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The centering bits are a problem, but for the others -- use a CSS pre-processor. (Sass, LESS, Scaffold, Compass, Stylus,etc.)

There are ones that are more Ruby-ish, or Python-ish, etc. Some can calculate colors (darken, lighten, blend, etc.), but almost all let you set things to variables so they can be set in one place and used multiple times.

(and none of this is really new -- I know folks that were using ColdFusion, PHP or even Perl to generate their CSS a good decade or so ago ... it's a page of text, and pretty much anything that can generate an HTML page can generate CSS too)

The centering bits are a problem, but for the others -- use a CSS pre-processor. (Sass, LESS, Scaffold, Compass, Stylus,etc.)

There are ones that are more Ruby-ish, or Python-ish, etc. Some can calculate colors (darken, lighten, blend, etc.), but almost all let you set things to variables so they can be set in one place and used multiple times.

(and none of this is really new -- I know folks that were using ColdFusion, PHP or even Perl to generate their CSS a good decade or so ago ... it's a page of text, and pretty much anything that can generate an HTML page can generate CSS too)

but the point is that it continues to pick up steam

Really? I see one active contributor on these five SciRuby repos (who is responsible for the "flurry of activity" you describe) with an overall trend downwards. The port you linked is also essentially inactive, though it may simply be complete. By contrast there's half a dozen different contributors on the first numpy commit page I linked alone.

OT: Nice Bach piece by the way. Why did you pick it?

Unfortunately it ignores the alternative of just using Python

The option of using python is implicitly rejected. Why would the contributors spend time on sciruby when they clearly know scipy exists? Speaking for myself, I've used python and scipy (both numpy and matplotlib) for several projects, but I much prefer coding in ruby to python. All the functionality of scipy isn't going to be duplicated with sciruby, but if the most common use cases are implemented, then I can use ruby for most projects.

this is a misguided waste of time

why? It's easier to re-implement (i.e., borrow from scipy) than implement in the first place, so it doesn't take all that much time. And, as pointed out, this is currently a minor project compared to scipy, so if it is a waste of time then it's not a lot of it.

Python has a "there is only one true way" mentality, so there isn't a lot of room to try and innovate within scipy. Perhaps sciruby will innovate in significant ways and scipy will draw a little from it one day.

and it's nearly inactive anyway

The fellowship and nmatrix commit history would suggest otherwise.

The slowdown in commits to sciruby proper is due to the recent efforts on nmatrix (the subject of the story). The github commit history is easily accessible and shows a flurry of activity. Many projects associated with sciruby are also not housed directly under the sciruby name (e.g., rubyvis)

There are a million minor projects like this that similarly aren't newsworthy enough to discuss

... yet here we are...

The lack of comparable scientific libraries is the primary reason many folks choose python over ruby. It's true that sciruby is young and doesn't yet compete with scipy/numpy, but the point is that it continues to pick up steam. A lot of folks who would rather code in ruby think this matters.

The SciRuby Manifesto does discuss the question, "Why Ruby?"

Why Ruby?

First and least, Ruby is a language with a sense of humor.

But more importantly, numerical computation and visualization can be done much better in Ruby, for a number of reasons:

        ''Everything returns a value.'' Ruby's better object model means better chaining of computation.
        ''Iterators'' are way better than ''for'' loops (each_slice, each_cons, etc.).
        ''Readability.'' Ruby is incredibly readable, which makes it uber-maintainable.
        ''Metaprogramming.'' Sometimes the simplest solution is to write a [http://github.com/wycats/thor code generator]. Sometimes, eigenclasses are the cleanest.
        ''Integration into Rails.'' The influence of Rails on Ruby is undeniable. Web-based visualization for scientific projects is the future.
        ''R is nice but clunky.'' The learning curve is enormous. It does some things very well, and others not very well at all (try doing a multi-line plot in R).

Unfortunately it ignores the alternative of just using Python.

There's also a (I'll be charitable) silly discussion in this vein on the same page:

Ruby has no equivalent to the beautifully constructed numpy, scipy, and matplotlib libraries for Python. We believe that the time for a Ruby science and visualization package has come and gone. Sometimes when a solution of sugar and water becomes super-saturated, from it precipitates a pure, delicious, and diabetes-inducing crystal of sweetness, induced by no more than the tap of a finger. So it is, we believe, with the need for numeric and visualization libraries in Ruby.

IMO, this is a misguided waste of time and it's nearly inactive anyway.

The fellowship is a summer long with only a $1,500 stipend. The most recent commit is from December 1st, 2011. The wiki and issue tracker appear to be similarly inactive. Even if the project does something, it probably won't do much; contrast it with numpy commits which are recent and numerous.

This story should never have been accepted. There are a million minor projects like this that similarly aren't newsworthy enough to discuss.

The fellowship is a summer long with only a $1,500 stipend. The most recent commit is from December 1st, 2011. The wiki and issue tracker appear to be similarly inactive. Even if the project does something, it probably won't do much; contrast it with numpy commits which are recent and numerous.

This story should never have been accepted. There are a million minor projects like this that similarly aren't newsworthy enough to discuss.

There is a good link here:

http://ttsiodras.github.com/rsbep.html

This is a good move for creating par files etc as part of your backups. He also has some other really good information up there in regards to protecting data. Especially creating backups under windows:

http://ttsiodras.github.com/win32backup.html

There is a good link here:

http://ttsiodras.github.com/rsbep.html

This is a good move for creating par files etc as part of your backups. He also has some other really good information up there in regards to protecting data. Especially creating backups under windows:

http://ttsiodras.github.com/win32backup.html

If you're looking to learn something new and general purpose, Python has a combination of decent docs (you can start with http://www.python.org/doc/ , http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_python/ , and http://www.lightbird.net/py-by-example/ ), good libraries (see http://pypi.python.org/pypi and https://github.com/languages/Python/most_watched ) and all-around flexibility (all the regular system stuff, lots of microframeworks for web, scientific computing tools, 2d+3d graphics).

You may want to take a look at IPython ( http://ipython.org/ ), Reinteract ( http://fishsoup.net/software/reinteract/ ), and DreamPie ( http://dreampie.sourceforge.net/ ) for some interactive shells/interpreters to play around with. I use vim for programming, but there are a number of IDEs. Of the ones I've tried, I thought IEP offered the most interesting tools: http://code.google.com/p/iep/

Probably the fastest/easiest way to learn (and learn if you like) Python is to go through Zed Shaw's book/exercises: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
There's a lot of other stuff on the Python wiki: http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Programmers

Slashdot definitely isn't what it used to be. For programming questions you may want to look at Stack Overflow or Quora. For general nerdly news, I find Hacker News, Techmeme, and The Verge tends to cover my bases better these days.

Before you post something stupid, you might want to look at the development history yourself. https://github.com/comex/star_

Before you post something stupid maybe you should read what you're attempting to respond to, here it is again:
So i'm guessing you're not familiar with times between versions of Jailbreakme then?

Now if you were familiar with the times between versions of Jailbreakme you'd see they have historically been quite large.

So i'm guessing you're not familiar with times between versions of Jailbreakme then?

Before you post something stupid, you might want to look at the development history yourself. https://github.com/comex/star_

Probably standard procedure to run a set of automated scans. Also, if the data was hidden via steganography in plaintext as opposed to encrypting it to look like (ie: Gaussian) noise in an audio/video file, then it sticks out like a sore thumb. You can just do local noise and autocorrelation estimates in small locales, and will be well on your way to figuring it out in no time. It's not that different from detecting how people have photoshopped an image, in the simpler cases.

If you had a big enough sample set - say, all the pr0n ever posted to USENET, all the pr0n ever hosted on MegaUpload, and all the pr0n... well, you get the idea. We're talking about a lot of pr0n.

If you had a big enough library of pr0n, you could just diff the two files and the embedded bits would fall right out. Even if you didn't know what they meant, they'd be a huge red flag screaming "look here!"

For an educational time: (videos are SFW, and you don't even need to view them in order to complete the experiment.)

1) Use something like youtube-dl.py to download a YouTube video. ( youtube-dl.py UiuiuwpgfNg )
2) Back it up. ( mv UiuiuwpgfNg.flv UiuiuwpgfNg.old.flv )
3) Wait a few seconds. Ask a friend to do the same thing from a different computer.
4) Download the same video all over again. ( youtube-dl.py UiuiuwpgfNg )
5) Compare the two files that were just streamed to you a few minutes apart. ( cmp -l UiuiuwpgfNg.flv UiuiuwpgfNg.old.flv )

At around 40 kilobytes into an 11MB FLV (or 34MB .mp4), YouTube embeds about ten bytes of metadata. It does this in every video it stream to every client. (And if you can't view .flv flash video on your platform, try it with omFG-MHqWw4.mp4 like a boss.)

The source code says differently.
https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-iOS/blob/master/gpl.txt

So the code is being distributed through GitHub under the GPL license, as well as through the App Store under Apple's proprietary license. ID Software still owns copyright to Doom and Wolfenstein; having made a GPL release does not prohibit them from also doing proprietary releases.

However, if you were to make your own game out of the GPL Doom code, you could release this derived work (under the GPL) for Linux, Windows, or even Mac OS, but not for iOS.

All "open source" is prohibited in many app stores.

And what app stores would those be? It's certainly not the iOS App store.

Doom is GPL Licensed
Doom is in the App Store
The Source for for iOS Doom

> I tried several different ways to get the window to
> open on the correct monitor, including my usual
> trick of: open new window, drag to correct monitor,
> and close. Open a new window again (which,
> usually, opens on the correct window, but never
> did under FF12)

Weird. I just tried exactly this in FF12, and it worked just fine. :(

If this is happening for you reliably, would you be willing to hunt down when the problem first appeared? If you are, there's a tool at http://harthur.github.com/mozregression/ that will automatically do a binary search on nightly builds. FF11 branched off the development trunk on 2011-12-20, and FF12 branched off on 2012-01-31. Presumably the problem appeared somewhere between those; with a binary search it should take 6 nightly build downloads to pin it down to a particular day.

The Vrome extension for Chrome works well.
https://github.com/jinzhu/vrome
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/godjoomfiimiddapohpmfklhgmbfffjj

You write the C# -> native compiler first ;)

And how do you think C# code is executed?

The "Native Image Generator" is

the Ahead-of-time compilation service of the .NET Framework. It allows a .NET assembly to be pre-compiled instead of letting the Common Language Runtime do a Just-in-time compilation at runtime

Not an ordinary .exe, granted, but the native code is there even in normal C# use. Ordinary native binaries can be generated from C# if necessary though - this is how Mono targets platforms like the Wii. The reason you can't write (normal) Windows drivers in C# is because Windows isn't written in C#.

That said, bindings exist for libusb, so that's a start.

(There seem to be a number of similar bindings for Java, and a standard API spec that no-one's implemented.)

Google tells me two operating systems have been written in C#: Cosmos and Singularity.

This isn't to say C# is more suited than C to OS/driver work, but it can be done.

http://civicrm.org/casestudy/node/1390
"New York State Senate's Bluebird: Managing millions of constituents for 62 New York State Senate offices ... With the backing of CiviCRM's community of developers, Bluebird's increased functional capabilities, streamlined workflows and refined user interface promises to move the State of New York forward and help improve the communication of representative governmentâs ultimately making the Senate more responsive to constituent needs. ... Several open source CRM solutions were evaluated as platforms to help improve the New York State Senate's communication and responsiveness to constituent needs through streamlined workflows, increased functional capabilities and a user interface built on principles of simplicity and efficiency. CiviCRM stood out from the other available platforms due to it's robust feature set, open source license, eager and thriving community of developers and cooperative core team."

The code is here:
https://github.com/nysenate

If CiviCRM/Bluebird can't do what the questioner asks, the feature could be added. It is a web-based PHP/Drupal application. The NYS Senate's technology group (a great group of people, who also run "Capitol Camp" http://blog.capitolcamp.org/ ) sometimes has openings for more open source developers, so for any expert PHP/Drupal developers out there who want to work in public service on open source, you might want to get your resume on file with them.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/179504

It runs on ZeroBin, which uses client side javascript to generate a random 256bit AES key, then compress and encrypt the text before sending it to the server. Comments are also compressed and encrypted. The key is never seen by the server, so the server can't decrypt your data.

It uses the Stanford Javascript Crypto Library for its AES code, and its codebase is available on github.

The system is vulnerable to an MITM attack, also a server admin may be able to reveal the poster's identity, but not the post's content

Revealing the posters identity is worse than revealing the posters content! That is a huge security hole.

Also where is the key stored? Expect the government to investigate and interrogate whoever has the keys.

It runs on ZeroBin, which uses client side javascript to generate a random 256bit AES key, then compress and encrypt the text before sending it to the server. Comments are also compressed and encrypted. The key is never seen by the server, so the server can't decrypt your data.

It uses the Stanford Javascript Crypto Library for its AES code, and its codebase is available on github.

The system is vulnerable to an MITM attack, also a server admin may be able to reveal the poster's identity, but not the post's content

Don't use SharePoint or CodePlex. Try this: http://github.com/ or this http://launchpad.net/ or this http://bitbucket.org/

The "CPP" file, for those interested: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/test/perf/perf.cpp

The core Julia implementation uses the MIT License, not the GPL. See the license information here.

It's nice to see some of my work come to light. I created prototypes for this back a few years ago with Google Earth and GDAL for the Bathymetric Attributed Grids (BAG) file from Hydrographic Surveys... http://youtu.be/7fOTlqqQ5O4 Or build a visualization yourself using the code: https://github.com/schwehr/bag-py

LICENSE file says that this file below contains licensing information, but it doesn't

https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II/blob/master/README.mkd

however, file has been edited two hours ago.

I was familiar with clean room because I was once part of such a project. I was aware nVidia drivers had parts that they considered to be "secret sauce" algorithms (and ATI didn't?). From what you said, I'm assuming it was the firmware which must be loaded onto the card?

I'm only vaguely familiar with the requirements for HDCP compliance, but I'm guessing that safeguarding keys is part of it. So, my assumption is that nVidia needed to do that, in general, rather than to specifically make it difficult for the nouveau project.

Perhaps, the libdvdcss approach by players will work. The players don't have de-CSS capabilities themselves, but they do look around for the lib. If it "happens to be around" (e.g. liability is shifted to the end user who downloaded it separately), they will use it.

In other words, you always need the card, so everything else is protected without needing specific protection of its own.

My answer to all that is that nVidia cards are mostly software nowadays (except for the real rendering/computing core). Nvidia uses a common ISA for most engines. It was reversed engineered when Fermi was out and took more than a year before we wrote our core firmwares by ourselves. I'm currently writing the hardware monitoring firmware as a first experience with this ISA.

These firmwares execute on harvard "microcontrolers" and all have some special capabilities depending on the engine they run on.

The firmwares themselves aren't secure at all and aren't meant to be anyway. However, some "memory pages" can be marked as secret so as you can't access them from the host unless you know the "password". I never studied this part, if you are interested, you can read what has already been documented: https://github.com/pathscale/envytools/blob/master/hwdocs/fuc-vm.txt

In the end, the card itself isn't particularly needed since it is mostly software and we should be able to fake many things. But what's the point of hdcp anyway?

Another assurance for nVidia is that they know how slow going the RE is, compared to what they can do. They'll always be several steps ahead, no matter what. So, nouveau is no "threat" to them. The only people they're really concerned about are competitors like AMD/ATI and Intel that make HW.

Right, by the time the hw is shipped, nVidia doesn't worry anymore about their secrets. Nouveau is thus not a problem for them. However, yesterday, the 3d driver for Kepler was released, less than a month after the release of the first Kepler GPU. Some people in the Nouveau really are in-human :D

Be thankful you're in Europe. In the US, the RIAA has been known to sue widows and orphans :-)

Yeah, the US is always crazy about IP. Can't wait for the whole damn thing be to reformed to be friendlier with those who really do make the country go forward.

but https://github.com/dacort/mwhich MWhich seems to do exactly what you want?

Trust no one. Encrypt everything.

Fact: The NSA has shown itself, historically, to have knowledge and technology 20-30 years ahead of that available to the rest of the human race (case in point, their suggestion to modify DES' S-boxes to strengthen it against differential cryptanalysis, an attack using math no one had even heard of until almost 30 years later).

Fact: A general purpose quantum computer makes all commonly used encryption algorithms worthless (though a number of quantum-resistant algorithms have started to appear, such as http://tbuktu.github.com/ntru/).

Fact: Countless research programs have demonstrated the viability of quantum computing, and you can even buy a 128 bit quantum computer today.

Likely: The NSA already has the quantum equivalent of a Beowulf cluster of these, if not something much, much better.

Conclusion: Using encryption trusts the single least-trustable entity on the planet not to already have the ability to turn it into Swiss cheese. That said, the NSA doesn't give two damns about the "little" things like copyright infringement, kiddy porn, or terrorist plots, so most of us have no reason to care about this. The local doughnut-eaters still have no ability to read your encrypted emails.

The patents are freely licensed for any GPL software; see link for details.
http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/offer.htm

Mosh appears to be GPL:
https://github.com/keithw/mosh/blob/master/COPYING

One of the pains of being an early adopter is you get your attitudes set in stone from ye olden days. For me, streaming will always be shitty breaking up and stuttering realaudio from 1997. Has it improved any? I tried watching a couple youtube videos on my phone recently and they're all stutter and buffer but maybe real devices work better now? Or does streaming still suck?

One Python script to solve all your woes.

My experience echoes your own. I "watch" YouTube videos by cutting and pasting the ID onto the command line. Then I go do something else while the video downloads, and by the time I'm done reading, all my "streamed" content is cached - permanently - on disk.

The fact that it's immune from being thrown down the memory hole at some later date is just a bonus.

Do you still provide the source code that runs the site? I remember that slashcode.com [slashcode.com] would track your changes in the past. Is this still true? I see that the last post there was in 2009.

The last time the public repository had any activity was September 2009. Trying to checkout the SF git repository appears to not work because there's no master branch, but it's easy enough to get at if you're familiar with git. However, last time I grabbed it, I put it on github to preserve it and get at it easier.

Just this week I decided to see if I could get the code running somewhere, because I was interested in seeing how Slashdot ran from an Admin perspective. It was a lot of work to get it going, but I finally got it (all told, maybe 6 hours of time). I used a Debian 6 (Lenny) image in VMWare Fusion because I was having problems getting it to work on a newer FreeBSD image. Also, mod_perl 1 will not compile if newer versions of Perl are on the system, but Lenny's default 5.10 worked fine.

For the most part, the INSTALL instructions were ok, and I found a few system packages I needed to have in order for the install to work properly. Also the MySQL SQL file for creating the database tables is broken and I had to fix it (syntax errors, plus some small tweaks to work with MySQL 5.1). In addition, the file is named differently than what the Slashcode install script is looking for, so it borked when running.

The git repository I linked above has my fixes on the 'development' branch. I also ran into a slight problem of ISE 500 when everything was up and I tried to hit the site, but that was simply a matter of tweaking the Apache config that was created. I now have a working Slash site on my home network to play around with.

I don't like C. Have Forth. https://github.com/MostAwesomeDude/cauliflower

impress.js. It isn't SVG/canvas, but it uses CSS3 and javascript to make prezi-like presentations using simple html. It's actually quite easy to use. I've been having a bit of fun with it lately.

It's not an editor, it's just a Javascript library. Also, it works on very few platforms.

impress.js. It isn't SVG/canvas, but it uses CSS3 and javascript to make prezi-like presentations using simple html. It's actually quite easy to use. I've been having a bit of fun with it lately.

By then, the pirate server (which is already under development), will hopefully be good enough for regular use.

Hey, look, streaming.

AIR is another runtime for SWF files that uses their ECMAscript VM, yes. More likely it's a wrapper with some add-ons, but I digest.

Long term meaning how long? 3 years? 5? 10? 20? Even 5 years is a really really really long time in the computer industry, and if things get really bad, there's always Gnash http://gnashdev.org/ and Lightspark http://lightspark.github.com/, which are good starts that could use some more love.

With what Adobe's been doing and saying, I wouldn't expect them to completely abandon the platform within 5 years, but I can't read minds. See: PalmOS, or Adobe's recent out-of-left-field announcements that makes one wonder if a chimp is pulling the levers on the board of directors.

One could liken it to Oracle's JVM and the other not-quite-implementations. There is an end-of-the-world scenario where the project survives. It isn't pretty, but it could work. And if all else fails, be prepared to switch technologies. Which, again, in the computer industry, you should at least keep in the back of your mind. I keep my "plan for nuking the world and switching to SDL" from getting too dusty.

In a conventional radio receiver, you start by filtering off the wanted signal with a broad filter, mixing it with another locally-generated signal (the Local Oscillator) to make a lower Intermediate Frequency (IF), then filtering the IF to extract a single "channel" of information. Then you demodulate this, possibly after mixing it down to an even lower IF.

In a software-defined radio, you convert directly down to a much lower frequency (audio frequency, even), but - and this is the clever bit - you do it with two local oscillators, 90 degrees out of phase. This gives you a complex sample, a pair of samples representing In-phase and Quadrature, or the real and imaginary components of your signal.

From there you can apply digital signal processing techniques to extract the wanted signal, show an FFT of the chunk of band you're capturing, and so on. This lets you do very sharp filtering, because you're no longer constrained by the physical realities of trying to implement electronic filters with practical components.

Shameless plug - if you want to try SDR out, go here:
https://github.com/gordonjcp/lysdr
Follow the instructions in the README, then either post a reply or bug me in irc.freenode.net ##electronics for further instructions.

The GSM versions of the LG thunder board (Optimus One/P500, even the neutered AT&T Phoenix and Thrive I think) have quite a community around them and support has been merged into the Cyaogenmod tree. The CDMA versions (Optimus C/U/V/M/S) have , but the CM guys have been dragging their feet on integrating it.

Never touched the Slider tho.

Sounds like Lightspark is not:

https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark/wiki/Site-Support

No mod points today, but this.

For collections of large files that Git doesn't handle so efficiently (my photo and music collections), I use a custom git-like system (https://github.com/TOGoS/ContentCouch).

Earlier I used backup2l to first make local backup and then rsync to server. The only problem was it was wasting disk space on each host, specially laptops.

Recently I moved to bup, provides more efficient backups with very small local storage. Now I have in every laptop, desktop and my email server (all running either Debian or Ubuntu) in /etc/cron.daily/bup-backup:

#!/bin/sh
echo Backup starting at $(hostname) $(date)
bup index -u /var/mail /home /var/lib/mysql
bup save -r backups.example.com: -n $(hostname) /var/mail /home /var/lib/mysql
echo Backup ending at $(hostname) $(date)

Because I do not want remote root logins on my file server at home, there is a need for small tweak in /root/.ssh/config:

Host backup.example.com
User bupups
Compression yes
HostName filesrv.example.com

Now as each system backups to the same bup archive, deduplication is taken care automagically.

Each month I rsync /home/bupups to external USB drive that is stored in different place in case of fire or other mishap it will be protected. At some point I've considered installing a low-power server at my father-on-law place for automated off-site backups; will keep the off-line copy in any case.

Of course, I do not much care about taking backups from movies, music - expect maybe some kids love; but they are already on some USB drive to entertain them while travelling...

This move was not unexpected. We've been hearing things to this extent for a bit now.

This leaves a few questions. First of which is:

Are the open source alternatives ready for prime time? Correct me if I'm wrong but here is the list of the major alternatives:

1. Gnash
2. Lightspark
3. Swfdec

4. 1. I've included Swfdec, but as I understand it, this is for flash apps that you have created and know work with swfdec. It is not for random content from unknown sources. A use case for this is a kiosk where you control the content and the display.

      Now, are the other two, Gnash and Lightspark, ready for primetime, i.e. can they replace Flash Player any time soon?

      Personally, the last time I used either one was a few months ago when I toyed with the idea of trying to make my workstation fully open source. I found that many youtube videos made the plugin crash for both Gnash and Lightspark.

      Since there is content right now that is made for Adobe's Flash Player, I feel that the way forward should be to stop creating new content for Flash. Let it die, and only create new content in HTML5. As for the existing content, the alternatives like the ones listed above need to be able to play need to be able to play it with no problems. I would even have no problem if there was new content developed with the alternative in mind rather than close source Flash Player.

The backup gem( https://github.com/meskyanichi/backup ) + an dedicated server + some cron processes.

I recently added LiveReload to my coding process (guard-livereload, LiveReload for Chrome), and it eliminates the second keystroke :-p It also has the added benefit of keeping any element styles you applied in the DOM inspector while reloading CSS or JS (which is kind of nifty).

Using sshuttle, the applications don't even need to support SOCKS; it proxies all traffic over SSH.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pdfjs/
https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

SparkleShare looks and works like Dropbox, but is actually just a fancy automated self-hosted GIT repo, (which you can interact with using GIT commands on a remote repo if that is what you want to do).

The wiki explains how to encrypt things (and the encfs recipe doc'd on the wiki also works with Dropbox, etc.)

I think the project has matured really well, but still isn't really well-known, and doesn't even get mentioned much on the slashdots, although that's where I heard about it.

www.sparkleshare.org

https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki