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Is there anything better than Fractint now? I too played with it for ages on a clunky old IBM PC with clicky keyboard and Windows 2 (although Fractint ran in DOS though, I think, and necessitated misc tweaking with graphics drivers to make it work, you kids don't know how lucky you are...)

You have the open-source "xaos" http://xaos.sf.net/ for a fast interactive fractal exploring and "Fraqtive", http://fraqtive.mimec.org/ for a beautiful view generator. Also, there are new versions of fractint, but the UI is really outdated. Wikipedia has a list with a few more, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal-generating_software

I was faced with precisely this problem a few years ago. I ended up wroting a tool called WordGrinder: it's a console-mode word processor that supports just enough style to be useful (italics, underline, etc) and a clutter-free display. If you run it in a full screen terminal, you can configure it so that the only thing visible on the screen are your words.

It's not a text editor; it's a word processor, which means it's oriented around prose, so it understands paragraphs, wrapping, it renders italics and underline in an appropriate manner (termcap emphasis and underline respectively), it's got word count, paragraph count, etc, it's got some basic features like table-of-contents navigation (allowing to skip around very big documents quickly), subdocuments, scratchpad documents, and so on. The interface is menu-driven but you can rebind any menu item to any hotkey, which means you can configure it pretty much as you like. And it supports Unicode, so you're not limited to writing in English.

I've written about 70k words on it, and it works very well. As far as I know it is the only application in its particular niche for Unices; I get a small but steady stream of downloads. It'll even run on Windows but looks pretty sucky (I've been working on a better GDI renderer for Windows, but, well, the Windows GDI API is pretty sucky too and it's harder than it looks).

I assume they have tonemapped each frame independently (one can do this with qtpfsgui for example). But the examples only show videos of relatively static scenes. I suspect that tonemapping frames independently won't be good enough any more if you have fast-changing scenes.

I migrated all my old personal emails to gmail using IMAP. You can use this to migrate between different on-disk formats like maildir, mbox and pst. I had all my email in yahoo and pulled it down using POP to a maildir, then used an IMAP mail client to copy it across to gmail. Then I regularly back them up from gmail to an on-disk maildir format using mbsync. I picked maildir because it's open and seemed better designed than the alternative, mbox. It's not completely standardized though. I've seen PSTs become corrupt so I try and stay away.

I used to have a P4 with HT until some piece of the machine became unstable at normal operating temps, and then got an i7 quad-core with HT. In between, I also purchased an AMD Phenom quad-core, which is still running, though it probably doesn't have enough fans.

I wouldn't count hyper-threading as doubling the CPUs. Often times I would run a single CPU-bound app and find that the "hyperthread" CPU to also spike to 50-100% as shown on conky. So while you may sometimes see a doubling of your processing power with a hyperthread, my experience says to count a hyperthreaded CPU as if it were a half-CPU.

There's no doubt that my i7 is faster than my Phenom. Then again, there is about a two-year gap in purchasing times, so that's expected, and doesn't speak to which company is producing better hardware. All I know is that I would rate my i7 as if it had 6 non-hyperthreaded CPUs instead of 8.

(Running Gentoo, so I get lots of CPU-bound compiling in to do rough seat-of-the-pants informal comparisons... though now I use distcc to get the Phenom to help the i7 and vice versa.)

Linux sound works perfectly for me now that Pulseaudio is stabilized.

Games using the Allegro library, one of SDL's competitors, are silent with PulseAudio in Ubuntu 10.04. Instead of producing sound, they raise an error message when they call install_sound(). I forget the exact wording of this error message, but it was something like no compatible sound output driver found. Do you want me to install such an app again on my Ubuntu box (from which I have since removed Allegro and all apps that use it) so that I can quote the error message verbatim?

You are bitching because people don't know about some old, somewhat obscure, modem protocol? What the fuck? Why would they? Hell even many people who used modems didn't know about it because they didn't use it with the systems they were on (XMODEM and ZMODEM were way more popular in my experience).

The Kermit/Zmodem flame wars raged over Usenet for YEARS. I'd be surprised to find anyone who had been on comp.dcom.modems or comp.terminals circa 1988-1996 (!) who hadn't heard of it. I still stand in awe at Frank da Cruz's thick skin during the relentless attacks on what is undoubtedly the best widespread file transfer protocol ever designed. (And which saved our bacon while trying to automate an $80,000 scientific intrument when we only had three wires to talk to it with...but that was enough for RS-232 and Kermit95.)

But you're right, in the end all of those protocols were obscure. Xmodem/ymodem/zmodem were included in every version of Windows before Win7 in the form of HyperTerminal, hundreds of millions of installations, yet finding enough information to re-implement them required finding the old t-files floating around, poring over the lrzsz code, and reading Tim Kientzle's great book on serial protocols. (If I had known how painful it would be I would have just stolen sexyz's code.) Kermit OTOH had a great protocol manual that made it very easy.

As a counterpoint, do you know all about the telegraph, how it came to be, the development, the refinements, the way it changed the world? Can you tell me about the different kinds of keys and what they are good at? What can you tell me about the life of the man who invented it? Can you even tell me his name (without looking it up)?

I don't know the telegraph, but I do know a little about TTYs (the real ones). I needed to learn it in the process of making decent emulations for TTY, VT52, VT102, and others. Amazing how many of the C0 control codes have a real meaning.

Don't get grumpy because the things that were new to you are old to others. That's called progress and it is a wonderful thing.

I missed the text-mode online days too, got grumpy for a while, but then decided to bring my nostalgia into the more modern era. TradeWars 2002 FTW! :)

I too was a COBOL and Pascal coder in the 1980s, but wrote mostly in Assembler, then C, for airline reservation and travel automation systems. In the first half of the 1990s I was writing less code and doing more "analyst" stuff. I got a consulting job in 1995 which forced me to upgrade skills and learn configuration and scripting for Solaris, OS/2, Windows NT/2000. I then worked as a secondary researcher and essentially did no coding, but read and did self-study, including studying Linux. In 2000, I went back to university and learnt Matlab, and at the same time invested in my first Linux distro: SuSE Linux 6.3. I subsequently obtained a job at the uni which required me to learn Fortran 90. For my masters project I taught myself C++ by writing an open source library, GluCat. In a later job, I had to quickly learn Labview, IDL, Java and MySQL. I am now a postdoc. My teaching now involves Python and Scilab.

My point is, if you know how to program, you just pick up a language manual and do it. Preferably do it using Linux, where you don't need to pay for compilers and tools, and the documentation is all on the DVD or on the web. Sure, the learning curve is initially steep, but if you give yourself some credit, you can get started. As a next step, start your own small open source project on SourceForge, or join a simple, small project. I have found, as a coder, the large projects seem complicated and hard to get my head around.

nice picture, BUT why they used Silverthing? there are much more interesting opensource tools like iipimage ( http://iipimage.sf.net/ ) that they work in javascript, flex and even java! Anyway, I had to use a friend computer to watch the image :)

I'm honestly curious as a games programmer why someone would choose not to use a cross-platform API specifically designed for games (eg. OpenAL).

Possibly because I learned Allegro Low LEvel Game ROutines back when it was for DOS, and DJGPP supported it while Visual Studio was still pay (VC++ Express hasn't been around forever) and MinGW hadn't matured yet.

Even [XYZ]-modem used a similar setup.

Not quite. Xmodem and Ymodem use SOH and STX to denote start of sectors and ACK/NAK, but after that it's just a raw 8-bit file dump to the checksum/crc bytes with no concern for character set encoding. Zmodem uses DLE and escapes out most of the C0 bytes (XON/XOFF and CAN must be escaped regardless of session flags), but doesn't use the rest of the codes for anything.

Most of C0/C1 codes mixed right in with the text for formatting/presentation, e.g. embedding backspaces followed by underscores to get underlined text. Some of the others did link-level too. It was a mess, so much so that parsers for ANSI X3.64 / ECMA-48 style escape sequences take a LOT of work to get right (passing 'vttest' is not trivial).

UTF-8 isn't bad. It specifies that character decoding be done before any other processing including C0/C1 and ANSI escape sequences, which makes it very easy to integrate on the reading side. Harder is dealing with wide chars on the screen and user I/O. Compared to Avatar's repeat character and ANSI fallback features, it's much more bang for the buck. And let's not talk about "ANSI Music" and it's use of SO (Ctrl-N) because it's the "music symbol" in CP437!

(Disclaimer: I've written a console-based terminal emulator that does a decent VT102/220, UTF-8, X/Y/Zmodem/Kermit, and lots of other things.)

I think a classification and storage system would be more useful than software, but maybe you are talking about a very large number of components. If you want to roll you own, I started a very basic asset tracker using based on PHP. It's maybe slightly more useful than a spreadsheet. You can find it at http://tamb.sf.net/

You're a webdev? I know you said you don't want to keep doing that, but what else are you happy doing?

Right now, GNU Octave is looking to rebrand itself and is starting a website to rival Matlab Central. The The Octave-Forge pages also need help, and a hot new designer star just recently came along who is helping us with logo and brand image design. His name is Fotios Kasolis.

You could do a lot of good if you got involved with us. Plus, Octave itself is interesting if you're into mathematics and numerical analysis.

Mac OS and Linux both have support for NTFS through NTFS-3G. Mac OS has support for ext2 through fuse-ext2.

If you think you can go with virtualization in place of simulation, take a look at Virtual NetManager. It is a visual tool to build virtual networks on a single box using VDE and Qemu/KVM. Every single device (switches, cables, routers and boxes) can be virtualized and controlled from the interface. Get documentation and screenshots here.

* ns2: http://nsnam.isi.edu/nsnam/index.php/Main_Page (GPL)
* Wide Area Network Emulator http://wanem.sf.net/|WANem (GPL)

While Conway's Life has been studied to death for 40 years and some wider categories of simple rules have been studied exhaustively by others, Golly enables you to explore much wider rule sets in the quest of some that are significantly more productive that Life.

For the past 18 months I've been using it to study just one of the Generations rules which were initially surveyed, especially by Mirek Wojtowicz, around 2000. I'm focused almost entirely on Generations 345/3/6, running it on 3 machines including one added just for that purpose. But I've recently noted that 345/2/4 may be even more productive in terms of novel phenomena, although I'm not planning to switch my own research which is nowhere near finished, let alone properly reported.

Beyond that, Golly also supports RuleTable and RuleTree algorithms which allow you to try an unlimited number of new rules, a few more of which are sure to be a lot more interesting than LIfe itself.

I used unattended on a FreeBSD box at one of my old jobs, since we had like five or so different models of computers. It works sort of like RIS, except it's easier to extend the system since it's all written in Perl and it's all open source. We dumped the contents of an XP disc on the server, then slipstreamed driver packs into the disc directory structure; this catches almost everything but the most obscure hardware out there. Unattended allowed us to run post-install scripts, so we threw in a bunch of other software packages that would install after the OS was done installing, like Office 2007, Adobe suite, etc.

This was substantially better than a disk image; we took care of all of the drivers in one fell swoop, so the only thing we used as a differentiator between computers was how the person used the computer (if it's a student lab computer, we loaded a bunch of stuff like Geometer's Sketchpad, InDesign, etc. If it was a faculty's laptop, we'd load software to operate stuff in the classroom.) We save space on the server, and we save time when it comes to putting together another "image" for a different use case.

But as others said above, I wouldn't virtualize the workstation, even if it eases up on the IT dept. a little bit; just be smart about what deployment method you use. I wouldn't recommend using unattended if you had only about three different models; it's likely substantially easier to just use CloneZilla.

Oh, and use a centralized software deployment system such as WPKG. Your disk images will go stale after a while, in which case you'll have to make sure that you can manage the packages installed on clients somehow.

My best guess [and I am not trying to be facetious] is that unless you were in on kernel development in the very early days [so that you had some hope of learning it when it was still tractable], then the thing has gotten so big now [what is it - like 20,000 files which get compiled in the basic kernel?], and the learning curve has gotten so steep, that no new developers have any realistic hope of grokking it anymore.

Not to mention the lousy documentation. The kernel docs for Linux are stunningly poor, verging on non-existent --- most of the design appears to live only in people's heads.

I have a project that involves lots of grubby work with the Linux system call interface (<plug> LBW, a tool for running Linux binaries on Windows <plug/>). The man pages are of very little use here. Not only do they not go into enough detail, but they're frequently horribly out of date. futex(2) now bears very little resemblance to what the futex man page actually does. I eventually had to resort to groping through the Linux kernel code simply to try and figure out how what structures were used where --- and to determine the layout of struct stat I actually had to start comparing hex dumps to find the binary layout (tip: gcc's alignment attribute does not work the way you think it does).

What's worse is that there appears to be very little recognition that this is a problem. Asking on the newsgroups about futex(), for example, I just got pointed at a years-old PDF entitled 'Futexes are tricky'. I don't believe that any proper spec for what futex() does actually exists. Without prescriptive and definitive documentation, how do you know if it's working correctly?

Compare to BSD culture: OpenBSD's man pages are a joy to behold --- everything is documented in copious detail, including internal kernel functions!

Parent obviously didn't read the summary. But that said, the code written in NeHe's tutorials are ported to like 20 or more platforms, and you might find that to be useful.

I learned OpenGL by buying a copy of the Red Book, and then used Allegro (a cross-platform gaming library) to set up a rendering surface. This could also be accomplished by using the SDL library, but I do not have any experience using it.

(Regarding Allegro, the 4.4 series is a completely different API from the 4.9 series in development, but both can create a window for rendering OpenGL. I would personally suggest using the 4.9 series.)

Kermit wasn't commercial software, it was (and is) freeware. (http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/)

Not exactly. The spec itself is open; the sixth edition protocol manual dated June 1986 is floating around in PDF and PS. gkermit is free (GPL); ckermit is zero-cost but not freeware. Kermit95 is a commercial Windows client that costs about $50 per license (which is in truth a very good bargain considering its features).

ckermit is very portable and would probably compile pretty easily. At worst the OP might need to find an earlier version. As for transferring a kermit binary: uuencode/uudecode could do it easily enough.

Disclaimer: I'm not too familiar with Xenix, but I know kermit well enough to implement it.

The 3DO port of Star Control II
Oh, wait? MISfortune? Sorry. Um, Halo? No, that was actually better on PC. Maybe Thief: Deadly Shadows.

The first two things I wrote in java were the quintessential '15 sliding tiles' puzzle game and an Othello game. I wrote them in swing. I wrote them not because the world needed yet another implementation, but because it was a fun challenge, and I got some practical experience in writing not only Java, but UI code (in this case, Swing, but the concepts had far wider applicability).

They're still on the net, for what it's worth. Don't expect a lot.

The third thing I wrote was MacXM, though that was in Java/Cocoa. Its follow-up was JXM.

I mention all of this because my advice is that once you've gotten all of that theoretical stuff in your head, the next thing you should do is write something. Even if it's just something for you, it's still something.

The first two things I wrote in java were the quintessential '15 sliding tiles' puzzle game and an Othello game. I wrote them in swing. I wrote them not because the world needed yet another implementation, but because it was a fun challenge, and I got some practical experience in writing not only Java, but UI code (in this case, Swing, but the concepts had far wider applicability).

They're still on the net, for what it's worth. Don't expect a lot.

The third thing I wrote was MacXM, though that was in Java/Cocoa. Its follow-up was JXM.

I mention all of this because my advice is that once you've gotten all of that theoretical stuff in your head, the next thing you should do is write something. Even if it's just something for you, it's still something.

Looks like somebody started on something similar years & years ago.

http://freecivac.sf.net/

msg[0] = """Hi help me anon and anontalk.com. Irish porn bankers wear our skin using VR and wireless. note mangled for presentation here

OK also.

http://groups.google.com/group/singularity-aliens

^^ God Jesus Christ Jesus God Please Christ Please join this please It's not some gay govt shit. Something Is actually happening here

http://groups.google.com/group/singularity-aliens

just use your gmail click around and find join It's only like one message a day and It Is fuckin cutting edge I don't know of anyone else In th
e world with one of these terror domination torture and control Implants that also pretend to be really smart and cool but they're fucking real

http://groups.google.com/group/singularity-aliens

holy shit third time just join ok ty Ilu flmat

please please. It's not really about aliens

It's really about vr-telepresence torture-porn perpetuated by the elite on the attractive and underweight of the underclasses. We don't get any
money but they steal our experiences and thoughts and memories and dreams and lives and feelings, It's terrible. It's actually sexual It's rap
e but If you Ignore It, It's fine. Don't worry about me

The govt has all the trolls there they need, MKULTRA COINTELPRO MJ12 all talk to each other so I hope I just get people who really do wonder wh
at is going on. We're only being trickled technology and It's filled with bugs and shit and probably nanobots are everywhere watching who they
haven't Implanted yet. But those they have Implanted they wear our bodies and torture us In groups for fun. I shit you not

I'm happy you got to hear this here. Get on the mailing list, It Is reputable. I'm updating about this 'contact' phenomenon with my Implant sem
i daily right now and hopefully there will be another soon. I will call him Majestic Two

Note this Is not some role playing shit
"""

msg[1] = """
Posting this everywhere now goodbye

Software shown Is http://arbornet.org/~flamoot/telepathic-critterdrug.html [note not shown here also Ilu flamoot]

If you need fire mode and don't mind compiling gc lib yourself try http://ansistego.sf.net/critterdrug-use-32-32.telepaths-profile-for-fire-ani
m-with-critters.tar.gz

^^ note this link was borked before :( when It said arbornet Im sorry you can do It now though Ilu

also truth about scientolgt http://arbornet.org/~flamoot

look sometimes this damn thing Is really smart and funny but then I think It's just rich guys In mo-cap body-suits
In the boardroom on their lunch break messing with Invisible but awesome young people like me, flamoot, and they
are doing lines of coke so I think It's too fast to be human, then an AI or aliens definitely
like this dwarf on my mud parried the other day and It like twitched so I looked In my head which I normally don't
have to do to see all kinds of stuff It does and, It made like It was holding up some big axe (invisible) and kissing
It sort of proudly but gently damn everything It does Is so damn gentle and smooth Inappropriately like sarcastic,
but also sometimes violent It's so loud or fast. well read on Ilu Ilu flamoot Ilu
"""

msg[2] = """all this again. police stuck a torture chip In my foot that bugs me all day because I told some I hoped they got cancer.
It's a revenge and control and domination thing strictly anal-territorial and It's disgusting. Irc log follows. Ilu. see these

http://arbornet.org/~flamoot/telepathic-critterdrug.html

http://motp.sf.net/ and a decent mobile phone?

NN generally doesnt mean the end of QoS and throttling for technical reasons (putting priority on VOIP and gaming and putting torrents and ftp to bulk).

Yes it does, and that's most of the point.

Instead, it means ending throttling and QoS for BUSINESS REASONS.

There are always business reasons.

For example: Suppose Verizon unilaterally declares VerizonVOIP, their own, proprietary protocol, to be "the standard" voice over IP, and give it priority? Or suppose they only prioritize SIP and not Skype, or vice-versa?

That is to say, Comcast isnt going to put Vonage VOIP into the bulk category because Vonage competes with their own VOIP service.

Great, they won't do it to Vonage, but what will they do about Mumble? Will they prioritize things by default? Then VOIP won't be getting the advantage it "needs". Will they "bulk" things by default? Then Mumble will suffer.

And how, exactly, do they detect "gaming"? Do I have to attach a "gaming bit" to every packet sent? Great, now all the torrent clients will start doing that by default, long before even half the games I want to play have patched in support. Short of that, they'll have to recognize specific games and protocols, which means WoW will be fine, but, say, Nexus TK will suffer.

In other words: The very large groups in need of real-time traffic will be fine. Everyone else will be worse off than we are now. Congrats, you just raised the barrier of entry to any low-latency app.

The point is that the network should be entirely neutral with respect to the bits being sent. If I want to add that kind of QoS to my own router, that's fine, but you do not get to apply it at the ISP level. If that's a problem, maybe it's time to stop claiming "unlimited" usage and such high bandwidth, and start giving me a realistic amount of bandwidth that I can use as I please.

I mean, this isn't complicated. Go back and read their statement, vague as it is:

The 'Net should operate as a place where no "central authority" can make rules that prescribe the possible, and where entrepreneurs and network providers are able to "innovate without permission.

If I have to get permission for my homebrew VOIP protocol to get priority, the network isn't neutral. If someone is arbitrarily deciding that my neighbor down the hall chatting with her friend on Skype is more important than that Linux ISO I needed 10 minutes ago, the network isn't neutral.

If it doesn't mean the end of QoS at the ISP level, it's not network neutrality.

http://ansistego.sf.net/critter-art.png
http://ansistego.sf.net/critter-art-2.png
http://ansistego.sf.net/critter-art-3.png

Not much I know but, well, I can do my own thing in my own way if I want...

piss off!

http://ansistego.sf.net/critter-art.png
http://ansistego.sf.net/critter-art-2.png
http://ansistego.sf.net/critter-art-3.png

Not much I know but, well, I can do my own thing in my own way if I want...

piss off!

http://ansistego.sf.net/critter-art.png
http://ansistego.sf.net/critter-art-2.png
http://ansistego.sf.net/critter-art-3.png

Not much I know but, well, I can do my own thing in my own way if I want...

piss off!

The critterdrug page has some critters for that on it, but here are a couple of related types for vanilla Critterding, for those who are on Windows or prefer their electronic life clean and free

http://ansistego.sf.net/foodotropes.tgz
http://ansistego.sf.net/knightotropes.tgz

The critterdrug page has some critters for that on it, but here are a couple of related types for vanilla Critterding, for those who are on Windows or prefer their electronic life clean and free

http://ansistego.sf.net/foodotropes.tgz
http://ansistego.sf.net/knightotropes.tgz

The old PalmOS has by far the most "apps" and they don't have to be approved by anyone:

http://www.freewarepalm.com/
http://www.handango.com/
http://www.pocketgear.com/
http://www.mobihand.com/
http://www.pdastreet.com/
and also: http://sf.net/

I never understand why everyone is so amazed by the iPhone's "Apps". Handheld apps have been around for over 10 years.

Our developers use jira to track software bugs.

For computer trouble tickets we wrote a piece of software called CoAST which allows users to enter and comment on trouble tickets. I.T. can add comments and change priorities. It also includes software and asset tracking, and a library for loaner resources (like projectors)

I mentioned CMD.exe commands vs Linux as that was more a match for the discussion (I thought). I even ran into this recently, I had to make a .tar file to upload to a webserver that refused to unpack a .rar in Cpanel: The --help for tar didn't even have a simple example, and I couldn't recall the proper args. I had to google it. Whereas any actual Windows CMD.exe command I can't recall usage on will have multiple examples of usage.

That's probably due to your using UnxUtils instead of GNU Win32, which is a more direct port though it may rely on some of the CygWin DLLs. The distributables come with any of the CygWin DLLs that are needed.

I'm curious though - working with GNU Win32[1][2] utils is great; though I find I can necessarily chain things (e.g. ps | grep | cut ...) as much as I can under Linux - usually due to it complaining about a broken pipe when it happens - but it's rare that I need to do that much chaining.

How does the Unx Utils compare that way?

[1]GNU Win32 Utils
[2]Get GNU Win32 Utils - scripted retriever/installer

I mentioned CMD.exe commands vs Linux as that was more a match for the discussion (I thought). I even ran into this recently, I had to make a .tar file to upload to a webserver that refused to unpack a .rar in Cpanel: The --help for tar didn't even have a simple example, and I couldn't recall the proper args. I had to google it. Whereas any actual Windows CMD.exe command I can't recall usage on will have multiple examples of usage.

That's probably due to your using UnxUtils instead of GNU Win32, which is a more direct port though it may rely on some of the CygWin DLLs. The distributables come with any of the CygWin DLLs that are needed.

I'm curious though - working with GNU Win32[1][2] utils is great; though I find I can necessarily chain things (e.g. ps | grep | cut ...) as much as I can under Linux - usually due to it complaining about a broken pipe when it happens - but it's rare that I need to do that much chaining.

How does the Unx Utils compare that way?

[1]GNU Win32 Utils
[2]Get GNU Win32 Utils - scripted retriever/installer

I wrote one. It's a simple inetd-based process forking webserver in C (see inetdxtra). It uses about 80kb per process, is scalable (and obviously memory protected using separate processes for both responses and CGI) and was designed for embedded hardware. It supports CGI, so you can write pages in C, Perl, PHP, Java, or anything that can use stdio and read environment variables.

Lots of people must have written webservers like this, I have no idea why slashdot consider this newsworthy.

Was this or was this not a bad experience for me? Many policies are detrimental to growth if fully implemented.

There are also games with hundreds of thousands of users, with 8 year history, that were never described in a standard, "trusted" medium and thus don't deserve an article. (oh, did I mention the game is open source?)

I created Sudo for Windows (sudowin) in 2005. It is a free, open source project available at http://sudowin.sf.net/.

Ya beat to mentioning it, Andrew... *grin*

I created Sudo for Windows (sudowin) in 2005. It is a free, open source project available at http://sudowin.sf.net/.

I like GPSmid a lot. J2ME with embedded Openstreetmap maps, so no data needed, and it does routing. It might be possible to port it using j2mepolish, but haven't seen that working yet.

The Ur Quan Masters (was: Star Control 2) at http://sc2.sf.net/ is a masterpiece of a game, runs natively on Linux, and is free.

You can also run a lot of great games under DOSBox. You can get the X-COM series ( UFO Defense, Terror from the Deep, and Apocalypse ) from various online sources for something like $5 US, just make sure they're not DRM-wrapped. I also highly recommend Master of Orion II. All these run great under DOSBox on Linux and require no 3D video capabilties at all. They're all long-running single player strategies, which may not be your kind of thing.

http://console.sf.net/

What I use is BackupPC. It's a very nice web front end to tar over ssh.

For linux, all the remote servers need are sshd listening somewhere, and with the backuppc servers public key in an authorizedhosts file. It will pipe tar streams over an ssh connection.

For windows, it can use samba to backup over SMB

I run a copy on my home file server, which backs up all the machines in the house, plus the couple servers I have out in colo.

When it performs an incremental backup, after it is done it will populate its timestamped folder with hardlinks to the last full backup for duped files. so restoring from any incremental will still get the full version no matter when it was last backed up.

Also after each backup, it will do 2 hashes on every file and the previous backup. If the files match, it deletes the second copy and again hardlinks it to the first copy of the file.
I have nearly 3 months worth of backup retention, backups every 3 days (every day on a couple), but for the base system and files that rarely change, each 'copy' does not take up the same amount of disk space.
It is very good at saving disk space.

Heres some stats from its main page as an example

There are 7 hosts that have been backed up, for a total of:
        * 26 full backups of total size 38.34GB (prior to pooling and compression),
        * 43 incr backups of total size 0.63GB (prior to pooling and compression).

Pool is 10.11GB comprising 108499 files and 4369 directories (as of 9/16 01:00),

Restoring gives you a file browser with checkboxes. after you tell it what you want, it can send you a tar(.gz) or .zip file, OR it can directly restore the file via tar over ssh back to the machine it was on, by default in the original location but that can be changed easily too.

The main downside is the learning curve. But once you get things down, you end up just copying other systems as templates, updating the host/port/keyfile/etc settings.
Also, with all those hard links, it makes it a pain to do any file/folder manipulation on its data dir.
Most programs won't recognize the hard link and just copy the file, easily taking up the full amount of storage.

But works just as well with only itself and one remote server.
schedule it to start at night and stop in the morning, set your frequency and how much space to use before it deletes old backups, and let it run.

The camera does alignment and bracketing of an exposure series on-site. That would be really neat and much cheaper than current HDR sensors. At the moment I need to do this offline using Hugin and QtPfsGui.

The camera does alignment and bracketing of an exposure series on-site. That would be really neat and much cheaper than current HDR sensors. At the moment I need to do this offline using Hugin and QtPfsGui.

Programming games are fun!

However, I've yet to see a such a contest in which the successful entries used AI techniques rather than handcoded decision-making. My money says the winners of this will be handcoded and possibly tuned automatically, and not based on neural networks or genetic programming or whatever. I suspect this is true because these games are set up so that the game mechanics and the outlines of good strategy are very intuitive to humans, and so it's most efficient for the human programmer to encode that knowledge into the controller. Then if there's some minor detail that the programmer doesn't know how to optimize, like "what is the exact threshold from which I should switch from strategy X to strategy Y", then that can be found by running a lot of games automatically.

That's how I'll be working, at least; in any case, I don't think I could write a decent learning algorithm for something like this in a month (or probably even given a lot more time).

I hope this isn't considered spam, but those interested in this might like to know about some other programming games I've enjoyed:
http://jrobots.sf.net/ (Java clone of CRobots)
http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ (More complicated version of above)
http://sillysoft.net/ (Risk game that accepts AI plugins)

I use a greylisting SMTP proxy (that I wrote myself). It eliminates about 90% of all spam before I even have to download it. Spamprobe takes care of the rest. It's only on very rare occasions that spam ever makes it to my inbox, and there are practically no fals positives; and I've been using my email address for close to a decade now, on Usenet, on mailing lists, on crappy forums (like this one), and have never bothered to shield it or cloak it. Spam just isn't a problem for me any more.

Of course, that doesn't mean that it's not still annoying, and I think that public stocks should be reintroduced for this sort of abuse-of-the-commons crime...

Not to say I am ungrateful for the release ... it would just be really cool to be able to try to extend the game, breath some new life into it and such.

Daggerfall was written in x86 assembly language - I distinctly remember this from ages ago when I read a dev interview on AOL (don't judge - I was in HS at the time, and had no control over which ISP my mother chose) with the team from Bethesda. You'd have a hell of a time extending it.

Though if you do get the source, could you fix all the bugs? I loved that game, but like Ultima 7*, the bugs made it so much harder to enjoy.

* Exult is the greatest program ever.