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Dude. Seriously. You have hardware problems.

I had failing memory in a box running XP. It trashed out the filesystem, very very slowly. It rarely crashed for the first few months, then started to hang up, occasional BSOD. Replaced a DIMM, reinstalled once (to fix the hosed files, probably mostly the registry), and it has crashed .once. in the last year, while I was running a beta video driver (ATI).

I'm not the first person to defend MS, not by a long shot. I use it as one of my desktop machines (along with OS X), but draw the line at my servers. Give me Solaris, Linux or OpenBSD depending on the task. However, it is stable as a desktop. Current versions (2000, XP) don't rot unless there's something else wrong.

I strongly recommend downloading Timo's Rescue CD Set. this is not a paid promotion ;)

It can boot to either a Linux install or to a memory testing tool. Run it overnight. If you don't have a bad stick of RAM (or random errors in the CPU cache), I'll buy you a beer.

• web development: Not only Zope and Plone, there's a lot of interesting development going on with Twisted... and, well, Twisted is not only about the web, it is about networking in general;
• .NET / Java development in general: Python in Java exists already... Java gaining more and more popularity? No problem, Python is already there. .NET/Mono taking the market away from Java? The industry will perhaps support more and more .NET techniques - with IronPython (featured recently on /.), Python is already there. No problem;
• some people might wonder if you really need that stinkin' .NET/Java stuff at all - Python is already very portable, but that's not everything - it already supports a wide range of MacOS/Unix/win32-specific functionalities.
• anything else makes you wonder, if Python is a good choice at all? What about realtime applications, like a VOIP phone (GUI included, win32/unix compatible) in Python? Do you read "interpreted" as "slow", do you wonder if Python is good enough to be useful in CPU-demanding programs like games? Anything else against it? Perhaps you're worried about Python's extensibility?
• if software telephony sucks for you, perhaps you should try a real mobile phone

Sorry for replying to myself here -- SQL fairy won't help with the different outer join syntax, for the moment it's only DDL.

Personally I have a nightly apt-get update -qq && apt-get dist-upgrade -qqd which will do the update, and download but not install packages. Then I've already got the packages locally when I wish to install them.

For books, I'd probably recommend rute

Seriously, have any other /.'ers created their own system?

Yeah, twenty years ago, in C. Some of the original sites have updated the software a bit, but the "classic" software is still in use. (I have done some work on modernizing the technology, but that got put on the back burner -- I may start it up again.)

(Some might argue that CoSy wasn't really blogging software. Well, aside from the obvious agreement that the web didn't exist then, so by definition it couldn't have been, there were several Big Names who used Byte Magazine's site (BIX) as just such -- Jerry Pournelle, for example.)

I used to use a little Tcl/Tk script that I hacked up to "train" myself on them until the muscle memory for the password kicked in. The script is available here in case anyone is interested.

Nowadays I switched to using PasswordSafe to store a whole bunch of passwords, and now rely on its random generation instead (I keep meaning to modify my pwdrill.tcl script to allow me to enter the "random" password to train on manually, to minimise the number of times I have to look the PW up in passwordsafe before the muscle memory kicks in.)

So take a look at quepasa. It combines remembering a passphrase, with cryptographically generated passwords (SHA-256 hashing of the passphrase and account name followed by mapping of the hash to typeable characters).

The combination means that I can always "recall" the password for any of my accounts using the quepasa application (all I remember is a single passphrase), and the passwords are not stored anywhere.

John.

Upon searching SourceForge for "inventory", 4 out of the top 5 matches appear to do what you want. I didn't check them all real close, but none of them appear to have the ease of use that they should, but here's what I'm thinking:

This wouldn't be all that hard to put together with PHP and MySQL, and I've got a lot of code laying around that could be reused to put this together pretty quickly. Anyone want to help with development? Contact "chris at efinke dot com" to pitch in.

The files are about 5 times smaller than with PDF for black and white 300dpi scans, and 10 or 20 times smaller for color scans (nothing even comes close to DjVu for high-res document scans).

DjVu is open source (the decoders and viewers at least). There are open source compressors, but they are not very good for scanned docs. You are better off using the free conversion server (see http://any2djvu.djvuzone.org ), or the commercial app from LizardTech (there is a free download version).

-- Anonycous Moward.

The reviewer complains about not having MSN Messenger-lookalikes: kopete works fine for me, as did gaim last time I checked; and if he wants something to run on crossover, he can try trillian which is supported. I know windows users who switched from the official MSN client to trillian because MSN was too intrusive.

Bunk. DjVu has an open-source implementation and well-documented specs. It will thus be readable no matter what happens to LizardTech. Similarly, the main reason PDF can be counted on to be readable in the distant future is not its installed user base (that changes quickly enough to be fairly well negated as an advantage over the 10-20 year timespan you suggest), but rather that it is an open format.

DjVu is probably the best format for the poster's needs. I had a university class where nothing was ever handed out to students in hard copy and documents were instead posted on the web; .doc was used for the kind of documents PDF is good for, while PDF was used for scanned-in (but not OCR'd) articles and so forth. This was a nightmare; the PDFs were absolutely huge, and just scrolling through them would bring a >1ghz computer to its knees. It would even have been better to use uncompressed TIFFs.

after you get the hang of it, is it comfortable enough to use with all your building? or is something you add on at the end when app/project is ready for export?

still, if I download something, and install procedure is anything besides "./configure; make; make install", I consider it a significant (though not 100% reliable) warning sign that I just downloaded crap.

> all of the examples I have seen do not accomplish the separation of content and layout which CSS seems to promise

The very best use of XHTML and CSS is by adding PHP into the mix. With PHP you can quickly generate your content using a template, without having to grow your XHTML out of control.

I'm going to be releasing the source code for my blog/photo-blog site over at zenbuzz.org very soon, at sourceforge.net/projects/gemsites.

This project lets you quickly design an XHTML template that goes with a CSS stylesheet, and then just leave it alone, running your site much more efficiently.

Features include, but are not limited to: photo/image uploading, safe image authorization by an admin, link submission, story submission, comments, user registration and validation, password changing if you forget your password, XHTML 1.0 Strict, PHP generated CSS (so you can write CSS using PHP), templates, admin contact form, FAQ generation, autologon, and a fairly good tracking system to know where links are coming from. That's just a start, really.

Images will display in articles if they are authorized images. The way the image code works is that images are uploaded and stuff into a database for approval. When they are approved they are written to the FTP and snuffed out of the database. When an admin is looking at the images that are not approved, the image validates the admin's session and only writes the image if the admin is valid. That keeps people from spamming your site with crappy images, and it prevents ftp uploading that could result in legal action.

> There is more to separation than just this however. In particular, I have to wonder what will happen to CSS Zen Garden if the content of the page is changed, say a paragraph is suddenly twice as long or goes away or an extra paragraph appears.

The trick is to create a template that supports dynamic text, using either classes or id tags based on the type of data. To do so is not easy; it's hard, but when you get it right, it's good to go. It's fairly simple to expand div tags so they can support dynamic content; the hard part is making a really nice looking site that conforms.

I did a page for a company before that resulted in some problems with the background image they wanted to use, as some pages dropped past the threshold of the image, and using another scroll-bar is never the answer (ie: don't use the CSS overflow attribute or use it very sparingly).

The solution? I posted the image in the main area, and simply designed the website around it. The background image became a seamless concrete texture.

So you have to work around problems with how we understand the web, and how the web works best. It's our problem, not the standards, IMHO.

> The style sheets include knowledge of the content and depend on it to fit inside certain boundaries. The prevalant use of ID tags (rather than descriptive style tags) really seems to underscore this.

Well we do have boundaries to work within; the browser window, but apart from that, we could really learn how to use the class attribute better so that the boundaries are more dynamic. Using the percent % width value, works wonders, but it's hard to sometimes get it right. I define my sheets as static size and let the end user worry about scrolling over if they have a small resolution; I just design it to work nicely with 800x600 and go from there. I too had many problems with CSS in the beginning but I'm far better at it than I once was. PHP created CSS works wonders.

> It seems like there should almost be three files: (at least) one for the content, one for general style rules, and one for local tweaks for the current page (laying out specific graphics).

PHP generated CSS will do this nicely. I can help you do some if you want to contact me, just click my site link. =)

Yes, folks, it's true. Ever since I started using POPFile I've been surrounded by some of the most beautiful women in the world, and next week I am marrying the Olsen twins. It's all down to POPFile, and my email is sorted automatically!!!

Oops, I guess I should have click the "Post Anonymously" button.

When you try visiting http://projectname.sf.net/ and get an error like that, switch to http://sf.net/projects/projectname/ instead.

However, in this particular case, the project has been discontinued.

Sorry bout the dud link above.

proper link http://pptpclient.sf.net

Both ndiswrapper (free and Free) and DriverLoader (commercial and proprietary) work on FC2. DL is more stable, though (ndiswrapper had a few occasional crashes every now and then, DL works flawlessly for me)

Get OpenVPN if you are looking for an excellent, portable (Solaris, *BSD and Windows in addition to Linux) VPN package that supports shared secrets or pub/priv keys for authentication and has many, many other nice features.

Can be downloaded here from The-Underdogs. You should only download it if you actually owned it of course.

Can't say I've tried it, but I'd imagine it'll work to some degree under DOSbox - Debian, Windows, OS X, RedHat, SuSE, FreeBSD, Be and MorphOS versions are available. The new version can run Windows 3.1!

YahooPops

So much time spent on JOSRTS and I STILL couldn't get you to learn patience

JOSRTS taught me that if things aren't done soon, then people get bored and go away (not to say there should be a rush, but things should be done) - Seeing as I spent several months checking the forum daily even when nobody posted, I'd think that very patient indeed...

Also, the forum is broken now, so not even me & Virum (he came back after a few months, wondering where everyone else went) can get on with things, which is a bummer. My final exams & stuff are over in 2 weeks, and I was hoping to spend my holiday getting JOSRTS to the point where it did something :( (Before the forum died I got some code done, but I never did a UI or main function, so you can see what should happen by looking at the code, but nothing actually does anything :/ linky. Also, the game got moved to space, to simplify some things so that we could get the project made in series rather than in parallel ^_^)

Apple's recent release of an iTunes SDK for Windows provides the ability for third party programs, such as WinAmp and Windows Media Player, to support the AAC file format.

* Fast - IronPython-0.2 is 1.4x faster than Python-2.3 on the standard pystone benchmark.

I don't know about pystone in particular, but Psyco (a dynamic compiler module that essentially replaces the Python interpreter's inner loop at runtime) tends to make code run much faster than that and can speed up algorithmic code tenfold or more.

When running with Psyco, quicksort written in Python is actually faster than Python's built-in C mergesort!

You can't really publish anything truely anonymously. You never really could anyway.

Toot toot (yabba dabba doo) - see ndiswrapper to get a bunch of wireless drivers working. Got my Thinkpad R40 Centrino wireless working this way. What I find interesting about this is that it uses Microsoft's leverage against them; they wield the force to make hardware manufacturers' drivers conform to their 'NDIS' API (thereby minimizing work on MS's part, but removing some competitive advantage between hardware vendors in terms of feature sets). The ndiswrapper linux module, I surmise, exports this 'NDIS' interface for the windows driver to use, and then talks to the linux kernel on the other end.

I don't need a crock of shit from the zealot crowd telling me I'm an idiot faggot and so on.

You very well may be. Nevertheless, I misquote Larry Wall in saying, "But you can use Linux [Perl] anyway." Some of us like to hope the Linux community is inclusive :-)

Samba is included, as is the new CIFs driver which replaces smbfs. What isn't included is the NTFS read-only driver module, which you can download as a binary RPM from linux-ntfs. As for the other stuff, I like to use the fedora.us + livna.org* repositories. There is also freshrpms, ATrpms, Dag Wieers, and Planet CCRMA. There are others, and be warned that Dag Wieers and Axel Thim (atrpms) are in a pissing match over Dag obsoleting at least one of Axel's packages for naming it "wrong". (look at the April acrhives of the freshrpms mailing list with some fresh popcorn).

* - The livna.org front page still says they are down and lists the mirror. The rpm.livna.org repo is actually back up, they just never bothered to update the main page to say so.

> you are going to see more serious enterprise
> features being developed by interested 3rd
> party corporations for PostgreSQL

In my mind this is due - at least in part - to PostgreSQL being under the BSD license. It seems to make contributors less leery than other licenses.

I know that I've had significant contributions to PMD from folks who said that if it were GPL'd they wouldn't be contributing - but since it's BSD, they did.

Could you consider SourceForge a 'plog'?

oh, dont worry, I'll just haxx0r your lunix machine with my linux machine via DDoS

Better just use GPG since it compress files too (by default it will use the same compression algorithm than Winzip). If you want to encrypt several files, use tar ( availiable for Windows too) before.

aespipe is a fast lightweight UNIX solution that is simpler than GPG:

http://loop-aes.sourceforge.net/aespipe/

There is an established UNIX solution which is not restricted to AES, and doesn't look like it's written by amateurs - mcrypt.

That sounds a lot like Freenet to me.

First of all: rpm is both a format an a tool. Both are fine. The format used in debian is deb and the tool used in debian is dpkg. Both are fine too.

Suse's apt-get equivalent is yast. But if you don't like yast, just install apt.

Second: yast md5sums all your configfiles and refuses to overwrite any modified files:

dexter:~ # SuSEconfig --module apache
Starting SuSEconfig, the SuSE Configuration Tool...
Running module apache only
Reading /etc/sysconfig and updating the system...
Executing /sbin/conf.d/SuSEconfig.apache...

ATTENTION: You have modified /etc/httpd/httpd.conf. Leaving it untouched...
You can find my version in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf.SuSEconfig...

So what's your problem with suse again?

A while back I was using a tool called Thingamablog and it does exactly what you're wanting.

It is a local Java application (no OS dependancies, if there is a JRE it'll run) that has its own mini SQL server built in. You edit using the application and then it creates Static HTML pages from your templates and uploads them via FTP (might support other methods by now) to the webserver. Is a very simple, clean, easy tool if you just want to publish a blog.

DOSBox and a shitload of power under the hood might do the trick.

Actually, if you check out some of the links at the USRBAC security system project *modestly points*, you'll notice several extras for Linux that can make it inherantly more secure than OpenBSD. Particularly, PaX gives better guarentees than ExecShield (redhat) or W^X (OpenBSD) can about the existence of W|X pages, to guarentee the blockage of code injection ("shellcode"); and PaX has better ASLR (instead of crappy library load order randomization) to effectively block ret2libc type attacks.

I personally use Hardened Gentoo with stack smash protection (propolice) and PaX. I'm also working on a book called "Hard" about this stuff, which will also detail out proper coding practices; for example, how do you order your variable declaration? Like this:

type function() {
char d[25]; /*arrays*/
struct foo c; /*structures*/
int b; /*values*/
char *a; /*pointers*/
int (*fp)(char *); /*function pointers*/
return foo;
}

struct foo {
int (*fp)(char *); /*function pointers*/
char *d; /*pointers*/
int c; /*values*/
struct foo b; /*structures*
char a[10]; /*arrays*/
}

Also, in functions, allocate your structures with function pointers AFTER all other structures with arrays, and try to use only one (or allocate pointers to them and new[] or malloc() them). For structures, reverse it.

My point here is that you have to partly rely on the actual programs, rather than the OS. BSD shares much of its underlying system (GNU tools, X, user programs like Mozilla and Gimp) with Linux and other Unixes. Even with stack smash protection, you can't i.e. protect a function pointer after (below) an array in a structure. ProPolice (patch for gcc, for both Linux and BSD, probably Windows too) also doesn't stack smash check until return, because checking at each pointer or at each fp call would be a lot of overhead.

I have no trouble with iptables rules myself. A nice GUI would be good, though, because as much as we all LOVE to brag about how our big dicks can satisfy the console's yearnings, it's simply faster and easier to use a more user-friendly interface (as long as it's not buggy).

Jeez, now that I got rid of Windows and switched to Linux, you have to show me a (FREE) app I was looking for. Damn you, Slashdot.

Joking aside, is there any similar applications for Linux? Excluding xine's OSD interface (oxine)

-----
because Linux-desktop is all over the map and has been for years
-----
Quit whining about desktops.

What are Gnome, KDE, or any other desktop environment? It's just a collection of toolbars, icons, buttons, and window dressing. It's just like MagicWorkbench on the Amiga. MWB was neat and cool but, in the end, it was just a collection of backdrops, color schemes, a toolbar, and icons that worked well together.

What do you really want on your desktop? If you want fast access to installed programs just about any WM will offer a right-click menu. If you want a backdrop just about any WM will offer it. If you want neat icons you can install the packages. What do you need a 2.5 mb window manager for?

Keep it simple. Keep it fast. Keep it efficient. UDE!

My XChat, Mozilla, gRip, Gimp, etc. etc. etc. look just as pretty as yours and I don't have to worry about the impending doom of a fledgling registry (gconf and whatever KDEs equivalent is) eventually evolving into the next spawn of Satan.

Try opening two directory trees you are about to diff with this new interface! (then go use Meld).

My two immediate suggestions would be:

1. To reduce the number of clicks required for "open in same window" to one (independent of the use one click for everything option - this is how the right mouse button works so why not the middle one?).
2. Consider showing more in the window to give users an idea of context, i.e. where in their directory hierarchy they are. Something like the chain of buttons you get at the top of the new open dialog to show context perhaps? Or maybe just show more of the path in the title bar. The little parent directoy list at the bottom left does this I know but it's not as immediately apparent as maybe it should be?

You might want to check OBB for an impressive looking drum machine. The developers are a bit lazy *ahem* so it's less usable than Hydrogen but I heard that they were planing some major release in a not so distant future.

; )

Right, peace treaties aside, I doubt would be happy about any C# in Evolution.

I think Sun should instead help develop a viable Java mail client, maybe http://columba.sf.net.

I tried for a couple hours to get it working, with a custom-built Wolk kernel, RedHat 9, and a Shuttle SN41G2 XPC. While I was finally able to get ACPI working like it should, I never did manage to get suspend to ram working.

The AtheOS File System by Kurt Skauen is a 64-bit clone of the BeFS, he even used the Practical File System Design book as a guide on how to make the file system. Syllable is using this file system.

What, you're not satisfied with fortune and nethack? ;)
Really, I suppose it's true that one of the few things left in the world that Windows is needed for (by some people) is games. Software like OpenOffice, GNOME, etc. would only take getting used to in a transition, but games are unique in that they are designed to entertain, not to perform a task.
Or you could try to distance yourself from modern-ish computer games. I play prboom and Maelstrom sometimes. Other times I use my operating systems as games.

• Neither RAID nor hard drive backups provide the file versioning capability that tape or offline backups provide.
• Doesn't help for the "rm -rf" situation.

Even for all that, I mostly use the same online storage you describe. :)

Sometimes, though, I like to archive that stuff off to cd or dvd. When I do, I use par2 to generate parity sets of the data I archive to dvd. That way, if I suffer some minimal bit rot, I can still correct it. With large enough parity sets, you can even correct for huge amounts of bit rot, but of course, that depends on how paranoid you are.

Between par2 and not putting cd labels on anything anymore, I feel a lot more confident about the long-term viability of my backups.

Since a vast majority of SPAM that I get are from throw-away domains, I see some value in this as well. It would, for instance, be nice if I didn't have to comb through my JUNK box looking for missing Emails from one of the many product specific Mail lists that I'm a member of.

However, Mail lists are usually on independant and under-funded sites, so it's unlikely that they'd be able to afford to become IronPort certified anyway.

SourceForge would be a good start though.

• Abiword - Word processor, supports .doc, .rtf, GPL.
• Open Office - Whole Office suite, including a database frontend and BASIC macro language.
• Perl - Scripting language
• Python - Scripting language
• Cygwin - UNIX emulator. Can create Windows programs, reliant on a cygwin1.dll.
• MinGW - Port of some of the UNIX utilities (BASH, gcc, vi...) to Windows.
• djgpp - UNIX emulator for DOS.
• Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird - Web browser, e-mail client, IRC client, lots more.
• Filezilla - FTP client.
• xchat - IRC client.
• putty, pscp, psftp and others - Telnet/SSH clients.
• Gaim - Client for IRC/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ/AIM and more.
• gzip - Compression (usually better than .zip).
• tar - Extracts/Makes tar archives.
• bzip2 - Totally ace compression (usually better than gzip).
• Info-ZIP - Support for .zip. Good free substitute for Winzip.
• 7-zip - Support for multiple compression formats.
• frhed - Hex editor
• Ext2fs - Several programs for doing Ext2 under Windows.
• Antiword - Converts documents out of the proprietary .doc format.
• MySQL - RDBMS.
• Apache - Web/Proxy server
• sendmail - Mail server
• squid - Proxy server
• freeamp - Audio player
• winlame - MP3 encoder
• cd-ex - MP3/OGG encoder?
• gimp - Very detailed graphics program.
• imagemagick - Graphic manipulation. Provides the 'convert' utility under UNIX.
• freeciv - Civilisation clone.
• gnuplot - Plotting package.
• TightVNC - A fork of VNC, with enhancements.
• RealVNC - The original VNC.
• rdesktop - Access Windows Terminal Services and Remote Desktops.
• Nmap - Well known port scanner.
• John the Ripper - Password cracker. Does NT and MD5.

If it can be played, it can be cracked.

By adding functionality to a PC emulator, anything that can be played can be decrypted. For hardware-stored encryption keys, it is slightly harder, but nonetheless doable. Once a key is obtained (and it will be), the only thing really necessary to keep the crack working is to disable watermarking. While this may not work for items downloaded off of the internet, pressed CDs/DVDs/etc will still work just fine. Removing the watermark is not too hard, as debugging the virtual machine can easily show any attempts to access the stored key.

I like FLAC rather than APE...it too is lossless, and is a nice free open source project. It even has support in the Rio Karma portable player and other devices.

http://flac.sf.net

Discaimer: I wrote GNU/Shoes. . .