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Moodle is good stuff, especially considering there are tools to convert Blackboard to Moodle course converstion and another utility to convert Moodle courses to a variety of formats.

Moodle is good stuff, especially considering there are tools to convert Blackboard to Moodle course converstion and another utility to convert Moodle courses to a variety of formats.

First of all, there is Broadcast 2000, a GPL non-linear editor. For your video capturing needs, try dvgrab (assuming that you've got a IEEE-1394 compliant capture card). And as a cheap plug for my own program, I am the author of gvplay, a simple Gnome/GTK video player. I wrote gvplay to help render my special effect (object replacement through tracking and edge detection).

wxStudio (http://wxstudio.linuxbox.com/)also seems to be coming along fairly well.

Right now, I compose music using a few linux software tools. The mediocre (but increasing!) quality of the software available right now is offset by the good quality hardware I use. The SB Live has open source drivers that are very bleeding edge (there is no MIDI support for the front panel yet, so I don't use MIDI :) My roland JP-8000 can synthesize any sound there is, and the recording from the emu10k1 in the SB Live is top notch.

GO Here. The links at the bottom of the page. Seriouslt this does it. All :-) Perhaps you can find salvation here even? GPL'd Etc. as a poster towards the bottom mentioned. Check it out.. Click Here! :-)

Wow, this does look quite impressive. I'm going to check this out as soon as I get home. By the way, here's a direct link to the screenshots:

http://heroine.linuxbox.com/bcast 2000screens.html

numb

I'll just put a plug in for this very professional, GPLed, nonlinear audio/video editing tool - Broadcast 2000. I just used it to put together a music "collage" for some fireworks our city does every summer and it absolutely rocked. The guy I worked with on it couldn't stop commenting on how excellent and intuitive it is, much less that it's free. If you have to do any audio editing (including adding effects, compression, fades, etc), this is the tool. Not sure about the video side, but I'd wager it's as good.

Ecasound, and Broadcast 2000.

Both are excellet programs. I use broadcast 2000 almost daily my self, and find it abseloutly amazing. Better then any multitrack audio software for windows.

BTW: You better use ALSA with theese apps, at least OSS/Free makes them both very buggy for me.

How about support broadcast 2000 a little. They were needed about $3,000 to get a hold of the firewire SPEC for digital camera's to beable to support them in their software. I think it is a neat video editing program and they don't want much. Broadcast 2000 Firewire Information and here is the Broadcast 2000 Homepage

How about support broadcast 2000 a little. They were needed about $3,000 to get a hold of the firewire SPEC for digital camera's to beable to support them in their software. I think it is a neat video editing program and they don't want much. Broadcast 2000 Firewire Information and here is the Broadcast 2000 Homepage

Hello Katz,

I'd be more than happy to share some of my reading habits with you.

Newspapers have never quite tickled my fancy, I've always had a hard time to tackle an overly large and totally untame sheet of paper. The times I do read something news worthy would be over a person's shoulder or when it appears in a more tame form (ie. cut into pieces).

On the average, being a geek, I'm a real busy person and would give almost nothing to the major newspapers out there (but I'v seen the new Onion), politics and gossip just does not delight me. The only time you do see me get over my boredom and read something in default format would be to turn the newspaper on it's back, and explor the last few pages in the hope of finding something comical to entertain.

The same goes for traditional books. I am an avid reader, but over the last few years, I've been slacking very badly (since it's just not economically possible to read a book anymore nowdays). All sorts of constraints apply when reading a book.

My solutions arrived in the form a small electornic device (which I immediatly dubbed 'garo' -- a long lost feline friend). This device was a PalmOS based Handspring Visor Delux, with 8mb ram and the ability to upgrade using an unique hardware modular slot (even though it's flash is not upgradeable).

After having exhausted my batters in less than a week (of continuous play with the Visor), I decided to explore the waste expances of software available for PalmOS. I installed utility after utility, getting delighted with the slightest twist of a coding wizard (and yes the little mirror program that turned your palm screen black did send giggles up my spine and entertain a whole load of female friends).

One of the delightfully free software that was buzzed down my USB connection into my Visor was AvantGo. Which was a mixture of channel based online newsfeeds and other resources (even /. could be tamed to exist inside my avantgo). I quickly started to apperciate the depth and breath of this free services and the number of channels available on my Visor. This is the time I started to read newsspapers seriously. I have the following channels on my Visor, CNet's News.com channel (updated puter type microsoftish news), ExploreZone (Scientific not so in depth news), HollyWood.com (Movie times for my city! very important -- daily as everyting else), New York Time ( traditional media now readable), PalmCentral/PDABuzz, Slashdot.org (Oh baby .. this could be created by making a custom channel in avant go and putting this URL in), The weather channel (Ok, not so necessary in the desert :))), USAToday (fine with me), Wired News (Some low tech is fine while doing the daily garbage disposal).

I take my visor everwhere, it fits snuggly in my pocket and feels very conforatble in my hand. All channels are updated at least once a day. I usually update early morning and in the evenining. News is read where I happen to be :)

Now that takes care of news.. What about books?! It took me over a month to get into books on my Visor and man.. Now I'm reading almost 2 books a week after that. My fav doc reader would undoubtably be Bill Clagett's CSpotRun, A GPLed reader that is undoubtably the king of all Doc Readers out there. It has the ability to make the fonts closer, to turn the text into every single position known on the pilot (read from the sides or upside down?), autoscroll, drag scroll, scroll using the pageup-pagedown (fun!), and anything you could contribute! Ebooks are fun! Most books from the gutenberg project have been converted into ebooks over at MemoWare also you could OCR any book you own and convert it into doc format using the linux doctoolkit. Others check here. I have read War and Peace (over 1/2 million words) by Tolstoy (free on tolstoy.org), re-read Most books from William Gibson, Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke and various other entities. I've also had the pleasure of reading classics such as ShakesSpeare, SunTzu, Tolkein, Plato, Confucious and many others right on my PDA.

Overall, the handheld computer with it's extreemly large memory (yes books in electornic format are tiny!) has been the only reason why I've gone back and read so many books (not to mention carry around so many techical notes and moste of the relevant HOWTO pages). I would recommend a handheld PDA to anyone who reads it and encorage them to read electornic Newspapers and e-books on a regualar basis.

Enjoy!
--

MUQ is indeed very well done. There are other such projects out there. Mine is called Momoko. While I like MUQ, it's not perfect so I figure I'll do it myself and get it just right. Momoko is designed not just for MUDs, but for any sort of multi-user networked application, like community based dynamic web sites or IRC servers or the like. Of course, the lovers of speed will laugh at me because it's written in Java. However, Java is just a language. They're working on compilers to compile Java into native machine code. Of course, OO code is generally not as fast as C. I think flexibility and ease of use is more important in the case of graphical MMORPGs. All the really speed critical code is in the client, the graphics routines. The server is all modelling of behaviour and an OO system is inherently better at that. In fact, I received an e-mail from someone working on Ultima Online 2 praising my use of Python as a MUD scripting language. I think perhaps they're using Python in UO2, but that's just a rumour. Another project is Coldstore, which isn't an entire MUD framework, but a huge, fast persistent store like EROS uses, except on the application level. It will be very useful to future MUD framework developers.

As for the "appearance" issue, you've picked one of the appearances that I like least. I have no problem agreeing that the "default" GTK look is pretty klunky. (And I'm not hot on the WM theme that you're using either.)

But redo that with the GTKstep theme and get something looking more like this fileselector or this scrolled window.

Other looks may be found at gtk.themes.org.

As for the "appearance" issue, you've picked one of the appearances that I like least. I have no problem agreeing that the "default" GTK look is pretty klunky. (And I'm not hot on the WM theme that you're using either.)

But redo that with the GTKstep theme and get something looking more like this fileselector or this scrolled window.

Other looks may be found at gtk.themes.org.

As for the "appearance" issue, you've picked one of the appearances that I like least. I have no problem agreeing that the "default" GTK look is pretty klunky. (And I'm not hot on the WM theme that you're using either.)

But redo that with the GTKstep theme and get something looking more like this fileselector or this scrolled window.

Other looks may be found at gtk.themes.org.

1/30/2000 LibMPEG2-1.1 is out. XMovie-1.3 is out. DVD support in XMovie is finally completed so now you can watch DVDs on a Linux box, completely in software.

looks like a complete DVD solution is out for linux. Is this using DeCSS?

I would imagine that the guys over at xmovie would have/will incorporate deCSS with their current DVD player. From their web page, they say that it can already play non-encrypted DVDs, it would seem that it would be a rather minor step to include deCSS

Hey, there's a beginning QT player/library at
QT stuff. Has it's own
codecs though (motion-JPEG and others). It might be a start
for others. I've written a player that uses it,
but my player is evil and doesn't work well.
Dunno if this helps.

Also FWIW, a system to handle binary codecs would
be a goodness. I'm working on one now. There's one in
xanim but IMHO it's too xanim-specific.... Ciao!

Quicktime for Linux already exists and can be found at:

http://heroine.linuxbox.com/quicktime.html

However, it does not include any of the proprietary codecs (which obviously apple could not release either). This can lead to a bit of a lack of functionality. As the website notes:

Be aware of one thing: Quicktime for Linux won't read any of the movies you download from the internet. Quicktime is a wrapper for many different kinds of compression formats. What you know as "Quicktime 4" is really a distribution of libraries which contain certain compression formats not found in previous versions Quicktime. Regardless of the version number, each Quicktime distribution is able to read and write a basic set of compression formats that you can manipulate on Linux or any system not officially supported by Apple.

The following codecs are supported:
Supported video is MJPA, JPEG Photo, PNG, RGB, YUV 4:2:2, and YUV 4:2:0 compression.
Supported audio is IMA4, ulaw, and any linear PCM format.

-AC

Sorensen is the name of that codec, which Apple doesn't own but does have an exclusive license for. This is a problem because of course Apple cannot release the source to that. Now QuickTime can use a variety of codecs and read a variety of formats. However the difference bettween Quicktime 4 and Quicktime 3 is primarly the Sorensen codec which qives QuickTime the compression and streaming capabilities which make it interesting.

And FYI there is a QuickTime libary for Linux at http://heroine.linuxbox.com/quicktime.ht ml but it just doesn't use Sorensen so it can't do all the cool stuff QuickTime 4 can.

Try this link.

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(Mark all that apply)
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Face facts -- aside from a different approach to development and marketing, Linux and Windows are the same thing: operating systems. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. If one or the other were to just disappear, some tasks would not be performed well when the other stepped in to fill the gap.

While I spend most of my time in Linux, simply because I enjoy using it more than Windows, it's not all things. I'm limited in my ability to surf because of an underpowered browser (Netscape) and a lack of plugins (Macromedia Shockwave and a workable Realplayer, as well as Windows Media Player formats that nothing in Linux can handle).

I do a lot of webpage design, and Linux has serious shortcomings in this area. While I can code by hand in any text editor, or use Bluefish, it is simply more practical to use Homesite in Windows.

Office software is another area sorely lacking. Staroffice comes close to filling the bill, but in a world where MS Office has set the standard, asking users to trust their productivity to underpowered and incompatable Linux equivalents would simply be wrong.

And such a rally would do nothing to correct this situation. Constant bashing of MS has done nothing in the past. It's preaching to the choir when done in venues like /., and makes Linux users look like Trekkies with their rubber ears and toy phasers when done in public.

Time should be better spent writing code for Linux. See something that's lacking? Create it, or improve on what's already available. That is the whole idea behind Open Source software. Windows got to where it is partly because it does what people want it to do. As buggy as it might be, if it didn't fill a need, no amount of monopolistic practices would have caused it to spread the way it has.

I have no desire to turn on CNN the day of the W2K release and see a bunch of Linux Geeks who can't get a date and have too much time on their hands waving stuffed penguins and burning Windows CDs. I would rather be able to walk into my favorite software store and find useable products made for Linux.

xml rocks. every piece of online information should be in xml. usability on the web is horrible right now. the fact that search engines and yahoo-style directories are the main entrances to the web is horrific. the fact that google can't find me a single page on gkrellm (a kick-ass system monitor for linux) pisses me off to no end when i'm bored with my current skin. with everything in xml the extraction of data would be much simpler and therefore the interfaces to the web would be much more effective.

the current problem is that

1. lots of people know what xml is, but don't really know what to do with it.
2. the processing of xml data at this point is very intense. rendering an xml web page (or add in the scaling of images, too, and call it transcoding as ibm does) takes a lot of work on the server side and there's not currently a way for it to be rendered on the client-side (browsers don't support this yet).

i'm working on a solution and need help...so it's actually pretty smooth that this article came out in ./ at this point.

in a huge blow to problems #1 and #2 above (as well as quite a few others), i am initiating the creation of Uberbia, the most open source of web sites. the backend is zope, which is a tres cool open source web application environment which can conveniently output its internal data as xml. what this allows is for information to be created in zope and stored in zope's native db format and served up as web pages (for instance) quickly, but then also output as xml. problem #2 solved. and when browsers can handle the xml...shove it out that way.

zope also allows for information to be very easily created and shared. this is one of the main goals of Uberbia.

the idea for Uberbia was born out of the fact that the Open Source community has been living in an environment of relatively closed content management on the internet. Sure, one could create a web page and post a HOWTO they just wrote. And then post a message to a relevant mailing list letting everyone know that resource is available. And then submit the HOWTO to the LDP and wait for it to be approved and posted on the LDP page. Uberbia will remove a lot of this hassle and allow the Open Source community to easily create and manage it's content. and the data will go into an xml-aware application. problem #1 solved, at least for the Open Source community. well, okay...so i'm still workin' on it, but it'll get solved, dammit.

on trying to figure out what i was talking about, Ethan (a friend and to-be-developer of Uberbia) wrote:

sounds to me like you want to build an open-content information space. am I totally off-base? Bring "source" up to the next level of abstraction? Collaborative environments of information?

yup. he gets it. but the possibilities that arise from having such a body of contributors and open content in xml are insane. for example, imagine turning on a "newbie" feature in Uberbia that automagically inserted links to the proper entry in the jargon file for every word that was defined there. not difficult with zope and the data in xml

so, essentially i'm responding to this ask slashdot question by calling out for help with an open source project that wants to solve this problem and others. some work has been done, but there's a lot more to do. sourceforge is graciously both hosting the development of this and hosting the project itself. if you are interested at all in the development of something like this or have some really smooth-ass ideas, let me know or join the mailing list.

i hope some of that made sense.

word, Uberdog

Help realize that vision by lending a hand to Broadcast 2000. Yes, it would be very cool to be able to do it yourself.

I could put my face on the pitcher at a ballgame, and my friends faces on all the other players...

Or how about being Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice re-runs?

[Sorry about the "realize your vision" bit, I just got out of a meeting with the marketing folk]

ODBC Socket Server does exactly what you want. ODBC Socket Server is an open source database access toolkit that exposes Windows NT ODBC data sources with an XML-based TCP/IP interface.

It includes clients for Perl, PHP, C++. The server is GPL, clients public domain.

I am the author, e-mail me with any questions at fxml@excite.com. Check us out at: http://odbc.linuxbox.com.

This page reads under "Changes":

1/10/19100 Final Y2K compliant.

Yeah, right. I've worked with professional video editing systems, and many have 32GB of RAID, not a terabyte.

I won't even speculate on the video cards or the 5GHz Athlons.

They are good people. They also do some other projects like quicktime for linux, etc. Check out their main page

--

As for the video editor, Broadcast 2000 will be released soon.

Here is some video software for Linux.

I wonder how hard it is to make a streaming video player, once the compression algorithm is known and clear. AFAIK at least some of them operate on some sort of independent blocks or frames (like you can display JPGs even when the whole image has not yet arrived) so umm.. just transmit the blocks via UDP or something. OTH I'm not an expert so I'll just shut up!

Now, what I'd like to know is why they didn't just adopt Linux for the kernel and toss a MacOS API on top of that. Oh yeah-- and do something about making QuickTime available for Linux, too.

Isn't the problem with QuickTime for Linux the various codecs that are used by it, like Sorensen?
I thought that was the reason there isn't a client for Linux that can play most of the movies that are on the web.

There is however a library for QuickTime at this page.

This is from that page.

Be aware of one thing: Quicktime for Linux won't read any of the movies you download from the internet. Quicktime is a wrapper for many different kinds of compression formats. What you know as "Quicktime 4" is really a distribution of libraries which contain certain compression formats not found in previous versions Quicktime. Regardless of the version number, each Quicktime distribution is able to read and write a basic set of compression formats that you can manipulate on Linux or any system not officially supported by Apple. Only a few of these compression formats are built in Quicktime for Linux because 99% of Linux developers can't use any commercial code in their software. Since 1998 Apple has licensed all the internet video formats for their own use. What you can do is create Quicktime movies.

Quicktime for Linux is here.

WMPrefs comes with the default Windowmaker installation and is setup the moment you run it for the first time.

wmakerconf is a GTK+ app that does much the same thing, but with a bit of a nicer (IMHO) interface.

Try them out..i think you'll find that you like them both.

For those of you wishing to make donations or send money, you may do so by sending check/money order/cash/shoelaces/whatever to:

MassLinux
55 Water Street
Shelburne Falls, MA 01370
USA

I wish I had something more prolific to say, but unfortunately I am still sincerely at a loss for words both over our tragedy and over your generosity and support. We really believe in Open Source and the OSS community at large. We have always been avid supporters of linux since that cold autumn day in 1994 when I first discovered SLS Linux :-)

As it has been known for some time, the domain name LINUXBOX.COM has been for sale. We wanted to use that revenue to expand our GNU/OSS offerings and create a nice site dedicated soleley to those efforts. It's still for sale :-) Unfortunately, due to lack of investors, this was a necessity for us.

I have been getting a TON of email, I will respond to all of it. Right now my hands are shaking and I'm too excited and shellshocked to be of much use, but let me just say one last thing: From the bottoms of our hearts, we thank you all tremendously!!

--Chris

Chris Gann
MassLinux

Indeed, one needs to be a better diplomat than programmer. However, if you extend this too far you'd simply end-up with a PHB controlling a drone of OS-slaves. Perhaps this is the reason Mozilla never took off?

And to take a tangent, thanks for pointing out that X11amp can be used on Solaris - I've been meaning to find out about this for a while.

Now, back to work - I'm sure RabTech can't waste a sys-admin on Open Source ;)

http://newwws.linuxbox.com/

Posted by OGL:

I really don't see either Gmc or Kfm as being useful...they're too much like windows explorer. If you want a really useful file manager which has easy to use associations and a good keyboard interface, try SFM.

The rest of KDE and GNOME are very useful however...I just wish they'd think a bit more about people with multi-head setups.

-W.W.

there are more nice music-progs for linux. e.g. aRts - analog realtime synthesizer a modular synthesizer currently under development. if you can help, please do so. the music-scene must use linux as os :-). bye -aurora