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Why not make use of the Athlon/Sempron machine lying idle in your basement (or your existing machine) by installing http://www.gnump3d.org/? I am a using it since its 1.X version and its amazing.

I wrote some software which was moderately useful and semi-popular.

When it came to be time to look for a job I asked around locally. One guy recognised my name after having used the software at his home.

That was enough to land me an interview. Of course once I got that I was on my own.

I suspect this happens a fair bit, you won't get a job unless you wrote something insanely popular but it might help you get an interview.

(Although writing something yourself, even with other people to help, from scratch is much more useful in terms of being recognised than adding a ten line patch to the Linux kernel, samba, or Apache).

GNUMP3d is a perl based streaming server which allows you to share a music/video/multimedia archive across a LAN.

Whilst it's designed on Linux machines and only sporadically tested under Windows it should do the job you want - point it at a directory with your media files in it, then fire up a browser to choose your songs / stream away.

Failing that Andromedia should do a good job if you have PHP on your Windows version of Apache. Their personal edition is cheap, and I think there's a free version somebody wrote designed to mirror it - but I've spoken to the author and he's a good guy so I'm happy to recommend it.

You could have a wishlist over at the friendly one-click creating Amazon?

I've had one for a few years to support some of my work.

Occaisionally I receive something and it's a nice bonus to actually getting something done.

Of course it doesn't work out so well when your code gets added to Linux distributions and nobody gets it from your website directly anymore - that was the thing that I noticed which made the initial donations tail off.

Still I do earn a little bit every now and again doing remote support / remote sysadmin work always getting paid by DVDs etc. It's much easier to handle than having to worry about currency conversion etc.

It's also a good way of having a small payment in advance, or at particular milestones - something like "Six films from the list, one in advance then one a week until the job is complete".

I come top when you search google for my name.

My website has images of my tattoos, graphic mentions of my body piercings, and a lot of free software.

I'm happy if people rule me out on the ground of piercings/tattoos whatever. At the end of the day the kind of environment where those things are unaceptable (no matter how discriminatory they are) I'm not going to want to work.

I think that my achievements stand on their own technical merits.

Hopefully somebody who's looking for a Debian Administrator would get in touch despite my piercings/tattoos/etc. If not no loss.

We've just saved me and them some time on each side.

You might want to take a look at gnump3d as that might cover the bases for the most part. It also has a web-interface with password protection if that's something you need. The Windows support seems to be flaky but since you'll be running it from Linux you shouldn't have TOO much trouble.

I accept donations - keep them coming ;)

And I write software some popular, some not, donations are always a good thing!

If you're just wanting to play the MP3's on your laptop rather than copy them there you could do worse than look at GNUMP3d.

Fast and very simple to setup..

GNUMP3d is now part of the GNU project, and isn't located on sourceforge any longer.

The right way is to promote your project on a big site like /.

Then subtly include wishlist links, and maybe pointers to other software you wrote.

Maybe you'll get lucky and somebody will buy you a thing or two ...

As a bit of self-promotion, since it was already mentioned:

It's included in Debian's unstable distribution and will have you up and streaming in a matter of minutes.

I wrote that software, cheers for the pimping! As a small note though you should use either the GNU Address, or the gnump3d.org domain.

Since it became part of the GNU Project everything was migrated away from SourceForge.

Edna was the thing that originally got me hooked on the idea of streaming files.

I used to love using it, but I found it missed a few obvious things such as searching, and sorting.

You can see that my project bears a clear resemblence to Edna, only more featureful and more recently updated - last time I used edna was when it was stuck in the 0.4 days.

I am biased as I wrote it, but there was a new release of GNUMP3d yesterday.

THis allows you to stream MP3/OGG Vorbis/MPG/WMV files across a network via a browser interface.

You can search, sort, downsample and generally have a blast.

Check it out?

Genuine question - when you say that it didn't work out what do you mean?

The implication is that you intended it to provide income, so I'm curious if I may ask what level(s) were you seeking vs. recieving?

I know that it's non-free now as I remember using it briefly before deciding that I wanted to write my own.

Although incoming hasn't been stunning I can claim that my current job was landed as an almost direct result of this code - and that I've received several hundreds of dollars worth of donations in either books/film/contract work since then.

Whilst I couldn't live off it I have been pleased and satisfied - as well as having had a lot of fun on the way.

Interesting; I assumed that any modern version of Perl would work for my gnump3d app.

I've not touched it since the Savannah.gnu.org compromise, but I'll have a look over the code and try to test it on a BSD box sometime soon.

That's OK there are many things that can be usefully done even if you're not a programmer.

For example I have a project which has happily had a few people contribute to - but I know there are areas I cannot manage myself.

Contribute a logo?, or contribute some documentation? These are equally valid ways of given some time to help the project.

Of course I like toys/rewards but even minor things like a good bugreport will make my day.

I think a lot of projects are very similar to mine, a large userbase but a very small core of people who will tell you what they want and give you a small patch every now and again.

It's not often that a project gets large enough to actually get lots of people working on it, and I'm glad that mine isn't like that to be honest. Sure I'd like to think that at some point I can hand it away to others and it will continue to exist - but as long as I've had fun along the way and learnt interesting things that's enough for me.

The next time you find some free software and have trouble installing it why don't you write up your experiences and post it to a newsgroup/mailing list. Google will happily index it and chances are six months later somebody you've never met on the other side of the world will be very grateful you took the time to contribute documentation. It's a funny world like that!

Nah .. you want to use GNUMP3d which supports streaming MP3s OGGs and other media types.

It's portable perl too, and will stream music to Freeamp, XMMS, etc.

Completely free - unless you want to make a donation.

I've setup mailing lists for my software and to be honest the traffic is very low - mostly because the software works.

But there's always a steady trickle of posts to my forums - as the barrier to entry is so much lower.

Whilst I would much prefer a mailing list and it's archive, a lot of people wouldn't go without the forums now.

I've setup mailing lists for my software and to be honest the traffic is very low - mostly because the software works.

But there's always a steady trickle of posts to my forums - as the barrier to entry is so much lower.

Whilst I would much prefer a mailing list and it's archive, a lot of people wouldn't go without the forums now.

Good backup systems like Amanda already exist - I'm guessing that the reason that the FSF people don't have backups is because they're relying upon donations to buy backup servers/tape drives, etc. (Yes that was a subtle plea to donate them cash ;)

On this breakin I have only two comments:

1. Why not use proftpd, wu-ftpd has traditionally been prone to attacks. (Granted its a little bit more secure after each one is discovered and patched, but after so many its hard to trust it).

2. Why use MD5 sums? I use GPG signatures on all my software - forging signatures is .. non-trivial.

That depends .. I run a small project (MP3 streamer in Perl; runs under Windows too ;)

I have two sourceforge mailing lists, a developers one, and a users one.

Both are near dead. One person recently mailed somehting along the lines of "The list is quiet; the software just works."

Originally the mailing lists were busy, but now even with growing users and inclusion in several distributions the online forums are the single most important point of contact for questions, bug reports, and suggestsions.

I attribute my success to writing something that worked well for me before releasing it, listening to feedback, and including the magic letters 'MP3' in the project name!

I've regarded the project complete-enough-for-me for a very long time, it keeps evolving as interesting suggestions are made by users more than anything else.

In terms of real achievements I feel proud to have created something that others want, humbled by the time taken by other people to help out, and would gladly code another 24 hours for every single "Thank you" email I receive (rarely).

OK I'm a money grabbing whore too - but the simple emails and guestbook signees always put a smile on my face and make me want to do more for my users.

That depends .. I run a small project (MP3 streamer in Perl; runs under Windows too ;)

I have two sourceforge mailing lists, a developers one, and a users one.

Both are near dead. One person recently mailed somehting along the lines of "The list is quiet; the software just works."

Originally the mailing lists were busy, but now even with growing users and inclusion in several distributions the online forums are the single most important point of contact for questions, bug reports, and suggestsions.

I attribute my success to writing something that worked well for me before releasing it, listening to feedback, and including the magic letters 'MP3' in the project name!

I've regarded the project complete-enough-for-me for a very long time, it keeps evolving as interesting suggestions are made by users more than anything else.

In terms of real achievements I feel proud to have created something that others want, humbled by the time taken by other people to help out, and would gladly code another 24 hours for every single "Thank you" email I receive (rarely).

OK I'm a money grabbing whore too - but the simple emails and guestbook signees always put a smile on my face and make me want to do more for my users.

Can I just say GNUMP3d ?

True it's not relevent to the jukebox question as it's a streamer, but it is free, open and portable.. For bonus points it's in (unstable) Debian GNU/Linux, SuSe, and in the FreeBSD ports collection.

OK I'm biased I wrote it... I admit it!

Your server was pretty much what inspired mine - I even remember posting a few small patches to your mailing list!

Personally I just don't get Python- though it's a fine language - so I struggled making anything over than trivial changes to your code.

I've gone from Edna, to bad Perl, to C, then C++ and now into good Perl.

Threading and memory management were what drove me to c++, but finding std c++ libraries were not threadsafe, and the desire to interface with databases drove me back to perl.

This is part of the reason that version 2 of my MP3 streaming server is being written in Perl.

Most of the work of the server is in file manipulation, and plugin coding - and the server will be mostly network/IO bound anyway. The speed lost due to the interpretted nature will be gained by safety.

OK I'm using Perl for more reasons that just that; but the lack of buffer overflows was part of the reason for the switch.

C

Would now be a good time to plug this and this? ;)

Actually I'd rather you used any spare cash for some charity nearby - wherever you live, a nice local project whose results you can feel.

(I'm bad with charity I refuse to donate money to poeple far away who I don't know, but I'm happy to donate to local groups and causes. I hope that doesn't make me a bad person - I view it as a good way of narrowing down the millions of charities in the world to a small group whom I can donate what little spare I have ).

Sure which is why I didn't offer my own MP3 / OGG Vorbis streaming server as a solution. In fact I haven't plugged it at all ;)

I've been working for a while on a bootable Debian based-cdrom which will mount any partitions it finds upon a disk, search them for media then automatically set itself up as a streamer.

I think that'd be kinda cool .. Most of the simple stuff is working now - but I can't settle upon a good user interface..

Streaming OGG is no harder than streaming MP3's if you use something like the GNUMP3d - and unfortunately named MP3/OGG vorbis streamer.

I've been wondering about this - and the answer is almost certainly not.

I've written a fairly widespread mp3/ogg streamer. I used to list MD5 sums on the download page - but recently I've switched to signing with my GPG key.

(On the basis that if somebody altered the downloads they'd be capable of fixing up the MD5sums file in the same directory too).

Taking a look at the download statistics you can see that about 1 person in 50 downloaded the signature file to match their archive.

That suggests that 2% of people routinely check signatures. I assume that less people check the code than check the signatures so ... it's probably safe to say that no more than 0.5% of people do.

If you have to work on only a few features, wouldn't you do those which scratch your own itch rather than those you were paid for?

I wrote and maintain GNUMP3d a streaming server for MP3's/OGG's. I originally wrote it because nothing was available which met my needs. After using it myself for a while I decided to make it available to others.

To be honest the last few releases have only happened because of the users. It does everything I set out to do. The features contained in the last few releases were almost exclusively requested by users.

Granted they didn't pay - but that's a good example of programming which wasn't explicitly scratching my itch.

OTOH I have had a couple of people buy stuff from my wishlist in exchange for features, or to persuade me to implement a feature before I'd planned to. So I can see it from both sides.

Personally I think a directory like this is a good idea - if there's somebody out there who wants to support OS work, but not donate to a faceless company like RedHat they can choose an application from the list there which they like and appreciate and easily find contact details.

No he wants to send the sound from the windows box - not to it.

(Besides if he wanted to stream MP3's he would be using my MP3 streamer, right? ;)

I'm an open source programmer - and I suck at designing graphics. This is why I asked other people to design logo's for me.

Thankfully there are capable artists who are prepared to give their work away for free, (or perhaps for recognition .. who knows?).

I have to disagree with your claim that open source games suck - picking an arbitary example Armagetron (a 3D tron game) looks great

I find most of your suggestions very good, and fairly standard - but the idea of adding comments to the end of closures seems a little .. pedantic.

Surely most coders use a decent editor - to make comments like that entirely superfluous?

I use DOC++ on my C++ code, after falling in love with JavaDoc several years ago. You can see an example of a fairly complex application documented :

• C++ Documentation for GNUMP3d

I've been thinking of an open source exchange for the past couple of years. Right now I have access to an exchange + outlook environment where I can play with things.

As my current project is almost feature complete, (and well tested), I'm seriously taken with the idea of starting work on this.

However I have my reservations also: its a huge job for an individual to take on singlehandedly - and having lots of people jump in before any code is reached can lead to a terrible time where nobody agrees + things decend into lots of aimless discussion. I've always though the best open source projects are the ones started by a single individual, which has been released - then incrementally improved upon by others; here I'm thinking of the "biggies" like Apache, The Kernel itself, Samba, and Squid.

The way I see it it would be a lot of work getting a compatible stand-alone calander server working, then there'd be the simplish job of integrating that with an existing open source, assuming I'm not missing anything, right?

If anybody has any serious thoughs on this I'd love to hear them - either here, or via mail...

(OT: Why is it that Squid always seems to be neglected when people are talking about stable, successfull open source projects - Squid rocks!).

Especially with my opensource MP3 streaming server ...

Cheap plug I know, but almost OnTopic.

I have secrets.. Things I don't want others to see.

I virtually never use PGP/GPG to encrypt email - but I use them both to encrypt files on my local machine, and the machines I have access to at work.

For example .. I have lots of online accounts with places like slashdot, my bank, etc, all of these accounts have different passwords - I can remember them mostly.

But, in case I forget, I have a file 'accounts.txt.pgp', and 'accounts.txt.pgp', which contains the usernames + passwords for all of them. This is obviously something that I don't want others to read - but the comfort of having it around is big.

Another reason for using GPG is that I can sign software releases I make - I'll be honest I've never done this yet, but the next release of my MP3 streaming server will have its releases signed by my public key. (I'll also add MD5Sums for people who check those..).

Its a well known fact that security is a process, it should be considered right from the word go, and not just prior to a software release.

I've been writing a network server, recently, for streaming MP3's, so I been thinking a lot about the various issues.

I came up with a list of things that I should be doing, partly after reading bugtrack, and partly due to things I've picked up over the years.

I think its good to see books like this come out - if only to educate the newer/younger programmers who've never though about the issues before. After all many programmers just work on applications which aren't installed setuid, etc, so when they have to work on such a beast, for the first time, they're likely to work the way that they always have.

I believe that all the programmer courses available should have a section on security - largely because too many people learn from code printing in books, or online, which has all the error checking omitted, so the user can focus on the example. Its obvious from reading many peoples code that they never expect a malloc to fail!