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For a partial solution, see SynCE.

/* sigh, so much for oo code reuse ... */
/* FIXME: put in a function */

Well, here's what I've done and it hasn't gotten me on any black lists for running an open relay because I don't.

First, my mailserver runs OpenBSD, this allows me to use pf for my port filtering software. Then each user on the server has a copy of CRM114 installed. This is a very powerful and extremely accurate bayesian classifier. I've gotten 1 piece of spam in the last three months, 0 false positives and it blocks about 150 pieces of spam a day (for my account alone).

For each piece of mail that I receive, the relays involved are entered into relaydb. This wonderful little program logs each mail relay listed in the message. When a relay has 3 times as many bad messages as good messages it is added to the black list. Because I'm using pf, this blacklist is updated in real time to the mail server's pf configuration, which causes spamming hosts to be sent to the tar pits.

I'd estimate the total accuracy rate (defined as non-Type I and non-Type II errors) to be somewhere around 99.95%. User interaction is zero for most of the time, I've got a nice corpus that I train the accounts with. On the off hand that there is an error the user mails the message to themselves and it gets fixed.

So, to summarize:
This idea won't work, you'll get your host marked as an open relay.
This is what I did to kill spam and it does work.

I had to laugh when I read this:

it was weird to find out from the horses mouth that there are now more than 23 times the number of downloads for IPCop than there are for SW GPL (both versions), that there are on average 15,000 more visitors per day to the download pages for IPCop than SmoothWall

and that for every four visitors to SmoothWall, three then click through to IPCop and download 1.3.0.

As for the final comment, if this were the case, how could any commercial security vendor survive? There will always be a market for boxed product, while the degrees of openness within such product will invariably differ from product to product, market to market, and over time.

However, in your sister's situation, I'd install fink on the machine. Fink is a port of a good portion of the Unix programs in Linux, and it uses apt-get for its manager. It's very Debian-like. Plus you get to keep OS X.

There's also a couple of other fink-like ports out there, but they're all in the process of merging.

I don't mind emacs, it's now my editor of choice, after I sat through the tutorial one rainy weekend.

Glad I'm not the only person who doesn't like dselect though.

I usually apt-get, even on my Macintosh where I could be using Fink

Who says Macs don't have good P2P? Poisoned is an excellent giFT front end for OS X. Open source and everything. Supports OpenFT, Fasttrack, Gnutella, with OpenNapster and eDonkey on the way.

> could get together to create and maintain a patch for the 2.4 kernel that would back port more then just the critical updates from 2.6

Check out the WOLK project (Working Overloaded Linux Kernel). I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this - it's a patch (quite a large patch) with various interesting features for 2.4.20 (eg. XFS) and as far as I'm using it, it doesn't seem to cause any instability to the 2.4.x kernels.

You might want to look info Zinf (formerly known as Freeamp). Development for the Windows port has somewhat stalled, but the latest Windows binaries are available at zinf.sf.net.

Zinf has the best playlist interface I've seen in any MP3 player.

Disclaimer: I did contribute some code to zinf, but I'm not really a very active contributor anymore...

The "standard" way to build levels is just to generate a WAD without the data and run it through one of the many existing BSP calculators. No offence, but it seems rather pointless to reinvent the wheel. (Plus, as much as I love Ruby, it might be a bit slow for this purpose..)

It is argued that there is plausible deniability, because it is possible that your node was not downloading the file because you asked for it, but simply forwarding it for somebody else. Given the state of the judicial process at the moment, I'm not terribly optimistic about this defense.

It seems doubtful that Winny works in the same manner as freenet, for the simple reason that Winny works, and well, freenet, umm, doesn't.

How strange...

I do wonder how you could have impiled such a large amount of crap, false statements and utter bullshit in a single post. Sometimes AC really amuse me; and how the hell did this post got modded up as Insightful amuses me even more...

Debian has a history of trouble and should be avoided.

Give me a list of this history of trouble you're babbling about.

First of all, Debian is extremely user-unfriendly. If nothing else, it has a reputation of being next to impossible to install.

It's hard to install, yes. It's hard to maintain, no. Debian is extremely coherent, and many distro should learn the solutions that Debian has had for ages (such as the update-modules tool). I've yet to find a better tool to create console connections like ppp-config, for instance. Oh, and juding a distro by its installer is plain stupid.

Second, Debian is extremely out of date.

Again, wrong. Debian stable is out of date, wrt programs version. But it's intended audience it's not the desktop user.

Even if you use unstable, packages such as Perl 5.8 are not available

What the fuck are you taling about? I've been using Unstable and Perl 5.8 for ages (I develop with gtk2-perl and it won't even compile without Perl 5.8, since it extensively uses UTF8).

And fourth, the Debian project itself has a horrible record of security. Just recently, four of its machines were compromised. They weren't hit through some unknown exploit, but because a user sent an unencrypted password over the network.

WTF? How the hell a user related security breach has anything to do with the intrinsic security of an OS? Damn, you look like a MS fanboy trying to tell that Linux is insecure because a user just fucked up something.

If you want to bash Debian, please come up with something insightful, and not the same "stable is old, it's hard to install" pre-cooked speech.

I think almost everyone involved agreed (and still agrees) that it would be cool for NetBeans and Eclipse to share a plug-in architecture, and even underlying framework code. It would allow a great leap in pooling OSS development resources, and would be a boon for plug-in developers, which in turn would help to make Java with *free* tools a better platform than competing MS technologies.

I wrote a version control plugin for JBuilder -- yet another IDE with its own plugin architecture -- and I'm currently learning the Eclipse plugin architecture so I can port it... yes, it sure would be nice if I could just deploy it as is to other IDEs!

But... I suspect that the whole merging idea was mostly conceived by management types who got a rude awakening when they started talking to the tool developers and found out what kind of effort it would take to actually do it.

The work involved would be mind-boggling... and it's not the sort of thing that would draw open-source developers. It definitely scratches an itch to implement that feature you've been longing for in your IDE of choice (which is why it's often easy to get lots of contributors to a good IDE; look how quick the Eclipse community grew!). But I'll be damned if I'm going to reimplement the same thing two years later for free.

The next version of any tool after it's been ripped apart and reassembled is usually much worse than the last version, too. I remember when JBuilder first switched to a version written in Java (3.5)... it hurt to see how many important features were broken or removed. Sure, you understand that this will help in the long run, but you don't want to be around while it fights it way back to mature status.

So would Sun and IBM be willing to pay what it would really take to get there? It would have been nice, but I'm not surprised the answer was no.

I assume the repeated usage of the word "Lame" in your post title was a pun?

Do you know of anything equivalent in quality and/or speed to TMPGEnc? As an alternative, do you know how to get TMPGEnc working under Wine? The last time I tried (maybe a year or so ago), I didn't get very far with it.

This is similar to the current situation with Quicktime, Real and WMV playback on Linux - there is a technical solution, but it is illegal. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that the companies developing these secret formats will ever port to Linux, and even less likely that they will make them open source.

I'm pretty sure there isn't yet any software for Windows which understands the ext3 journal, so you'll only find read only drivers for it. By far the best driver I've seen is the one I link to in my sig- ext2fsd. Takes a bit of tweaking to install, but works quickly, seamlessly, and, in my (readonly) experience, flawlessly. Other drivers I tried would crash all the time. Remember- before you use any windows ext2 driver in rw mode, be sure to back up your data.

Yeah, but the automation systems don't have some "Export selected titles to an XML file to send to Amazon over SOAP" button you can click. As well-defined as library data is, there aren't that many tools for handling it outside of the automation system.

...as reported by CPD.

Here's the report.

Alright kids, now get on emule and go download this game!

I created a similar thing for Flash ActionScript called ActionCrypt; although it's still in progress. You might want to check it out; Javascript and ActionScript are very similar (as they're both based on the same syntax).

<plug>javainetlocator and IP::Country</plug> are also available.

The city data are unreliable. I've posted elsewhere (link1, link2) the reasons why, but will repeat the main points here.

• All IP geolocation techniques assume the user of an IP address lives close to the company which registered the address.
• The above assumption is mostly true if you define 'close' as 'in the same country'.
• In the USA, a lot of people live in (or close to), the same city as the company who registered their IP address. This is because lots of people live in cities and use ISPs which have a presence in that city.
• Most of the world population (and US population) doesn't live in a city with major ISP presence. Their city locations aren't going to be accurate by any IP geolocation technique.
• The commercial IP geolocation vendors (quova, digital envoy) have a business reason for making city geolocation sound accurate. If it wasn't accurate, why would anybody buy their products?
• Conducting a survey that inflates the accuracy of city geolocation is easy - just ensure your survey participants live in a major US cities and you'll achieve high accuracy. One way would be to use server logs from a US financial industry website. Once you have a survey that shows high accuracy, you can sell your product to businesses whose customers don't live in major US cities
• It's extremely difficult to measure accuracy of IP geolocation (even at the country level), so if you make bold claims, no one is going to be in a position to argue.

The last GPL'd release of Warp Pipe (including sources) is available here for download.

--
Evan

Qt also works on the Mac and Windows - GNOME toolkits don't

There is no GNOME toolkit. I think you mean "The GIMP Toolkit.

GTK does work on Windows, and it works pretty good. Two projects that use GTK are Gaim and Workrave. I have used both on my Win2K box at home for the last year, and use it regularly here on my work box also.

Qt also works on the Mac and Windows - GNOME toolkits don't

There is no GNOME toolkit. I think you mean "The GIMP Toolkit.

GTK does work on Windows, and it works pretty good. Two projects that use GTK are Gaim and Workrave. I have used both on my Win2K box at home for the last year, and use it regularly here on my work box also.

hope that helps.

Yeah JXTA's nice, but you still need to do some programming to get something useful out of it, as it is a framework, not a network per se. It has indeed a nice pipe-based architecture.

I'm being redundant with my a previous post of mine, but you might want to check out U-P2P. You can set up a Napster-style P2P network without any programming. We're working on a Gnutella adapter too.

...or how about at least give the creator of a P2P community a framework to help him build one from scratch, and pick and choose specific protocols and other attributes based on his/her needs? Ideally not much programming knowledge should be required.

Check out our U-P2P effort, it is going in that direction.

kmail and konqueror in kde 3.2 are much better than they used to be. Between Evolution and kontact/kmail, I'd have to say that they are _extremely_ close in features. Between Konqueror and Epiphany, I'd have to say that Konqueror is better, but khtml is still not as good as gecko is (but khtml feels a LOT faster, probably thanks to Safari)

As for Gaim, Kopete (also new in KDE 3.2) is pretty close to Gaim in featureset. As for xchat, konversation is pretty nice (beats the crappy ksirc), and is included in kdeextragear, and there is even a kde xchat frontend in development (vertigo)

The only exception still is GIMP. There is good news here as well, as Krita (f/k/a, krayon, kimageshop), is back in development. Architecturally, it's quite similiar to GIMP, but it's just lacked developers for the last year, until recently.

XPipe is an ambitious project to migrate the usefulness of pipes and text streams to XML. The meat of it is a process to break-up tree transformations into small steps.

...at least, in terms of duplicated code clumps as reported by CPD.

Here's the report... not bad at all.

Well freenet is the obvious answer to this problem.

And, it actually is pretty much working again, at least the web-based part; just use a utility like freeweb to insert your list of songs you uploaded with /SSK@CKesZYUJWn2GMvoif1R4SDbujIgPAgM/fuqid/9// FUQID (freenet link, only works when you are running freenet), download to your hearts content.

It used to be easier, you could use FROST to share files and post messages, but someone went insane at the developer end and decided to make it pretty, and CP free and it hasn't worked for sharing files since v050903.

Before that, there were several thousand files available, download times were comparable with Gnutella / E-Donkey, and it was expanding logarithmically.

Well freenet is the obvious answer to this problem.

And, it actually is pretty much working again, at least the web-based part; just use a utility like freeweb to insert your list of songs you uploaded with /SSK@CKesZYUJWn2GMvoif1R4SDbujIgPAgM/fuqid/9// FUQID (freenet link, only works when you are running freenet), download to your hearts content.

It used to be easier, you could use FROST to share files and post messages, but someone went insane at the developer end and decided to make it pretty, and CP free and it hasn't worked for sharing files since v050903.

Before that, there were several thousand files available, download times were comparable with Gnutella / E-Donkey, and it was expanding logarithmically.

First off, it is true that open-source games lack a lot of the glitz and spectacle of closed-source games. But that's actually not relevant. Look at a great open-source game like armagetron. My non-geek friends love this thing. Everyone I've introduced it to gets hooked on it. But it's really nothing more than "Worms" done right with great gameplay.

Armagetron, in my opinion, is like "The Blair Witch Project". They are both the work of talented amateurs. Armagetron will never be Doom 3, but Blair Witch will never be Waterworld. The great thing about open-source games is the same as ultra-low-budget moviemaking: the barriers for entry are so low that anyone can cross over. No one will make Doom 3 or Waterworld that way. But I for one liked Blair Witch better than Waterworld. And while I'm not prepared to say I'll like Doom 3 less than Armagetron, I do think there is a strong niche for light, cheap, well-made games. I mean, honestly, if it were all about the frills, who would still bother playing chess?

to one of our favorite open-source games out there?...

The Ur-Quan Masters
Here is the line-up:

SCO = The Korh-Ah, bent on destruction of Open Source
Microsoft = The Kzer-Za, bent on enslaving all sentient species
Linus & RMS = Humans with a precursor service vehicle...

So what will be our secret weapon to destroy the Sa-Matra that SCO & Microsoft hold in their hands?

Why don't you think about it a little more, bdonlan@users.sf.net, ok?

Or you could just use Zero Install and forget about the whole problem. Surely this is much better for end-users than either RPM or APT (and more secure, too)?

You get to share packages between distributions (no conflicts due to different install locations) and you'll never have to reach for a package manager because you forgot to install something.

What if the traffic is encrypted? Are the packet shaping tools really effective?
Mnet comes to mind.

The way to go here is to make serving content through bittorrent easier. Ideally, as easy as publishing a resource on a web server (that is, copy a file into a directory and figure out what the URL is). This is the goal of the mod_torrent project. We're building an apache plugin on top of libtorrent which automatically creates torrents in response to http requests, and then begins serving them, in response to conditions on the apache server. Load is low? Fine, service with good-old HTTP the normal way. Load is high? Instead of a direct HTTP download, instead have the HTTP GET respond with an application/torrent file, which then launches bt to grab the content (all automatic). Goodbye slashdot effect.

PC-based systems don't *have* to have clunky, complicated user interfaces. I've been fiddling around with this stuff for about a year now, and what I have at the moment (apart from the noise) is about as good as one can reasonably get.

I'm using Freevo to provide the user interface, along with a simple IR receiver and remote for input. I went with this rather than MythTV because the latter involves the extra administrative overhead of a database -- with Freevo, I can simply drop files into a directory and it'll include them on in the menus.

All that said, the whole thing is rather more work than I'd like it to be. Once it's set up it largely "just works", but getting all the bits set up took quite a lot of effort. Unfortunately I still haven't seen a "black box" device that does everything I want, and that includes the subject of this review.

My next step would be to look at building something on based the VIA M10000, but my understanding is that the TV-out subsystem on those doesn't support widescreen resolutions. A pity, because otherwise it looks ideal.

(I've written a number of short articles on building this sort of system, the most useful is probably this one.

OS X users can already apt-get to their heart's content (albeit for lower values of content) here

That goes to show that pretty bright minds are working on Free Software, doesn't it? And suggests what could be a very interesting (though probably quite busy) Slashdot interviewee... I will admit I'm curious to know what drew him to that level of participation in Free Software.

I was pleased to note that dissenting views on whether string theory was science were presented, and even brief discussion of what constitutes science.

(I saw the man once in Park City, Utah -- no, he wouldn't remember me -- busy with a PowerBook, and at the time helping launch another noteworthy open project, the UC Davis Math Archive.)

Slashdot editors?

I am currently publishing several several-hundred-page technical manuals using the following workflow:

All documentation is edited using an ordinary plaintext editor.

The documents are marked-up using ReStructured Text conventions. This has satisfied 99% of my needs. I've decided the convenience of ReST outweighs the need for the remaining 1% of the frills I want.

I use CVS for revision control. There may be an RCS involved in the backend; I don't operate the server that hosts my repository.

The ReST documents are converted to XML using DocUtils. The project coordinator, by the way, has proven himself a superlative programmer. DocUtils rocks, and will also transform ReST to HTML or Latex.

The XML is converted using XSL templates that I've created. Saxon then transforms the DocUtils XML to XML:FO, and FOP transforms that into PDF.

Pretty fucking spiffy, if I do say so myself.

I also currently use HT2HTML to transform ReST to HTML. I use it in preference to DocUtil's native HTML transformation because it allows me to do a few nice tricks. In the future I plan to migrate entirely to another set of custom XSL tranformations.

This system has proven extremely productive. At any time I could pop a few bucks for a commercial XSL:FO->PDF engine and stomp the few gripes I've had with FOP (my number one issue is lack of keep-with-next functionality; however, FOP is under a complete refactoring, and will emerge with full functionality). Saxon has been superb, DocUtils has been wonderful (and I've been able to contribute to the overall design), and ReST is quite pleasant to read and write.

Overall, I highly recommend this workflow.

Your source material becomes extremely reusable, eminently accessible, and free from commercial encumberances.

(footnote: if you do go this route, please don't flood the DocUtils developers with suggestions and ideas. Work out your idea in detail, consult the developers' mailing list archives, and make full consideration of side-effects. Only then suggest it. They've been at this so long, and had so many discussions, that they've become a little short of patience with loud-mouthed newbies. I suspect most popular open-source projects get that way...)

Simple, right? You just click on their name and hit "ignore" and it's not a problem anymore, right? Well, what if you had to click 10,000 names in an hour? It would be an unreasonable task for somebody as lazy as I am...I found myself spending more time dealing with these bots than actually conversing.

It is said that "Every new feature is the scratching of some developer's personal itch." Well, being a developer (albeit one with marginal skills and even less time) with a personal itch, I thought to myself "There must be a way to automate the filtering of all these messages."

Sure enough, open source to the rescue. My Instant Messaging client software, gaim, provides the ability to include modular plugins to modify the behavior of the software. Eureka, I could write a plugin that would filter out annoying chat messages!

So I sat down, scratched my head, and wrote one for gaim that attempted to filter out annoying messages. After a few revisions, I had something that filtered out ~90% of annoying messages, without any false positives. It was easier than expected, because most messages that we don't want have one or more common characteristics:

Linkified messages whose URLs do not match the linkified text (e.g. Click HERE to see hot girls!)

Multiple messages containing links

Long messages (more than 20 characters) repeated verbatim

So all one need do is check these messages for these characteristics and you've got a pretty good filter. Unfortunately, gaim tends to change its API from version to version, so it is always getting broken. But you are welcome to take a look at it and contribute fixes if you like.

SovBob

...called the Interoperability Prototype for Liberty.

Just to see what would turn up, I ran PMD over the source code - it came out pretty clean.

Hmm, anyone else remember the I-Opener?

A $99 computer with a proprietary (QNX-based) OS on a flash disk, that was sold at a loss because the company figured they'd make money from their dialup service... Until someone found the IDE connector on the motherboard and installed something else.

Well, after a short war between the hackers and the company (including state of the art protection mechanisms as epoxy glue on the bios, torx screws, clipped IDE pins etc) the company finally had to raise the price of the unit, resulting in the sales plumeting, and in the end bankrupcy.

Now, I'm not saying it's a bad thing to hack devices like this, heck I've got an iopener (running jailbait linux) standing next to my main computer. But there is a good chance that soon nobody will use the $11 developing deal, resulting in the cameras getting pulled from the stores.

Just as there were lots of people happily using iopeners as they were intended, I'm sure there are lots of people happy with the service that Ritz is providing, and if so it's a shame if we, the hacker community, proceed to destroy yet another service for other consumers.

Yes! You nicely pointed out some of the reasons for a standard syntax tree representation in XL. The properties you mention (accessibility to third-party tools, persistence, representability to the programmer ("rendering"), extensibility (more data than in the source)) are all important, and discussed on the Mozart web site.

The "new" XL compiler, the one that bootstrapped, is an attempt at vastly simplifying that tree representation. It's now down to 7 node types.

Plone obviously scales well, but is also very easy to use for quickly getting started with small-group content management. Consider this:

• Plone is easy to install - get Andy McKay's Win32 installer or Jim Roepcke's Mac OS X installer Get 'em here and you will be up and running in 10 minutes with a Plone site pre-configured by the installer. Also you can get RPM or DEB packages.
• Default workflow and content types let you hit the road running: you have documents, news items, events, images, etc.
• Customization examples are available - Andy's ZopeZen skin is available in the collective - a good example of doing a weblog-style site in Plone.
• Plenty of add ons mean less code you have to write: check out the collective project on sf.net, mentioned above.
• Membership and security is built-in - you could do complex stuff like authenticate off of mysql or LDAP, but the default user-folder (and upcoming group support in Plone 2.0) system is capable and easy to work with without the fuss or worry.
• Simple workflows can be changed through the web; you want to do a google search for "CMF workflow just publish" - or better yet, just grant your small group publish abilities, and let them choose to do it. If you want to hack the edit script, one line of code would trigger the publish workflow transition, if you want to save some clicks. The point is that this is very customizable, and on the other end of the spectrum, you can do things like email notification in your workflow scripts with a bit of cut and pasting some stock code.
• Recipes abound on zopelabs.org under the CMF category
• With Plone 2.0, you can seriously customize the UI without changing the templates, just by haing and admin change values ina web form that are plugged into dynamically generated CSS.
• One of the most supportive mailing lists and IRC (#plone on irc.freenode.net) channels on the planet.

Seems like Sun is trying to get away from R&D. Which is sad, because it was their forte.

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