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Wanna play Trilobite yourself?
This was my first (and last) Java Applet. JRE 1.4.1 required: Have fun :)
Well, I didn't elaborate the applet as far as I wanted, but it was fun learning Java/GUI programming and fundamentals of path finding (A*) at the same time.

...or Execute Disable. Check out Table 4-6 for more details.

As for the ("waekly" -is that Welsh or what?) IA-32e processors since they aren't shipping yet, you don't know whether they'll have it ;).

The Message Labs data actually maps mine pretty closely. Their monthly chart shows a small increase December to January. My daily data shows a sharp drop on the 1st, then the traditional trudge for the rest of the month, with an overall small rise.

As I mentioned, spam continues to be up overall. But, without the two hits, it would be double, instead of 30%.

Don't believe it? Map your own data.

The "Upon reaching a certain level of visual translucency, user input in the region of the window is interpreted as an operation on the underlying objects rather than the contents of the overlaying window" can be found here as a standard behaviour in the window manager: http://www.bluebottle.ethz.ch/wm/gallery.html. But the automatic fade-out over time is not really in the system. (Although i remember an experimental info dialog that faded if the OK button was not clicked)

• Monte Davidoff - co-author (along with Gates and Allen) of Microsoft/Altair BASIC
  
  
• Richard Stallman - Pioneer of open software movement/GNU
  
  
• Niklaus Wirth - PARC researcher responsible for Algol, Pascal, Modula-2, Laser Printers, and more
  
  
• Marvin Minsky - Built the first neural net AI in 1951
  
  
• Seymour Papert - Developer of LOGO and another AI pioneer
  
  
• Tommy Flowers - Built one of the earliest electronic computers, with the practical application of codebreaking during WWII
  
  
• Donald Knuth - Regarded by many as the "Father of Computer Science".
  
  
• Edsger Wybe Dijkstra - The guy leading the way to abolish the GOTO statement is surely a hall-of-famer!
  
  
• Konrad Zuse - Another early computer pioneer that due to politics and circumstances beyond his control was never able to be fully-recognized.
  
  
• Jeff Raskin - Creator of the Macintosh and pioneer in computer-human interfaces.
  

Here
you can find a very good short guide to LaTeX. It is not comprehensive, but it can get you started fast, and contains all the basic to intermediate material you need to typeset technical documents. It is used widely at my university.

It may be damn fine software, but its creator has decided that he doesn't like the existing init systems on linux/BSD and so has written his own. That right there took qmail out of consideration. I don't care if he is right or wrong, I have no intention of installing a second init system just so I can run his software. The creators of Postfix integrate beautifully with linux standards, Redhat even provides a well integrated postfix package (install the rpm's then run 'redhat-switch-mail'). Not to mention the awesome 'mailgraph' utility - http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~dws/software/mailgraph/ for charting stats!

And best of all, its wicked fast. I can handle 100's of msg per minute on a 500Mhz box, which I learned the hard way that sendmail can't.

These guys beg to differ. And that's just one of the many examples you can get from google.

Increased solar radiance leads to a higher average global temperature.

1 Month on 100 sparcs? Peanuts! In my research simulations usually take (depending on the problem) up to 6 months on an average of 150 workstations (and some runs on large clusters). You wonder what I do? Spin glasses!

Spin glasses are systems in with the interactions between magnetic moments are in conflict with each other. These competing interactions make these systems extremely hard to simulate at low enough temperatures. If you have a linux box sitting around idle which is fast enough, let me know and I will provide you with some samples to run. Current project: 100 - 300 samples, each takes ~ 10 days on a 2.4 GHz Xeon... For information on how to contact me, go to duamutef.ethz.ch. Of course your name will be mentioned if you compute a considerable number of samples!

1 Month on 100 sparcs? Peanuts! In my research simulations usually take (depending on the problem) up to 6 months on an average of 150 workstations (and some runs on large clusters). You wonder what I do? Spin glasses!

Spin glasses are systems in with the interactions between magnetic moments are in conflict with each other. These competing interactions make these systems extremely hard to simulate at low enough temperatures. If you have a linux box sitting around idle which is fast enough, let me know and I will provide you with some samples to run. Current project: 100 - 300 samples, each takes ~ 10 days on a 2.4 GHz Xeon... For information on how to contact me, go to duamutef.ethz.ch. Of course your name will be mentioned if you compute a considerable number of samples!

Interestingly, one of the founders of OMS, Clemens Szyperski, recently went to work for Microsoft Research.

Buy one linux server, and then discover the wonders that are ping and SNMP. Simple tools such as Nagios and MRTG (or NRG or Cricket) can do wonders for helping spot problem switches/routers and congestion spots.

For example, every device we have is pinged 3 times every minute, and queried for bandwidth usage every 5 minutes. This has helped in finding bottlenecks, and the occasional switch that reboots every few minutes. (MRTG alone convinced the higher ups to buy new gear for our Datacenter and give it a dedicated link to the Core).

Also, setting up a wonderful SNMP trap server can be very useful. It allowed us to find a switch that likes to reboot at random intervals (the switch is 5 years old and being replaced this weekend). Of course, having it send a trap whenever a switch reboots is just the start of what certain switches/routers can do.

Also the use of Snort to sniff traffic that can be potentially malicious can be very helpful in tuning firewalls and finding those script kiddies. (use ACID for a pretty front end)

Another nice tool is NTOP Does almost everything NetFlow does and has a pretty graphical frontend built in. (I recently used this to find out that one of our firewalls was sending gigs of syslog data to the wrong server.)

And with the mention of syslog, might as well throw out a link for syslog-ng. yet another useful tool.

Basically the point of this is to say that sometimes it's best to let your equipment do that talking. They'll usually tell you what's wrong, just as long as you've set them up to do so. I found that once we put a lot of these tools into full production, we were able to cut down on our need to sniff the line whenever problems came up. This isn't to say that Ethereal isn't needed. That's hardly the case. Its use is still huge and shown all the time.

if this is the person we are talkin about

does he work at a homeless shelter ? smoke weed ?

America has not had a nuclear test for over a decade. And has not had an above-ground nuclear test since 1962.

There are a few nice SVG-GIS (geographic information services) sites out there: vienna and even nebraska

Who would have though that a mainframe manufacturer would keep prompting dead langauges? <g>

Whilst Algol isn't there, Oberon is, as is Ada, a shareware version of Forth, Haskell, Eifell, Pascal, Perl, Python (twice) and SmallTalk

I've converted Keisler's calculus textbook to full text-searchable DjVu and put it up in both bundled (single file to download) and unbundled (many files for fast browsing) formats. Enjoy!

For those who don't yet know, DjVu is a free, highly effective compression format for scanned documents. Conversion from PDF to DjVu shrank the Keisler from 24MB to 10MB without perceptible loss in quality, and added incremental loading, fast browsing, and (most importantly) full-text search capabilities. Get the free viewer.

I've converted Keisler's calculus textbook to full text-searchable DjVu and put it up in both bundled (single file to download) and unbundled (many files for fast browsing) formats. Enjoy!

For those who don't yet know, DjVu is a free, highly effective compression format for scanned documents. Conversion from PDF to DjVu shrank the Keisler from 24MB to 10MB without perceptible loss in quality, and added incremental loading, fast browsing, and (most importantly) full-text search capabilities. Get the free viewer.

They so know that if they were to open up the CLR of their .net Technology, and like, allow people to write their own CLR languages, their stock would plummet.

Um, people can write their own CLR languages. Quite a few have. Hell, they even let Borland play.

Perl

Python

FORTRA

More FORTRAN

SmallTalk alike (SmallScript)

Mondrian

Pascal

Scheme

Mercury

Eiffel

Oberon

Cobol

Ya know what's annoying? Having to type in a bunch of random crap at the end of a message because slashdot does now seem to like having a low number of characters per line.

I got tired of seing Flash based ads, so I followed the instructions on Macromedia's website on how to remove the player.

No more Flash ads.

If you're using PostgreSQL, Gedafe is a very nice automatic web frontend generator. Just define your tables, views, constraints, etc. for validation and such, and it takes care of the rest. Give it a try, it's really good.

More information about Neumann:

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/VonNeumann.html
http://www.neumann.com/
http://www.mbi.ufl.edu/~vetneumann
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathemati cians/Von_Neumann.html
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~neumann/
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/vonNeumann.html
http://www.karto.ethz.ch/neumann/
http://www.rit.edu/~drk4633/vonNeumann/
http://www.fsm-a.org/neumann

• No more institution centric home page
• There should only be one portal. (don't want the students using Yahoo! or Excite - we want them to use our portal)
• There must exist -complete- customization available to the user. Otherwise, they will continue to use another portal that allows them to do what they want.
• Replaces your desktop

At work here we use a combination of two things to monitor our servers. First is Nagios (previously NetSaint). Nagios is good because it can do very basic checks from just pinging a server to see if it's up (and network routers, switches, firewalls, printers, etc...) to actually checking to see if a certain service is up. Such as requesting a webpage to make sure that your HTTP server is running, or making an SMTP or FTP request to check that those services respond too. (it also does more, but there's no use in listing them all here.) We have nagios setup to send out pages whenever a server is reported as going down.

Also what we use is just a simple implimentation of SNMP plus Cricket (an interface for MRTG) to graph the SNMP data over time. That tells us things like CPU load, memory + swap usage, and a number of other things. Both products work pretty well and they give us a very good idea as to what is going on with our servers and such. And on the bright side, they're free! The only cost you need is the hardware to run them on.

And if you really wanted to get fancy, you could always try something like Smoke Ping which tells you the latency to your servers over time. It'll report the average time for a ping reply, plus a graph of how far away from the norm a ping is. Works great for if you want to see things like if a server's network response time slows down at various points of the day, or during heavy CPU load and things like that. It's a very nice product, and it sits on MRTG just like Cricket does, so you don't even need a separate box for it.

If your Unix system doesn't come with one Net-SNMP will install on many of them.

The SNMP daemon by default understands how to monitor Load Avg, Memory, Processes, and so forth. It may not be able to tell you details of the process, such as what user is logged into the POP3 daemon, but it will tell you that you have 500 of them running, and alert you (via SNMP Traps) of that fact.

ALl you need to do once you have checked the documentation for your SNMP agent and then configured it, is to setup a single (ok, maybe 2 or 3) machine to send your traps to so you can kick of alerts. With some simple scripting in $FAVORITE_SCRIPTING_LANGUAGE you can email, page, text message, update web page, or $OTHER.

Cricket or MRTG are nice utilities that will poll the servers in question (by default every 5 minutes) and produce graphs. MRTG was designed to handle network equipment and graph the bandwidth utilization, but with a change to the SNMP string, will graph anything. Cricket is the same concept but does things a little differently by using a tree configuration system for property inheritance and does graph generation on the fly instead of the at poll time method MRTG uses.

And last but not least, Transmeta produced a very good perl script monitoring package known simply as Mon. This package will do active polling of the servers including issuing a transaction to the service you are monitoring. Due to the way this software monitors, you can actually see if the remote machine is alive by actually utilizing the service to monitor instead of just the "I can ping it, it must be up" mentality some people have.

Best part about all the above mentioned software is that they are all applications with an OSI Approved OpenSource license. This means you don't spend anything but TIME, and possibly a few machines to do the actual monitoring with.

And you may wonder about the impact of system performance due to the monitoring by SNMP, MRTG/Cricket, and Mon. The short answer is that I couldn't detect a noticable increase. Other utilities such as Argent (Commercial Pay For Software) would impact a HP-UX V Class 8 CPU with 8GB RAM machine from 0% on all 8 CPUs to about 20% on ALL 8 CPUs while it telneted to the machine, created about 150KB of test scripts, and then ran them.

Money is indeed a very good reason, or rather, the lack of it. It impels those of us working in UK government departments (or local government, in my case) to adopt free and open source solutions simply so we can do our work effectively. MRTG, Nagios, KiXtart, and SysInternal's PSTools are all tools in my arsenal, and because they were free I just went and used them. No management financial decisions were needed, so a lack of budget couldn't get in the way of us doing our job properly.

The problem is that many in IT in the UK Civil Service (why do thay call it that, it's neither civil nor a service these days?) wear their Microsoft / Oracle / whatever they were brought up on blinkers, and feel / are way out of their depth when it comes to IT which involves more than point and click.

What the Office of Government Commerce is trying to remind Central and Local Government is that their solutions should be cost-effective.

For too long those in central and local government here have have taken tax incomes for granted. It's not like the real world where if you screw up your business goes under. The money flows in no matter how wasteful you are. It's worse than that, actually, for if you do a good job and shrink your expenditure, your budgets get cut, whilst habitual overspenders get their budgets increased. Crazy, huh?

I've coded in Oberon. You can too.

"So you want to complain about it? How about offering a valid solution?"

OK, here's one: it's called QoS on a switched network. Instead of saying "everyone gets 100Mb connectivity, more than enough to saturate our single T3, each", set the network to only allow 500kb per LAN drop. Simple solution, and solves the problem nicely without having to poke around inside students' computers.

At the same time, monitor bandwidth usage on a per port basis (gee, too bad there isn't a free multi-router traffic grapher out there somewhere). Any user that consistently pegs their bandwidth cap gets a stern talking to from the local network honchos.

DC?

Thank you Mr Edison. We'll call you if we need you.

Yeah, I mean it's not as if there's any research being done in this, or any manufacturers of power systems building these things.

As if any serious energy company would even consider such a thing!

I had problems viewing the 19MB Quicktime (SVQ3) File with mplayer, and no, it wasn't the corrupted version posted early on TORN and seeded via bittorrent.

Anyway, a colleague converted it to DivX, for your viewing pleasure...

http://n.ethz.ch/student/asuzuki/download/rotk_tra iler.avi

Enjoy.

I can find no reference about him ever doing work for Microsoft. I also doubt that he would - he has always been a very strong apponent of bloatware.

Is the parent post a troll, or just badly mistaken?

Ok, here's a direct HTTP link to the fixed version, as posted on TORN.

However, there seem's to be a problem with mplayer, it crashes instantly, strange because it seemed to player SVQ3 files with no problems whatsoever.

Anyway for all you Windows/Mac Users, a friend of mine confirmed that it works fine with Quicktime 6.

Here you go:

http://n.ethz.ch/student/asuzuki/download/rotk_tra iler_480x280_fixed.mov [20MB]

Have fun,
Alex

PS: If anybody could convert it to DivX or something, let me know, I want to see it aswell!! :-/

Why future?
Several such parking systems are already in use in different countries.
There is one near Lugano (Campione) in Switzerland, and I saw one in Japan.

do you know any thing i can use to view latex under windows? or linux?

i just installed lyx and i'm playing around with it. is there anything better you suggest?

Learn some LaTeX codes, edit in vim, run latex or pdftex and view at leasure in gv or acrobat.

Yes, it's a hassle, but worth it if you're writing scientific articles; maths and footnotes support is excellent.

It is in the context of the poster - (s)he has a firewall and appears to be running a web hosting company. You on the otherhand appear to be a home user, so you may not have as much latitude depending on your ISP and how much control you have over how you get online.

The first place to start is your router, since all traffic must pass through it, or a dedicated firewall immediately behind it. The simplest way to acquire traffic stats is with SNMP using a tool like MRTG which is how I do it. If you have no control over the router, then you might be able to get the same figures off the port on your switch that it connects to. I say might, because this assumes that you have a switch (likely these days) and that it supports SNMP (not quite as likely).

Falling back further; no central point of ingress/egress you can monitor and a non-managed switch/hub... OK, we need to look at the traffic on the host NICs directly, on a per host basis. That means a bandwith monitoring and logging tool; any software site will have loads (search on "bandwidth and log") and most host based firewalls can provide this information for you as well.

Apparently someone in Europe patented certain functions of MRTG and it would force MRTG pay to use these functions. You'd think there would be amnesty for people who used something for years before a law was put in place like this. I would hate to see awesome software like MRTG go. Would this be considered a Moral right of use?

> Would love to see an animation of a webserver being slashdotted.

It probably would look something like this the entire time....

We got the first virus today at about 13:00 (MET +2) and we are now getting about 10 viruses every second:

graph

Best wishes,
Mike.

To everyone who has had something useful to say, thank you. Your suggestions are what I was looking for. I have found a few resources in my own searching's, but felt that having the eyes and minds of the /. crowd helping would yield far greater results.

As for the rest of you: I have long wondered how many /.'ers were real sysadmins and hackers and who wasn't. Thank you for removing all doubt I may have had about your status.

Several of you have tried to make an argument that I am under qualified for the job I've taken. I read over my submission again, and at no point do I say "I've never seen one of these new-fangled Windows machines before". My specialty has been with implementing Linux solutions to Windows networks via Samba. I have a fair grasp of Windows technologies and am quite comfortable in said environment. However, it would be foolhardy to assume that I know all there is to know about Redmond's offering.

It is made clear to me by your statements that either you are wishful thinkers straining to install Corel's distro or that you haven't the self motivation necessary to stay competitive in this field. To the later, I look forward to cleaning up your network once you've been dismissed.

I realize this is a bit off topic, but I felt that it would be unfair to those in similar straits watching if I didn't address these comments. Now, as promised, the links which I have found most useful.

• http://www.ss64.com - A helpful listing and translation of Windows NT, BASH and Oracle commands.
• http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/realmen/index.en.html - Real Men Don't Click is a site by "a merry band of system managers from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology" and catalogues their efforts to manage a Win2K network with Linux know-how.

This is the example I always use to impress people of SVG's capabilities (like convincing my boss of using it instead of Flash) :-)
http://www.karto.ethz.ch/neumann/cartography/vienn a
A lot of useful information here: http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8

SVGmaker gallery
Kevin Lindsey
Adobe examples
Andreas Neumann's Vienna GIS example

And if you can't get past the JavaScript and the embedded player, here is a direct link to the movie:



http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~ufranke/hektor/Hektor_ Bb and.mov

http://www.floyd.ethz.ch/img/swimtest/spiel4_small .png

That image looks like some kind of ritual, is it some kind of new robot religion? It seems like there is not much time left until the robots will rule.

Oberon-2 is a great language (though I'm not a fan of the Oberon OS) - it's low-level like C, but with safety, objects, and GC. It is, in my opinion, much better than Pascal or Modula (and I used to be a Pascal fan).

Anyway, quick links:
POW! - Oberon-2 IDE/Compiler for Windows.
OOC command-line compiler for Unix.
Oberon home page at ETH

Can't speak for Cobol, though. What school do you go to? I'm interested to know where they teach Oberon

-rob

Debian will probably include it.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?archi ve=no&bug=95870
http://n.ethz.ch/student/robertjo/download/rj-deb/ pkgs

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.

Any network monitoring applet docked to your environment will do for real-time stuff, but for historical logs you should consider keeping MRTG logs as well. MRTG works with *everything* and the log file format it uses doesn't grow over time (magic!)

• solves the distribution problem by allowing to mount packages with NFS and using the automounter to make the applications available under a standard path (/usr/pack/PACKAGE)
• provides for each application a wrapper script that takes care of all the necessary environment setup so that users don't need to edit their bashrc
• supports installation of multiple versions of the same application by installing version-tagged binaries in addition to the normal binaries. I can for example run mozilla-1.1 or just mozilla, in which case I get the "default" version. This is very important for example for a Ph.D. student that wants to finish his thesis with Matlab 5.3.
• automatic generation of web documentation (have a look here)
• usage logging with syslog
• dependencies

• solves the distribution problem by allowing to mount packages with NFS and using the automounter to make the applications available under a standard path (/usr/pack/PACKAGE)
• provides for each application a wrapper script that takes care of all the necessary environment setup so that users don't need to edit their bashrc
• supports installation of multiple versions of the same application by installing version-tagged binaries in addition to the normal binaries. I can for example run mozilla-1.1 or just mozilla, in which case I get the "default" version. This is very important for example for a Ph.D. student that wants to finish his thesis with Matlab 5.3.
• automatic generation of web documentation (have a look here)
• usage logging with syslog
• dependencies