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All these frameworks limit testing capabilities and move things away from the compiler to the runtime. EL expressions, JSP taglibs, Beans using Reflection, huge XML configuration, XSLT and so on are all evaluated at runtime and none of this can be checked by a compiler.

JSP taglibs are compile-time validated. The compiler generates JSP page members/methods for them..

A large part of EL expressions can be compile-time handled, too.. (my EL implementation (contained in my project) does this.. it uses known type information to create compiled EL expressions containing generated code and runtime EL operation calls where the EL ops can't be handled by the compiler..)

If you're opposed to generate "simple HTML" via frameworks, I suppose you don't use compilers anyway.. I mean, binary code is so simple, right? ;)

I can understand most of the choices, but I have to ask: why is Xvid listed? It seems so completely arbitrary. It's not the only MPEG-4 codec, it's not only open source MPEG-4 codec, and many people agree that it's not even the best of the open source MPEG-4 codecs...

If you want to list a video codec, why not http://ffmpeg.sf.net/ ? Not only do they have a great (and fast!) MPEG-4 encoder, they also have hundreds of other codecs, many reverse engineered, and incredibly optimized.

If you're doing anything with video on Unix, you can be sure you're using ffmpeg. MPlayer, VLC, Xine, Avidemux, MythTV, etc. all get most of their functionality out of ffmpeg.

Seems like the thing Xvid has going for it is good publicity...

Obviously my favorite is my own creation! Multiplayer, online scrabble, written in Python.

A separate deamon that could survive a Firefox exit or crash would be very interesting. (And will eventually allow power users to try more complex setups, like the daemon running on a separate always-on head-less server, while the FF plugins is only used as interface. For example, that's something I do frequently with mlDonkey & mlDonkey, and that's something that is really missing in Azureus [no head-less mode. Always needs to start full GUI, even when remotely controlled] ).

Also if you keep your promise of making AllPeers open-source, there's good chance to see something interesting like :
- Allpeers-compatible plug-ins for IM softwares like Gaim. IM softwares may be different candidates as "always-on" programms (because some networks like MSN don't allow messages when recipient is offline, there are a lot of people keeping their IM software always running).
- Allpeers-compatible module for multi-standart P2P softwares like mlDonkey or Shareaza.

A separate deamon that could survive a Firefox exit or crash would be very interesting. (And will eventually allow power users to try more complex setups, like the daemon running on a separate always-on head-less server, while the FF plugins is only used as interface. For example, that's something I do frequently with mlDonkey & mlDonkey, and that's something that is really missing in Azureus [no head-less mode. Always needs to start full GUI, even when remotely controlled] ).

Also if you keep your promise of making AllPeers open-source, there's good chance to see something interesting like :
- Allpeers-compatible plug-ins for IM softwares like Gaim. IM softwares may be different candidates as "always-on" programms (because some networks like MSN don't allow messages when recipient is offline, there are a lot of people keeping their IM software always running).
- Allpeers-compatible module for multi-standart P2P softwares like mlDonkey or Shareaza.

• Ask (politely) ATI to provide 3d specs
• Work on DRI project (r300 driver for example)

And somewhere in the middle there are things like adesklets, which provide a reasonable amount of eyecandy without the weight.

Jedidiah.

I'm a developer of Seahorse, a project that integrates encryption into the GNOME desktop. Because I have friends that use webmail almost exclusively, including another Seahorse dev, I was always being told they couldn't read or send encrypted mail. To solve that problem, I created a panel applet that is capable of performing OpenPGP operations on the text contents of the clipboard. It works with both the ctrl-c/v and the select/middle click clipboards as well as provides a(n optional) window with the encrypted or plain text for when no entry field is immediately available.

It was recently blogged about HERE.

I realize this isn't the cross platform solution requested, but we did receive a patch for building on Cygwin(YMMV, but patches are welcome).

Fixes the one weakness in sudo (lack of logging on root shells) that people have been complaining about for years. Log everything that happens in a root shell (sudo -s, sudo /bin/bash, etc.), including keystrokes within editor sessions, as well as timing information (exactly when and how quickly things were typed), and playback recorded sessions later. My favorite use of sudosh is to do something particularly complicated within sudosh so that it's recorded, and then tell junior admins to go replay the session to see what I did, and in what order.

Ironically, the only system it doesn't seem to compile on yet is OpenBSD (possibly Free and Net as well; haven't checked) - although I hear Todd Miller may be planning to incorporate the sudosh functionality into the sudo code tree.

I cannot speak for other developers or other projects but you can send your complains to the wyoguide-users mailing list and I'll see if I can forward any to the appropriate developer. I can't guaranty anything but most developers I know are rather responsive.

Also you can try out any of my applications of wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) and see if you detect any complains there. I appreciate any feedback, positive or negative, as long as it gives me hints how to improve my software. Please send them to the wyoguide-users mailing list, not everybody reading here might be interested.

see also http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=172 263&cid=14343909

O. Wyss

That only works on ANSI terms.

In other words, on every single terminal in existence made within the last >15 years.
This may be an issue if the output goes to something that is not a terminal (like redirected to some GUI), but, in that case you can simply check isatty() or pipe it through ansi2txt or ansi2html (bundled with a package of mine, trivial to recreate on your own).

I don't want to start a flamewar "GTK+ versus ..." either but IMO IBM would be well adviced to look into wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) especially if they target Windows users. At least wyoGuide also has development guidelines, can be used as a simple tutorial and the provided sample code is not only a "Hello world" but a fully featured application usable as a starting code base for others projects.

So if you plan to start a new project either on Linux, Windows, MacOSX or whatever, first have a look into wyoGuide and mkae up your own mind.

O. Wyss

I have ported ppmd to a nice pzip style utility and a pzlib style library. Find it at http://pzip.sf.net/

Speed is better than bzip2 and compression is top class, beaten only by 7zip and LZMA compresserors (which require much more speed and memory). Problem is that decompression is the same speed as the compression, unlike bzip2/gzip/zip where the decompression is much faster

The review quoted above is totally useless because 7zip for example uses a 32Kb dictionary. Given a 200Mb dictionary it really starts to perform quite well! I would not be suprised if 7zip didn't come out the winner there given a better compression parameter.

Winpooch + ClamWin works better than AVG free for me, I now recommend it to clients who dont want to pay for anti-virus.

http://winpooch.sf.net/

WxWidgets?

Good point. I think that Python + wxPython + wxGlade is a very powerful combination for clean, fast and maintainable GUI development.

If you do GUIs I suggest to try these tools: they are simple and powerful (wxPython even contains additional classes that are not present in wxWidgets).

If you want to learn and retain extensive vocabulary, you're going to have to repeatedly test yourself on it (relying on "real life" conversation will not work, as some words are far too rare), so it makes sense to optimize the scheduling of that learning according to what we know about memory formation.

The most effective software for this purpose is SuperMemo, but it is non-free, so you may instead want to use the slightly inferior, but still effective Memaid. I have found memaid very useful for teaching myself kanji. Even if you don't decide on using Supermemo or Memaid, you should definitely read the SuperMemo website, as it contains a wealth of information on effective memorization. Both these programs are most effective if you can use them every day, but it does not have to take much of your time each day.

Granted, some of the frameworks, like Stackless and Rails, may not run on these tools, YET ... but there's really no reason to start totally from scratch and throw out a nice VM and a nice set of libraries...

Granted, some of the frameworks, like Stackless and Rails, may not run on these tools, YET ... but there's really no reason to start totally from scratch and throw out a nice VM and a nice set of libraries...

Stop posting fluff articles in the absence of real news before the holidays.

Java isn't going anywhere for a while. It is a fantastic language for large scale projects simply because its very easy to write maintainable code AND its buzzword compliant. That latter fact alone will keep it afloat years after it is truly dead.

Don't get me wrong, I love Python and I have really high hopes for it in the coming years, but to declare that "enthusiasts" have left Java, seems silly

Totally agree with this.

In addition, the common perception of AI as being a bunch of rules means that many people dont believe in anything even approaching strong AI.

As far as how to advance down the road to strong AI, maybe a good way is to assume infinite computational, memory and I/O capacity, then create algorithms based on that?

If we look at a previous "impossible" technology, the development of aircraft, that only became possible with the development of the internal combustion engine, steam engines were just too heavy. No reason why we cant generate some sortof learning algorithm today based on the technology of tomorrow.

Note a slight refinement to this: we probably shouldnt *quite* assume infinite computational capacity, since that would allow us to consider k-hard algorithms to be soluble, which they probably are not. This doesnt mean we cant use k-hard algorithms, only that we cant expect to get the "perfect" answer from them, just a rough best-guess answer in finite time... rather like our own brains.

Started to put some of these ideas down in a sourceforge project at http://artlearn.sf.net/

Hugh Perkins

Y'all are trying too hard. Just get your ISP to install Adzapper on their proxy.

These days a geek probably will develop cross-platform since a geek don't want to be limited by platform considerations. And if you want to create a decent application with all the usual features a top application has, there is IMO just one solution and that is wyoGuide. wyoGuide allows you not only to create cross-platform applications but also build good and full featured application and with the demo sample code you get this application coded really fast. Any application written using the sample code will just run right from the start.

If you have time I invite to try it out and hopefully return an experience report for others to see how easy it was.

O. Wyss

If you need more complex system/router data, Cacti is a really good way to centralize the collection of SNMP data.

Spam? on Jabber? This is news to me.

Jabber has built in anti spam. In order for me to talk to you, I have to ask you if I can, and then you have to tell me that it's OK. This is part of the Jabber protocol itself. Google Talk has no reason not to turn on server-to-server connectivity. They're limiting their usefulness by leaving it off. I really do wish they would turn it on because I already run my own Jabber server, and my Jabber ID is the same as my email address. I'm confident that gaim will support Jingle soon, so all Google needs to do is enable s2s support and I can completely ditch AOL IM and stop signing into Google Talk.

I want to ditch AOL IM because lately AOL IM has turned to crap, with their auth-servers (the servers that verify your screen name and password) successfully authenticating me, and then redirecting me to a chat server (commonly known as a BOS server) that is dead. Dead as a doorknob. -ECONNREFUSED. And if I mash reconnect enough times while they continue to direct me to a broken chat server, they put a ban on me for trying to sign in!

A lot of people have already mentioned the PyDev plugin for Eclipse. You may also like to know about TruStudio (another Eclipse-based IDE) which supports Python and PHP amongst other "scripting languages", and perhaps something like Stani's Python Editor. I've got all three, plus a couple of other generic editors like Vim, Notepad++, NewEdit, JEdit, also PythonWin (which comes with ActivePython, but you can get it separately for vanilla Python.org).

A lot of people have already mentioned the PyDev plugin for Eclipse. You may also like to know about TruStudio (another Eclipse-based IDE) which supports Python and PHP amongst other "scripting languages", and perhaps something like Stani's Python Editor. I've got all three, plus a couple of other generic editors like Vim, Notepad++, NewEdit, JEdit, also PythonWin (which comes with ActivePython, but you can get it separately for vanilla Python.org).

The Visual-Python is a simple, easy and comfortable way to develop python while working on a Windows machine.
It blends in nicely with Visual-Studio and provides all those little things that make writing code nicer easier and sleaker.

Well there's always PyDev for Eclipse. It's reasonably mature, takes full advantage of what Eclipse has to offer (integration, debugging, code completion etc.) as well as having nice integration of other tools such as bicycle repair man for refactoring and pylint for static checking.

Jedidiah.

A quick question. Has anyone made a plugin for Eclipse to handle Perl or any of the other popular scripting languages?

Yes, people have made some very good plugins for Eclipse to handle Perl, Python, and other scripting languages. If you're willing to use Eclipse they turn it into quite a nice environment for the scripting language fo your choice, including debugging, good code completion, on the fly syntax checking and error flagging, and many other nice features.

Jedidiah.

A quick question. Has anyone made a plugin for Eclipse to handle Perl or any of the other popular scripting languages?

Yes, people have made some very good plugins for Eclipse to handle Perl, Python, and other scripting languages. If you're willing to use Eclipse they turn it into quite a nice environment for the scripting language fo your choice, including debugging, good code completion, on the fly syntax checking and error flagging, and many other nice features.

Jedidiah.

A quick question. Has anyone made a plugin for Eclipse to handle Perl or any of the other popular scripting languages?

Yes, people have made some very good plugins for Eclipse to handle Perl, Python, and other scripting languages. If you're willing to use Eclipse they turn it into quite a nice environment for the scripting language fo your choice, including debugging, good code completion, on the fly syntax checking and error flagging, and many other nice features.

Jedidiah.

Instead of charging an annual support service fee on a free product as many companies do, EnterpriseDB uses a "plain old software license," Astor said. The only difference with closed-source providers is that the EnterpriseDB database is based on PostgreSQL, an open-source product.

There's a nice debugger in Open Perl IDE, which unfortunately seems unmaintained. http://open-perl-ide.sf.net/

128MB of shared memory isn't enough

Lisp is still best under emacs.

Yes, but SchemeScript, tries to fill this gap. It has very good support for S-expression-based editing. It has been highly influenced by Emacs.

Download the hotfixes from another computer and burn them to a CD or copy them to a USB drive. See this thread on the Microsoft Software Forum Network for a list of the hotfixes currently out in the wild:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=3188 6

The page also lists the switches to specify to do a silent install, so once you've downloaded them all you can create a batch file to install them all, put the hotfixes and the batch file in a folder on a CD, insert CD, execute, get a snack, come back, your machine is now secure. huzzah!

Tip: If you have super sed ( http://sed.sf.net/grabbag/ssed/sed-3.59.zip ) Then you can make this batch file pretty easily. All of the hotfixes released after service pack 2 support the /q /n and /z switches (except the mailicious software removal tool, which isn't really a "hotfix" per se). So put all the hotfixes in one folder, open a command prompt and then navigate to that folder and then get your i/o redirection groove on:

dir /b *.exe | ssed -e "s,$, /q /n /z," > InstallHotfixSilent.cmd

I just made a list of things, and Slashdot will be making ad money from the list of other people's software being here:
http://sf.net/

http://digg.com/

http://grisoft.com/

Someone sue Slashdot! Quickly now!

The scalability of iPhoto is quite limited.
I use KameData to
organise and catalogue my photos and backup media.

...that is, a static analysis of a bunch of Java SourceForge projects. It does unused code and duplicate code detection... sometimes it finds some interesting things.

PMD home page is here, book site is here.

Their goal turned out to be the creation of a piece of software later called Fog Creek Copilot, which would help techies fix customers' or relatives' computers by giving them remote access to the ailing machines.

Great idea! Take an idea that already exists, in several variations, and create yet another incompatible implementation. When it fails, you can always fall back on the movie!

GoogleTalk in Gaim :

- for the messages, use jabber :
explained here, or in short :
Screen name : your gmail name (djsmiley2k)
Server : gmail.com
Password : (your gmail password)
Under Jabber option, Connect server : talk.google.com

- for the voice :
SIP isn't supported by Gaim, yet.
There was a fork experimenting with voice, Gaim-VV.
They did manage to get something interesting to work, and now they're working to port back their results into the main Gaim.
According to gaim's news, it'll be included in version 2.0.
Best part, one of the developper has been hired by google to make sure that gaim works with google talk's feature.

For your "IM window taking over the PC", it's a window manager problem.

Under Linux, it's just some settings to tweak
- KDE's control pannel "Desktop" - "Windows behaviour" - then play with "advanced" option (how much is it easy/hard to ask for focus) or "focus" (like "focus follows mouse", never get your focus stollen. Old school unix style)

Under Windows, well... the window manager just sucks. You must find another way.
- You may try Gaim - Tools - "Preferences" - "Plugins"
"notification icon" (message can stay minimized (and not focused) until you clic on icon, like on old icq98 client)
"message notification" (set different ways to alert about new message, like changing the title instead of asking for focus)
and optionnally you can install the "guifications" plugin (use "toaster" non-focused windows, like MSN. Effects on 3D games may vary. Doesn't show up when playing games on my old 3DFx Voodoo 5)

- There may be free tools (the "check against spyware before installing" kind) that can control the focusing behaviour of windows.

Since I mostly use Linux whenever given a choice (in other words, any time I can connect to my machine at home and/or drag my laptop around), I tend to prefer open-source programs like Gaim, which seems to support logging in on more than one screenname or network at the same time. Although I will admit, the only network I've used so far is AOL's, mostly because I've been using their instant messenger for years...

Honestly, though, I rarely use instant messenger much. I can't stand it. Whenever I want to talk to someone they're offline, and whenever someone wants to talk to me I'm busy. In fact, despite what some people say, I find e-mail to be a much faster medium for communication – whereas Gaim is almost never running on my machine, mostly because I usually don't leave it running, I almost always have Gmail open as one of the five different sites I've configured to all come up whenever I start my browser. (Isn't tabbed homepages great?)

Going to have to say Trillian = bloat + not completely free... and slow to develop. (And for my own irritation... skins so mottled that you have to re-learn how to use the app with each new skin or design your own) Gaim = slim + completely free... as in beer... as in open source and speedily developed... except for -just- recently as they are trying to get to 2.0 and add all the features and new code from the google summer of code team that was working on GAIM. Not to mention you have three flavors of security... gaim-encryption.. best one out there... gaim-e which I don't have any experience with.. and Off-The-Record encryption.. which is kinda like that little kid that lived down the block and spray painted his bike black so he could be cool like you... but is ok encryption and what AdiumX for OS X is stuck with thanks to no native GTK for OS X (but not for long! http://developer.imendio.com/wiki/Gtk_Mac_OS_X). Anyway.. Gaim is a bit more ugly, for sure.. but if you're practical and admire utility and inginuity... GAIM is the way to go. http://gaim.sf.net/ However, if yer mr. money buckets and like having to add stuff like a Jabber PLUG IN in order to use the jabber protocol and like lots of confusion because theres no UI guidelines when people make skins and you're not too concerned with the fact that AOL/Time-Warner actually sells a product to capture text sent over their instant messaging networks, and sells them to corporations... or that about three lines of PERL will do the same thing for another 'tech savvy' guy that sits three cubes down from you... well obviously security/privacy isn't anything important to you.

...has been tracking the various Sun Java-related giveaways; you can hear them talk about the Java Studio Creator and Java Studio Enterprise giveaway in JavaPosse # 13.

I highly recommend the JavaPosse podcasts; it's a great way to keep up with the latest developments in Java. Haha, get it, developments! Anyhow. They do a nice job of tracking things that most Java developers may not be using but will be someday - i.e., the recent discussions of the Mustang Hotspot speed improvements and such.

Disclaimer: They just interviewed me about PMD and my book PMD Applied. But still!

Amazing, this survey lists the first fact what I pray for years: "There are not enough common applications on Linux"! And the solution for this is: "Cross-platform development". Cross-platform development is easy if you do it as wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) suggests. Besides see this summarizing eWeek article http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1893639,00.as p.

Try out Thinstation

I at one stage had it running on a NetVista 2800, using it as a thin client to remote into various other machines.
Worked great, except for the 60Hz refresh rate making my eyes bleed.

I'm actually working on a very similar project, right now.

I'm trying to finish up the software end of things before I go out and purchase hardware, but I've got a sourceforge project up (AFX), although currently, I'm working on local versions of the source and not checking into CVS due to a major rewrite and complete lack of planning.

Use Xsu to get a graphical su login automatically when you need it (configuration varies). Instead of opening a new terminal and typing "su [enter] password [enter] vi /etc/mpd.conf [enter]," you'll just be typing "password [enter]" whenever you need to access something as root.

Use a graphical file explorer like Rox to navigate and sort through directories quickly. Don't rely on ls for everything; it is far faster and more flexible to organize files graphically. Dragging a box and one click-drag can replace dozens of keystrokes across multiple commands.

If you always startup X after you login, then have X startup automatically. No reason to type "startx" every time.

Use Conky for system monitoring.

Let normal users halt or reboot the system if appropriate. In many, many cases it's silly to maintain the *nix default behavior of only letting root shutdown/reboot the system. If you're running a server with dozens of remote users then yes, this would be unwise. If it's your personal workstation though, it's completely reasonable.

Use "slocate" instead of "find." Pardon me if this is obvious, but I still see too many *nix diehards waiting for "find" to finish when there's a perfectly up to date slocate DB ready for searching. "find" is nearly obsolete.

Have your drives automounted with Submount. It's pretty sad that something like this is not standard in the 2.6 kernel. Typing a command every time you want to read a CD looks pathetic to the average Windows user used to autorun or clicking "My Computer."

That's all I have for now. Basically, I liberally automate outdated procedures (which many *nix users still tolerate). This makes day-to-day operations much smoother overall, and doesn't disrupt tasks by having to constantly bring up new terminal windows.

#! /usr/bin/python
if ( "one man job" == "unreliable and poorly built" ):
    print "Well, maybe you're right."
else:
    print "I told you so!"

Depends on the license. Some things, such as the linux kernel, just want you to license it under GPL to them, in which case they're going to have to write a replacement for your part. But other projects require you to assign copyright to them - mysql and qt do this so they can release closed-source versions, but also e.g. the FSF requires assigning copyright so they can enforce violations better. I imagine Nessus required assigning copyright, otherwise a license change like this would be impractical. But then again, the reason for this is apparently that they were getting very few code contributions, so maybe the author has just rewritten everything that was contributed.

Just like other projects with licensing/source/philosophical issues - make a fork of the last available code and try to go their own way. Just like OpenBSD from NetBSD, IPCOP from Smoothwall, etc. etc.

It's happened already. http://sf.net/projects/segusius

Oh boy, I can account for this claim completely. I used to co-program with another person on a large website that used MySQL from the start. Him and myself would constantly look for ways of increasing performance and minimising lag, but we never tried using a different database. With a site that massive at the time, we should've been using PostgreSQL at least, or even Oracle or DB2 or similar if we could get the money to buy it. I even went as far as rewriting the entire system with the most optimised PHP code possible, and we minimised database usage and dependence, moving several things to sessions that would occasionally update from the database. We even used partitioning strategies by placing the main culprit of the data usage, the forum's replies table (nothing would get purged, only archived with an archived bit set to 1), on a separate hard drive that was only used for storing backups of the database. Performance shot up for a few days, but it quickly went back to sucking ass.

Sure, with all that, I've come to learn how to exploit MySQL to get its best performance, and how to use PHP to its maximum performance, but we would've been better off using a transactional database for one, and more specifically if we had used PostgreSQL from the start. Those efforts are primarily available here, but since the inital optimisations, I've transferred everything to use ADOdb Lite. I hope to get this transferred to a PostgreSQL database instead, but it won't matter much for the original site in question as I no longer program with him.