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Actually, this program, if anybody remembers it, had Emacs keybindings just because that's what I was used to.

Actually, this program, if anybody remembers it, had Emacs keybindings just because that's what I was used to.

Try to compile an OS with a C compiler and see if it fits on a floppy...

Here's my old "Ulric's Router Construction Kit", a single-floppy Linux distribution. Of course, Linux is an OS compiled with a C compiler. At the time there were a bunch of such mini-distributions, I'm not so sure it would be possible today. http://siag.nu/urck/

If you want a great spreadsheet: http://www.quantrix.com/
If you want to beef up the programming language but are fine with Excel: http://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/excel_link/

If you are talking non commercial: Siag (suggested above) is cool: http://siag.nu/index.shtml
This hasn't seen much activity in a decade but Haxcel: http://www.johanmalmstrom.se/haxcel/ is Haskell in a spreadsheet.

The small business that I work for (that just finally, after years, saw decent growth in 2012) just switched to Quantrix, and let me tell you, that's an amazing piece of sotware. Not sure if it was OP's answer, but the what if scenarios are actually decent, not fluff, and another good feature was the fact that it wasnt =AVERAGE() or some other excel BS. (It almost replaced my job -- seriously, i'm not that important)

If you want a great spreadsheet: http://www.quantrix.com/
If you want to beef up the programming language but are fine with Excel: http://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/excel_link/

If you are talking non commercial: Siag (suggested above) is cool: http://siag.nu/index.shtml
This hasn't seen much activity in a decade but Haxcel: http://www.johanmalmstrom.se/haxcel/ is Haskell in a spreadsheet.

Have you looked at Scheme in a Grid?

As old as the hills: http://siag.nu/siag/

• HAproxy
• Distributor
• Crossroads
• Pen
• Balance/BalanceNG
• Pound

HAproxy (which is the one I use) has the ability to define "backup" servers which can be used in the event of a complete failure of all servers in the pool, even if there is only one server in the main pool. If you're trying to do this on the cheap, that may help. It also has embedded builds for things like the NSLU2, so it may be easy to run on an embedded device you already have.

pen can perform some configuration changes on the fly using an optional control service; you can set server weightings at least. It's also event driven rather than the thread-per-connection model I believe pound uses, so it should scale better.

I am wondering if we have forgotten this cute little app... Thwe webpage says
2000-12-07, but I think I've played with it long before that. And yes, it had
database connectivity, could serve data over HTTP and, of course, the extension
(and half of implementation, I'd guess) language was Scheme.

http://siag.nu/siag/

Paul B.

If it doesn't you could try "Scheme in a grid" http://siag.nu/siag/ (supports scheme, tcl and a C like extension language). I've used it but must admit I usually resort to chicken scheme + sqlite for any data processing needs that go beyond what an ordinary spreadsheet can do.

I find it mind-boggling. Maybe I should crank out a simple Scheme based spreadsheet. Perhaps call it "AccurateAnswers", or "CalculatesForSure".

Maybe it should be called SIAG Office?

Can you name me an open source spreadsheet-like program that is not an Excel clone?

slsc, an updated version of the classic sc program.
SIAG, part of Pathetic Office, which won't win any points for marketing, but who cares?

I've often wondered if there is a "Unix way" to do spreadsheets--that is, a way to put data in a plain text file and then do analysis on it.

As someone else mentioned, awk.

Can you name me an open source spreadsheet-like program that is not an Excel clone?

slsc, an updated version of the classic sc program.
SIAG, part of Pathetic Office, which won't win any points for marketing, but who cares?

I've often wondered if there is a "Unix way" to do spreadsheets--that is, a way to put data in a plain text file and then do analysis on it.

As someone else mentioned, awk.

The DSL I have has Firefox.

And though it I had the introduction to the excellent Scheme In A Grid

DSL recently had a "Donate a Dollar" fundraising drive. I don't know how much money they made but I gave them a $. Who says you can't make monet from free software !

• I run daemons for logging my data into the database
• I use a web server on the database side (thttpd) with cgis that let me access the database in certain ways.
• I have cgis written in both c and python
• Keep it simple: each cgi is self contained, small and does only one thing well.
• The front-end (written in wxpython) queries the database over the web and display pretty graphs
• Replies from the webserver can be compressed/encrypted if need be

At the moment, I have my mind set on using sqlite. If I decide to change database for X reason, I don't want to get screwed. I found a wrapper called libsdb which I may use... the same SQL queries can be proxied to a variety of databases (oracle, progresql, sqlite...). The one thing I could lose in sqlite3 is the ability to join records in a table spanning across different files. Well... I don't know if that could speed-up my queries or not. Will need to try and check.

This tutorial I also found useful.

OpenOffice 2.0 beta (and every single other version of OpenOffice I have used) has a nasty show stopper bug in it.

The bug is this: If I want to make a document use any font besides their (IMHO, ugly) default "Nimbus Roman No9 L" font, the font will revert back to the Nimbus roman font if I hit the right arrow at the end of the document. Because of how I write, I frequently do this, resulting in what I type being in the wrong font.

I can't find any way to work around this issue (besides having to constantly look at what I am typing and changing the font when this bug pops up).

AbiWord (both 2.0 and 2.2) have a serious issue with being very slow. In particular, when I hit the up and down arrows at the ends of the vertical scrollbar, AbiWord freezes for one or two seconds while slowly scrolling. AbiWord also does this when I need to change pages while typing. AbiWord 1.0, which didn't have this problem doesn't compile without great effort (thanks, GCC developers, for breaking code that compiled just fine only three years ago), and doesn't run when compiled.

SIAG is very unstable and frequently crashes on me (using both the Xaw and the Xaw32 toolkits.).

I finally settled on Ted, an excellent light word processor which compiles and runs fine. Naturally, this word processor is also not bug free on my system; it has a problem with finding font, requiring some serious hacking in the file appFont.c before I could use this program to write a paper.

I am using Fedora Core Three and wasn't able to find a word processor without serious bugs in it. I finally had to do some source code hacking to get a word processor that I could use.

Actually Lotus 1-2-3 is better than Excel, if you ignore that it's for DOS and no longer being produced. Personally I use sc, but mainly because it comes with psc. Which lets me prepare data from various sources and run sc equations on it. sc is public domain, but it's probably not appropriate to bundle with iWork. :)

The point is interesting though, if you allow me to expand on it a bit. All spreadsheet programs are basically "perfect". Lotus 1-2-3, Excel, gnumeric, and sc are all pretty much the same thing. What sort of innovation can be done in the world of spreadsheets?

uses scheme for it's equations, that might be an innovation. But it's probably a step in the opposite direction for Apple.

Time to rename Pathetic Writer to "Excel Lingo" and one of the TuxRacer clones to "Excel Racer". And so on.

There used to be a funky Linux office suite called Siag Office .

It worked.

I use past-tenses in my above sentences because the author of the Siag Office, Mr. Ulric Eriksson, got so offended by software patents that he shut down the Siag Office website in protest.

If you want to try out Siag Office, you can STILL download the latest version HERE .

Download it before Siag Office is gone forever !

There used to be a funky Linux office suite called Siag Office .

It worked.

I use past-tenses in my above sentences because the author of the Siag Office, Mr. Ulric Eriksson, got so offended by software patents that he shut down the Siag Office website in protest.

If you want to try out Siag Office, you can STILL download the latest version HERE .

Download it before Siag Office is gone forever !

There is another solution to your problem. You know what I'm going to say and you don't like it, but I'm going to tell you anyway because it's the truth.

Quit using windows. It doesn't have what you need, so stop.

If you only want to have some servers giving redundant services, like web or mail, this is quite straightforward to configure and use.

Pen, a load balancer for "simple" tcp based protocols such as http or smtp. It allows several servers to appear as one to the outside and automatically detects servers that are down and distributes clients among the available servers. This gives high availability and scalable performance.

1. add AutoDia/Dia2Code/Dia2SQL/DiaCanvas etc, daVinci Presenter (nonfree), JGraphPad, ObjectArtist, ...
2. Add JProjectTimer, Ma href="http://www.logilab.org/pygantt/">PyGANTT, jgantt/DayOrganiser, Narval::ProjMan, QtGantt, ...
3. Add KOffice, SIAG Office, gobeProductive (nonfree today, being groomed for GPLing as you read this, ...
4. One thing missing so far is a PDF editor; there is no problem with tools for making, viewing and converting PDFs.
5. Can't go past PuTTY for making Windows useful! (-: Try also WinSCP, and there are many GUI ssh managers available for Linux.
6. Mozilla's great. There are also `lite' versions (SkipStone, Galeon etc) and alternatives like Konqueror.
7. What can I say?
8. That's as bad as using an autodialler (the best way of forgetting numbers that I know of): what do you do when Password Safe or the system it runs on gronks and you need one of the passwords in it to restore a backup of it? Nevertheless, Free equivalents abound.
9. sorry, afk for now.

Too bad some dumb VC didn't give SourceGear umpteen millions to complete AbiSuite. AbiWord (now part of Gnome Office AFAIK) is quite nice, and runs on just about everywhere a semi-modern GUI is available.

Well, Lisp isn't really based of anything, at least, not off of any other programming langauges. It is based on the concept of the Lambda Calculus, which is something of a way to describe programs in a mathematical way. Or, something like that. <g> Honestly, I've never gotten a great definition of lambda calculus, but I'm content that Lisp is cool. ;-)

Now, as to why you haven't heard of it before, my guess is because you are either not a University Computer Science graduate, or you haven't branched into functional programming. Most universities will cover it at least very briefly in some sort of programming languages class, though rarely do they do it justice.

As for functional programming, it's a programming paradigm, like imperative or object oriented programming. It tends to be very powerful, often makes use of constructs which are terse (fewer lines of code to do the the same thing than required in other langauges) and generally makes extensive use of recursion.

Lisp is very interesting, however. Even though it is usually thought of as a functional language, it actually provides excellent support for functional, imperative, and object oriented programming. In fact, many people think the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is one of the best Object Oriented Programming implementations available. It was also the first object oriented langauge that was standardized (by ANSI or ISO, I don't remember for sure which one).

It's also been around for a while. In fact, Lisp is one of the oldest programming langauges still in somewhat common use today. (The only older language being Fortran, which predates it by about 5 years, as I recall.)

If you've never had any experience with functional programming, I strongly encourage you to investigate and study[1] it a little, even if you never really use it, because you will learn a great deal about programming in general for your time invested.

Now, as for what applications have been written in it, the canonical example is GNU Emacs. At it's core, Emacs is basically a lisp interpreter, and most of the editor is then written in Lisp.

While applications that are written entirely in Lisp are perhaps not as well known, one of the most common places to find Lisp is as an extension language for other programs. Here are a handfull that make impressive use of Lisp:

The GIMP uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp for it's Script-Fu, which can be used to programatically execute anything that can be done by hand.

Autodesk, the makers of the industry leading CAD software AutoCAD use their own dialect of Lisp, called AutoLISP, for programming and customising the AutoCAD software.

Siag Office is a free small, Open Source, and very impressive, Office Suite making extensive use of Scheme. (SIAG == Scheme In A Grid). It includes a very cool Spreadsheet program, as well as others, and is highly customisable.

GnuCash makes use of the Guile library to provide Scheme as an extension and scripting language for the application.

Speaking of Guile, Guile is the official extension language library of the GNU project. Using Guile to provide Scheme scripting, you can add support for scripting and extensibility to any application. Guile is used in many applications including GnuCash (mentioned above), the SCWM Window Manager, the TeXmacs editor (integrating Tex support into an Emacs like editor), and many others.

One last example is the Sawfish Window Manager, which seems to be among the most popular Window Managers around these days. It makes use of an Emacs-ish philosophy, having a very small core program, including a lisp interpreter, and implementing most of its feature set on top of that with lisp.

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of applications written in, or making use of, Lisp, however I think everyone here will prolly recognise a few names there. ;-)

[1] If you're interested in learning more about Lisp, I strong suggest you take a look the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The full text is available online at the link here, and it is one of the best books ever written about Computer Science. It's also used as an early CS text book at MIT.

Where quality is more important than new features, quality rules. Notice the author isn't complaining about bugs in her car's brake system.

If Moore's Law really is coming to an end, then maybe the software engineers can start coming to greater social prominence. (gratuitous reference) Hey, maybe that'd help the open source cause! (/gratuitous reference)

BTW, they have a good slogan: "It sucks less!"

StarOffice, although not Free, is a decent, very full-featured, if somewhat bloated, office package, and includes presentation software.

Also, Corel has ported WordPerfect, and is porting the rest of their WordPerfect Office2000 suite, as far as I know.

Then, in the Free Software world, there is Siag Office and, of course, KOffice, which, while not finished, look promising.

So, we do have usable tools now, and great Free tools on the way.

--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!