardware sucks. We go through about four or five distributions a day. Every now and then, I notice a little devil on my screen. Stickers for every of these distributions have been plastered o n my case. Suddenly, my room stinks a lot more with these people in here. I ask them why they never shower, and the usual response is something along the lines of "showering is like rebooting" and "I do n't want to lose my uptime."

Week 3, Saturday: There's a troop of men running naked in a circle around McGill Hall. I am no t even going to ask.

Week 4, Wednesday: Linux is FINALLY working on my computer! I have a pretty slick desktop too. I think I might like this. I can finally work in my room instead of the labs, although considering the every increasing layer of garbage on the floor...

Week 4, Thursday: My computer flashes messages about how I am "0WNX0RED" and how I should "PHJ3 3R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux afte r discovering about 17 rootkits.

Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD working on my computer. I wonder if this will last. The stres s has been building and I forgot to take a shower this morning.

Week 6, Tuesday: Seems I have been "0WNX0R3D" again. Took longer this time. Minutes later, so meone comes in with a "Bastile Linux" install CD. He gets started installing. I am feeling very susp icious of these guys.

Week 6, Thursday: Everyone seems to know more about my system than I do. It's a bit unnerving. I guess anyone could feel upset from this sort of treatment. They hack my box, trash it, then reins tall everything. I guess they think they're being funny. My dirty clothes are piling up and I am out of clean ones. I don't have time to do laundry, I'll have to wear something out of the pile.

Week 6, Friday: I got up this morning, sat at my machine, and stared at it blankly. An icon ap peared on my desktop for Quake III. I suppose it couldn't hurt to play some. I have been very stress ed lately.

Week 6, Sunday: I lost track of time! I started playing Quake III on the network with some oth er CMU students (who killed me hundreds of times in the course of 10 minutes) and completely lost myse lf. There's a bag of chips that has been sitting here for a few weeks. I think I'll finish those off for breakfast and then go to sleep.

Week 7, Wednesday: I masturbate every day now. Not a single girl comes near me. This is so de pressing. Do I really smell? Oh well, I have the task of learning how to secure my Linux box to keep me busy. Who has time for the opposite sex after all?

Week 8, Tuesday: I got into a fight with this little shit who kept telling me RedHat was great. What a fucking moron! Anybody who knows Linux knows that Debian kicks its sorry little ass. I'll b e getting my judiciary papers for the incident in the mail. Doesn't this school get it? I can't let someone go around converting people to RedHat! WtF!?

Week 8, Friday: My roommate squeezed my ass today! At first I was shocked and appauled, and I told him off for it. Thinking about it later though, there was just something that seemed too strong about my reaction. I'll talk to him later and appologize for getting so upset, it wasn't really so ba d.

This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's [cmu.edu] School of Computer Science [cmu.edu]. It has been a remarkable experience that I would lik e to share with the Slashdot community. Here's an account of my experience.

Week 1, Sunday: I moved in today. My roommate, a sophomore CS student, had already moved in tw o days before me. The floor is already completely covered with garbage. He also smells. I think he might be gay too. He's already asked me if I like the color he painted his toenails. This should be interesting. I am almost completely settled in. Techno music is playing in every room in every floor of my dorm. There are computers and other types of trash out in the common areas. What a mess. Tom orrow, I am going to go sign up to get my network connection.

Week 1, Monday: I got hooked up to the CMU network today! I jacked into the network, only to f ind that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increm ent the network numbers a few times. I am really eager to get on.

Week 1, Tuesday: I am still looking for a free IP address. Can't anybody here properly configu re their systems?

Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have i t, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly be en developing a headache since I first arrived. Everywhere I look there are these Lucent Technologies wireless access points. I wonder if that's the problem.

Week 1, Saturday: I sat down at my computer today. My desktop wall paper is now the goatse.cx guy. Pleasant. Scattered over every directory on my C: drive are thousands, possibly millions, of fi les titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have liv es? Maybe they need laid or something. It'd take days to clean this out. I mentioned to my roommate that I needed to reinstall Windows, and immediately he jumped up and shouted: "NO! Do NOT use Window s!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each tout ing an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, Re dHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have shower ed since he was born was touting "Linux From Scratch", saying that only losers used pre-made distros. A crowd of people in the back kept quiet about how I'd be sorry if I used Linux instead of BSD on the network. Who the fuck are these people? Classes start next week. Hope I have my computer working s o I can do my assignments.

Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling m y that my hardware sucks. We go through about four or five distributions a day. Every now and then, I notice a little devil on my screen. Stickers for every of these distributions have been plastered o n my case. Suddenly, my room stinks a lot more with these people in here. I ask them why they never shower, and the usual response is something along the lines of "showering is like rebooting" and "I do n't want to lose my uptime."

Week 3, Saturday: There's a troop of men running naked in a circle around McGill Hall. I am no t even going to ask.

Week 4, Wednesday: Linux is FINALLY working on my computer! I have a pretty slick desktop too. I think I might like this. I can finally work in my room instead of the labs, although considering the every increasing layer of garbage on the floor...

Week 4, Thursday: My computer flashes messages about how I am "0WNX0RED" and how I should "PHJ3 3R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux afte r discovering about 17 rootkits.

Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD working on my computer. I wonder if this will last. The stres s has been building and I forgot to take a shower this morning.

Week 6, Tuesday: Seems I have been "0WNX0R3D" again. Took longer this time. Minutes later, so meone comes in with a "Bastile Linux" install CD. He gets started installing. I am feeling very susp icious of these guys.

Week 6, Thursday: Everyone seems to know more about my system than I do. It's a bit unnerving. I guess anyone could feel upset from this sort of treatment. They hack my box, trash it, then reins tall everything. I guess they think they're being funny. My dirty clothes are piling up and I am out of clean ones. I don't have time to do laundry, I'll have to wear something out of the pile.

Week 6, Friday: I got up this morning, sat at my machine, and stared at it blankly. An icon ap peared on my desktop for Quake III. I suppose it couldn't hurt to play some. I have been very stress ed lately.

Week 6, Sunday: I lost track of time! I started playing Quake III on the network with some oth er CMU students (who killed me hundreds of times in the course of 10 minutes) and completely lost myse lf. There's a bag of chips that has been sitting here for a few weeks. I think I'll finish those off for breakfast and then go to sleep.

Week 7, Wednesday: I masturbate every day now. Not a single girl comes near me. This is so de pressing. Do I really smell? Oh well, I have the task of learning how to secure my Linux box to keep me busy. Who has time for the opposite sex after all?

Week 8, Tuesday: I got into a fight with this little shit who kept telling me RedHat was great. What a fucking moron! Anybody who knows Linux knows that Debian kicks its sorry little ass. I'll b e getting my judiciary papers for the incident in the mail. Doesn't this school get it? I can't let someone go around converting people to RedHat! WtF!?

Week 8, Friday: My roommate squeezed my ass today! At first I was shocked and appauled, and I told him off for it. Thinking about it later though, there was just something that seemed too strong about my reaction. I'll talk to him later and appologize for getting so upset, it wasn't really so ba d.

This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's [cmu.edu] School of Computer Science [cmu.edu]. It has been a remarkable experience that I would lik e to share with the Slashdot community. Here's an account of my experience.

Week 1, Sunday: I moved in today. My roommate, a sophomore CS student, had already moved in tw o days before me. The floor is already completely covered with garbage. He also smells. I think he might be gay too. He's already asked me if I like the color he painted his toenails. This should be interesting. I am almost completely settled in. Techno music is playing in every room in every floor of my dorm. There are computers and other types of trash out in the common areas. What a mess. Tom orrow, I am going to go sign up to get my network connection.

Week 1, Monday: I got hooked up to the CMU network today! I jacked into the network, only to f ind that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increm ent the network numbers a few times. I am really eager to get on.

Week 1, Tuesday: I am still looking for a free IP address. Can't anybody here properly configu re their systems?

Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have i t, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly be en developing a headache since I first arrived. Everywhere I look there are these Lucent Technologies wireless access points. I wonder if that's the problem.

Week 1, Saturday: I sat down at my computer today. My desktop wall paper is now the goatse.cx guy. Pleasant. Scattered over every directory on my C: drive are thousands, possibly millions, of fi les titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have liv es? Maybe they need laid or something. It'd take days to clean this out. I mentioned to my roommate that I needed to reinstall Windows, and immediately he jumped up and shouted: "NO! Do NOT use Window s!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each tout ing an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, Re dHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have shower ed since he was born was touting "Linux From Scratch", saying that only losers used pre-made distros. A crowd of people in the back kept quiet about how I'd be sorry if I used Linux instead of BSD on the network. Who the fuck are these people? Classes start next week. Hope I have my computer working s o I can do my assignments.

Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling m y that my hardware sucks. We go through about four or five distributions a day. Every now and then, I notice a little devil on my screen. Stickers for every of these distributions have been plastered o n my case. Suddenly, my room stinks a lot more with these people in here. I ask them why they never shower, and the usual response is something along the lines of "showering is like rebooting" and "I do n't want to lose my uptime."

Week 3, Saturday: There's a troop of men running naked in a circle around McGill Hall. I am no t even going to ask.

Week 4, Wednesday: Linux is FINALLY working on my computer! I have a pretty slick desktop too. I think I might like this. I can finally work in my room instead of the labs, although considering the every increasing layer of garbage on the floor...

Week 4, Thursday: My computer flashes messages about how I am "0WNX0RED" and how I should "PHJ3 3R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux afte r discovering about 17 rootkits.

Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD working on my computer. I wonder if this will last. The stres s has been building and I forgot to take a shower this morning.

Week 6, Tuesday: Seems I have been "0WNX0R3D" again. Took longer this time. Minutes later, so meone comes in with a "Bastile Linux" install CD. He gets started installing. I am feeling very susp icious of these guys.

Week 6, Thursday: Everyone seems to know more about my system than I do. It's a bit unnerving. I guess anyone could feel upset from this sort of treatment. They hack my box, trash it, then reins tall everything. I guess they think they're being funny. My dirty clothes are piling up and I am out of clean ones. I don't have time to do laundry, I'll have to wear something out of the pile.

Week 6, Friday: I got up this morning, sat at my machine, and stared at it blankly. An icon ap peared on my desktop for Quake III. I suppose it couldn't hurt to play some. I have been very stress ed lately.

Week 6, Sunday: I lost track of time! I started playing Quake III on the network with some oth er CMU students (who killed me hundreds of times in the course of 10 minutes) and completely lost myse lf. There's a bag of chips that has been sitting here for a few weeks. I think I'll finish those off for breakfast and then go to sleep.

Week 7, Wednesday: I masturbate every day now. Not a single girl comes near me. This is so de pressing. Do I really smell? Oh well, I have the task of learning how to secure my Linux box to keep me busy. Who has time for the opposite sex after all?

Week 8, Tuesday: I got into a fight with this little shit who kept telling me RedHat was great. What a fucking moron! Anybody who knows Linux knows that Debian kicks its sorry little ass. I'll b e getting my judiciary papers for the incident in the mail. Doesn't this school get it? I can't let someone go around converting people to RedHat! WtF!?

Week 8, Friday: My roommate squeezed my ass today! At first I was shocked and appauled, and I told him off for it. Thinking about it later though, there was just something that seemed too strong about my reaction. I'll talk to him later and appologize for getting so upset, it wasn't really so ba d.