Slashdot Mirror

http://linux.maruhn.com/sec/jpegoptim.html

No. You can compress JPEG lossless.

There are lots of DIY 'scope kits out there, many that are purely software and rely on your soundcard's digitizer.
xoscope is one for linux.

Multimeter. The $3 ones from Harbor Freight are okay, frighteningly enough, but if you get a cheap Craftsman one they're reasonable. I think it's really important because I can practically guarantee you won't put resistors back where they belong if you have to read the color codes, but you will if you can just measure them.

Eventually it's nice to get a bench multimeter and some banana plug to clip/grabber-type leads for it. You can get old HP 3466 bench multimeters off ebay for only somewhat more than new handheld multimeters, and they sure are nice. (I used to build them: reasonably high-quality internals.) It's nice to find a multimeter that can measure more than an amp DC. It's even nicer if you don't have to disassemble it to get to the fuse that'll invariably blow when you somehow manage to put 15A through the meter.

ebay scope probes. I got two 500mhz probes that match my scope for $30 each. (way overkill for most scopes, but I have a nice scope.)

I forgot in my other post in this thread to mention allelectronics.com -- not a great cross-section of material but it's hard to beat the price, especially on proto boards.

JOVE = Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs

http://linux.maruhn.com/sec/jove.html/

You can play all of the Scott Adams adventures by installing the scottfree interpreter at http://linux.maruhn.com/sec/scottfree.html (for linux.) Clients are also available for Windows, OSX and DOS.

I have seen in this thread are handled by KDM exactly how people are dreaming they would be implemented.

I doubt that, since KDM isn't even a window manager.

You probably meant "kwin", but that can demonstrate bad window-focus-handling too.

For a test, run XMMS and kwin. First set XMMS to be on all workspaces (a little difficult, because it doesn't draw standard borders, but try pressing Alt-F3). Next, open and close an auxilliary XMMS window, such as the playlist, and see if you can get the workspace setting to persist...

It probably wouldn't take much to take rhmask and update it to use xdelta or something, though. Note what the xdelta manpage says about using it on compressed data, though:

Gzip processing
Attempting to compute a delta between compressed input files usually
results in poor compression. This is because small differences between
the original contents causes changes in the compression of whole blocks
of data. To simplify things, Xdelta implements a special case for
gzip(1) compressed files. If any version input to the delta command is
recognized as having gzip compression, it will be automatically decom-
pressed into a temporary location prior to comparison.

[...]

There is one potential problem when automatically processing gzip com-
pressed files, which is that the recompressed content does not always
match byte-for-byte with the original compressed content. The uncom-
pressed content still matches, but if there is an external integrity
check such as cryptographic signature verification, it may fail.

That would clash with rpm's MD5 and GPG signature checking.

I would have thought that we linuxers had understood how to connect to the net through dialup by now...

Still, it's nice(?!) to see them take it seriously enough to release software for linux, even if it's been done several times before...

"...except for sound, which no Linux distribution supports without the Open Sound System proprietary drivers."

Tried sndconfig? I've used it with a few rpm based distros and it has automagically set up a wide range of PCI, ISA and onboard cards. Plus you get a nice sound clip of Linus when it works...

The mouse pedometer is pretty inovative.

Unfortunately, there is still no coherent architecture for mirroring and for mirror sites to register their collections with the sites which they mirror. In fact, we lack even a common (de facto) standard for recording this replication information in a machine readable for-mat. Some progress was made on this a few years ago by the Internet Engineering Task Force s [1] working group on Internet Anonymous FTP Archives, with the creation of the so-called IAFA Templates [2]. These provided a simple machine readable format for recording per-resource or collection metadata, which could easily be created by hand or programatically. Although support for IAFA templates was integrated into some software packages, e.g. the ALIWEB search engine [3] and the ROADS resource discovery sys-tem [4] , this approach never became successful on a large scale. The World Wide Web Consortium s Resource Description Format (RDF) [5] and the Dublin Core metadata effort [6] may eventually provide a viable machine readable interchange format.

Currently, the database underlying the freshmeat.net weblog [7] is perhaps the closest thing we have to a genuine mirror registry - though it focuses almost exclusively on soft-ware packages and operating system distributions, and only offers limited mirror informa-tion. RDF is also being used in this capacity as part of rpmfind.net [8], although mirror information is very limited in this case too. The Internet Engineering Task Force s Uni-form Resource Names effort [9] is also relevant here, since it would be very useful if there were persistent and location independent names for these collections of replicated resources.

[1] http://www.ietf.org/ Internet Engineering Task Force website
[2] http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/iafa/ IAFA Working Group & IAFA Templates homepage
[3] http://aliweb.emnet.co.uk/ ALIWEB website
[4] http://roads.opensource.ac.uk/ ROADS website
[5] http://www.w3.org/RDF/ World Wide Web Consortium Resource Description Format (RDF) homepage
[6] http://purl.org/dc/ Dublin Core website
[7] http://freshmeat.net/ freshmeat.net website P. Lenz & Andover Advanced Technologies, Inc.
[8] http://rpmfind.net/ rpmfind.net website
[9] RFC 1737, Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names K. Sollins & L. Masinter December 1994

And at the end somewhat less relevant to the topic.

This kind of metadata should be extremely valuable for implementation of the URIs and particularly for the I2C(s) (URI tp URC). Quote from the RFC 2483:

"Uniform Resource Characteristics are descriptions of resources. This request allows the client to obtain a description of the resource identified by a URI, as opposed to the resource itself or simply the resource's URLs. The description might be a bibliographic citation, a digital signature, or a revision history. This memo does not specify the content of any response to a URC request. That content is expected to vary from one server to another."