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I wrote mplayerplug-in. I also submit patches to other projects when I can.

I'm farely well organized and I don't use my desktop search service (shameless plug http://nariva.sf.net/) much for finding things that I know are there. One of the real benefits is finding things that are related to things that are there. All Desktop search is is a data mining application for end users. Money probably wouldn't be made from ad revenue but from branding, customization and corporate search services. Search is the key to any good content management system and that is the future of the agile business. Providing it to end users now gives you mindshare when it arrives in the future.

Shameless plug: Nariva http://nariva.sf.net/ is a java based OSS desktop search tool I'm working on. Uses mostly Apache software but is still in beta. If anyone in the OSS community is interested in helping me out, feel free.

I've been working on one since before Google Desktop search came out (honest!). Some of my other projects have taken priority though. Check out http://nariva.sf.net/ . It's an Apache Lucene based desktop search service. Uses Apache VFS so conceptually you should be able to index anything network reachable (ftp server, webdav) in addition to the local filesystem. Methods are exposed using Apache's XML-RPC so you could write your own GUI if you want to. I wrote a Firefox based GUI that I also make available on sourceforge. Nariva is still beta and so are some of the libraries it's using but feel free to try it out. I could always use some help. :).

Lzip

What is lzip?
Glad you asked. Lzip is an advanced file compression utility that
generates smaller file sizes than either gzip or bzip2, and does so
much faster. Lzip can achieve these goals because it it based on a
so-called "lossy" compression scheme (most other utilties make use of
slower, less efficient "lossless" compression). For more information,
you can consult the Frequently Asked Questions list. Or, you can dive
right in, grab the 1.0 tarball and start reducing your bloated files
down to 10%, 15%, in some cases 0% of their original size!

yeah. actually, Azureus is much faster. on my computers (windows and linux), it's barely a speck of CPU usage.

of course, the official clients under windows are about the same, as they're compiled into machine code, so it shouldn't be having any speed issues either.

I've had a situation before where every time someone's 2.4GHz phone rang, the local backbone would go down. It's really amazing how much noise those phones put out. Most wifi equipment is pretty friendly to other devices in the area, but some of the phones are almost as effective as a EMP bomb.

I'm not trying to deal with a similar situation in my neighborhood. Every time my neighbor gets on the phone, my local network becomes unusable, even if I'm 3 feet from the AP. Of course, it wouldn't be so bad if my drivers were decent... madwifi blows if you have any noise in the area.

Right. The good news is that while a lot of people will cry out to be screwed, there will be people serious about security who say, "Your products have been so virus-prone in the past. Why should I trust them now?" One of my friends is in the latter group; he's the IT/security guy with multi-million-dollar company, and they are absolutely fanatical about security. Guess what? The whole organization uses Macs. Believe me, these kinds of institutions have significant purchasing power.

On a tangent, I'll admit that my understanding of trusted computing is limited, but wouldn't the "master key" which would allow any software to be run on your computer (which would of course be held by the vendor) be the ultimate prize for malware purveyors and virus authors? The temptation to sell and steal these would be extremely high. All it takes, buddy, is one corrupt employee. Or, for that matter, companies could willingly sell the right to "advertise" on their customer's computers.

And with regard to shareware, I recently discovered how many of my favorite GPL'd applications also run on Windows, like Pan or Gaim. Point more of your friends to http://sf.net/.

> Is there a single country in the world where one can do security research without being accosted by the Man?

Yes, in Freenet contry.

It's the same reason that there are no Open Source computer games that compare to commercial games.

Cough.

Now, amend that to "very few Open Source computer games" and I'll agree 100% with you, sadly...

How does peercasting compare to something like Dijjer. Anybody try it out lately, i remember it being mentioned on slashdot sometime ago but haven't heard much about it lately.

There's something rather amusing about a PHP extension specifically designed to keep code and markup separate, given that allowing you to combine code and markup has always been PHPs main (almost only - it's a pretty horrible language) selling point.

I'm quite partial to TAL for a templating language myself (available for python and PHP, among others).

The majority of development has moved over to a subproject on the logicampus project on sourceforge. sf.net/projects/logicampus . Feel free to post any questions over there - the main .com site is not being updated much, although that may change in the next few months.

What are some of the pros/cons you saw in LC compared to other projects? Mostly curious here, but it's nice to get that kind of unsolicited plug on /. here. :)

Music - XMMS (WinAMP on Windows), is there even a comparison to Windows Media Player here?

WinAMP ist not FOSS. It's a free (beer) closed source app.
Both are just a joke comparing to iTunes.

Video - MPlayer, it even runs without X Window. Can Windows Media Player run video in MS-DOS?

What kind of argument is this? Who cares about DOS? WMP is OK when you install the missing codecs. (I prefer VLC though)

Web Browser - Mozilla FireFox. Internet Exploder doesn't even compare.

And Opera? Firefox is also my favourite browser, but Opera has many interesting features that you can't find anywhere else. Opera is commercial or free (beer) software, but not FOSS.

File Browsing - Nautilus, Konqueror. They crash 100% less of the time that Windows Explorer crashes.

What are you doing with Explorer? I didn't see it crash the last couple of... er... years.

And no annoyingly built-in Internet Explorer that's available even if I denied access to iexplore.exe (which I do on spyware-infested clients' computers).

How about blocking Explorer.exe and deleting iexplore.exe? (That's what I do when I have do mess with Windows.)

And let's not mention the horrid Mac OS X versions of MS Office.

Yeah, MS Office:mac is sooo bad when compared against GNUmeric and OpenOffice. OK, GNUmeric and OpenOffice only run in an X-Window, don't support drag&drop, looks ugly-as-hell, etc. while MS Office supports all that stuff. Wow, GNUmeric and OpenOffice are soooo superior.....
(BTW: Yes, I know about NeoOffice/J - it's my main Office suite. But NeoOffice is != OpenOffice)
Abiword compares to Wordpad, not Word (or OpenOffice Writer).

Instant Messenger - Well, GAIM may be missing some features of proprietary AOL AIM, but one of those features missing is the spyware.

Trillian? How about that?

Programming - Do I even need to compare the long list of free, open-source and standardized Unix/Linux tools to the not-quite-as-affordable MS Visual Studio??

A lot of developers say that VisualStudio is the best programming environment. Others say it's Xcode. Both aren't FOSS.

PS: No, I'n not bashing FOSS. Most apps I use are FOSS like Firefox, Thunderbird, or Fire Messenger, but theres more closed source software that's better than it's FOSS counterparts than just Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Opera is cool. Trillian is cool. MS Office:mac, Explorer (not IE), or Windows Media Player not so bad either.

which is free software (and coincidentally written by me ;)

Get it here.

Someone's ported it to Linux too.

I've actually been trying to archive as much as I can of old stunt island films before they disappear forever. The archive is available here:

http://halelamien.no-ip.org/stunt_island/

Unfortunately, I've only been able to locate a little bit so far. If anyone has old movies lying around on floppy disks or something, please let me know at neuronexmachina@gmail.com

Also, Stunt Island runs like a charm in DOSBox, and you can typically acquire it from an abandonware site like The Underdogs.

But CherryOS does exist! You can download it for free here. If what is said is true, it's just a modified version of PearPC.

What would be the easiest way to run the client on Linux? All FAQs I've seen still refer to the long-dead native client. I know Iris exists, yet all I have at hand is the 2D data, this thing wants 3D data (which is presumably downloadable completely legally through some way or other), and my Windows partitions are out right now so I can't use the real thing, even on Wine.

So, where do I get the client data?

Take a look at Common Lisp (see: http://www.common-lisp.net/ or http://www.cliki.net/ or http://sbcl.sf.net/ ).

It is a language supporting every paradigm you'll ever need. And if not you can (portably!) code it. The hacker's language of choice.

Uhh, I can. Right now I'm running Azureus, a Java/SWT-based P2P app, with one torrent downloading and none uploading. It takes up 50m of physical mem. and 60 megs of virtual mem. Emule, which is written in C++, takes about half that with 10 or 15 shares running. At it's way more responsive too. Java 5 is nicer, but it's untrue that there is no difference between Java and native apps. Have you run StarOffice recently?

Uhh, I can. Right now I'm running Azureus, a Java/SWT-based P2P app, with one torrent downloading and none uploading. It takes up 50m of physical mem. and 60 megs of virtual mem. Emule, which is written in C++, takes about half that with 10 or 15 shares running. At it's way more responsive too. Java 5 is nicer, but it's untrue that there is no difference between Java and native apps. Have you run StarOffice recently?

I mean seriously, LJ has got to be the most hideously unusable website since Sourceforge - are there any usability guidelines it doesn't violate?

Cheers, nice one, I'll give it a try.

Meanwhile I found a cool project called PyWM that should (I say should since I haven't actually tested it, will give it a go tonight) provide an FVWM-like WM written in (or at least providing a huge API for) Python, and since I can hack a bit of Python myself, it sounds like a nice option too...

Not necessarily. UML is mostly useful to app-level programmers (and those who work with them), whereas UML is mostly useful to sysadmins and system-level programmers (with whom UML, to the best of my knowledge, has never really caught on).

I'm at least a nominal member of all three sets, and I work much more with UML than UML.

Not necessarily. UML is mostly useful to app-level programmers (and those who work with them), whereas UML is mostly useful to sysadmins and system-level programmers (with whom UML, to the best of my knowledge, has never really caught on).

I'm at least a nominal member of all three sets, and I work much more with UML than UML.

I second OpenVPN was well.

We've used FreeS/WAN (now OpenVPN) since 2001, with nary an issue. We currently have 12 connections ranging from 144KBit to 3Mbit (all business quality!) all connected together. The VPN/firewall hardware at each site is a Pentium 120Mhz w/ 32MB or RAM, two network cards, and nothing but a floppy disk booting/running LEAF's Bering-uCLib. We have Win2K/XP VPN clients connecting to these "LEAF" systems as well. In theory, OpenVPN can support many hundreds of VPN tunnels - though the highest we've pushed it was around 30 (ie: permeant tunnels plus the Win32 clients) - with about 600 users between all the sites.

When we stress-tested this hardware/software combo, we were able to push just over 7Mbit/sec, and only added about 5ms latency to the link!

This combo has been rock solid - not a single connection failure can be blamed on the VPN software - it has been either the last mile, a NIC failure, or a bad floppy disk. Administration is via SSH (with a web-based admin console in development), and the firewall code is Shorewall.

i also recommend openvpn. supported on a majority of systems: windows 2k/xp, linux, mac os x, bsds, & solaris. here's the howto.

imho, great example of kernel/user-land separation: tun/tap virtual device driver is the only kernel-side part, the rest is in user-land. no more having freeswan keep the system from cleanly shutting down because of a lost reference to a network device. but there is overhead from context switches between kernel & user, though it's a trade-off i think is worthwhile.

you can do ip or ethernet tunneling, depending how far down the osi model you want to go and how much overhead you are willing/able to process. with a single wireless client in my household, i do ethernet tunneling, as it frees me from having to do any ip routing and configuring a wins server (which i've found problematic with windows 2000 and samba 2.2 on debian stable).

openvpn openvpn can use shared key or tls, just depends on what you want. you can quickly develop a proof of concept with shared keys (prove software installation, network communication, etc work) and then "upgrade" to tls.

openvpn uses openssl for it's encryption/authentication engine. that means that all the scrutiny and improvements openssl receives (security analysis, assembly encoded algorithms, hardware engines, etc) benefits openvpn. i'm interested in doing openvpn on the via epia platform with hardware-assisted openssl serving as wireless xterminals.

encrypting lots of bandwidth means lots of processor cycles, and depending on the speed of your processors and the bandwidth between the two, expect some slow down. this is not particular to openvpn, but any (software) encryption, so choose your hardware accordingly (with lots of benchmarking for your particular use case).

ipsec is a valid option, though i prefer openvpn. ipsec is a standard, and is supported on more platforms than openvpn (especially embedded systems & dedicated hardware), but is firstly cumbersome to configure and secondly compatibility is theoretically possible between all implementation but not guaranteed. i once connected windows 2000 and linux/freeswan using ipsec. nate carlson's howto is invaluable. with linux 2.6 it's even harder to implement ipsec with iptables because neither the in-kernel ipsec implementation nor openswan support virtual interfaces (ipsec[0-9]). supposedly it's "possible" using iptables to tag packets, but i won't consider it "practical" until it's easy enough to be documented in a howto.

"suggested that filesharing would turn into from large anonymous groups to small groups of people that knew each other and were suspicious of newcomers"

Sounds not unlike what WASTE provides a setup for. To get in, you have to exchange keys with someone in the group plus, sometimes, a password on top of that. Traffic is encrypted, and there's an option to saturate, to a certain point, with "garbage" data.

Just wanna throw in a voice for Kaffeine 0.5. I think the playlist is much nicer and the whole thing integrates a lot better into kde. Jürgen Köfler and the rest of the gang really pulled off a nice app with 0.5. In any case, whichever version you prefer, Kaffeine should be the number one choice for a xine frontend on KDE.

If, you could create a freenet that only hosts torrents, and not the files themselves,

had searching for torrents (which they don't have),

and then somehow tracks the downloads totally anonymously,

You want a competitor for Exeem on SourceForge? Here's your competitor.

POPFile is exactly what you're looking for.

As a Debian user, you will miss the package management.

Not if you use fink. Fink got me to install Debian on my old SuSE box.

Of course there is already a fix out for that, its called XPilots-NG, Gravity is entirely configurable, as is bullet speed, and to add to all that its multiplayer (with all physics computed in the server), works in all unix operating systems and linux.

xpilot

Yes, I agree that filesystem abstraction is good. Have you looked at the Reiser4 filesystem? The papers on that site have similar ideas to yours. Why can't the filesystem be the interface to many things? Then we gain in the ability to use common tools (ls, less, rm, ...) on something new.

Also, I am aware of two projects to create filesystems in Linux userspace. This is also a great idea and I don't truly understand those who do not see the usefulness. One is FUSE, the other is LUFS. Both require a kernel module (obviously), but from that point on users (other than root) can mount and use arbitrary filesystems. I have used sshfs included with LUFS to mount a remote fs only available via ssh. This makes me so happy. I love running commands over ssh, but I love running local tools on remote files even more.

Yes, I agree that filesystem abstraction is good. Have you looked at the Reiser4 filesystem? The papers on that site have similar ideas to yours. Why can't the filesystem be the interface to many things? Then we gain in the ability to use common tools (ls, less, rm, ...) on something new.

Also, I am aware of two projects to create filesystems in Linux userspace. This is also a great idea and I don't truly understand those who do not see the usefulness. One is FUSE, the other is LUFS. Both require a kernel module (obviously), but from that point on users (other than root) can mount and use arbitrary filesystems. I have used sshfs included with LUFS to mount a remote fs only available via ssh. This makes me so happy. I love running commands over ssh, but I love running local tools on remote files even more.

The Neuros version of Tremor runs on a TI DSP that has access to 64K of memory (total, for the code and data).

It works fine. The source is available too.

Free CD ripper and encoder for MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC and (soon) MP4/iTunes.

Homepage: http://www.bonkenc.org/
SourceForge Project page: http://sf.net/projects/bonkenc

I didnt notice filezilla anywhere on your site. I use it very often in windows for all my sftp needs.

You'd do it like this (With the link to GAIM as the example): Gaim

ConTEXT Superb text editor. Can't recommend it enough.
GAIM
MS VC++ Toolkit 2003 (Don't hate me. It's pretty good)
SpamPal: Nifty little spam filter. Works with almost any client.

Just suggestions. Not affiliated to any of the above in any way except as an end-user.

You missed http://gaim.sf.net/Gaim. Arguably the best IM client for both Windows, and Linux, and as a bonus it's also totally free. If anyone can direct me as to the correct way to make a link with the name Gaim, like the parent has (and as I obviously failed to do here), I would be most apreciative.

Marathon was a great game. I think its gameplay AND story far surpasses halo. It's was really fun to replay the game when I was older, as reading all the information that's available on terminals and such makes the game SO much better.

You can play it in a kind-of redoing of the engine if you have the original data files with Aleph One is available (it's open source, too!) Be sure to check out the official Bungie Marathon site for more info.

Well, if you're willing to be a bit flexible, there are options for nonpurist gaming.

bootable DVD/DivX/MPG4/MP3 Mplayer and image slideshow, no hard drive required and in 10/20/50mb iso sizes (leaving plenty of space for pics)

open source of course

I run the Mac OS X panther...I used to have Debian running on it, but OS X makes it unnecessary (also see the FINK project http://fink.sf.net/ and DarwinPorts http://www.darwinports.org/

I run Fluxbox in my apple X11. It's very handy..

Azureus allows you to throttle and it works extremely well. I can download at 400kb/s total (this absolutely pisses off my roommates as it cripples our net connection (but they appreciate it because I get these awesome downloads from a porno server, and then share the files with them)), and can only upload 30kb/s total.

See here.

I am the author of a free software program called im_narrator that provides text-to-speech services for a variety of IM clients on both win32 and Mac OS X. It's written in pure python and yet it uses a variety of platform-specific accessibility APIs, such as Microsoft's "Active Accessibility" and both Microsoft and Apple's TTS services. So it should prove useful to anyone who's interested in providing these kinds of services in free software.

I happily run POPFile (http://popfile.sf.net/ http://www.getpopfile.org/). Perl-based, acts as a proxy. I can't run SA on some of my mail accounts (work, contractual jobs, etc). It's a basic word filter, and lets you see/change how words rate. It also explains its decision process to help you tweak it, for instance, any email with "penis" for my setup is 99.99999% spam.