Slashdot Mirror

lambdas and metafunctions: boost and spirit. However, I agree with you that they should become core langauge fetaures. Notably, that's what Boost is - a group that's working on implementing, in a rigorous and standard-friendly fashion, potential extensions. it's droolworthy; I'd say even moreso than Loki, though visible policies make other people's code far less painful. (Yay, Phoenix!)

As far as type inference, I disagree.

cParentClass * foo = new cChildClass();

what's the redundancy of cFoo = new Foo(); ? You specify the type of the thing and then identify the creator and pass it information. Because you always have matched types and creators simply says that your code doesn't require some of the more complex leveraging of the language.

Auto seems convenient at first, but consider the potential for problems. And really, what does it gain you? Five or six keystrokes, in the greater scheme of things, really just isn't that important. Predictability and specificity are, in my opinion, far more important.

If you're so hard up for horizontal space that you can't make a single definition, stop tabbing 8 spaces, put a using or two in place, or get a bigger monitor. Jeez.

I host a bunch of VPSs based on Jeff Dike's UML (User Mode Linux) project.

One (of the many) cool things UML allows is for you to try out new kernels without having to dedicate a real box to it. Even if you're only dedicating the box to it between kernel swap reboots. Especially if you're not sure if the new kernel will corrupt your precious partitions.

The UML 'host' server can continue to run whatever stable 2.4 kernel you need (in my case 2.4.21).

You SSH from your 'host' server into your hosted UML kernel. Play around, test reliability, fiddle with new features, regression test your apps.

So anyway, I'm off to grab the new kernel and have a play. Maybe even see if there are any crazies out there who want hosting with the 2.5/2.6-pre kernel.

- Peter
RimuHosting - Linux VPS Hosting

ATI may not support your 9000 well, but the 8500 (and by implication, 9100 and above) is well supported in XFree86 4.3 and above. I should know; I have one. I actually specifically bought a Radeon 9100, replacing my GeForce2, so I wouldn't need to have a tained kernel to get direct rendering.

Additionally, for XFree85 4.2 and earlier, you might want to check the DRI project.

By the way, if you didn't know, the Radeon 9000 is well known to be a worse card than the 8500. The 9100 is actually the 8500 relabeled.

Here's a duplicate code report (generated by CPD) for a checkout from the APACHE_2_0_BRANCH as of about a month ago. Time for some refactoring....

So you have a Windows C64 or Apple II Emulator hacked to run on the Xbox? After all, you said you were running Lunix!

Hell with any of that! What about rdesktop?

I was able to switch to Linux on my desktop at work about three months ago, because I use rdesktop to terminal into a server to run Exchange (the only think holding me back from switching before). At this point in time, 4 other employees have followed and are now running Linux full-time, and using a terminal service to run exchange. rdesktop is honestly a BAD ASS project. I cannot name a single problem I've had with it.

Try ayttm.

How did you post on /.?

w3m

See Galeon (1.3.x).

Why in the world do they put the start thingy/taskbar/icon collector at the bottom of the screen? Because M$ put it there first. Take a look at your browser. See all the menus up top there? See the titlebar to move the window and close it etc? Shouldn't the taskbar be up there too?

Seems like an awfully small thing to pick on. I don't think "on the same side of the screen" alone amounts to a huge amount of copying. That said, you obviously don't know what you are talking about. Try a default install of GNOME CVS or in Debian or go download Ximian desktop and you'll see that they both have two bars that divide the functionality based on type to achieve a (arguably) cleaner result.

And MS has mostly copied it's GUI as well. There's no reason to throw all the UI development that dates back to the 80's and before just to be "original". MacOS had most of the stuff Windows has now well before them.

I don't know, but the only place I saw the window grouping feature before XP was KDE/GNOME. Is this possibly something MS decided to copy from them? When will we see virtual desktops in a standard MS gui? Also the spiffy transparent selectionbox is clearly from nautilus ;)

For something really different, you could look at Slicker and of course everyone knows SuperKaramba. That's Open Source GUI innovation for easy to use desktops. There's a bunch of really good and interesting window manager ideas as well. Just check out Ion, for example.



Look at StarOffice and OpenOffice. They seem familiar. And there are plenty of others, but I think you get the point.

Except that MS didn't "invent" how an office suite is supposed to look like either. There were office suites before Microsoft's and they copied them. Lotus had one. As a result, much of the same functions as in Lotus 1-2-3 are present in Excel.

Another thing that M$ gets bashed on here is because they "embrace and extend". Many, many open source projects do exactly this.

Open source projects do this?

I don't know what will come of it, but Linux runs on an iPod, and they have Vorbis playback at 80% real time. So it should be possible.

The Direct Rendering Project is also writing drivers for many products, ATI included. They're even mentioned and linked to on ATI's site.

Check out Ur-Quan Masters.
It's the original Star Control 2, ported to SDL & OpenGL and available FREE for *nix and Windows - including source.

It seems to work fine with Sarien as mentioned in the shameless plug. In fact, everything was amazingly intuitive. I saw the post about Sarien, downloaded the source tarball, did "./configure && make", went to the directory of the game, ran sarien, and it was up and running.

There is a version of Sarien for PalmOS devices -- has anyone tested it with SQ0?

Sarien is a very mature reverse-engineered interpreter that carries on that tradition and will run on just about every modern platform (protected-mode DOS, Win32, *nix, pre-OSX Mac, OSX, Photon, PalmOS, even original platforms like real-mode CGA DOS and Amiga). It even offers improvements over the original AGI like high-res graphics and multi-channel sound even on PCs.

*Disclaimer* I'm an official project member, so I may be slightly biased. ;)

I've been planning to add a web server for control and streaming in the next release.

popfile works with every mail client with an easy to use web interface.

Here's a report of duplicated code in the JDK, thanks to CPD.

Crikey!

I've been using spambayes for months now and it really is quite amazing. Now, when I get the occasionaly spam in my mailbox it's actually interesting because I want to figure out why it made it in. The number of false positives is almost nil, and the ones that do get hit are spammy looking autogenerated reciepts from purchases I've made. It's made reading email a much more enjoyable activity.

-Adam

is a scalable popfile for larger organizations. If I could get popfile (with its super-easy-to-train/use-web-interface) that would run on my linux server, scan my IMAP mail server (well, incoming mail would actually work fine, too. I've heard they have a smtp plugin for it in cvs), and then have a popfile config page for each person, or mayby tie it into the imap/smtp server's login. THAT would rock. I've heard spamasassin does Bayesian, but I couldnt see how it was trainable (and I dont want other people on my server to read each others mail, obviously).

It's not really a PDA, it's a pocketable Linux computer.

First, the PDA side of things. People criticise it for having weak PDA features which, compared to Palms, and that's somewhat true; my previous Psion PDAs had a few extra features around the edges that I miss, but by and large the PIM features are fine for my moderately advanced use.

But there's so much more! SCUMMVM in the palm of your hand with mp3-encoded talkie versions of Fate of Atlantis or Day of the Tentacle is pretty nifty.Add a Wifi card, install Wellenwreiter or Kismet, and go low-profile warwalking. I have a Pocketop IR folding keyboard for long documentation on the go; the screen rotation software Just Works, unlike a lot of PocketPCs.

Unlike Palm owners, I can handle DOC and XLS files native on the device; this is particularly key because the Zaurus is a computer in its own right and not a PDA. The Hancom office apps shipped with it are usable enough for quick on-the-go editing and creation. I could do with one of these now for instant printing of invoices when I'm out at a client's site.

The big compelling piece of software is OpenZaurus, a completely open source and regularly updated distro to replace the Sharp ROM. It's a bit like trading Debian stable for unstable; kinda hacky at times, kinda buggy at others, but it's so exciting to get a massive batch of upgrades every few weeks full of improvements. It's never been buggy enough to lose my PDA data, and in any event with multisync, unison and rsync my data is backed up six ways to Sunday.

Other people like apps like opie-reader for ebooks, portable Ogg players (there are a few), portable DivX playback, email (this is noticeable ropy under OpenZaurus, but getting better), and many more... For more ideas, see this thread on zaurus.com.

Downsides? I find the QWERTY keyboard wearing after a few minutes, hence I have the Pocketop, and I've managed to scratch the screen under the handwriting recognition area so I can't really use it any more (I think that was my fault, to be fair). The battery life sucks too, but then it does on all these colour mobile devices. Apparently, the SL5600 is better.

So basically, if you want a PDA, get a Palm. If you want a pocketable Linux computer in a PDA form factor with respectable PIM features and a mountain of open source apps, get a Zaurus.

One more reason to use anonymous networks like freenet (http://freenet.sf.net/.) if you use freenet these fuckers will only know that you are on the network, but they can't findout which files you are sharing.

I am the main programmer of the 3d demo shown on the screenshots. This demo combines a distributed interactive fluid simulation with graphical intensive rendering using pixel shaders. It uses Net Juggler to manage the distribution on the cluster. You canse some picture and a video of the fluid simulation in our gallery . The shader for the rabbit's fur is explained on this page of my website (please be gentle with the server...).

I am the main programmer of the 3d demo shown on the screenshots. This demo combines a distributed interactive fluid simulation with graphical intensive rendering using pixel shaders. It uses Net Juggler to manage the distribution on the cluster. You canse some picture and a video of the fluid simulation in our gallery . The shader for the rabbit's fur is explained on this page of my website (please be gentle with the server...).

It's too bad Lindows is trying to copy windows without stealing more from OSX.

Well first, Lindows is trying to take market share away from Windows, not OSX.

Honestly, if a Linux distro tried to copy OSX as much as they copy Windows, I would load that onto my winXP box.

Second, you're not in their target market.

Third, aside from the above, that's a great idea (seriously). Start a project on SourceForge to create a look-alike OSX desktop for Linux (like XPde is trying to create an XP look-alike for Linux).

Fourth, the rest of us could start a pool based on how long it takes Apple to sue you into the ground.

You might want to look at the Nice language. It is similar to Java, but with many extensions, and the compiler is GPL, with an open design process.

• GUI (wxWindows)
• Audio I/O (portaudio)
• PCM sound file i/o (libsndfile)
• mp3 decoding (libmad)
• id3 tagging (libid3tag)
• pcm resampling (libsamplerate)
• time and pitch stretching (soundstretch)
• vorbis encoding and decoding (libogg/libvorbis)
• XML parsing (expat)

would be interesting to see what xine could do on this platform. maybe any xbox could be turned into a full-featured dvd player (including menu support) that way?

LRP didn't just die. It evolved, or reincarnated. Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall (or LEAF) is the next step. Kernel 2.4 support, several ready distributions for different needs, packaging system, etc..

"LRP is dead" news is more like a bitter cry of an abandoned developer.. If he touts his "next version would've had all these magical abilities", why doesn't he release it? Even a partial implementation would probably attract attention and it could be integrated into other embedded projects.

Linux-on-a-floppy idea is generally just an issue of picking the right components and wrapping it up. I taught a linux-trainee to make an iptables-floppy in one night, just by cut-pasteing parts of a running debian system and compiling a custom kernel.

I'd say that the linux-floppy-culture owns most credit to uClibc and Busybox developers, for making embedded-sized libc and utilities.

leaf.sf.net

Not dead. Not even comatose.

Yes, code forks suck.

Yes, trying to make ends meet writing free software is no easier than with many other labors of love.

While I personally feel sorry for Cinege, I use the result of his work 24/7. Not a bad legacy...

Hear hear. Someone on the PostgreSQL mailing list suggested that I investigate DbUnit, a utility for use with JUnit that restores a database to a known state after each unit test for situations in which mock objects are too inconvenient. It looked perfect... until I tried it with my database.

My schema's referential integrity constraints required the re-import of data to be done in a certain order. DbUnit officially only supports Oracle and Sybase (I think), and I suppose this wasn't a problem for those DBs... but I thought I had hit a wall that I could not cross with PostgreSQL. A simple look into the code showed that the change wouldn't be very hard to make. A few hours and a patch later, and DbUnit had new functionality that it did not have before. The point is, not only was I able to use the fact that the utility was open source to make it work better for me, but the change I made went into CVS and will hopefully be of use to others. It is not a myth.

Let's face it. Most of the suggestions above are useless. Since when is a company going to officially distribute stuff via Kazaa or BitTorrent? Sorry, but when Microsoft says 'To download our latest Service Pack, use Kazaa' then pigs will be flying. It's so unprofessional.

IÂm stating to experiment with stop motion video production.
I even wrote a tool to capture frames from a digital camera...
The same program can be used to capture frames in a regular interval to make "accelerated" videos
The results are very cool ;D

I'll probably piss-off the red-bloded Americans here, but man, I can't wait to not drive my car. I want to have fully automated driving. I want to finish work on a Friday afternoon, go home, grab my stuff, go to my car and say "Miami Beach, Please!". I want to watch movies for a couple of hours or finish reading Dune, and when I wake up, I'm parked right at my favorite beach. Same thing for the reverse trip Sunday night and Monday mornings wouldn't be half as bad. Paint fuel-cells into that picture and it wouldn't even tweak the greens.

CMU's robotics program has been working on automated driving systems for years. When I was there I heard one of the professors had outfitted his normal home car with about $1500 of equipment and "drove" to school and back every day mostly hands-off. All based on neural-nets and some snazzy control systems.

And that was like 6 years ago. I'm sure there's wisdom in not rushing into something like this, but I also get the feeling there will be some hard lobbying against it. Like, what happens to truckers, cabbies, UPS/Fed-Ex drivers, etc. etc.? Will the (perhaps undeserved) reputation of dangerous speed-freak truckers come home to roost?

I wonder how Detroit would feel. At first, it's a shinny new feature == more margin. But beyond that, I can't help but see cars become even more commodity. All you really end up caring about is your comfort/ammenities.. there won't be as much attention to "performance".. ahhh.. Detroit will ~love~ it, BMW won't.

You could even share these kind of cars, like the Zip cars, but instead of you going to the cars, they come to you. Or perhaps just the under-carriage comes to you and connects to your personal travel cabin. Then, you pull out of the driveway and merge into a long train of like-designed cabins-on-wheels, all virtually-linked together via 802.11z. The road/car system routes you shortest-dijkstra-path to your destination and then your car parks itself once it's dropped you off. There's traffic density that would make clog up modern highways for years, but its all flow-controlled, so you go 120MpH with only inches between cars, so your trip takes half the time.

The moving sidewalk (armchair) of the future? :)

One already exists, it's called RBMake.

But Lunix does! :-)

Ever heard of Lunix?

Luckily, ambitious hackers have already thought of this. (minus the web interface...)

iptstate does that (not the traffic volume, though) on a Linux NAT firewall. It actually shows you everything the netfilter connection tracking stuff is keeping track of, so it's useful on any stateful firewall, not just NAT.

Also, try ipband, iftop, or iptraf.

How to announce software on /.:

1) Go to SourceForge.
2) Register a project; upload files
3) Post link to SourceForge page on /.
4) ???
5) Profit

How not to announce software on /.:

1) Upload software to your web server behind a T1
2) Post link to /.
4) ???
5) Cry over the money you just wasted.

--Quentin

Specifically, I took a couple of sounds for my user interface from Powermanga. The license allows this kind of thing, so why not? In this sense my game is a 'derived work'.

There are of course public domain sounds, and indeed graphics, around. It seems pretty hard to find good ones that you can be sure are genuinely PD.

Well, all I can say is, if Venice weren't already well established on SourceForge, I'd probably put it on Java.net. And it's comforting to know I now have a backup option if VA suddenly goes belly-up and SF disappears. (Not that I think that's gonna happen or anything, but sometimes you never know which way the frog's gonna jump.)

Google does wonderful things

Here's a good chance to mention the Gaim-Encryption plugin project. For self-compiling people you can grab the plugin source, (get the gaim source too, they have to match), and compile the plugin. Then enjoy.

Sadly, there's a licensing issue with the Win32 plugin. The author, Bill, was distributing an installer with the Gaim binary, the plugin binary, and the OpenSSL-for-Win32 dlls in one package. Apparently that's a GPL No-No (does this mean GPL is evil now??). So he ceased the distribution of the Win32 port.

However, you can still get the Gaim source, Gaim-Encryption plugin source, the OpenSSL-for-Win32 package, and follow the instructions on the plugin project page to compile it all yourself under Cygwin + MinGW. (That was a huge sentence)

It all uses RSA through OpenSSL to make it work. It works with Gaim so it will do crypto over all of Gaim's IM networks it supports (AIM, ICQ, etc). It's fantastic and open source :)

Enjoy!

Yes, but how exactly do you disable ICQ?

The only IM you need is a Jabber client and you can get on AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo Messenger networks.

My personal favourite is Psi

Last summer, I accepted a contract with a client to customize and install a Linux POS solution based on L'ane POS, a Perl/Tk/PostgreSQL point-of-sale system designed for touchscreen-equipped terminals. The basic codebase was decent, (if typically under-documented) but since this particular customer had some very weird pricing and product bundle logic requirements, I ended up building them a custom app using Ruby, its Gtk+ bindings, and PostgreSQL.

Needless to say, it was a fair bit of work to buird a full backend and GUI "while they waited," but in the end it was a much better-adapted system for their needs. So I would personally recommend that you keep in mind the possibility that you (or someone else -- I'm available for contract development work, of course ;) may need to develop (or at least heavily customize) an open-source solution to really meet your customer's needs. Just like any buy vs. build question, you just need to look at the time pressures, special requirements your customers may have, etc., and come up with some numbers and feature lists for each of the options.

If you like the aix system, and want something made by IBM that's even to a certain degree "compatible" with the system AIX uses, then have a look at evms.

Well, I'm not sure, but my 9 months of CTS might contradict this finding.

Let me just start off by saying that you wouldn't want to wish CTS on your worst enemy. It's not a pleasant experience.

That out of the way, I can say, without a doubt, that typing was the cause of my CTS.

I was hacking up an Ericsson PABX controller for many many hours for many many days. I wasn't taking breaks, I wasn't stretching, and I was using a mouse and a normal keyboard.

At first my hands went numb on a Friday. I thought it was strange, but my wrists were fine and feeling was restored after the weekend.

About 3 weeks later, I suddenly got this huge amount of pain in my right wrist. The next day my whole right hand was paralised, and I took 2 weeks off work.

I returned to work after having trained Dragon NaturallySpeaking to program C with Emacs. After about a week, my voice was gone, and my throat hurt like hell. So I gave up on that.

I got an MS Natural Keyboard. It helped. I got a trackball and used my left hand instead of my right hand. That helped.

I also discovered an amazing program called Workrave that forced me to take breaks. I highly recommend that people use this program. Prevention is a good thing.

So anyway, it's been 9 months. I've been to physiotherapists, chiropractors, hand therapists, hand surgeons, etc. None have really fixed the problem. But it's "managable" now.

Anyway, I'm probably looking at some form of surgery in the next few months as I seem to be stuck in a "rut", having good wrist days and bad wrist days.

The moral of my story: if you're typing a lot, and you're not taking breaks, then you're in for an aweful experience. Do some stretches and stuff as well. Seems to help. CTS isn't fun. Very depressing at times.

Oh yeah, I'm 20. I've been programming for maybe 6 years. So you don't necessarily have to be old to get a form of RSI.

Oh, another good resource is the Typing Injury FAQ.

The example doesn't really add up -- stick that code in a utility class static final method and it'll inline. You probably wanted something that'd actually transform its input instead of just saving some typing. Most lisp macros need to work on the parsed form of the sexp that is their argument, splicing bits in here and there, inserting control statements or special forms that wouldn't work in a function. Java has neither the sexp format nor any special forms in such formats that would lend itself to a macro facility like lisp.

Anyway, if you really want to extend the language in a clean way, just use OpenJava like everyone else does. As long as OJ is developed independently from Sun, it stands more chance of being actually being useful and not crippled.