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It doesn't even list its dependencies - it wants me to use gems and some dependency resolver

Have you ever used Rails before? Apparently not. Meet the Gemfile. If you don't like gems, Ruby isn't for you. Go back to your Personal Home Page and manual package micromanagement.

Diaspora will become popular by means of geeks. I can shoot anywhere between ~100 photos at family events to ~1000+ photos for a Rugby tournament. I even wrote a script to make it easy to upload photos to Facebook from my headless server.

If I start uploading my photos to diaspora and telling people that's where they are. I guarantee I can get a few people to join.

That, or Diaspora will be populated by my friends that were first on facebook. In the days before the wall and live stalker feed.

I just took a quick look at the driver's code code and there's no sign of any decryption.

...and according to the nginx-folks its blazing fast and can do wonderful stuff ontop of the already nice config script foo.

If you plan to do (performant) webapps, you should have a look at that.

Here's the ngx_lua module.

The fastest growing, hottest languages on GitHub right now are Ruby and Javascript. Partly that's due to the amazing Node.js server-side platform that runs on Google's V8.

It's certainly not very optimised. I get 31 FPS in Chromium 8 with your test, but I also get 31 FPS in this much more complex example.

Hey genius!

https://github.com/JoshBlake/OpenKinect

Indeed. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API#Writing_Audio and https://github.com/corbanbrook/dsp.js are closer to what's needed for realtime synthesis. Hopefully it will make its way to other browsers too.

You might be interested in https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API#Writing_Audio and https://github.com/corbanbrook/dsp.js

Not sure what the latency is, but if it's too high for uses like this, please let the people involved know? They want this to actually be useful for exactly the sort of things you're talking about.

Why would ANYONE use Safari on Mac when you have FF? ABP and NoScript for the win!

ClickToFlash works very nicely and there are several other extensions that let you block stuff. It even replaces flash videos with the H.264 stream if it is available.

I'm really loving GlimmerBlocker, which sets up a http proxy so any web browser you use will have ads blocked, you don't need to install an ad blocker extension on every browser you have. It'll even allow other computers on your network to use the proxy and gain the same benefits. Pretty nifty.

There have been a bunch of projects, though most dealt with Scheme rather than Common Lisp (but then you didn't specify which one you prefer...), but they never really took off.

Of the current Lisp-alike offerings, the one that looks most promising is ClojureCLR.

A linux build is available here. It's an firefox addon file (xpi). I have it up and running on Ubuntu fine. You'll need libpcap installed obviously.

You need to make sure you run firesheep-backend --fix-permissions as root manually before it'll work. You'll find this in Firefox's plugins directory.

All info taken from here.

Note how I didn't focus on the distribution; yeah, you can hack it in. That's not the fundamental incompatibility here! As to your accusation, I'm offended :P http://github.com/agrif/osubus http://github.com/agrif/daemophone http://gamma-level.com/iphoneos/ports/ Sorry, no nice HTML links cause they're hard to type on tiny keys.

Note how I didn't focus on the distribution; yeah, you can hack it in. That's not the fundamental incompatibility here! As to your accusation, I'm offended :P http://github.com/agrif/osubus http://github.com/agrif/daemophone http://gamma-level.com/iphoneos/ports/ Sorry, no nice HTML links cause they're hard to type on tiny keys.

On serious note, this article reminded me of this project I saw the other day: http://github.com/ehamberg/vim-cute-python. It makes vim show various Unicode characters for Python keywords, such as "alpha" and "not".

Kinda neat :)

I don't have much good to say about PHP, but didn't someone recently roll out a compiler for it? I can't imagine PHP performance is a significant bottleneck, especially as people run successful websites written in everything from Java to Ruby. And what would you suggest in its place, C++? Gee, thanks, now we can spend all our time focusing on memory leaks and buffer overflows instead.

Yes, Facebook runs PHP compiled to C++ using HipPop.

Finally, MVC. Exactly how is this "bastardized"? How would you do it differently, if you were writing a web framework?

I think he's talking about the RoR model, where the view is essentially a template. That annoyed me too, but the framework I used is flexible enough to allow me to use Views as proper objects, which then use Templates.

It's coming soon. There is a pull request open right now.

If you have the money and don't mind a bit of a learning curve, datahand is definitely the way to go. Although, I wouldn't buy a new one myself at the current price. But you can find used ones on ebay occasionally, that go for about half of what a new one costs. Which is admittedly still a pretty big chunk of change for a keyboard. But they are much, much, much easier on your hands.

Also, if you want to geek out on it, you can check out my alternative firmware - http://github.com/JesusFreke/DHFirm

For everything that doesn't need to be on your own machine, find web equivalents that let you download regular backups: Bookmarks on Delicious, photos on Picasa, blog on WordPress, books on LibraryThing, development projects on GitHub, feeds on Google Reader, and CAD drawings on Thingiverse.

The ultimate tool at home has gone from CVS via Subversion to Git. The learning curve is steep, but it's liberating at the end to know that all the data, in all its versions, are on all my machines and will not get lost bar some really serious happenings. This is for the personal documents, application settings (useful to have the same everywhere) and of course development projects. If you want to forget old stuff, a git rebase --interactive is just the thing. To handle multiple projects which mostly just need to be pulled from a different machine, I've developed fgit, a simple script to run a git command on all repositories below the specified directory (or the current one, by default). Thus, to update everything when moving to a new machine, it's simply fgit pull -- ~.

I don't know about rocket launchers, but did you want to play Asteroids in your browser with any web site?

Speaking of effortless nice Android UIs:

In an effort to make creating a nice Android UI less painful I started this small project called Android Theme Samples.

Its just like the Android Samples, where many examples are combined into a single downloadable app so you can browse it, try it and get those parts that better fit your own app.

Its up in github for anyone to take and contribute: http://github.com/pllopis/AndroidThemeSamples

I just got started and only a "light" theme and an "Action Bar" UI pattern are included. (Mind the design, I am not a designer).
Would be really great if others contributed their own design :)

... Also, even after several years, it still bothers me that closing a window on a Mac doesn't terminate the application. I can understand the philosophical rationale (for what it's worth) behind this, but it seems unnecessary and wasteful.

It's funny, but I actually like the differentiation between closing a window and an application. But I do a lot via the keyboard, not the mouse, so when I want to close a window I use Command-W and know that the application will still be in memory to use Command-O or Command-N rather than having to relaunch the app. If I want to quit then I use Command-Q. I was actually a bit annoyed when they changed "single window/document/view" type applications to exit when their window was closed (though I get the rational.)

I also launch everything from Spotlight rather than spelunking around the Finder. One of the funniest things to me is how people (not saying you) assume that Mac OS X is not for power users and is mouse centric. But if you enable "All Controls" in System Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts, have Spotlight enabled and know the difference between Command-Tab and Command-`, you can do most driving from the keyboard. Add the Automater's Save As Service, the consistent Service interface, applescript and the ability to assign global, application and context sensitive keyboard shortcuts and for me Mac OS X is a power user's dream. All right out of the box. For instance, using the Application's Shortcuts I've bound Command-. to bring up the System Preferences and by creating a "Finder Application.app" in the automator I can use Spotlight to jump right to the finder rather than tabbing through 20 apps or mousing around in expose. Plus Shift-Command-G in virtually any file dialog and Finder and you can type in a path rather than click up and down folder hierarchies.

While I'm in fanboy mode, I'll mention what I love most is the consistency. All (non-MS) application's text edit areas support the basic emacs-like ^a, ^d ^e, and ^k functionality. I'm an old emacs/bash guy, so I'm happy, even if it makes no sense to young-uns. Also, once you know about property lists, you can figure out where prefs are for 99% of applications. And if you can find to the right docs, you can tweak away. It almost sucks that there is no uninstaller, but it rarely matters and if you care - once again the consistency tells you exactly where to look for any left over files. I think that the "application bundle" is a great way to deal with managing all the files related to a program.

Apologies for the fanboyism. I also came from years of Linux experience, which I loved. But for some reason Mac OS X just "clicked" for me.

If you don't have it, I highly recommend TinkerTool which is free "as in beer" to explore some level of system/UI tweaking. Also, Lingon

is a pretty decent open source tool for navigating all the system and user startup services provided by launchd. It's no longer under development, but it's an Apache licensed program and pretty useful so maybe someone will pick it up. I install Lingon via MacPorts (though the git based HomeBrew" is intriguing...)

OK, I'll go away now...

Check out Homebrew: http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

I find it much less obnoxious than Fink and DarwinPorts.

you can see the packages at this location. Homebrew is pretty neat, I dislike fink and Macports. Said that, the documentation needs some work and there aren't as many apps, but the most popular applications are there.
http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/_pages

you can see the packages at this location. Homebrew is pretty neat, I dislike fink and Macports. Said that, the documentation needs some work and there aren't as many apps, but the most popular applications are there.
http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/_pages

Make it easier to install binaries used on other *nix systems.

Take a look at homebrew. MacPorts and Fink both suck heavily, but brew has been fantastic to use.

NT2 http://github.com/jfalcou/nt2/ is an emerging numerical computation library built on top of very modern C++ libraries and ideas. It is closely related to Boost libraries.
From the description: The Numerical Template Toolbox (NT2) is an Open Source C++ library aimed at simplifying the development, debugging and optimization of high-performance computing application by providing a Matlab like syntax that ease the transition between prototype and actual application.
A way to contribute would be to make yourself familiar with it's use (e.g. port some of your Matlab scripts). Try to understand the basics of how it works internally. You will find features missing that you could try to add. Above all though, you will learn a lot.

You are remiss in not mentioning github.com which does the favor of free, immediate online hosting of OSS projects and content under git. I don't know how many presenters I've seen with their slides and demo code all on github. It's the killer app that makes git really rock.

Hi,
I was researching this just now. It seems the PS3 "hacks" are based on the actual PS3 "jig" that sony uses to repair PS3s. I "found" (thanks google) an official manual describing one procedure ("ID swapping") and it seems to start off by exactly describing the process of jailbreaking a PS3. (Connect Jig with USB cable, Power on and hit eject within 0.2s)
Then it goes on to describe some complete different chain of activities, looks like cloning some "ID" from the hardware onto the usb, and then allowing it to be written to another PS3. Whatever.
My point is, Sony put this (buggy) code into the PS3 on purpose, and I guess the original hacking team have reverse engineered part of it, and figured out the rest from leaked documents, enough to get the exploit running anyways. We certainly aren't booting into service mode. It seems that the PS3 USB hacking devices are partial clones of this official sony hardware, and the danger lies in the fact that despite this being "open source", we don't really understand 100% how the exploit works. Microsoft had a nice (lame) trick for their Xbox360 hard drives - the drive contains a "security sector" that is nothing more than a (copyrighted) microsoft logo. I'm just worried you could be hosting some binary Sony logo, without knowing it, or something else that they can complain is "stolen".
Here's a bit more info on service mode: http://www.ps3news.com/PS3Dev/some-playstation-3-service-mode-details-1/
Anyways, the PSFreedom Git hub is here: http://github.com/kakaroto/PSFreedom
Those are easy to clone ;)

Over the years I also had made a meta-makefile which does much of what I needed.

• http://opensource.jdkoftinoff.com/project/wiki/autobuild

Latest version is on github at

• http://github.com/jdkoftinoff/

But even then quite often I just use qmake!
--jeffk++

Isn't the point to simply make network capabilities accessible to the Arduino? Most NICs for PCs don't offer hardware encryption, so why should the board for the Arduino?

First, I doubt it will often really be necessary. Personally, I've been looking at using an Arduino at work, to trigger various forms of robotic entertainment when specific events happen (successful build, overloaded server, etc.). Once someone's on our office network, they already have access to all of the corporate data. Does it really matter that they can make a robot dance?

Second, there's the fact that the Arduino is inherently running custom software. If you need security, you can just add it into your program. If you really need the raw speed of hardware-based encryption, perhaps you can find a separate shield to provide a layer of encryption, or design the shield yourself. There seems to be a fair amount of interest in embedded cryptography already.

If someone's building a project that can access "serious" systems, should they really be relying on the not-fixable-if-wrong security features of their network card? Conversely, if someone's building a project that requires only basic (or no) security, why should they pay for the additional cost of hardware-based encryption?

The newer CurrentCost meters are not only inexpensive, but also provide a serial interface (over USB).

A friend of mine has created py-power-cost to extract this data into a DB and generate reports/graphs viewable via a web app.

I don't think "that it was open source that made people think they ought to test and review code". I think that open source makes it possible (not necessary) to increase the total number of people able to review the code, by orders of magnitude. The diaspora team has 4 people. The total number of forks in github is 403, with over 2500 watchers.

If you are using a current version of Safari, there's also an extension:

http://hoyois.github.com/safariextensions/clicktoflash/

You need click2flash: http://github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash

You've got the performance part backwards for PostgreSQL; it goes up with every release, sometimes a little, sometimes in a big way. See PostgreSQL history for a comparison covering versions 8.0 to 8.4. The mild regression in 8.4 shown there is actually reversible; it's mainly because a query related parameter for how many statistics to collect and use for query planning was increased by default. That results in better plans for most real-world queries, but it detuned this trivial benchmark a little bit. You can get performance back to 8.3 levels just by turning the parameter back to the "optimized for trivial queries" default of the older versions if you care about that. Most people prefer the new default. In the real world, 8.4 is actually faster due to improved handling of background VACUUM tasks too, which don't show up in simple benchmarks either.

I'm the current lead architect on building a PostgreSQL Performance Farm to prevent regressions from popping into future versions of the code too. There is a recently completed beta client for that purpose. We're in the process of working out how to integrate into future development, starting with 9.1, so that potential regressions are spotted on a commit by commit basis. I haven't seen any performance regressions between 8.4 and 9.0, only moderate improvements overall and large ones in specific areas that were accelerated.

Now, if you use some of the new replication features aggressively, that can add some overhead to slow down the master. But that's true of most solution; the data coming off the master has to take up some time to generate. The way PostgreSQL 9.0 does it is is pretty low overhead, it just ships the changed blocks around. Theoretically some statement based solutions might have lower overhead, but they usually come with concerns about non-determinism on the slaves when replayed (random numbers, timestamps, and sequence numbers are common examples).

Given the non-disclosure terms of most of the closed source databases, nobody can publish benchmarks that include them without going through something like the TPC or SPEC process. The last time that was done in 2007, PostgreSQL 8.2 was about 15% slower than Oracle running the same database-heavy workload. And note that it was PostgreSQL 8.3 that had one of the larger performance increases, so that was from just before a large leap forward in PostgreSQL performance.

At this point, Oracle and most other commercial databases still have a large lead on some of the queries run in the heavier TPC-H benchmarks. Links to more details as to why are on the PostgreSQL wiki. It just hasn't been a priority for development to accelerate all of the types of queries required to do well in that benchmark, and nobody so far has been willing to fund that or the subsequent certification via the TPC yet. Sun was the only one throwing money in that direction, and obviously the parts of that left within Oracle will no longer do so.

Here's a semi-deobfuscated version. My assembly skills aren't really up to snuff, so I doubt I'll go much further. http://gist.github.com/588199

How does this compare to other SWF players written in JavaScript, such as Gordon or Smokescreen? Ideally, these SWF players should run entirely inside Safari.

From their website: http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora "DISCLAIMER: THIS IS PRE-ALPHA SOFTWARE AND SHOULD BE TREATED ACCORDINGLY. " So if you're expecting a world-class program that clearly outshines Facebook, I think you're being a tad premature.

There are several implementations of Flash that run in iOS Safari without the need for jailbreaking or violating any agreements with Apple. There is absolutely nothing stopping Adobe from bringing Flash to Safari on iOS, though this announcement gives them even less reason to do so.

Quick update, there's an open source tool chain now.

http://github.com/ooPo/ps3toolchain/tree/development

I sync my mail (~ 2GB) from the server (courier) to my laptop with offlineimap. A number of years ago I used mairix and later nmzmail to index and search the Maildirs, but then I settled on mu. I find mu to be very fast, both when indexing and when searching.

Also, with mu I can integrate Emacs, org-mode, remember and mutt, which is the perfect combination for my needs. I use org-mode as a GTD-like task manager, and from within mutt I can create a new entry in my org file with a reference to the message in the Maildir.

Hi, Being myself a geek parent with some education background (grad in Social Sciences), I wrote a software that my toddler (now almost 2yo) got fascinated with. Basically, it doesn't require any coordinated input but instead give audiovisual response to any keyboard or mouse interaction. My kid can stand in the computer for around 20 minutes, which, something those with a toddler at home knows, is a very good time frame. It is free software and is hosted at my github account (you just need the latest SDL perl module installed for it to work).

From my Firehose submission, there's an open source version available using a cheap and easily obtained development kit (~$40 US).

News article
Source code plus patch which you need to enable backup functionality.

All it would need is someone to port it to Linux (USB Gadget). An Android phone would serve as a suitable USB client.

Even better, this dongle disconnects itself from the USB bus when it's done - the only thing Sony can do is recognize unauthorized packages. Which becomes a problem because package managers will start using popular game IDs that Sony can't ban or block because it would block legitimate customers. Or download demos off PSN and use those IDs.

Here's the previous licence

The Briefs code is now up on GitHub, and yes, you can go look at it, however it's not "Open Source" (per OSI), it's not "Free Software" (per the FSF), and it's not "DFSG-free" (per Debian).

If you look at the commit history for the license, he even explicitly changed the license two days ago to make it less free:

2010-08-28
Modified license terms to disallow someone from reselling Briefs without making major modifications. Also protect the Briefs trademark. Still, free source code, huh? Not too shabby.

Prior to two days ago, the code was under the... well, I'm not exactly sure what license!

Here's the license (the first paragraph is a dead ringer for the opening of the MIT License):

Copyright (c) 2009-2010, Rob Rhyne
Briefs is a trademark of Digital Arch Design Corp.
http://robrhyne.com/
http://digitalarch.net/
All rights reserved.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction except as noted below, including without limitation
the rights to use,copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute,
and/or sublicense, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

Here's the non-FOSS part:

The Software and/or source code cannot be copied in whole and
sold without meaningful modification for a profit.

This is more of the MIT license:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

This middle part looks like the BSD license:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
the documentation and/or other materials provided with
the distribution.

Actually, there are only two clauses there, so that's essentially the 2-clause BSD, not the 3-clause one (just a minor point, really).

Then we get the YELLING-AT-YOU indemnification clause. Lawyers seem to love these things, but they seem so uncouth to me. Anyhow, for 5 points, from which license was this paragraph chosen?

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

That's right! It's the indemnification clause from the MIT license.

I googled around trying to figure out if other people used this same license, but the best I came up with was the NCSA license. It's unlikely that this license is based off that one, as the phrase to deal in the Software (MIT) is used in this new license instead of to deal with the Software (NCSA).

One more thing: let's point out exactly why the license doesn't pass any of the most popular FOSS metrics:

1) "Open Source" (per OSI)

Per

How exactly do you put something into public domain legally, such that you can legally protect them to be in public domain?

In some countries, you can't really. That's why we have the WTFPL. The Wikipedia article says there are only 11 uses of it on Freshmeat, but it's rather commonly used on GitHub.

from the link: "using 30-year-old or older machines."
from the fine article: "First released in 1981; discontinued in 1994 using 30-year-old or older machines."

I recently (three weekends ago) fired up my Commodore PET 2001 (a *genuine* pre-1980 computer) and have been writing a Forth for it. It's really a lot of fun, and I'm finding that 30 years experience in various high-level languages has improved my "6502 assembler golf" game a lot. It's very incomplete, but the inner interpreter mostly works. Feel free to throw down on it here

Charlie

Maybe it's just not as concentrated? I don't think we really need a facebook of porn when pretty much any idiot with a camera and a decent body can make their own website.

This means very little. Anyone can make a subset of a language faster then a full implementation.

The Ruby world has been through this recently: Someone comes out with a fantastic runtime that supports 1/8 of the ruby language, and it's 10x faster then everything else!

There's lots of hype, but as development continues the other runtimes get 2x faster, and the new magic runtime gets 5x slower by actually supporting the whole language, and the new magic runtime is now the same speed as the rest of the field, with less compatibility and more memory usage.

So color me skeptical, until this runtime supports the whole language, including transparent overlays and all the stuff that the Adobe guys claim makes Flash slow.

Even the author of this article will tell you this. He recently added:

Update: Please do not think that this implementation is 30x faster than the Flash Player developed by Adobe. One(!) microbenchmark is never a number you should count on. I would like to make clear that I never said this.

That being said, If we're stuck with Flash for at least the near term, I'd like to see projects like this, Gordon, and Smokescreen take off and perhaps improve our choices in runtimes. I just don't expect magic.