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Discaimer: I wrote GNU/Shoes. . .

For my final year dissertation I wrote an interactive profiler named rtprof. The idea is you have a remote machine calculating the profile of a process running on another machine in real time, all of which is visualised in three dimensions.

I ran across it cruising through Freshmeat to see if there were any good 3D animation programs that I had missed.

Really, there's not much out there. Blender is the best and most capable, but (despite many advances) it's UI has a steep learing curve. But if you stick with it, you can do amazing stuff, and to be fair, the UI is way better than it used to be, and promises to only get better.

Anim8or is an Windows program by Steven Glanville. (It works fine under WINE.) It's free, but closed source, because Steve doesn't want to deal with people bugging him about unofficial releases - I understand the sentiment! It's a great modeller, and I think the scanline renderer is underrated, but the animation features are a weak - for example, it doesn't yet have IK. However, the next release promises to include it, so it's definately something worth watching.

Art of Illusion is an open source Java program by Peter Eastman, and I suspect that most people - if they've heard of it at all - know that it's a full-featured raytracer, but don't realize that it supports animation. The bones based animation uses a 'pin and drag' interface based on Animanium, and it's very cool. Unfortunately, you can only do animation via pose morphs in the current release, but the next version promises support bones animation on a seperate IK track. By the time 2.0 comes out, I think it'll be an excellent program for doing character animation.

There have been rumors that some day Björn Gustavsson's Wings3D would support animation, but so far, that's only rumor. Wings3D started out as an open source version of IzWare's Nendo modeller, but has in many ways surpassed Nendo since then, so it's possible...

Finally, there's Sascha Ledinsky's Java based JPatch program, a successor to Mike Clifton's now abandoned sPatch program. Although it's currently only a modeller (the beta should be ready by the end of the month), it has designs to support animation - sort of an open source version of Animation:Master. It may not look like there's much going on at the site, but I've had a chance to play with some of the development versions - it's worth keeping an eye on.

If anyone knows of any open source/non-commercial programs capable of producing character animation, I'd love to know about them!

I ran across it cruising through Freshmeat to see if there were any good 3D animation programs that I had missed.

Really, there's not much out there. Blender is the best and most capable, but (despite many advances) it's UI has a steep learing curve. But if you stick with it, you can do amazing stuff, and to be fair, the UI is way better than it used to be, and promises to only get better.

Anim8or is an Windows program by Steven Glanville. (It works fine under WINE.) It's free, but closed source, because Steve doesn't want to deal with people bugging him about unofficial releases - I understand the sentiment! It's a great modeller, and I think the scanline renderer is underrated, but the animation features are a weak - for example, it doesn't yet have IK. However, the next release promises to include it, so it's definately something worth watching.

Art of Illusion is an open source Java program by Peter Eastman, and I suspect that most people - if they've heard of it at all - know that it's a full-featured raytracer, but don't realize that it supports animation. The bones based animation uses a 'pin and drag' interface based on Animanium, and it's very cool. Unfortunately, you can only do animation via pose morphs in the current release, but the next version promises support bones animation on a seperate IK track. By the time 2.0 comes out, I think it'll be an excellent program for doing character animation.

There have been rumors that some day Björn Gustavsson's Wings3D would support animation, but so far, that's only rumor. Wings3D started out as an open source version of IzWare's Nendo modeller, but has in many ways surpassed Nendo since then, so it's possible...

Finally, there's Sascha Ledinsky's Java based JPatch program, a successor to Mike Clifton's now abandoned sPatch program. Although it's currently only a modeller (the beta should be ready by the end of the month), it has designs to support animation - sort of an open source version of Animation:Master. It may not look like there's much going on at the site, but I've had a chance to play with some of the development versions - it's worth keeping an eye on.

If anyone knows of any open source/non-commercial programs capable of producing character animation, I'd love to know about them!

The problem is that for many critical features in Blender, the UI offers no clue that a particular option might exist, or what hotkey/mouse combination you need to press if you knew it existed, but forgot which hotkey it was. Given Blender's roots - an in-house production tool - this sort of interface isn't unusual. But now that Blender's gone "open source", there's been agreement from Ton and others that the UI is broken and needs to be fixed.

Take a look at Art of Illusion or JPatch for examples of open source applications that are "user friendly" - they support hotkeys, but any important functionality can be reached through the UI. When you are in a particular mode, the status bar at the bottom of the window displays hotkey modifiers and mouse options that are available. (I don't include Wings3D because it's pretty much specialized for modelling).

I'll readily that the example programs are currently less capable than Blender (and Art of Illusion is due for a UI overhaul in a few releases), but they show how these sorts of things can be added to the UI, even for complex processes.

And while Blender's made a lot of progress in making the UI better, but it's stalled in the last couple months - especially in critical areas like RVKs. Hopefully, people will get back on track with overhauling the UI.

The problem is that for many critical features in Blender, the UI offers no clue that a particular option might exist, or what hotkey/mouse combination you need to press if you knew it existed, but forgot which hotkey it was. Given Blender's roots - an in-house production tool - this sort of interface isn't unusual. But now that Blender's gone "open source", there's been agreement from Ton and others that the UI is broken and needs to be fixed.

Take a look at Art of Illusion or JPatch for examples of open source applications that are "user friendly" - they support hotkeys, but any important functionality can be reached through the UI. When you are in a particular mode, the status bar at the bottom of the window displays hotkey modifiers and mouse options that are available. (I don't include Wings3D because it's pretty much specialized for modelling).

I'll readily that the example programs are currently less capable than Blender (and Art of Illusion is due for a UI overhaul in a few releases), but they show how these sorts of things can be added to the UI, even for complex processes.

And while Blender's made a lot of progress in making the UI better, but it's stalled in the last couple months - especially in critical areas like RVKs. Hopefully, people will get back on track with overhauling the UI.

I think for the average hacker however RHEL3 and White Box are not going to appeal that much, because they are older software - that people are sure works or know the limits of - and not the latest and greatest. No SVG themed gnome 2.6, no current KDE, no 2.6 kernel ...

You can get the current KDE (3.2.2) for RHEL/Whitebox/CentOS/Tao at the same place you would get KDE for Red Hat 9: kde-redhat. Use the "3.0" release for RHEL.

I thought that 16-bit per channel support was added in CinePaint and was going to be merged back into the Gimp trunk. Does anyone know anything about that?

I'm not sure exactly how such a large, disparate group of developers will be able to defend their copyright if it comes to that.

That's true of any open source project. However, the bad publicity a company would get from abusing a third party's copyright could be damaging to their credibility.

I don't see anything on SpecOpsLabs site that talks about the fact that WINE falls under the LGPL.

Take a look at ReWind. It is an MIT licensed fork of WINE. Many of the key developers licensed their code under both MIT and LGPL licenses when the WINE license changed in mid 2002. With the exception of the developers employed by Codeweavers and a couple of others, most of the main developers have allowed their WINE patches to be used in ReWind. If SpecOps Labs used ReWind as a base, then they have no legal issues to be concerned with with respect to WINE code they may have used.

Someone's working on it...

Porthole

We may see some of these tools shipping with Doom 3. I can only speculate, but I heard tale of some really cool editing tools this time around. Something about making levels in realtime? Can anyone confirm/deny this? (JC?)

I'm heading up a special mod project for Doom 3 that will only see the light if we can get some amazing models talent on board, so even if there is IF styled game design, there still remains the problems of customization.

I've recently rejoined the gnutella network using gtk-gnutella and been pleasantly surprised at how good the gnutella network is these days -- it got pretty shit for a while. Plenty of sources and good quality stuff.

Hell, why stop there? VTK and MayaVi are also pretty amazing visualization kits, both of which are either written in or provide python bindings. (MayaVi is built on VTK, but it provides a nice wrapper.) VTK has great isosurface locaters and some pretty awesome vector algorithms for looking at 2d and 3d data. We use it for physical applications at my work...

For one thing, centralized MMOG developers have to face a network scalability problem. Each connected player must be updated in real time, and serving thousands (or millions?) of players can be very network intensive. Your typical, optimized 3D shooter protocol uses something like 2K bytes per second. Serving five thousand players, in this case, would require an 80 MBPS link, which I imagine is not really cheap, at least not yet.

And of course the server is also a processing bottleneck. Running the simulation in the clients saves you from buying expensive machines or having to pay for the Butterfly Grid.

FreeMMG is a mixed peer-to-peer and client-server MMOG model. It leaves the server doing "lightweight" work such as authentication, session tracking, etc. and uses a P2P protocol to run the actual game simulation. And it offers protection agains player cheating (I hope so, if not, I'm not getting my master's :-).

I can program, yes. I have a bit of code in the scripting layer of GLAME, some code in Guile (I rewrote format to be reentrant and submitted a fix or two for the slib module), and I maintain Bobot++.

I am not especially amazing at programming but I can do what I have to to get around. Perhaps you should read the Philosophy of the Free Software Foundation in order to understand why I say the ability to use a hardware gadget is convinience and not freedom.

dont forget using a proxy server in conjunction with a redirector if you have multiple browsers and/or users and like the idea of just updating new regexps via cron.

Yes, it does! I tried MS-Word, OO.org and xmlresume before switching back to good old LaTeX and the excellent res class.

To all who visit the dilbert website regularly, has anyone seen that floating ad that blocks the last panel of the strip? I have seen it about 5 times and I read the site daily.

No - but that's because all the comics I'm interested are harvested for me every morning by the dailystrips scripts run on a cron job on my machine and nicely organized and indexed ready for my reading later. In theory, anything at all published on the web is retrievable by some method, processable and automatically tidied up before you view it.

If advertising ever gets bad enough that the web pages aren't really usable or readable without some extra processing, there will be a market for advanced filtering of whatever HTML/XHTML/XML is being used to extract the useful stuff. If that is integrated into a browser, then you might even not notice the muck. Or you could just go back to links/lynx/w3m or whatever.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

While I agree with the sentiment of this remark, I have to disagree with some implementations.

Yes, it's not going to be difficult to attack the users passphrase if it's stupid. However you make an assumption that most people who encrypt their harddrive keep their keys on the laptop.

I don't.

With loop-aes, you have pretty good abstraction.

So you can have a set of gpg keys, a file encrypted to a given public key, and the data to be decrypted, all in different places.

In theory, it can be done over a network, a usb keychain, a serial cable, whatever you want.

In the end, if they have all three, yes, the password is the last link obviously.

The key is to make sure that those three aren't in the same place at the same time, once the system is on, the keys are loaded into memory and aren't needed. Remove the usb key with your gpg secret key. Remove the usb key or detach from the server that has the actual encrypted gpg file that holds the actual disk encryption keys.

You need all three to attack the users password at that point. Assuming that you decide it's not worth cracking the gpg encrypted file (4096bit), that it's not worth cracking the passphrase (war and peace in leet speak), you can attack the disk file itself.

Each encrypted partition has 64 different keys that are all
61 different characters long.
Example:
kd11Zki1oKre4iSwXaMX+C/wH+t7RXBtG 3Q0rog5pYAHHVm0tb CWDYp0MgII

So yea, it's possible to crack that, but I highly doubt that you will.

So stealing my laptop takes away my hardware, and my encrypted disks. It doesn't mean you have an easy way into my data.

Check out the loop-aes project for practical examples of this in Gnu/Linux.

It's not perfect, but it's better than the stupid cryptoloop crap where you can't ever change your password because that requires writing all the data to the disk again (with the new key).

> There are people who've been writing perl code for years and still don't believe the language is "human readable".

And that's the fault of the authors of that code and *not* the language. Nothing makes me more insane than people who talk about how Perl is "write only". No, it's not. It's the people who write crappy Perl scripts and use every obfuscation feature they can to make the thing unreadable. It's perfectly possible to make readable Perl code, just take a look at POPFile. It's also perfectly possible to write unreadable C/C++: just look at the obfuscation contests.

John.

Maybe it was The Free Lossless Audio Codec?

I use both POPFile (at home) and SpamBayes (at work). They both work like a charm...

I use both POPFile (at home) and SpamBayes (at work). They both work like a charm...

> Can anyone tell me how to do a solid path checking so I can include a module specified by a POST variable?

Personally, I would create a table of values that lists the existing filenames.

Possible fields:
record_id (INT, PRIMARY KEY, AUTO INCREMENT)
the_filename (VARCHAR 128) (ie: thatfile.php)

Don't put the path in the_filename... hard code the path in your init file. ie: $FILENAME_PATH = '/images/birthday2004/';
Then:

print $PATH.$fields['the_filename'];
or
require($PATH. $fields['the_filename']);

This way the file your clients request has to be in the table. :-)

Make the POST var a numeric one, and that way you can quickly SELECT from the table, the record_id, and read the_filename.

I've got examples of how to do this in the Gemsites code.

xpy, firefox/thunderbird, 7-zip, nettime, winamp, mpc, gaim, mp3ext, textpad, nsis hope that were ten ;)

xpy, firefox/thunderbird, 7-zip, nettime, winamp, mpc, gaim, mp3ext, textpad, nsis hope that were ten ;)

xpy, firefox/thunderbird, 7-zip, nettime, winamp, mpc, gaim, mp3ext, textpad, nsis hope that were ten ;)

xpy, firefox/thunderbird, 7-zip, nettime, winamp, mpc, gaim, mp3ext, textpad, nsis hope that were ten ;)

p.s. i found out about ratpoison via a /. post

p.s. i found out about ratpoison via a /. post

If only it had a visual pager...

I see your list is pretty similar to mine. However, in place of MultiDesk, might I recommend Virtual Dimension. It's another virtual desktop manager for Windows. It includes the visual pager you desire, as well as adding the ability to set shortcuts for paging, making windows always-on-top, exist in all desktops, minimize to tray, make arbitrary windows transparent, etc. Combined with allSnap to give windows snap-to-edge behavior, I don't long for KDE quite as much on my Windows machine anymore. :-)

Winzip - Yeah, you know what this is

Editplus - Possibly the best editor ive found, not free im afraid, costs around $25

VLC - Free media player

SmartFTP - Great free for personal use FTP client, not found a better one yet!

1. Fink - get the GNU POSIX environment on!
2. OSXVNC - get somewhere else
3. OO.o
4. Mozilla / Firefox / etc. - and the plugins:
   • Flash
   • Acrobat Reader
   • StumbleUpon toolbar - it's like having your own personalized fark (not that I read fark, but this is probably why)
5. MPlayer - it handles just about all the codecs
6. WS Manager - Multiple desktop manager. I'm too cheap to pay to upgrade from OS 10.2 to 10.3 for Exposé, even with my wife's educational discount.

• HT Editor
• Far on Windows / Midnight Commander on Linux

• gentoo linux
• FreeBSD
• bash
• vim
• perl
• ruby
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Apache
• PHP
• links www browser
• wget
• K Desktop Environment
• Mozilla Firefox
• xchat
• gimp
• Openoffice.org

On Linux or FreeBSD:
ratpoison, rxvt, irssi, Links/lynx/ELinks, nvi/vim/elvis or emacs.

On Windows:
Nothing - I don't install things on other people's computers.

I just released "torrentchanger" which is such bad and simple code, that it'd have to work with the mono project... ;p http://writtorrent.sf.net

Really, why bother, the dedicated calculator is dead. Just install EasyCalc and EasyStat which can do some pretty neat stuff for your Palm and you're all set. My Tungsten T3 has a 144Mhz ARM CPU, which is loads faster than anything dedicated calculators can offer and has a beautiful 320x480 16bit tft.

Plus there are loads of software for Palms that can do statistics, etc..

Too bad HP can't see it. Or maybe they can and they want to rip you off? After all, if you buy a Palm, all you have to do it upgrade your software to get new features. With this, you need to buy a new calc.

Talk about a rip-off if I ever saw one.

Really, why bother, the dedicated calculator is dead. Just install EasyCalc and EasyStat which can do some pretty neat stuff for your Palm and you're all set. My Tungsten T3 has a 144Mhz ARM CPU, which is loads faster than anything dedicated calculators can offer and has a beautiful 320x480 16bit tft.

Plus there are loads of software for Palms that can do statistics, etc..

Too bad HP can't see it. Or maybe they can and they want to rip you off? After all, if you buy a Palm, all you have to do it upgrade your software to get new features. With this, you need to buy a new calc.

Talk about a rip-off if I ever saw one.

FY [slightly OT] I,

There's a mature VOIP multi-platform already out there. Now under new management, but still Free.

Speak-Freely

linux/unix \ MS windows

It rocks. Much lighter than GnomeMeeting, but full featured multi codec + strong encryption.

Linux people get be sure to get the Tcl/Tk GUI...

Do you keep wav files on your hard drive because they are loss-less?

No, I use FLAC or shorten for my master audio files, because they are lossless. (Not all compression formats are lossy.) Or I store in cdda on cd (this covers cds I buy as well as flacs/shns I download and burn). I may occasionally make copies in vorbis or other lossy format, but never the master. (And I certainly don't pay a dollar a track for already lossy files!) :)

Just like the mp3 format works so well by slimming down the things the human ear can't hear

Actually, the fact that I can hear it (especially in the cymbals) is the main reason I don't use mp3 even when I do use lossy audio formats! (That and the fact that my vendor supports ogg vorbis and flac, but not mp3.)

You brought up something interesting there.
How many "encrypted" file-sharing tools are there?

* Waste
* Mnet
* Freenet
* Entropy

From what I know most of these are either not very popular (Waste, Mnet) or not suited to distribute large files (Freenet, Entropy).

Am I misinformed?

You brought up something interesting there.
How many "encrypted" file-sharing tools are there?

* Waste
* Mnet
* Freenet
* Entropy

From what I know most of these are either not very popular (Waste, Mnet) or not suited to distribute large files (Freenet, Entropy).

Am I misinformed?

If they don't, you had better hope they use static ARP, or something like EtterCap will eat right through your network.

iRATE is a program that downloads music that artists have put on the net. These downloads are also taylored to your own tastes, based on comparing what you like with other users. With this, there isn't a need for P2P music file sharing, and risking being sued by the RIAA, as copying this music is sanctioned by the artist. (Unsurprisingly, not much of this music is made by RIAA labels)

How about md5sum or md5deep? md5sum comes with most linux distros, and md5deep is at md5deep.sf.net.

</ASP>

It's a nice language. A bit baroque in places, but it has lots of nice features if you're programming this kind of thing; persistance (never need to worry about storing your data on disk!); incremental updates (connect to the server and fiddle with the code while it's up and running and serving requests!); a nice threading model (cooperative multitasking with teeth --- your thread has complete control until it suspends, but if you wait too long the thread's killed)... The VM is sophisticated enough that the game server runs its own web server.

The language itself is sort-of garbage collected (parts are, parts aren't), object oriented with pure dynamic dispatch, has some very nice security measures which I didn't use in Stellation because I wasn't letting users program it, and generally behaves like a slightly gothic Smalltalk with C syntax. Very easy to get used to.

If you're interested, check it out. I was really rather pleased with that game, and at its peak I got a reasonable number of players. It needs redesigning from the ground up, but I've yet to find a VM that's quite as nice as LambdaMOO for doing it in.

(Anyone want to adopt it?)

iRATE radio is a project that downloads music that bands have released for free, and plays it to you. Based on how you rate the tracks you are given, it gives you more that it thinks you'll like by comparing with other peoples ratings. This results in a pile of MP3's that you like (at least to some degree :), and an easy way to get more that fit your tastes. You also have control over how regularly you hear each track, and so on.

Leo @ Sourceforge

It's mature, actively developed, cross platform, and quite useful when working with languages that don't have the concept of a subroutine, like XML/HTML, XSL, SQL.

The iRATE project downloads music from sites like these, and gives them to you inside a music player. You then say how much you like various tracks, and it compares your ratings to those of other people, and gives you more stuff it thinks you'll like. You end up with a large collection of indie music that is filtered to be what you consider good stuff. (And then you can buy CDs of it to support the band if you like :)