Slashdot Mirror

The other alternative is http://www.freshmeat.net/

All the kids on my lawn seem to be using this new fangled youtube thingy that apparently needs flash...

Memcached is an excellent suggestion -- especially since it is a distributed cache. Of course, there is overhead; some time ago, I did a series of tests using ApacheBench, trying to establish just how big the performance penalty is.

In purely local tests (i.e. ignoring network overhead) performance dropped 40% with the introduction of memcached. Over a rather slow 10 Mbps LAN, the performance degradation was only 10%. Note that memcached was still local to the server in the second series of tests -- only the request from ApacheBench went over the LAN.

Much of the memcached overhead was due to marshaling; in the non-memcached version, all objects lived entirely in memory. Increasing the number of objects in memcached 10 times resulted in a massive 70% performance drop for the LAN-based tests.

So, if you cache few objects (or plain strings), and there is little communication between the machines in your server farm, memcached performance will be close to pure in-memory performance. On the other hand, if there is lots of local I/O to handle a request, and you maintain a complex set of objects in memcached, you will take quite a hit.

The above is not the fault of memcached -- it is just that when designing distributed systems, you are actually trying to reduce the amount of communication inside the cluster. This is similar to multi-threaded design, where you must try to reduce the number of threads and especially their interaction with each other (I covered this in one of my articles for O'Reilly).

In my system (FlightFeather) I do maintain quite a lot of in-memory state to improve performance. For example, a special subclass of the float type (this is in Python) helps create a fast session cache. In addition, the operating system helps when you are using files directly, by maintaining a cache on its own. The most important thing, however, is to try to generate static content for frequently accessed material. The authors of memcached already know that static content is "boring, easy" (PDF; see page 30). If you want reliability and performance, boring and easy is where you want to go :-)

When I saw this post on slashdot, the top Freshmeat item is coincidentally a python based Text UI library called .

I doubt any "standard" will develop among different social network sites.

It may not have to. Imagine some software that would come pre-installed with most web hosting accounts or easily installed via c-panel a la wordpress or movabletype and people will no longer need a centralized site in order to connect in the way they seem to want to. Friends lists, message boards, picture commenting and bulletins could all easily be done with a free host and the right software. No need to rely on a central server/company that buries you in ads or censors you. And your less geeky friends could use it from a multitude of free or cheap hosts as their entire page and I could install it in a directory of my site to stay connected in a neat way to my online friends.

Sure, today the software's too difficult to install and lacks some features. But if that ever changes it could mean a big change in how social networking pages interact with each other: No more middle-man.

Encrypted file systems have a similar problem. They need to decrypt the filesystem for authorized boots or mounts, but need to stay encrypted otherwise. One common trick here is to only make the decryption key available once, at start up, after which it is put into memory, preferable with a small amount of obfuscation to slow down memory walkers. You could then use something like FUSE to mount the encrypted filesystem with your plaintext password.

As other folks have wisely pointed out though, the best posture is to use mandatory access control and restrict access to the configuration file. If you have the privileges, another good practices involves removing all compilers from the machine, firewalling all FTP traffic in or out, firewalling egress (outbound) HTTP traffic (pull in files to process), restrict SSH traffic to pre-defined nodes and enforcing that with a firewall ruleset. Preferably, you'd make all the firewall stuff occur on a separate box. What this does is restrict what tools will be available to an attacker. You can also remove fun programs like strings, ldd, od, *hexedit, and so on. "But I need to modify these tools!" you say. Leave SVN or CVS clients on the node, check your changes into SVN/CVS on your test bed machine, and then just check out the latest stable branch on your exposed machine. Then you get good protection and good configuration management all in one swoop.

Other tricks involve establishing a proxy process or strict limiting what can be done with the compromised username/password. A proxy process might be a setuid C program that only does one thing and accepts no user input. If you must accept user input, be extremely strict (use sscanf on all inputs and limit the size of the buffer accepted) and then have an experienced C developer review your code for improper bounds handling. This proxy process might do things like move files to a read-only directory structure (static web pages in a DMZ), or it might be a CGI script that updates rows in a database. We've actually used the CGI script idea because it a) it a cross-platform way of talking to the database, b) is a good decoupler of otherwise complex code, and c) strongly limits what can be done as an attack. Be careful of the venerable SQL injection attack there though.

A good use of a proxy process might be the transparent mounting/unmounting of an external USB drive, perhaps against a hidden partition on the stick. The drive would have your key. Sure it's obfuscation, but it's complicated enough to decode that it will slow somebody down for a while.

The last trick is to limit what can be accomplished with the username/password that is obtained. We have some processes whose job is to inject data into the database for the backend to all of our tools. That database user is limited to select, insert, and update operations. With Oracle, I could even restrict which specific tables get which privileges.

The best thing to do is to write a document that some folks call the Security Design Document to define your security posture, what you are known to protect against, and where you are vulnerable. Assign a risk mitigation matrix (vulnerability, threat, countermeasure, residual risk) row to each vulnerability. Be honest and then let your manager understand the position you've left them in and try to assign a cost to each countermeasure/mitigation so they can make a decision on what to close or leave open.

You are always going to have vulnerabilities. Everyone does, even the best systems. What makes the difference is those who analyze, understand, and counter that risk in a way that is appropriate to the situation. Direct exposure to the Internet is a situation that should warrant better risk analysis, but rarely does.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/sentinel/
i did this for sentinel. i used an executable packer and a number of different means for keeping the salt secure, such as splitting it up and randomizing it during compile. you can look at the source as it compiles...its strings proof but not perfect.

I think you're describing something between CORBA and CMIP.

SOAP was simpler to setup (no broker and associated config), easier to grasp publication of servants, and the data packet can be debugged on-the-wire, so you can code-test-debug until it goes. CORBA is a binary format that is more optimal on the wire, but harder to debug. There's Other Issues, but These issues are Mine.

Even thought I can sit in my figurative armchair and say "seen it before", in truth these concepts co back and forth (or iterative cycles, take yer pick) and feed off each other to evolve. Maybe Son-of-CORBA is on our horizon: a better, leaner, easier RPC.

Critical Mass: The perl/python/php/ruby/etc/etc extensions didn't come for CORBA quickly enough :)

For me, there's the SOAP-to-CORBA bridge. Maybe someday I'll have time to hack on that a bit :)

CMIP-to-SOAP-to-CORBA bridge? That would be fun. More hack, less Slashdot. Don't need to find a hidden cache of German tanks to realize even that might be a bridge too far...

#rm -r -f / tmp/dir

Why does that look so familiar?

Oh, yeah;
rm -rf /home /phaedrus.old

Thank freshmeat for unrm

For temperature try Web Thermometer. I'm sure there are similar devices for measuring water. I remember building a water sensor from a cheapo Radio Shack electronics lab years ago, there's really not much to it. From there it's just a question of monitoring for a signal on your COM port and sending an email or calling your cell on a particular 'event' (see 'man setserial' if you're a Linux user). You can also hook up a web cam and using something like xawtv on Linux via a shell script that can email pics. I'm sure you can do all this on Windows too. Don't forget to write a how-to for the rest of us when you have it all figured out.

In the wonderful wide world of open source.

I ripped all my music to FLAC with tags and use Amarok as my music app on my PC. When I want MP3 or OGG versions of my music (for a portable device or when I burnt my "best of" DVD of MP3s for use in the livingroom), I use the TransKode script in Amarok to convert them on the fly (which copies the tags over as well).

There is an Ultimate BootCD for Windows which is based off of BartPE. I use it regularly and highly recommend it. It includes a good amount of tools and more can be added.

I'd also recommend INSERT. It's a Linux LiveCD that includes ntfs-3g (full read/write support), gParted, the Linux-NTFS tools (ntfsclone and ntfsresize being the most useful to me), and others. It has a GUI (fluxbox is the manager).

Recovery is Possible is also excellent and I use the PXE version heavily. My only complaint about it is that it doesn't have ntfs-3g yet. When I need that, or need to resize partitions (gParted) I use INSERT.

You should tell them about ntfsclone (part of the Linux NTFS project). The PXE/LiveCD RIP includes it. To back up a system, it's easy:

ntfsclone --save-image /dev/hda1 -o - | gzip -9 >hda1.gz

If you want it split up into, say, 512mb files:

ntfsclone --save-image /dev/hda1 -o - | gzip -9 | split -d - hda1.gz_

To restore a system use:

gunzip -c hda1.gz | ntfsclone --restore-image - -O /dev/hda1

or if you split it up:

gunzip -c hda1.gz_* | ntfsclone --restore-image - -O /dev/hda1

If doing multiple machines, it's a good idea to resize the filesystem to as small as it will go before creating the image. For example, I generally do 8G since that will usually hold everything:

ntfsresize --size 8G /dev/hda1

Then reboot into windows to let chkdsk run (I use BartPE instead and run chkdsk /f /r c:). Go back to RIP and save your image as above. When restoring a system, run the following command directly after ntfsclone to grow the filesystem to the full size of the partition:

ntfsresize -f /dev/hda1

To write a Windows boot loader use the tool ms-sys:

ms-sys -m /dev/hda

This can be scripted very easily. In the few places where I don't automate the whole install/app install/configuration with Unattended I use a RIP-based netboot. As soon as it boots it restores the image and then restarts the computer. So if I need to reimage a dozen computers all I have to do is walk in the room, turn on the computer, hit F3, and go to the next. Then I come back 15 minutes later and see that all of them are restored.

I looked at a couple of the popular ones, installed Awffull and played with it for a bit. But it wasn't immediately
obvious to me that any of the common ones supported aggregating stats across domains / hosts. Eg, I have 10 virtual servers on this
Apache box, give me a sorted list of hits per domain/host. Probably one or more of the popular open-source stats packages
*does* do this, but I didn't feel like spending hours examining different ones and installing them. Since my needs were very basic
I just wrote something of my own.

Since all my domains are ultimately served by a Java webapp running on JBoss (I redirect from Apache to JBoss with mod_jk) I just wrote a servlet filter to write hits to a postgresql database. That's it,one table with the hostname, date-time, user-agent, and a handful of other things I care about. Now, getting the info I need is a simple as a quick sql query with pgadmin III. Although I'm looking at using the Eclipse BIRT stuff for looking at the data, as my next project.

Awstats seems to be the modern usual answer (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/), used and recommended by many admins and groups (in my case EGEE, European Science Grid intiative http://www.eu-egee.org/) but for traditionalists with no eye-candy desires, there is a copy of Webalizer (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/) lurking on most servers and almost all destribution package repositories. It's worth looking at the wikipedia page for specials, extended verions and general info on web server statistics and analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webalizer.

Particularly, Stone Steps Webalizer is an interesting version of feature-full and candy-enabled version: http://www.stonesteps.ca/projects/webalizer/. Others can be easily found on Freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=webalizer&section=p rojects (i.e. Webalizer Extended with included Geolizer and extensive 404 analysis support, http://www.patrickfrei.ch/webalizer/ and AwFull with usability, CSS and geo-ip features, http://www.stedee.id.au/awffull etc.).

Others can be found on Freshmeat (117 hits at this time http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=web&trove_cat_id=24 5&section=trove_cat) and Wikipedia (very short and poor stub of a list that you might want to improve after your extensive testing :-) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_web_ana lytics_software.

There is also Sherlog, an Apache Log Analyser, specialized in user experinece tracking more than statistcs - an interesting complimentary tool (http://sherlog.europeanservers.net/.

Awstats seems to be the modern usual answer (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/), used and recommended by many admins and groups (in my case EGEE, European Science Grid intiative http://www.eu-egee.org/) but for traditionalists with no eye-candy desires, there is a copy of Webalizer (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/) lurking on most servers and almost all destribution package repositories. It's worth looking at the wikipedia page for specials, extended verions and general info on web server statistics and analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webalizer.

Particularly, Stone Steps Webalizer is an interesting version of feature-full and candy-enabled version: http://www.stonesteps.ca/projects/webalizer/. Others can be easily found on Freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=webalizer&section=p rojects (i.e. Webalizer Extended with included Geolizer and extensive 404 analysis support, http://www.patrickfrei.ch/webalizer/ and AwFull with usability, CSS and geo-ip features, http://www.stedee.id.au/awffull etc.).

Others can be found on Freshmeat (117 hits at this time http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=web&trove_cat_id=24 5&section=trove_cat) and Wikipedia (very short and poor stub of a list that you might want to improve after your extensive testing :-) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_web_ana lytics_software.

There is also Sherlog, an Apache Log Analyser, specialized in user experinece tracking more than statistcs - an interesting complimentary tool (http://sherlog.europeanservers.net/.

What the hell are you talking about? Support NVIDIA or ATI? Well, you have to do that with MS windows too. You just have to program in OpenGL, as DirectX in MSWindows.

All the different distros? They just have a few different packaging formats. Last time I checked, they all used GNU libc, X11, and OpenGL, so the binaries need not be different. Just don't link in the latest bleeding edge, and it will only be a problem for those who haven't upgraded their box for 10 years. I'll let you in on a little secret: MS didn't have a packaging format at all for a long time. People just made self extracting .exes. It sucked, but people got by. Even if you are too stupid and lazy to put your package into the different distro's formats, you can just create a self extracting tarball. Not any more difficult than MS's OS. Except Linux has packaging formats, and there is a program to convert between them.

Unless you are talking about all the different bleeding edge support libs a developer might use? Well requiring users to install those would be a mess in both Linux and MSWindows. Professional apps usually either static link them in or include them on the CD.

And the "OSS vs ALSA" debate? First off, if you support OSS, it will work on ALSA. They made it backward compatible. Second, you are saying MS has never upgraded their sound APIs?

The kernel doesn't even come into account until you start messing with the system directly. The program is supposed to be linked against libraries. GNU made a crappy hack, but the newer versions of libc are backward compatible with the older ones. Similar story with X11 and OpenGL. If the game was trying to manipulate hardware directly or some such, a different kernel may cause problems, but I'd be worried if a game started doing that to my computer...

In fact, I doubt it would be any more difficult to write a game using OpenGL / GLUT and Posix standards and have it cross compile to many different systems (Linux, Macs, *BSD,...) than it would be to write a game for MS Windows. I don't know what sound interface Macs use, but OSS would work on both Linux and FreeBSD--I assume the other BSDs as well.

I don't know why you crackheads think supporting Linux is really so much more difficult than MS Windows. Must be wishful thinking, since you are too brain dead to wrap your little mind around something besides your "great master."

• Want to listen to mp3s? XMMS or Songbird.
• Want to watch movies? VLC. Ports installs a heap of cd ripping software with VLC too, and I package managers for Linux do as well.
• Want to share files? KMLDonkey.
• Want to play some free games? Here.
• Want to do office stuff? OpenOffice.

From personal to multinational

http://freshmeat.net/browse/76/?orderby=&filter_sc ope=237

NUT diet software
http://www.lafn.org/~av832/

ShrinkingMan
http://debain.org/software/shrinkingman/

Diet Monger Ass Kicker
http://freshmeat.net/projects/dmak/

Pydance
http://icculus.org/pyddr/
(dance dance revolution for Linux with dance pad support)

No you have no excuse to be a fat Linux looser. Soon you will be a regular Linux looser like everybody else, except of course you'd have very fast feet. :-)

I'm surprised that nobody seems to have pointed out the existence of many theme sites yet. You can make Linux look beautiful today!

I think it looks very nice these days. Of course, being functional and stable is more important, but it doesn't hurt to look good too :-)

If you'd like to run an encrypted root filesystem (including /etc, /var and friends), and encrypted swap on top of an established distro, take a look at JayOS. Although it's built on Linux From Scratch, the author releases bootable livecd ISOs for x86 and Intel Macs quite often. I should know, I am he :)

The latest addition is a rudimentary, yet effective technique to store and retrieve hidden data in your encrypted filesystems (plausible deniability). Custom build scripts and source are available, so even if you choose not to use it as a distro, you might learn a new trick or two for your own setup.

There is also a project page on Freshmeat.

Jay

It uses the GTK engine so you could get a new GTK theme. I've never tried it so I'm not sure how well it works.

On a side note, did anyone else notice the "slashdot it" link at the bottom? I understand linux.com is a part of the OSTG but that seems kinda cruel...

There exists an LCARS theme for Enlightenment DR16 at http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/lcars/

Some freshmeat searching reveals that there's themes for GTK+ too at http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/lcars_/

I used to use this theme years ago to show off, although the thick vertical bar at the left of the windows sort of wasted space on the 800x600 monitor.

There exists an LCARS theme for Enlightenment DR16 at http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/lcars/

Some freshmeat searching reveals that there's themes for GTK+ too at http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/lcars_/

I used to use this theme years ago to show off, although the thick vertical bar at the left of the windows sort of wasted space on the 800x600 monitor.

This might not work as requested but it works for my home network and parenting needs.

pdnsd

If you can spare any keyboard LEDs. This little tool might help.

an image editor...easy to point/click your way through creating three dimentional wire frames, applying textures, opacity and colors to those frames then rendering those from whatever angle you liked in conjunction with various light sources into static or animated objects.

Wait, what? Would you like your image editor to compose music and poetry too? Maybe run your home theater system and control your christmas lights from a slashdot-proof webapp? Let me know when v3.0 comes out, I hear they're promising world peace and an end to hunger.

As far as 3D rendering and modelling programs go, Blender isn't for the faint of heart. If you want to just point and click your way through something, a quick tour through Multimedia::Graphics::Modelling on Freshmeat lists a few that might be up your alley, depending on what exactly you want. I suggest checking out SharpConstruct, which looks to use a nifty sculptor interface for making 3D things and has pretty active development.

I knew Debian provided source, but I don't know an easy way to find it. I probably just need to look through their site more...maybe I got lost, but the ftp site you gave appears to only have binaries. Not a problem, since I found alien, which says it will translate to any packaging format.

As for dependancy tracking, Slackware doesn't use any, so I won't notice much difference if the system just cut that out. However one of the main reasons for dependancies is finding all the libraries, so I don't understand why ldd can't be done on the binaries of a package, which will give all the missing libraries, then search the package system for which packages have those library files. There may be a problem if exact version numbers are needed, but I think it would work better than the current systems. At least as an extra check on the current dep system. I suppose data file deps might be a problem (does anyone do this?)

Unipkg looks promising. I haven't had the chance to try it yet, but sounds like they have a good plan.

Thanks for your input.

Perhaps this will help spark more interest in anonymous web browsing.

gramofile

(Comments in brackets are generally not directed at this post's author, but rather members of the usual /. peanut gallery who are likely to flame me for deviating from standard groupthink)

2. Migration. What to do with mailbox files that go back to 1993, for example, or more importantly, other documents created in Windows-only programs? I could save a computer just for Windows, of course, but how would I migrate these documents that are historical and artistic in nature if I need to update them?

For word processor documents, you'd need to figure out whether said file formats are binary, or primarily textual. If they're binary, there probably isn't a whole lot you can do...if however they're primarily text with proprietary markup, opening them in a hex editor or possibly even plain Notepad will allow you to get the text out of them. From there you can simply paste it into whatever other application you want. For graphics you should be fine, as there aren't a lot of completely unreadable proprietary Windows graphics formats about that I know of. (Unless we're talking about vectors, of course)

1. Inertia. There are six machines in the house and we both work at home. As longtime computer users, we have habits. Linux means re-learning a lot of those habits, from mousing styles to keyboard shortcuts. And it would mean learning how to connect the whole mess together and have it work -- without massively losing productivity in the meantime. That potential loss matters when you're self-employed and depend on your own knowledge and learning to get you through.

You need to figure out specifically what it is that you want/need to do before you can solve this problem one way or the other. Form a list of your usual tasks, and then do some research to find out how Linux handles those specific tasks. That in turn will tell you how difficult adapting is likely to be.

3. Applications. This is talked about over and over, but the dicussion often ends up with the most popular office-style applications. There are clones (and improvements) of these, and the graphics software is improving. But there are not yet functional equivalents to programs like Sonar, Finale, Sibelius, and Adobe Audition -- nor the literally hundreds of small applications that I use, some only for a few minutes each day.

Two websites can help here. The Wine website, which is about a Windows emulator for Linux that can run a large number of Windows programs, with varying degrees of success, (it has a database of known apps) and Freshmeat, which is more or less an OSS equivalent of Download.com, and can thus help you find Linux native applications that do the same or similar things to those you use on Windows.

Also, in terms of "small applications," you might want to consider learning some shell scripting. You may well find that not only can you write shell scripts which duplicate the functionality of your small Windows apps, but that even more, they can potentially do so without you needing to be in front of the keyboard.

4. Hardware. After total failure trying to get Red Hat to work about three years ago, I gave Ubuntu a run last week. It only recognized about half my hardware (but not any of the pro sound hardware, just the low-grade onboard audio), saw all my hard drives and network but none of the other computers on the network (all set up via TCP/IP). This was pretty darn good, but not good enough -- because the sound hardware doesn't have Linux drivers, it turns out, and without those, there was no point to pursuing it until that hardware investment is obsolete.

Red Hat is to be avoided, as is anything rpm based. Mr Shuttleworth's heart might be in the right place, but Ubuntu also seems to have some fairly serious problems as well, from what I've been hearing lately.

I'm going to get flamed for this, but it's good advice, so I don't car

Brin is so full of **** here, it's not even funny. Freshmeat has a whole category full of free BASIC interpreters and compilers. A lot of them run on Windows. He also doesn't seem to understand that there are other languages that can be programmed in a procedural style, just like BASIC. For example, there's nothing stopping you from writing python programs in that style. BASIC doesn't suck because it's simple and nonpretentious. BASIC sucks because it's never been standardized. I learned to program in BASIC on a TRS-80, and it was a major pain having to translate programs written into other dialects into the TRS-80 dialect.

If you like to read about good news and hard work you can read the other OSTG site freshmeat.net, but personally I don't find it very interesting.

I come here to read interesting points of view (even if /. makes up debates that don't exist, as here, interesting comments usually come up).

This doesn't surprise me in light of my experience with some of his other projects. On several occasions I've come upon one of his projects on Freshmeat and been interested enough to try to build it. This has generally been problematic. He has his own configuration and build system. It isn't necessarily bad - it may even have some advantages - but it is idiosyncratic and in my experience a pain to use. When I've examined the specifics of his project I usually find that the differences between it and the more standard version (several of his projects are variants of standard utilities, e.g. his count is a variant of wc) aren't sufficiently interesting to me to make the hassle of his build system worthwhile, or that they lack features of other variants that are important for my purposes. (His count, for example, is said to be faster than GNU wc, but doesn't understand Unicode.)

None of this means that he is evil or incompetant, but it does give the impression of someone who is insistently idiosyncratic. I can easily imagine that he'd be difficult to deal with.

The guitune project seems to do everything your second program does. Linux only at the mo' (but in gtk or qt flavours)

There's loads of metronome free software around too.

But when you start running with dependencies etc it gets confusing. Of course, it might be the projects I've been tryin to work with (Ogre3d etc) which seem to base their documentation on the premise that it's better to start halfway through things and require that any new apps require libs from the samples...


On the other hand, if you're looking for simple web development, I've found that Quanta (KDE) works quite well, although depending on the version it can crash on ocasion.

This thread has inspired me to register the domain "publicpriorart.org" -- the intention is to build a database of ideas, thoughts, algorithms,etc in a public place, strictly for the purpose of preventing patents from being filed for them in the future. Anyone interested in helping? Or can point me to an existing effort, so I don't waste my time?

Though there's no one public place, other than the internet, there are a number of websites who share not just programs but other things like music. There are all of the open source website collections like Sourceforge and Freshmear. Here's Creative Commons, for legal music downloads there's Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads and MagnaTunes. More can be found on Wiki's Creative Commons License page.

... genuinely free when it is easy enough to create that anyone can and will create it as they need.

By its very goal, that of making complexity easier to use and reuse, software will get this easy to produce.

http://wiki.ffii.org/IstTamaiEn

thru the application of abstraction physics we can create, in analogy, a calculator capable of outputing an application as its result. Capable of prompting the user for refined information it needs to do so.

autocoding project:
http://lists.debian.org/lsb-discuss/2002/01/msg001 05.html

http://freshmeat.net/projects/victor1/

Have a look at OCS Inventory NG, it's an asset tracking system. It can also integrate with GLPI, which is a helpdesk system. They're FOSS. I'm thinking of giving them a go at the non-profit where I work. It looks pretty cool, the only thing that bothers me so far is the shoddy translation.

Two days ago I also stumbled across this small program that can help you in case you don't use Firefox: youtube-dl.

It's times like this that I'm glad that I use offlineimap:

* http://freshmeat.net/projects/offlineimap/

This is an excellent script for syncing your computer with an external imap account. Works incredibly well with Mutt.

Also, email readers like Thunderbird have an offline setting that allows you to create a copy of your mail on your dekstop.

There are many good resources on the web. The standard resource is The Linux Documentation Project, or http://www.tldp.org/. Another site, which is much better than it used to be, is http://www.linux.com/. http://www.linuxjournal.com/ has many great articles to guide you through a wide variety of small projects. A great newer site with helpful articles is http://www.howtoforge.com/. For help on the desktop side, http://www.desktoplinux.com/ has many articles you may find of use. Documentation and information about KDE is, of course, available at http://www.kde.org/ and it's affiliated sites (linked from their homepage). IBM is always putting up new articles at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/ that can provide usefull information for development work under Linux. You may also find the articles on http://www.debian.org/, http://www.gentoo.org/, and http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ usefull even though the articles were written for other distros.

If you can't find what you're looking for there, you can always head over to irc.freenode.net. The #suse and #opensuse channels will be of particular interest to you. You may find #kde helpful for KDE applications. ##linux is basically a catch-all channel; we'll generally be able to field just about any question you throw at us there. If we can't, we will point you in the right direction.

Keeping up with the FOSS news can also teach you quite a bit. You already know about Slashdot. http://osnews.com/ is another very nice resource. http://www.kerneltrap.org/ is a less frequently updated site which can provide you with more advanced information. Keeping an eye on http://www.freshmeat.net/ can help you get a better feel for the various software available for Linux. And of course, with gmail you can setup alerts for Linux, KDE, etc.

If you really want to learn more about Linux, there's no better way than distro hopping. Go to http://www.vmware.com/ and download their free VMWare Server 1.0 to allow you to try out various distros without having to wipe your hard drive. This does, however, require you have a decent amount of RAM (I'd recommend at least 1 GB). Go to http://www.distrowatch.com/ for a fairly complete list of the available Linux distros, sorted by popularity.

If all these links really don't solve your problems, take yourself over to your best local bookstore and buy a book or two. The drawback of doing this, however, is that most of them will be pretty much out of date by the time they hit the shelves. On the other hand, they will give you a great foundation upon which you can build (update yourself) easily by utilizing the online resources.

Also, never forget about http://www.google.com/linux!

PySol, Fish Fillets and FloboPuyo are also nice.

http://fillets.sourceforge.net/

http://freshmeat.net/projects/flobopuyo/

PySol, Fish Fillets and FloboPuyo are also nice.

http://fillets.sourceforge.net/

http://freshmeat.net/projects/flobopuyo/

I looked at 3D rendering quite a while back (about 15 years ago). Believe me -- you probably don't really want to built this up from scratch.

It sounds like you just need some sample code that doesn't rely on OpenGL or DirectX. To that end, the following (open-source) projects may be useful:

• Freshmeat listing of 3D Rendering Projects is probably a good place to start. The first few projects look promising already.

• Flipcode game development website listing of software may also be helpful. The Toxic Engine and SW-Shader (now SwiftShader, under Transgaming) projects seem to be pure software renderers that may be suitable.

First of all there is Charon from Inferno. It supports html, EMCAScript (1.1 IIRC), CSS, DOM (level 1 IIRC) and https. (See screenshot however this one is a bit outdated)

Abaco is the most actively developed Plan 9 web browser. It supports most of html. DOM level 3 development has been started. Mozilla's Javascript engine has been ported to Plan 9 and can be used today for a Javascript shell. This will provide abaco with Javascript in the future. Work on CSS has started but I do not know what has been done or where it is heading. Abaco has been ported to Linux and friends via Plan 9 from Userspace. Package managers are encouraged to make packages of abaco for their systems. (See screenshot)

Then there are webpage, links, mothra, and htmlfmt.

Finally there are text web browsers for acme (htmlfmt for Plan 9 and see this for Inferno)

In other news, SDL now works on Plan 9.

Yeah, I screwed up the link. Use this if you can't figure it out for yourself.