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The amount of swap space on a default RHEL4 / FC4 / CentOS 4 with 2GB of memory seems not to be enough for Oracle 10g XE.

"This system does not meet the minimum requirements for swap space. Based on the amount of physical memory available on the system, Oracle Database 10g Express Edition requires 3039.0 MB of swap space. This system has 2046 MB of swap space. Configure more swap space on the system and retry the installation."

A simple workaround.

yes... great win32 support. From the package:
"Compiling Dia (Win32)
---------------------
Currently only the Micro$oft VC 5.0 compiler is supported (VC 6.0 should
work).
-1) Create your build environment (normally based on tml's latest Gtk+
    snapshot). Instead of asking me how to do this, you'll probably want
    to join the gimpwin-dev mailing list (see: http://www.iki.fi/tml/gimp/win32/)
-0) Get additonal required libraries (libxml, gdk-pixbuf, libart, ...).
    I'm planning to integrate my small patches to cvs, too. But this may take
    some while, because they need to be conform with Gnome maintenance.
1) Get the latest Dia sources from cvs.
2) nmake -f makefile.msc in directories lib, app, objects, plug-ins
3) If the build succeeded, fine. If not, fix the sources and send me patches
    or use the binaries. Please don't bother me with beginners questions about
    C, VC, makefiles, etc.. Because I'm doing the port in my free time, which
    is generally limited.
    Instead of answering beginners questions, you probably want me to use my
    spare time, to build the latest, greatest Dia version.
4) Copy the files to their directories (see binary package)

Have Fun,
        Hans Breuer "

There are quite a few people nowadays, who have grown up with NES systems in their time, keeping the music alive in various forms. For instance:

Minibosses
Redefined - Nintendo A Cappella
All Your Bass A Cappella

..and as a side mention:
http://www.pressplayontape.com/

Here I was, happily writing stuff with XEmacs, but somehow, there was something missing from my coding stuff and things started to feel a bit wooden.

Weirdly enough, when I grabbed RDT, things started to look surprisingly bright and writing code was not that boring anymore. There are some emacsisms that I miss, but otherwise, this thing is really great. Eclipse was clearly made for bigger projects and it worked just fine when I got the crazy tendency to split my code across zillion little files! Wish XEmacs had this good file browser...

(And the silly little Ruby project I've worked on lately was Miller's Quest.)

IE does understand and parse the XHTML doctype correctly.

You might want to do some research on why XHTML is over-hyped and can lead to future problems, because most web servers don't serve XHTML in the correct MIME type.

HTML4.01 is a standard too, ya know.

And yes, you can get IE6 to operate in STRICT mode (box type, etc.) if you supply the correct DOCTYPE. Further complicating things is the fact that Mozilla, Safari and Opera have an "almost standard" mode, which you can read about on the site I just linked.

For more information, check out QuirkMode's section on doctype and what it changes on the different browsers.

Ahem: HOWTO Spot a Wannabe Web Standards Advocate.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner!

Most of the navigation among the tabs, frames, and (virtual) desktops is done from the keyboard (I use vim-like bindings), though much of it can also be done with the mouse.

The screenshots, unfortunately, are not too representative (and I can't get fbgrab working properly), but they'll give you a general idea of what Ion can look like.

Why don't you go to http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/ and explain to this guy that the sea-shells he makes with a single object and a well-chosen formula are impossible? And go to this page: http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/pov__eng.htm and tell the guy writing these tutorials that show complex rendered scenes in just a dozen lines of code are impossible? And your next stop should be here: http://www.povray.org/ and then compare the images you saw in the POVray hall of fame to this scene from Myst classic: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dwbruhn/Terragen/Myst.jpg and tell me that they would all take the same amount of time? The scene from Myst runs to 45 boxes, 37 cylinders, 6 triangular prisms, the tree objects (which look like a cone with a bark texture, about 10 cylinders for the branches, a .png texture with transparency and a leaf fractal rendered in green scattered around it, joined together as a merged object and copy 'n' pasted about 16 times), two height fields (one for the ground and another for the mountain...height fields can just be monochrome bitmaps with a random scattering of noise in them, which, when fed to the ray-tracer, get interpretted as white-high-Y-coordinate, black-low-Y-coordinate, grey in-between), and a sky texture (in POVray, that's the Bozo texture with about 0.7 turbulance and a color-map of four colors, two whites and two blues.)

But hey! You got it, that's impossible!!! Isn't this the same damn crowd that screams Linux is too hard to use (which makes my 8-year-old daughter superior in computer skills to you)? http://liw.iki.fi/liw/texts/linux-anecdotes.html Go tell THAT guy that it's impossible for a 21-year-old who starts out with no computer to write an entire operating system that sees global use.

Go tell a literary scholar that it was impossible for Robert Louis Stephenson to write "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" in three days: http://www.the-wow-experience.com/resources/NEW_Pu blic_Domain_Products.htm

Go to this page and tell this guy: http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle.jsp?in dex=723 that he's full of hooey when he says:
"Slideshow Adventures are cheaper and easier to make than the 3D equivalent. Hobbyists can do them for fun. Small independent developers can produce reasonable (even excellent) games on a shoe string. They're a way to start for those hoping to make the big-time. For the Adventure genre to thrive it needs a supply of Adventures. If Adventures are limited to productions costing tens of millions of dollars there won't be very many of them."

And then go to hell so the rest of us can have a decent conversation for a change.

At one point, Linus had implemented device files in /dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day.

I personally enjoy both sorts of moves - the tool-assisted, manufactured runs and the naturally-played runs.

However, I disagree with your statement that the tool-assisted videos are mis-represented. The FAQ here certainly indicates that they use every underhanded trick possible:

http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/FAQ.html

And the speedrun collection on archive.org also indicates what exploits are used in the game, such as "exploits luck", "tool assisted", "exploits bugs in the game".

If you're downloading them second hand, then you might be right about them being misrepresented, but only because you don't have the metadata and commentary about the video.

The Mega Man X + X2 time attack, which beats each game quickly with identical joypad input, is extremely impressive. Even if it was recorded frame by frame with a re-record count of 14432.

http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/750S.html

An accurate artice, to say the least. I've attempted my share of speed runs and time attacks, and eventually resigned to the fact that there are people who have much more time and patience than i do to get things perfect (for more evidence of that, check the sonic 3 speedrun on bisqwit's site). but i definately enjoy watching the runs myself. there's still something to be said about watching someone smoke bionic commando in 15 minutes or utterly destroy mega man 2.



a point of note -- when the article talks about morimoto, he's the one who did a crazy smb3 run. the article makes it seem like what he did was completely wrong and unethical. on the contrary, the video is a time attack. the levels in question are automatic side scrolling levels, where the speed cannot be changed and the time is consistent whether its me playing it or him. instead of making the video extremely boring and unpleasant to watch in those 2 minutes (by hiding in a corner and getting pushed along or something) he jumps and accumulates a ton of lives during a time that would otherwise be paint-dry boring. i think it was well done.



the link to bisqwit's site (mentioned in the article, iirc. read it yesterday.) is http://bisqwit.iki.fi. definately go there if you want to relive some nostalgia done perfectly :]



(advance apologies for the formatting. doing this through lynx).

*coughshamelessplugcough*

Done that, and music ensued:

All Your Bass does Ghostbusters
All Your Bass does Super Mario Bros 1 + 3

These are recordings from a 4-man quartet competition in feb 2005. The quartet consists of three 2nd bass singers and one 1st tenor. (And yes, we did win a prize :)

Done that, and music ensued:

All Your Bass does Ghostbusters
All Your Bass does Super Mario Bros 1 + 3

These are recordings from a 4-man quartet competition in feb 2005. The quartet consists of three 2nd bass singers and one 1st tenor. (And yes, we did win a prize :)

...people could now record songs in their bedrooms and make them available to the world, and new artists no longer needed "a label, or a manager, or a BBC Radio playlist".

"We feel that it's almost like if I could go and watch Lennon and McCartney in the studio making Sgt Pepper, and watch them on the internet making that record, that would be a really exciting thing," James explained.

But there are so many bedroom musicians. How do you pinpoint the future Lennons and McCartneys?

I've written some brief notes on the question, but to summarize, I think the word is an oxymoron because 'nature' means everything that there is. Therefore there's nothing outside it. On the other hand, science is not (yet) complete, and there are plenty of things in nature that we know they exist, but we can't fully explain (for example ball lightning).

For time attack and speedrun movies bisqwit's site is even better than http://speeddemosarchive.com/ in my opinion and is regularly updated. It focuses on console emulation, however, and doesn't include speedruns for computer games.

Some are more entertaining that others, but there is a best videos page for those who are first time visitors and just want the most interesting/entertaining videos to date.

Almost all of these speedruns use glitches in the games to achieve faster speeds. Speed isn't everything though, they also try not to be too boring. One of my favorites is Hitler no Fukkatsu (Bionic Commando) done in 14:06!

For time attack and speedrun movies bisqwit's site is even better than http://speeddemosarchive.com/ in my opinion and is regularly updated. It focuses on console emulation, however, and doesn't include speedruns for computer games.

Some are more entertaining that others, but there is a best videos page for those who are first time visitors and just want the most interesting/entertaining videos to date.

Almost all of these speedruns use glitches in the games to achieve faster speeds. Speed isn't everything though, they also try not to be too boring. One of my favorites is Hitler no Fukkatsu (Bionic Commando) done in 14:06!

Yeah, they say that all the time. And when you then go to work for them based on that misinformation, you figure out the truth pretty quickly.

Why yet another distribution when everyone's favourite operating system already works, even on Xen - ``Of course it runs NetBSD!'' :)

Some links:
* What does Xen look like - a screenshot:
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/hubertf-xe n.png
* Installation:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/howto.html
* General information on NetBSD/Xen:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/
* Live CD with Debian, NetBSD and FreeBSD:
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html#20050421_004 1
* Benchmarking:
http://www.iki.fi/kuparine/comp/xendom0/xendom0.ht ml

- Hubert

BitTorrent file here. http://bisqwit.iki.fi/torrents/DualPhotography.mp4 .torrent

Which is a funny thing for anyone to think given the gamma correction issues with Safari (think they've fixed it some time ago) that never occurred with Konqueror.

Picture of Branden Robinson

More pictures

Branden a long time ago

AutoREALM is pretty nice, however, there's some small clumsiness in the UI. It's the kind of software that you want to use to create really complex maps, because it sure isn't smooth enough to do anything really simple.

It's sure very powerful, has some nice drawing tools and such. Very nice layering functionality too. The symbol library feature helps too.

The only problems I had were with snapping/accurate ends, zooming and panning (there's a separate pan tool, no mouse shortcut, and panning tends to screw up the display until done). Also, in this day and age, I'd definitely expect the program to do EPS or SVG exporting, but nooo-oo, not yet! Okay, it's been an year since I used it - hope it's being improved a bit...

AutoREALM had one curious feature, too - name generator, based on context-free grammars. I found it a pretty strange coincidence that I spent this day tweaking my context-free grammar based text generator, and the first thing I see in Slashdot after that is some question about AutoREALM. This generator of mine happens to have one AutoREALM grammar as an online demo =)

Apple fucked up PNG support too. I've just spent the last three hours dealing with this major annoyance. The humorous upshot: I had already frozen the blended layers to each other so the png-pointing style sheet goes to IE and I had to make a special jpg-based one for safari. Sheesh!

This is the wireless state of Oulu a city of Finland: http://joker.iki.fi/cms/?q=node/view/135&PHPSESSID =80c78af4c4b6589901e695a40bf23ec0 http://www.panoulu.net/ Right now PanOulu is free for university students and personnel. Can you believe it? FREE as in BEER!

I don't see the problem with users installing software in their $HOME. *nix users do that all the time. When I get a non priviledged account on a *nix box I'm glad I am able to install my favourite window manager and IRC client in my $HOME without having to bother the admin. If the admin doesn't want users to install stuff (why?), he just has to ask users to not do it and set the /home (and /tmp) partition noexec (yes I know it can be circumvented but if you really want to you can still install stuff as user on Windows too).

There is no reason for most applications to need administrative rights on installation (admitting the target directory is writable by the user).

http://www.iki.fi/teknohog/luminocity-theora.torre nt

If Microsoft fixes their CSS support in Internet Explorer 7, every single little CSS IE hack used around the world will break.

The problem is that all these years, Web developers have had to resort to these little IE-specific hacks to compensate for years of neglect on Microsoft's part. Sure Microsoft can add more security or tabbed browsing... but CSS? It'd be too risky on Microsoft's part to send out a new IE that *breaks* exisiting websites. (Although to be honest, they done it before - twice - IE:mac and later, IE for Windows. But this time they can't rely on DOCTYPE Switching anymore.)

Microsoft's mantra of backwards compatibility would be at odds with releasing a fully CSS 2.0 compliant IE browser.

http://mjr.iki.fi/texts/patentfund

Although it's now up to (a full majority of all (even absent) members of) the parliament to stop this stupidity, it's never to late to raise our voice. Let's use the same tactics as those pushing this maffia legislation: join the 'European Anti-Software Patent Bribe Pledge Drive'!

See http://mjr.iki.fi/texts/patentfund

Well I'm not sure whether they are corrupt or just monumentally stupid. Anyhow, there is European Anti-Software Patent Bribe Pledge Drive running at the wery moment. An interesting approach indeed, at the very least it could raise some eyebrows if enough money is pledged so consider donating. I've done my share.

Sorry, I faxed.

b.t.w. Today I mailed and faxed to several MP's to Inquire how much is needed for: http://mjr.iki.fi/texts/patentfund

I got a resopnse almost imediately from Arda Gerkens that she didn't know, but was determent to attack this undemocratic process.

http://mjr.iki.fi/texts/patentfund - Nuff said.

And even with the alternate versions, sometimes the background colored areas of the PNGs don't exactly match the actual background color even though they have the exact same color designation.

That's due to gamma correction. Remove gamma information from your PNG images, and it will display more consistently across browsers. More information.

This must be the third time I post the nice image of my rat and the computer he ate. See also a detail of the destruction.

This must be the third time I post the nice image of my rat and the computer he ate. See also a detail of the destruction.

Maybe what we should do is require scientists and engineers to pair-program with recent CS graduates. Both sides would learn a lot from that.

I actually learned Perl by pair-programming with a CS guy, though nothing good came of that ;)

...or good enough to tell a difference between a clever video game video and a forgettable hollywood movie...

I agree with you, but I'm always wary of using the word 'supernatural'. I've elaborated the problem with this word here a little more.

I've tried to understand Safari's shortcomings and have even defended it on /., but I think my cup just leaked over. Following the crash I wrote this to the crash report I sent to Apple:

Please describe the circumstances leading to the crash and any other relevant information:

Running browser SECURITY TEST at http://bcheck.scanit.be/bcheck/ is what crashed Safari this time - in addition to the n+1 other situations where it normally crashes (generally involving ridiculous memory consumption indicating huge memory leaks).

Now, if Mac OS X Panther as a whole would be so badly programmed as Safari is, I'd probably gladly switch to some crap from Redmond. See, Internet Explorer for Windows, even while being hugely insecure without virus scanner and continuous patching and having horrible CSS support, has much, much greater stability than the newest version of Safari.

Luckily, though, real alternatives exist - alternatives like Camino, Firefox, Opera and Omniweb. They all do not take advantage of all the fine features (those like Keychain) of Mac OS X and Cocoa API as well as Safari, but they really do have much greater stability comparing to Safari.

So shame on Apple's Safari & WebKit team. Safari has been like this for a really long time, and does not seem to get better at all. If you just can't figure out anything better, you should drop Camino altogether and move to back Camino, which, despite it's shortcomings on feature side, at least runs very smoothly, and besides uses much more widely supported rendering engine than Safari, which is a plus too.

I do wonder, though, whether someone at Apple actually reads these crash reports I'm sending to you? Perhaps I should send them directly to Mr. Jobs' mailbox instead?

Well, anyway, if you want to argue with me about all this, please don't hesitate to mail me at [address here] But I really think the best thing you could do would be just start fixing those bugs instead - and designing them out completely, for that matter.

Yours sincerely,

Ok, so I have to admit that the flash cartridge is a great idea. I'll have to keep up on that. The SNES produces nice output, but the NES has trouble keeping up with a good emulated setup. Many GBA games also work very well in a full screen format, so why would you want to squint at a little handheld?

Don't know what Zelda run you saw, but I have never seen one (or any other speedrun) on an inaccurate emulator. There could be many reasons why it seems like the game is bugged. In fact, many games do have bugs which are exploited, but all are part of the game, not the emulator. There are some debatable ones, like the effects of pressing left+right simultaneously in some games (this produced an amazing run through Ninja Gaiden 2), but I don't think anything like that was used in Zelda. Also, sometimes different versions (U/J/E) behave differently, but I don't know if that is the case here.

Here is where you'll find the latest version of the Zelda run and others.

From the horses mouth right here. The issue is actually with the plug-in, not Java itself. In brief, you can load a Java class in an applet via JavaScript using getClass().forName() and use that reference to make calls outside the confines of the sandbox.

Here in Finland we have a society called Internet Users Forever IKI. It provides permanent e-mail and web forwarding services for its members (only private individuals in Finland, sorry) and it has been quite popular among students since it was founded in 1995. I think it was originally founded by students who realized their university mail account would be gone after they finished their studies.

I have been very happy with their service. It is a non-profit organization so you are generally paying for what it takes to run the service and no more. In fact, the costs have been covered by new joining members paying their initial membership fee (30 EUR at the moment). Notice that they are only providing forwarding services, not e-mail accounts. But it is all you need to have a lifetime e-mail address.

IKI member count has been growing at rather constant rate and they now have some 15000 members. They forward more than 1.2 million mails per month.

Here in Finland we have a society called Internet Users Forever IKI. It provides permanent e-mail and web forwarding services for its members (only private individuals in Finland, sorry) and it has been quite popular among students since it was founded in 1995. I think it was originally founded by students who realized their university mail account would be gone after they finished their studies.

I have been very happy with their service. It is a non-profit organization so you are generally paying for what it takes to run the service and no more. In fact, the costs have been covered by new joining members paying their initial membership fee (30 EUR at the moment). Notice that they are only providing forwarding services, not e-mail accounts. But it is all you need to have a lifetime e-mail address.

IKI member count has been growing at rather constant rate and they now have some 15000 members. They forward more than 1.2 million mails per month.

And by the way, if you don't like that one for some reason, I found a lot more of them here.

... even when it's a computer, most people bought it simply as a game system, and a fine one it was.

Anyway, the weak link in th C-64 was not the computer itself, but the power supply, which was separated. Since it was somewhat complicated (fully regulated) and encased in a solid black epoxy box, most people didn't bothered to fiddle with it. This site has the complete schematic for a power supply, from where you can either fix it or build a new one entirely.

http://www.iki.fi/teknohog/hacks/gainhog/

Yeah, like is said in the other replies already, you have to teach the ham likewise the spam. But when it learns it's stuff, it works like charm! For example, my email forwarding operator http://www.iki.fi/ is currently testing spamassassin, and it marks the messages it thinks is spam with a *SPAM** in the subject. Well, it works fairly well, but it doesn't catch them all, some come into my inbox unmarked, but Thunderbird does catch them!

And I've yet to see it miss a single message, or incorrectly marking it as a "Junk". Truly magnificent piece of software.