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midcom-p2p.sf.net has an implementation called natcheck which might be handy. Note that you can even connect via TCP sometimes; Bryan Ford is writing a paper about that. See also draft-ford-midcom-p2p-03.txt, RFC3489 (STUN), and my site, alumnus.caltech.edu/~dank/peer-nat.html.

The eternal AC
Proudly posting AC since 1998.

That's why we have asymetric encryption: you can use your GnuPG public key with any kind of software now, whether it's an e-mail or Jabber client like Psi.

You insensitive clod, not all people want NT 4 SP2 on their win 98 boxes.

Seriously though, the first thing which goes on is the latest McAfee Stinger. When that's wiped out most of the viruses, I uninstall their out-of-date Norton - so many people don't realise that the major antivirus vendors are on a rental model and just buy the product and expect it to last forever. Then Avast! Personal Edition goes on, and the PC is fully scanned. After that comes Spybot and Ad-Aware. I use both because each product has its stregths and weaknesses. All of this is done form a CD burnt with the latest patterns so no internet connectivity happens until their PC has been cleaned. And then Sygate Personal Firewall completes the mix of security products.

After that comes Thunderbird and Firefox, The GIMP and Audacity (if they are into that sort of thing. And of course we musn't forget IrfanView.

Yes, it's a blatant rip-off of Justin Frankel's WASTE.
http://waste.sf.net/

Moreover, the Grouper CEO has the temerity claim to its his original idea:

"The idea for Grouper was born out of personal frustration after Josh came back from Burning Man with loads of photos and video clips taken with his digital camera." http://www.grouper.com/about/presskit.htm

This doesn't much surpise me as I have experience working with these Grouper people. I'd never work with them again.

Sounds like a more polished version of WASTE.

Doh, that should be "the ReWind project".

WINE uses to be licensed with the X11 license and when they changed to LGPL the project was created as a fork. Transgaming is using the X11 licensed version and I believe pulling from and contributing to the ReWind project.

1. Document Management
   Checking documents in/out, versioning, etc
2. Portal Management
   Slash, Nukes, etc.
3. Web based Content Management Wikis, Blogs, etc.

• TikiWiki
• Drupal
• CMS Made Simple
• Jaws
• Wordpress
• MediaWiki

Rating System? Winamp5... Check.

Automatic playlists? Make lists with search queries... Check.

iPod management plugin? ummm... Check.

What were you saying again?

Has no-one heard of this awesome app which has tons more features than iTunes? This thing (http://yammi.sf.net/) has got the ability to search based on approximately what the song/title/album/whatever is spelled like. AND it lets you output the songs to any of your other favorite players such as XMMS or Amarok.

It's simply awesome, and it makes this unstable hack pale in comparison.

So, for anyone who thinks Linux is lacking in the music department, think again.

Let's all emulate windows software when we actually have feasible solutions for Linux! Wait...

It works with your ipod, it works with xmms, and it works in 2.4 and 2.6.

All the Wacom models work reasonably happily with Linux+X and the relevant drivers at http://linuxwacom.sf.net/ - wacom is not at all linux-hostile.

Using a tablet means you can draw like an adult on your computer (directly on the screen if you spring for a Wacom Cintiq...).

I used to think a mouse was okay for GIMP and Blender use. It's not. It _utterly sucks_ . I got myself a tablet on a whim and now I can draw as well on my computer as on paper (okay I'm not brilliant at drawing on paper, but like most people I've ever seen, I'm far better on paper or a tablet than drawing with a mouse!)

I have pretty much the same system as you.

• Dell 8200
• NVidia 5700 LE
• Santa Cruz Audio
• Yamaha DB-XG50 synthesizer
• Parallel zip drive
• Epson Stylus Color 880

Pretty much everything worked out of the box for me on going from Fedora Core 2 to Fedora Core 3. The only breakage were things I expected to break.

• NTFS broke (and hung boot) until I upgraded the NTFS rpm
• Used the old NV driver until I built the NVidia driver
• Yamaha daughterboard doesn't work - a known ALSA issue

From an install point of view, some other software broke that in retrospect should have. I had to recompile my version of PHP since libcurl was upgraded. I had to recompile mod_perl-1.99.17 for my version of Apache. I had to move all of the GNU Java out of the way so that my Java applications would run. The GUI parts of mono broke since Gnome has been upgraded. And finally, mysql broke because Fedora Core 3 reinstalled the last version of mysql supplied by Redhat.

There are a lot of good things about the new release. Probably the most important from my viewpoint is that switching between KDE and Gnome no longer borks the menus. I think Gnome has fimally moved over to the free desktop specifications. While not perfect, I can now switch between desktops without too much menu breakage. I haven't tried editing the Gnome menu yet.

Most of the issues involved have to do with third party packages and not the Fedora Core 3 core. I build my own Apache. I install a lot of my own Perl packages. I install Java directly from Sun. The NVidia mess (not using udev) has been noted, and is pretty easy to fix.

Evolution 2.0.x is a mess. It's ugly, offers no summary view, no RSS, and no weather. In short, there's no reason to use it over any other mail client unless you have to go against an Exchange server. The lack of a summary view is particularly annoying in that I no longer can see at a glance what tasks I have, what the temperature is, how many mail messages I have not read, and of course what new stuff has been posted on Slashdot.

Fortuneately there are Firefox extentions that give me the RSS feeds and weather. Habari Xenu does the RSS feeds, and WeatherFox does the weather. Check out both from Firefox Extensions

One last nit. I've noticed that running Gnome applications under KDE carries my old Gnome wallpaper along with it. It's not visible in KDE, but when I log out the old wallpaper flashes on the screen. I wonder how much memory that costs me.

In short, a nice release, pretty painless upgrade, and a comfortable distribution of linux.

I think one of the best available WAV editors for Linux is Rezound http://rezound.sf.net/

Audacity runs on Windows, Linux and OS X... and is GPL.

mediaindexer

To play Monkey Island - or Day of the Tentacle, or Sam & Max, or Fate of Atlantis, or whatever - on a modern OS, download and install ScummVM. It's a replacement for the old .exe, and uses the original data, so you'll need to own the game. Enjoy the goodness.

Note I say 'a modern OS' and not just 'XP'. OSX, Linux, it's been ported to just about everything there is.

Now, if you'll excuse me I have to settle a matter of honour with this dairy farmer.

It works for me in Azureus. Maybe Azureus is doing some correcting?

I hear that MacOS is the first OS to have the bluetooth profile ("A2DP") necessary for stereo audio direct to the headset, but I haven't been able to get it to work with this headset. Currently the only advantage with using this headset over traditional wireless headsets is my phone can interrupt my music when a call comes in.

My critiques of this headset so far.

Oh, and we are working on linux bluetooth audio at this moment. It's a huge step to use A2DP so I can understand why it's slow to appear in more devices.

If you're on Unix and have librsvg installed, you can have librsvg act as a Mozilla SVG plugin. It integrates well with both Mozilla/Firefox and Gnome. The last time I checked, it is more standards-compliant and featureful than Mozilla's own SVG implementation.

Link here: http://librsvg.sf.net

Dom Lachowicz

• If it were that simple, than there should be no buffer overflows in modern C/C++ programs. But it apparently isn't that simple, for several reasons. Using container libraries costs extra time and effort, and it is less efficient than error checking that is built into the compiler, for example. Also, using container libraries is not something that the C/C++ compilers help enforce; that is, if some module doesn't use it, nobody ever gets warned about it.

• Because of its superior API (closer to higher level languages, and a superset of what C/C++ has to offer) it is Easier to use than the C/C++ alternatives. (The functions do more and do things that other languages have done with strings for a long time.)
• Because of its superior architecture (length delimited) and implementation (uses the fastest corners of the state of the art in C/C++ compiler technology) it is Faster than the C/C++ alternatives. (I've got the benchmark numbers to prove it)
• It comes with the optional bsafe module that creates link overrides to the standard C library functions where buffer overflows occurr most often and which are redundant to functionality in the Better String Library. I.e., deprecation of bad C library routines can be Enforced.
• And, of course, the API is completely buffer overflow safe.

• If it were that simple, than there should be no buffer overflows in modern C/C++ programs. But it apparently isn't that simple, for several reasons. Using container libraries costs extra time and effort, and it is less efficient than error checking that is built into the compiler, for example. Also, using container libraries is not something that the C/C++ compilers help enforce; that is, if some module doesn't use it, nobody ever gets warned about it.

• Because of its superior API (closer to higher level languages, and a superset of what C/C++ has to offer) it is Easier to use than the C/C++ alternatives. (The functions do more and do things that other languages have done with strings for a long time.)
• Because of its superior architecture (length delimited) and implementation (uses the fastest corners of the state of the art in C/C++ compiler technology) it is Faster than the C/C++ alternatives. (I've got the benchmark numbers to prove it)
• It comes with the optional bsafe module that creates link overrides to the standard C library functions where buffer overflows occurr most often and which are redundant to functionality in the Better String Library. I.e., deprecation of bad C library routines can be Enforced.
• And, of course, the API is completely buffer overflow safe.

• If it were that simple, than there should be no buffer overflows in modern C/C++ programs. But it apparently isn't that simple, for several reasons. Using container libraries costs extra time and effort, and it is less efficient than error checking that is built into the compiler, for example. Also, using container libraries is not something that the C/C++ compilers help enforce; that is, if some module doesn't use it, nobody ever gets warned about it.

• Because of its superior API (closer to higher level languages, and a superset of what C/C++ has to offer) it is Easier to use than the C/C++ alternatives. (The functions do more and do things that other languages have done with strings for a long time.)
• Because of its superior architecture (length delimited) and implementation (uses the fastest corners of the state of the art in C/C++ compiler technology) it is Faster than the C/C++ alternatives. (I've got the benchmark numbers to prove it)
• It comes with the optional bsafe module that creates link overrides to the standard C library functions where buffer overflows occurr most often and which are redundant to functionality in the Better String Library. I.e., deprecation of bad C library routines can be Enforced.
• And, of course, the API is completely buffer overflow safe.

See Webware for Python and its PSP (Python Server Pages).

But for everybody? Anybody can get a pretty decent computer algebra system for free, but most people I know have never even heard of them.

I should mention that anyone interested in 3-D astronoomy visualizations should check out Celestia, and my site related to it, the Celestia Motherlode. We have a scaled down MOLA dataset, among others availalbe on this page.

Try THINSTATION http://thinstation.sf.net/.

It is a complete Linux distro that can be used as a RDP "thin terminal" (does also support ICA, Tarantella, XDM, VNC etc.).

Thinstation can boot on diskless terminals (Etherbot/PXE), but also from floppy, CD, HD or Compact Flash IDE devices.

133Mhz CPU and 16/32Mb RAM should be good enough.

if(logger.isLoggable(Level.FINEST) == true){
// etc
}

if(logger.isLoggable(Level.FINEST)){
// etc
}

i mainly use gallery 1.4.x - http://gallery.sf.net/ - and WordPress - http://wordpress.org/ - to create my photoblog. i host them on the same server and subdomain so its easier to reference.

a sample page can be found at http://scaturan.negimaki.com/blog/index.php/archiv es/2004/08/27/weekend-sleep/

both scripts are VERY easy to setup. ideally, you only need Apache's mod_rewrite, a mySQL account, lots of webspace and netPBM to get it up and running. altogether, the setup takes less than 5 minutes. but that's if you know what you're doing. read the docs.

if you have questions, feel free to join the #WordPress or #gallery IRC channels on irc.freenode.net - http://freenode.net/

Perhaps you should try Firehol (http://firehol.sf.net/). I use this on my firewalls as a high level language to IPTables and it's very, very good!

Precisely. The major issue in porting graphics applications from Xbox/Win32 to the Mac is DirectX. System calls are almost identical on the two platforms and there is little CPU-specific code. However, applications written to DirectX cannot be trivially ported to OpenGL even though the APIs have the same functionality. They use different paradigms, (slightly) incompatible shading languages, and wind everything from input to networking into the DirectX layer. This isn't to say that DirectX is a bad API-- in fact, it is superior to OpenGL in many situations. It is just a different way of accessing the same hardware. Porting games requires rewriting the graphics layer, which is often the most optimized and specialized piece of a game. -m G3D - The Open Source cross platform 3D engine

The question now is, can a Linux version be far behind? (From the article)

I would hope not as of now just looking at the fundamental flaws with the Windows version. Haven't you seen the spyware-related issues regarding it? Besides, as mentioned already, there are a few other already in development (and released) spidering and organizing tools readily available for Linux. Check out http://sf.net/ for that and pretty much everything under the sun that you might need for Linux and/or Windows, MacOS, etc.

I'll stick with GNOME and such for now. Google may have an opportunity to make a good prog regarding this, but as of now they have no real credibility regarding a desktop organizer. We'll have to wait and see how it's done for MacOS and what they will do to improve on the Windows port.

My project, Jace, is one of the tier 1 projects. It'll probably be one of the simpler ones to port, because it was already written with portability in mind. I was all "WOO HOO" when I found out I was getting an iPod Mini. Then I was all "DARN" when I realized I couldn't port my own project and win a G5. ;)

TWiki supports HTML as well as having a very simple markup which is trivial to learn.

But Open Source helps. Look at Shareaza, no RIAA threats to them yet, because you can't threaten them. Plus, certain important legal battles are finally being won in the fight for rights. Plus, (shameless plug follows), you can go open soruce and secure: WASTE.

Firebird is an excelent choice for an Access killer. Just needs a nice graphical frontend for final users on it.

Too many projects that started big have fizzled, and small applications that work tend to grow and morph into ground-shaking applications as they mature.

A quick search of the web -- or heck, just SourceForge -- will show a plethora of projects that "started small" which have also completely fizzled.

There is nothing wrong with thinking big when starting a project - there are some types of project that simply can't be done on a small scale. Mozilla is pretty damned big, for example, and while it started off with Netscape source code, much of it was discarded. Eclipse is likewise a big project.

The key to doing a big project is you have to really put your nose to the grindstone and work your butt off to get something online in a reasonable timeframe. The biggest problem I see with large scale projects that fail is they get bogged down in minutae, which slows down their release cycles so much that they don't achieve any developer or user attention. We all forget with Firefox 1.0 imminent how the press used to claim that the Mozilla project has failed a few years back because it had taken them a few years from the time Netscape Open Sourced their browser code, to the point where it was usuable. And yet now we're celebrating the release of a world-class Open Source browser.

That's a big project which didn't start off small which is going to be a rousing success. Yes, projects which fail to gain traction because of lofty ideas and infrequent releases to tend to fail in the long run. However, there are an order of magnitude more small projects which similarily fail. The only difference between the two is we tend to hear about the "big" ones, but nobody cares one whit about the tens of thousands of small projects which come and go.

Yaz.

OK, shameless plug ahead...

Currently I'm working on the Aukyla PHP Framework which is hosted at http://aukyla.sf.net/. Besides stuff like Login management and Configuration management, it also contains a Widget model. These widgets give output in Aukyla XML, basically a custom XML schema designed to be easily exportable to XHTML 1.1, XHTML 2.0 and XUL. While the actual XUL support will follow later it will allow you to write webapplications which can seamlessly exported from one codebase to different formats. While I don't really focus on MySQL myself, I know of others who are already using this framework in combination with MySQL, so there you have your XUL/PHP/MySQL combination ;)
I hope to do a beta2/rc1 release (depending on the stability I can get this week) the first of November, this release will show the first progress towards multiple output support.

NetPass is an opensource alternative that's rapidly approaching 1.0 status.

You dont need a PC speaker when you've got Sopwith!

Dude, all of the high end sound cards work great with ALSA. The RME Hammerfall, M-Audio Delta series cards, a bunch of USB-Audio stuff for laptops, and a couple of others. The big-name players in audio (well, basically RME) all provide docs or their cards are simple enough to be easily reverse engineered.

I have a Dual AthlonMP box with a Midiman Delta 1010 and it works great as a Digital Audio Workstation. Check out ardour and Jack. Linux Audio is in a way better state than video is. I still have a Radeon 9100 simply because it's the second-fastest (the FireGL 8800 is faster but way more expensive on eBay) graphics card with Free DRI drivers. And they SUCK speed wise. My sound card can do everything the Windows card can do it and it's fairly high end.

Sorry, I generally agree with what you're saying, but you tweaked my feathers on one point:

Compare a nicely-fleshed-out Windows application, with automatic visual styles and Direct3D and OpenFileDialog boxes, with wonky Java applets that might run in a browser, and might just break.

NOBODY and I do mean NOBODY writes Java Applets any more. Java Applications are what have been working to displace Windows dominance. A few examples:

Azureus Bit Torrent Client
Thinkfree Office Suite
DataDino Database Explorer
Disk Analyzer

Games too:

Wurm Online
My 4K games
Big game list

So PLEASE don't mention Java Applets. You're likely to get stoned for it.

Car stereo's - erm, don't follow you there at all, I'm afraid. Can't comment because your argument makes no sense.

"Music has traditionally been pretty much free, until about 50 years ago" And you still don't complain when it gets expensive, if I read your statements above.

Can you point me to your complaints 5 decades ago, when the industry changed? No, I thought not. The industry did change, from where people would play music (live) for a fee, people would write music (for a fee), into the "tin-can alley" industry, where people would write music for a salary, others would perform it for a salary, and maybe royalties, and the new "music industry" would take the rest (and the risk).
That's how it was 50 years ago. Like it or not, it's ... dare I say this on /.? ... it's the indisputable truth!
I bought vinyl and tapes in the 70s and 80s, I bought CDs in the 90s. I've not heard much worth buying in the naughties.
Ain't worth buying, ain't worth downloading. If it's worth downloading, it's worth paying the legal price for. If I don't like that legal price, I can happily live without it (the quality is pretty low at the moment anyway).

"There's no moral high-ground in taking something without consent." What about the freedom to listen to my LEGALLY obtained music where I, yes I, want and not where the music industry instructs me too??????????

That's another matter - buy a CD, and it ought to be a CD, not some crippled bastard-child which might play on some PCs, on some in-car CD players, and not in others. If it looks like a CD, it should be a CD, or sold at a fraction of the price. I was given a Dido "CD" which I enjoyed listening to in the car, but can't play on my Linux laptop. Useless. Can't rip it, can't do the things I have the right to do with it. I'm dead against that, don't get me wrong. I'm still against taking illegal copies. That's perfectly consistent, if it doesn't seem that way, read it again.

About the quality of what's available - it's up to the Industry, these days, to sell the stuff to me. What I hear on the radio is (occasionally) worth hearing for free on the radio, rarely worth going out to buy. If I hear something interesting on the radio, I make the decision - do I buy it? do I download it? do I live without it?
Unless it's legally available for download, the "download" option isn't evan an option.

(insensible rant deleted)

Take it or leave it. If your favoured artist has signed up to a a major record label, and that label chooses to distribute that via certain channels, you have no legal option. If your favoured artist chooses to make their music available for legal download, feel free to download and enjoy.

Who told you you could get something for free? Wake up - this is the smell of coffee.

Do you work for free? I don't. I do certain free software projects in my spare time, but it doesn't feed my family.

I'm not a believer in the Capitalist system, and I'd honestly love an alternative, but unless you can suggest one which works, I'll spend my time working for cash, spending my cash on things which are worth it, spending my free time contributing software to the community because I enjoy it, and - remind me again - what do you do? Oh, you download CDs. Well done.

The client built into KDE is pretty nice too.

What? The guy didn't say what platform he was talking about.

Based only on your list, I would have looked at an embedded database like HSQL or Berkeley DB. These would have been less intensive on your target machines, faster performing, more secure (no network connection), and easier to install. Unfortunately, I can't give a realistic recommendation without knowing more about the application.

Your specs could even be met with databases like PostgreSQL, Firebird, Xindice, and quite a few others.

It's a window-aware VNC app, I'm about to install it and see if it lives up to it's hype...
http://metavnc.sf.net/

Use clear, meaningful, variable names.

I was playing with obfuscated Perl code, and got about 300 lines out. It was a script to go through my gaim logfiles, and generate stats for how much I talked to each person, how verbose they were, and so forth. It mostly just shelled various shell commands like wc, and my PIDs jumped by about 1,000 at the end (meaning that it was spawning about 1,000 processes from start-to-finish.) It wasn't well-written or anything, but it was kind of cool. And writing obfuscated, hack-job code is kind of fun. It ended up producing an HTML file.

I finally decided that it'd be cool to have the program read its own source and output it to the HTML file. It was pretty easy, and, as with anything else done just for fun that isn't too challenging, I just assigned stuff to random variable names. $hats and $fog were the most commonly-used.

I simply opened the source as $hats, and opened $fog for write, and then wrote $fog to $hats. No errors or anything!

The output file was blank. So I went back to edit the source code. Umm, it's blank too. And, of course, I was just messing around, so I had no backups.

Then one day it suddenly occured to me: I probably screwed up the variable names for the input and output, reading the blank output file and writing it over the program's source code.

So, remember, kids, use meaningful variable names. Using $hats instead of $fog could be the end of your program.

Grab the latest copy of Azureus. I've had no issues between it and UltraVNC. Of course, it only does torrents, but what do you need those other P2P protocols for anyway? ;-)

And it's not very good. The open-source antivirus for windows (Clamwin) seems to detect more viruses and mal/spyware for me, recently.