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Word docs could get piped through msdoc2txt (If it only existed!).

text/html; /usr/bin/w3m -dump -T text/html '%s'; copiousoutput; description=HTML Text; nametemplate=%s.html
application/msword; word2text %s; copiousoutput

And then put lines in your .muttrc similar to the following:

auto_view text/html
auto_view application/msword

Then the HTML and MS-Word attachments will show up as plain text right in mutt's internal pager. I'm sure there are similar procedures for other mail readers. More information is available.

The results weren't bad: at around 1:40UT the sky cleared (it was amazing: from fully clouded to clear in less than 10 minutes) and we could watch for around 1 and a half hour. We saw a total of 60 meteors (55 being leonids) with 3 large ones (one being very spectacular).

We in europe are in a bad position since the maximum is predicted at around 19:00 localtime (when the radiant is still below horizon), but we are going to try again tomorrow. Yes, it's cold, yes, we only see meteors for maybe an hour on an entire night, but when you see a huge meteor giving a trail that lasts for seconds .. you know it's worth it.

The results of this expedition will be put next to our other ones, and can be found at our observatory's website

IMHO, antiword is by far the best Word-to-Ascii converter out there. It even renders footnotes, can be used in pipes and is much faster than wvWare. The program is GPL and comes for a variety of OS platforms. As the moderator of a mailing list, I regularly use it to convert *.doc attachments. (One should patch majordomo so that it automatically filters *.doc attachments through antiword. It has worked flawlessly for me since more than a year. It surprises me quite a lot that such a superb program is so litte known in the Free Software community.

His minor daughter. (You know what LRH says about omitted data, Zinj!) I think harassing a teenager is pretty low.

Maybe not as low as having Bob Minton's grade-school-age daughters followed. Maybe not as low as sending a PI to stalk the mayor's 12-year-old son in the public library. Certainly not as low as locking a little deaf-mute girl or a 4-year-old boy in the chain locker of a ship.

Pretty damn low, though.

Kristi
Scientology Lies

His minor daughter. (You know what LRH says about omitted data, Zinj!) I think harassing a teenager is pretty low.

Maybe not as low as having Bob Minton's grade-school-age daughters followed. Maybe not as low as sending a PI to stalk the mayor's 12-year-old son in the public library. Certainly not as low as locking a little deaf-mute girl or a 4-year-old boy in the chain locker of a ship.

Pretty damn low, though.

Kristi
Scientology Lies

He sure gets around - here's a completely unrelated bunch of pics from a recent anti-scientology picket by net-people in Amsterdam: pics 1 pics 2 pics 3 pics 4

He sure gets around - here's a completely unrelated bunch of pics from a recent anti-scientology picket by net-people in Amsterdam: pics 1 pics 2 pics 3 pics 4

He sure gets around - here's a completely unrelated bunch of pics from a recent anti-scientology picket by net-people in Amsterdam: pics 1 pics 2 pics 3 pics 4

He sure gets around - here's a completely unrelated bunch of pics from a recent anti-scientology picket by net-people in Amsterdam: pics 1 pics 2 pics 3 pics 4

Here is the accouncement for khttpd in June 1999. That's pre-2.4 if you didn't notice, the current kernel at the time of announcement was 2.2.9
Alan Cox wasn't sleeping, here is his 2c worth, about 2 weeks after the announcement. It's just a special in-kernel cache after all, not like running IE5 or IIS5 wholly in the kernel like some other OS's.

The home page is http://www.fenrus.demon.nl. kHTTPd only serves up static content, all non-static stuff is passed to a userland webserver, like Apache or Zues.


"Why didn't I join Microsoft? [LAUGHTER]"

Here is a good one. Prepare to be shocked and amazed.

There is a {free | open source} product which is called TCM.

It is not specifically an ERD editor, but provides a set of various diagramming editors and tools.

Overall I like it, but since it attempts to support a lot of diagrams, I don't perceive it as very strong in the ERD area.

If you don't want to delve into details (attributes, constraints) and remain on a fairly high level (entities), this might work for you.

Usual disclaimer: It's 6 month ago when I tried it, it might have improved a lot...

Personally, I use W2K and a product called DeZign, which is reasonably priced and offers a cripple ware version for download and trial.

Good Luck..

While watching meteors still rocks, there is a nice mechanism that detects meteors using radiowaves. In short, you tune your radio to a radiostation that you wouldn't normally receive (because it's below the horizon). Then you wait for a meteor. When one shows up, it leaves a ionized trail, which will reflect the radio waves: you hear the meteor coming by!

More information: http://www.imo.net/radio/
I am member of a small observatory in the Netherlands. We are quite active during meteor showers, for a report of the last Leonids shower, visit http://www.lansbergen.demon.nl/uk/meteors/leonid20 00.html(some nice pictures are included :)

--

By the way, don't believe all the hype about survivor II's "isolated outback location". By US or European standards, it's isolated. By Australian standards, it's actually pretty close to a reasonably large town/small city. It's less than 200 miles from a popular coastal resort!
If you really want isolation, might I suggest the Canning Stock Route.

--

What I would really love is one of those programs that seem to grow up around the Mac ecosphere to translate PC files into other files ...

You are conflating two servers. khttpd is a static-page-only accelerator; TUX does both static and dynamic content.

Old old news. It's been in since kernel 2.3.14
KHTTPD web page.
It's not enabled by default (Duh). Redhat have a similar product, as used in some SPECweb ratings to beat NT. KHTTPD and the Redhat product offload non-static requests to Apache/AOLserver/whatever.

Even better than that: antiword.

The really sad thing is that this is more true than you might think. We've seen time and again that superior technology doesn't automatically "win" in the marketplace. Savvy marketing and sales are critically important business functions. People might think that .oog is stupid, or they might not. The point is that that stinking file extension really is important.

FEAR OOG!

(1) OOG, The Object Orientation Game

(2) Welkom bij Tennisvereniging Oog In Al

(3) Oog TV (Has a cool interface. Check it out!)

(4) Out of Game (OOG)

(5) OOG Radio!

(6) Yes kids, Oog in Oog (Hmm...does "oog" mean "eye" in Dutch.)

(7) Oh baby!Even more oog in oog

John S. Rhodes
WebWord.com (Usability Vortal)

First, get it right: RS-232 is the +/- 12v serial interface that you mentioned. The current loop standard of which you speak was 20mA, not 4mA. (In fact, the military used to use a 60mA variant.)

Speaking of good standards that persist for a reason, consider VT-100. How long has it been since DEC introduced the first VT-100s? And how many of you are using xterm, dtterm, Eterm, gnome-terminal or one of a half-dozen other programs that implement some flavor or forward-compatible superset of VT-100?

First, get it right: RS-232 is the +/- 12v serial interface that you mentioned. The current loop standard of which you speak was 20mA, not 4mA. (In fact, the military used to use a 60mA variant.)

Speaking of good standards that persist for a reason, consider VT-100. How long has it been since DEC introduced the first VT-100s? And how many of you are using xterm, dtterm, Eterm, gnome-terminal or one of a half-dozen other programs that implement some flavor or forward-compatible superset of VT-100?

Nope. Above 4 CPUs, you get diminishing returns for Linux as it stands at the moment, but it's not a hard limit (and 2.4 should do better with more CPUs, too). Take a look at http://www.dare.demon.nl/linux/sparc 64/yow.txt for an example of Linux running on a 14 CPU UltraSparc system. It's worth remembering that Linux is not just Intel. I don't think that current Intel chipsets can handle more than 8 CPUs. Machines that can take more (e.g., the Data General AV25000 can take up to 64 CPUs) tend to use multiple quad-CPU boards. These are also NUMA configurations, rather than traditional SMP.

...a suitable error-correcting protocol that can cope with there being no feedback from PC back to MP3 player.

Why, of course there is! And another one too...

Isn't modern technology great?

..that if you put something up on the web, you've made it publicly available for people to link to.

Yes, but there are right ways and wrong ways to do it - to take an example, the fantastic World of Spectrum has thousands of ZX Spectrum games available. Some people then link directly to the games (say here), trying to make it look like they've put the work in to build up this collection (I've seen sites with "here are some of my games for you to download" and then linking to WoS).

Phil

From The Tao of Programming by Geoffrey James:

There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?"

"An operating system," replied the programmer.

The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said.

"Not so," said the programmer, "when designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design."

The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. "That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?"

The programmer made no reply.

Well this might be painfully apparent, but you'd be amazed how many times I've seen people do stupid things like turn their front page into an .asp script merely to have today's date on it (cron! I tell them). Anyways, make everything static, as much as possible. Stat out what pages are receiving the most hits and endeavor to make them as static as possible. This is what most big sites do - Yahoo recieves well over 100 million hits daily and they sure as hell aren't dynamically creating anything besides search results. Any page that is not immediately created or modifyed based on a user request can be made static when used in combination with scripting.

This being said, don't enslave yourself to Apache. There are lots faster ways to shooting static text over a socket, namely Zeus and khttpd, the kernel http server. It (khttpd) only serves static pages, but by placing it out of user space you get to bypass all the kernel gunk that accompanies a user-level proces. Needless to say, it's really, really fast (especially compared to Apache) and I have no doubt that even on a modest Pentium 1 you could crank out hundreds of thousands of pages a day using static HTML and the khttpd. Also, it can be used in combination with another webserver, so you don't have to sacrifice any dynamic fuctionality. Check Zeus if you need more features. Either way, they're faster than Apache. Other than that, all the obvious apply - put the SQL server on a separate box and make SQL queries as sparingly as possible. If your site is image-laden, consider putting those on a separate box. Or clone your boxes and employ load-balancing. Or just pray for Apache 2 to be released :) Lots of ways to skin the cat here.

--

Consider, just for starters: The main character of the story is named Jim Hacker.

>ever wonder why in any professional benchmark linux gets defeated by NT or whatever?

There are professional benchmarks that give the edge to either Linux or NT. Ones that are favourable to NT get by far the most attention, because every Linux newbie who wants to help Linux but can't figure out how to open a .tar file goes on a jihad against that benchmark, giving the benchmark free advertising and the moral upper ground.

The Mindcraft trials tried to test Linux's "webserver" 'Apache' against NT's webserver. But Apache is _not_ Linux's "webserver". Apache will run on Linux but it will also run on NT/sunos/etc. Apache is the most popular webserver due to it's good support of dynamic content, as it has many features and good performance. I remember talking to our web-admin about an auto-translation module and remarked that it sounded like it would cost a lot to buy. He responded that it comes free w. Apache.

What Mindcraft was testing was the static content performance of the webserver. This is a test of the raw I/O, effectively how closely 'integrated' the httpd is with the OS.

Apache/Linux is in no way integrated, NT/IIS is. Therefore NT/IIS will win. Linux's integrated webserver is khttpd. khttpd/Linux ~4x faster than Apache/Linux making it approximately as fast NT/IIS.

Apache is designed to serve _dynamic_ files. You need dynamic content to do anything much more professional than a 'Here is a foto of me & my dog'.

Here is a benchmark I picked at random, from a yahoo search "Linux +benchmark Webserver".
Benchmark

This shows that Apache performs about as well as IIS for what it was designed for - Dynamic content. Not really surprising Apache and IIS are both best of breed httpd, and there is an upper bound to what you can achieve w. given hardware.

I have been told by an applied math geek friend of mine that STW is another one of those "it's all connected, maaaan..."-type theories along the line of "e^(pi * i) + 1 = 0", although a good deal messier. I've also been informed that STW was used heavily in Wiles' proof, not unlike a load-bearing block in Jenga.

(Never mind "First Post!" I hereby start the new tradition of "Most Links!" After all, it's more productive, and more importantly, it's all connected, maaaaaan....)

I've happened on this site before, it may have been posted to memepool or something similar. There was a lot of information on Scientology that Scientologists wouldn't find too flattering. A lot of it seemed so paranoid to me that I hoped it wasn't true, such as a list of ex-scientologists who later turned detractors and also later met an untimely demise. Given the rabid nature of a lot of the scientologists defending their cult I wouldn't be so sure however.

I don't see this as anything different than a review or expose however. This is no different than if George Lucas went after any bad Star Wars: The Phantom Menace reviews and had them yanked because they referred to LucasFilms or ILM's trademarks. For that matter its no different than if restraunts threatened legal action over poor restraunt reviews (or poor health department ratings).

What's so amazing to me is how incredibly stupid the scientologists and their lawyers are. There's a page that says all kinds of unfavourable things about them, the least of which is that they bully people who don't agree with scientology, and they bully them into being shut down. Nothing like providing proof of peoples opinions of you.

For a 20/20 expose on Scientology go here, here, here or just click this for a Google search

The dangerous thing about this as far as rights go is that while many think of the internet as the last bastion of freedom its really not even close. ISP's routinely take the easy way out when faced with any legal action or even public pressure.

Here's a link to a pretty cool site I've had bookmarked. It's got RealAudio files of numbers stations, as well as clandestine stations, unidentified broadcasts, etc:

http://www.cisquet.demon.nl/soundsframe .htm

If you want to speed up perl, take a look at Velocigen. For serving static content, see kHTTPd.

If you have several servers that you do things like load content off of, and aren't using round-robin DNS, then you can speed up what the customer sees by cutting the number of DNS lookups. Use IP addresses in your URLs (URLs on servers that you control the IP of only!).

I have yet to look into support for compressed HTML, but I can imagine for some things (mailing list archives) it would be a real blessing.

From what I read, their next processor, the M3 (Jalapeno core) will rival the K7; although there is little hype about this new CPU (scheduled to appear later this year), there are a few places on the web that have some info about it (such as http://www.cpusite.demon.nl/f uture/tech.html#jalapeno). The M3 should be an interesting alternative to the k7 or PIII.