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The traditional vi is available here:
http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/

You're not alone. For those who dig eclipse, there do appear to be efforts related to this, such as eclim, vimplugin, and viPlugin.

May the source be with you.

You're not alone. For those who dig eclipse, there do appear to be efforts related to this, such as eclim, vimplugin, and viPlugin.

May the source be with you.

I for one would rather use emacs, but if key combinations like ctrl+alt+meta+% are beyond your manual dexterity, the best vi clone is vigor

You would have to be assuming we were talking about vi vs. emacs. Maybe the real issue should be vim vs. vi. I prefer vi.

I for one would rather use emacs, but if key combinations like ctrl+alt+meta+% are beyond your manual dexterity, the best vi clone is vigor

A few years ago, I modified all of the system test environments at my workplace so that vi was just an alias to vigor. All of the administrators were thrilled with vigor's responses, including everyone's favorite: 'You pressed the right arrow key. Push OK to continue'. No OS can be considered mature (or senile) if Vigor isn't installed by default.

Agreed. One thing I love about Vim is all the Unixy tools or functionality you get built-in: grep, diff, tail, and others. I didn't have to download Cygwin/MingW for ages because I could always jump into Vim to get atleast these two tasks done. (Yeah, I know about GnuWin32, but I didn't back then, and hate using CMD.EXE anyway; and Vim's sometimes convoluted interface to them is relatively easy to look up and work with, not to say anything of the pretty colours).

Thank you, Mr. Moolenaar and others!

Most don't take the time to read the documentation http://www.eandem.co.uk/mrw/vim/usr_doc/index.html . One of the great thing about VI(M) is the ability to execute this in Batch Mode (i.e. Ex ). For that matter in these days of Microsoft Glory and GUI's that don't work so well, its nice to know that GNU Tools http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ are around for all those pesky OS's that fall short of Batch Processing abilities of any sort to speak of. VI(M) also operates in this area quite well.

Nice to know it's not forgotten.

It's in the FAQ. It's actually been included in the tagging FAQ since its first version, January 2006.

Shakespeare Programming Language

Plus, it really only deals with the Gnutella network, whereas most of the traffic nowadays would probably be using Bittorrent.

1. Theora video is somewhat based on H.261 and is obsolete in regards with recent developments such as H.264 and VP8 from On2. Can someone knowledgable about Theora make any comment on this assertion? Theora is actually based on On2 Technology's VP3 codec and not an H.261. It may be comparable in quality to H.261 though. Theora is good enough quality for the current Web and the small size videos we are used to through YouTube. It cannot compete with high-quality H.264, but it was not designed to do so. OTOH, the BBC Dirac codec http://dirac.sourceforge.net/ is built to compete in that space and Dirac is an open standard according to the definition of Bruce Perens: http://perens.com/OpenStandards/Definition.html.
2. De facto standard of the Web is Flash video and H.264 encapsulated in either FLV or MPEG 4 file formats. This one valid and reversing the trend seems difficult to imagine. De facto standards come and go. There have been many image formats de facto standards before we got to the current set of jpeg and png. Flash is not providing all the potential a web video format should provide. Flash was never developed to do so but accidentally slipped into that role after Quicktime, RealMedia and WindowsMedia failed to make usable web video technology. There is only one thing certain on this planet: change.
3. They believe are not at ease with the process of the organisations behind ogg / vorbis / theora development and fear standard forks. Ah the old argument against Open Source software! Fear! No, I'm not going there. Too much has been written about this kind of marketing approach before - no need to repeat here.

You are correct in saying Ogg is not a codec. But when you compare Theora to VC-1, you must not have been reading the license terms of VC-1 properly. VC-1 is riddled by patents and there are royalites to pay when you use it: http://www.mpegla.com/pid/vc1/ . There is no such thing as royalties to pay for Theora. Also, the only patent on Theora were ones owned by On2 Technologies, who donated their VP3 codec as the *basis* technology for Theora and kindly granted an unrevocable free license regarding those patents: http://www.theora.org/benefits/. As for quality - yes, Theora is a generation behind in compression technology and H.264 is much better quality at lower bitrates. Again - have you read the license conditions? Theora is simply the only open codec standard (as to the definition of Open Standard by Buce Perens: http://perens.com/OpenStandards/Definition.html) with a usable implementation. Mind you, I would watch out for the BBC's Dirac codec http://dirac.sourceforge.net/ which is based on Wavelet technology and is thus opening a whole new space of new video codec developments and improvements - a space H.264 didn't enter. And Dirac is an open standard.

You've never heard of Scilab or octave? Or the older rlab?

Try http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/ to r/w ext2 and ext3 partitions on mac. Just make sure that you use tunefs to turn indexes off (on a proper linux box); it'll only mount ext3 r/o if they are on.

I'm not Mac inclined, but I did notice ext2fsx http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/ which is the Mac driver for ext2/3. Although at first look it doesn't say anything about ext3, the filesystems are compatible. Ext3 is just the journalling on top of ext2 IIRC. I assume Mac does FAT filesystems, so just pop the driver in that partition on your external drive.

Agreed about the NAS solution. What I now do is have a drive with 2 partitions. The first is a 100MB FAT partition with some windows tools (firefox vlc etc), and the rest of the drive as an ext2 partition. The FAT partition contains the windows driver for ext2/3 so I can use the drive nearly anywhere.

http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/

It comes when Ripple http://ripple.sourceforge.net/ reaches critical mass.

My point wasn't that you should use C instead of PHP. It was that PHP isn't the be-all-end-all of web development. Ruby on Rails has a lot of selling points other than "look what I can build that can be built with anything else". However... You can "hook into the webserver" pretty easily with CGI programs written in C. That's how they did it (along with Perl) before PHP and every other web framework. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface String manipulation isn't much more cumbersome in C than any other language. Just use a library if you can't figure it out for yourself. http://bstring.sourceforge.net/

When I said "include R in Sage", I meant to include R as part of the Sage distribution (so that it gets installed when Sage is installed) as well as provide interfaces to R from Sage. One such interface is RPy ( http://rpy.sourceforge.net/ ) which is a library level interface that allows R to be used from Python. Another interface will communicate with R via a pseudo-tty. Here is how such a session will look:

sage: a = r([1,2,3,4])
sage: a = r([1,2,3,4]); a
1 2 3 4
sage: a.length()
4
sage: a.dim = (2,2)
sage: a
[,1] [,2]
[1,] 1 3
[2,] 2 4
sage: r.t_test(range(100))
One Sample t-test

data: sage106
t = 17.0622, df = 99, p-value alternative hypothesis: true mean is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
43.74349 55.25651
sample estimates:
mean of x
49.5


--Mike

My vote goes for the C64 Last Ninja soundtrack. Absolutely awesome.

Star Control 2 / Ur-Quan Masters. Actraiser and Seiken Densetsu 3 for Super Nintendo are also pretty good, and Zelda 3 has some memorable stuff as well, as does Castlevania 4. And Chrono Cross and FF7 for Playstation.

Sigh. I just realized that I do most of my playing with ZSNes Super Nintendo emulator nowadays. Hell, I prefer 2D games to the 3D ones, since i have a tendency to get lost in the latter. I'm getting old :(.

There are ways to get python to run as machine code(or at that level, I don't care about splitting hairs). For instance, psyco, which is more or less a JIT for python code:

http://psyco.sourceforge.net/introduction.html

There are also python like languages(pyrex) and attempts at using type inference to make stuff that looks like python compile as C++(Shedskin), so the range of ways to run python(like) code is pretty broad for (I more familiar with python, I'm sure others have similar options).

The big difference between what you are calling compiled languages and interpreted languages is mostly typing. A big long rant about it is here:

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/is-weak-typing-strong-enough

Weak/dynamically typed languages often end up interpreted because it is a whole lot easier to make them work that way. They end up memory managed because memory is usually most important where speed is most important, and they, mostly because of weak/dynamic typing, are generally not cycle efficient, so prating over memory doesn't end up being worth it.

http://pdf2psp.sourceforge.net/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bookr/

The original .mod files were pretty good for the day, but the "official Ur-Quan Masters remix" packs are a step up as well

http://sc2.sourceforge.net/downloads.php

I am an avid user of Firefox but even I will admit that Firefox has more than a few vulnerabilities. If you think surfing the net without an active AV keeps you safe from malicious code on the net, well, lets just say, you have a false sense of online security. Hey, I tied in the article's title to my post!!!

Seriously, If you want to browse the web without AV and feel safe. Shell into your favorite Linux box and browse with "Links"

I need a record of my passwords outside my brain. Where should that record exist?

For backup, on a piece of paper, maybe in your wallet. For quick access from your computer, get a password manager. PasswordSafe works great for me. Make sure you get a newer version, because some attacks have been found against older ones (but that's true about almost any security software).

Hard to believe no one has mentioned PDFCreator. An excellent option for end users, it will interface with any windows program which supports printing. Open source, lightweight and very handy.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

You want PDFedit. Ubuntu 7.10 Universe repository.

PDFedit already exists and is GPL. It's in the Ubuntu 7.10 Universe repository.

Of course, but I still use Nero 5.5. It does everything I want, so if I upgrade to Vista I have to shell out money for a new buring program?

The coolest use for a soundcard I've seen is still the SoundcardEEG.

NT works similarly to UNIX. It supports hard links, so the file instance could be considered an inode. On NTFS, files also have a unique number that could be considered the inode number.

The main difference comes from how NT has mandatory locking. When you open the file, you specify what file permissions other processes are allowed to use. Naturally, very few programs grant the "delete" sharing permission.

There's also another constraint in the way deletes are done under NT. When a file is opened, the directory entry used to open it is remembered. If the "delete" sharing permission is granted, other processes are allowed to remove or rename that directory entry.

However, when an open file (directory entry) is deleted, that directory entry is marked as being in the "delete pending" state, and no other access to it is allowed. The entry stays in place until the last reference to it is closed, at which point it is removed. (If there are no other hard links to the file, the file itself is deleted at this point.) This differs from POSIX in that POSIX removes the name immediately, but NT requires that there always be a name present. Essentially, NT does not allow anonymous files to exist.

Hard links in NTFS are just like POSIX hard links: they simply add a new directory entry for an existing file on the same filesystem. They cannot cross filesystems. In API terms, CreateHardLink() will create one. For commandline utilities, XP and later support fsutil hardlink create.

Symbolic links have been added in Vista, but I do not have much information on them at present. 2000 and up have something roughly like symbolic links for directories only, called Junction Points. They allow a directory to refer to another directory on any volume (filesystem). There's no simple API for them, because the underlying mechanism is NTFS's Reparse Points, which are basically filesystem-level hooks implemented by filter drivers. 2000 and up just ship with a built-in driver for junction points. There is also no included commandline tool, but both the Resource Kit and sysinternals have one.

I recommend using the NTFS Link shell extension; it makes managing both hard links and junction points easy, and teaches Explorer how to properly handle junctions in UI terms. (Normally Explorer will delete the contents of the referenced directory when you try to delete a junction point. That makes working with them bare somewhat dangerous.)

sounds like there is a business selling physically destructable drives - a drive witha an easy open case, and a method to physcially damage the platter

Why do that? Just buy a large amount of flash ram. It can be erased rather quickly, and isn't recoverable. If you want to be "extra paranoid", do the 7 pass thing.

If you have a HD, just download, boot, and run dban on it. It's not all that difficult, even for a neophyte.

Don't bother hiring IT services to wipe drives, just use DBAN.

Meh. I'm not terribly impressed. I'm guessing all the guy did was show up, ran a copy of DBan charged him $300 (because it's a government job), then left. Not that he did anything wrong. At least he knew the difference between formatting a drive and securely wiping it.

I can think of at least one interesting way to set this up using FUSE. Once this service becomes available, someone writes a FUSE filesystem for it. Then you use encfs to mount an encrypted filesystem on top of the mounted gdrive. Viola! Mount a gdrive locally and hide its contents from Google too.

I can think of at least one interesting way to set this up using FUSE. Once this service becomes available, someone writes a FUSE filesystem for it. Then you use encfs to mount an encrypted filesystem on top of the mounted gdrive. Viola! Mount a gdrive locally and hide its contents from Google too.

I disagree. There is actually a webbased, cross-platform, open source CRM/CMS system called Covide which integrates tightly with Asterisk VoIP server. We installed both at our office, and although we're still getting the hang of it, hitherto its functionality has been outstanding. For more info:

http://www.covide.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/covide/
http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/
http://www.asterisk.org/

Strange... I posted this yesterday, but it seems to have disappeared into Limbo. Computers are weird, and the programmers are even scarier.

I disagree. There is actually a webbased, cross-platform, open source CRM/CMS system called Covide which integrates tightly with Asterisk VoIP server. We installed both at our office, and although we're still getting the hang of it, hitherto its functionality has been outstanding. For more info:

http://www.covide.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/covide/
http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/
http://www.asterisk.org/

Strange... I posted this yesterday, but it seems to have disappeared into Limbo. Computers are weird, and the programmers are even scarier.

> No viewers for Linux / Firefox

http://djvu.sourceforge.net/

> I agree that custom plug-ins suck

DJVU is not a ``custom plugin''. It is an impressive technology,
originally developed by AT&T, with a Free and Open reference
implementation:

http://djvu.sourceforge.net/

You make an excellent point. I'm a Gutsy user at the moment, and I also was expecting more. Feisty had set my expectations high. Two thoughts: First, Feisty was released in April '07. Even followed by Gutsy, that makes '07 a banner year for Linux, IMO. Second, '07 is the year of 64-bit pervasive computing. I personally hope to never purchase a 32-bit machine or OS again, and hope not to live to see the 64/128 transition. I think this transition is one reason for displeasure with the new OSes. Typical apps that use to run in 100 meg now take 150 or more, and run 10-20%slower, simply because they're 64-bit (except for mine). And talk about disappointment, I know tons of guys who were led to believe that 64-bit machines would be 2X faster. Twice the data width means twice the throughput, right? Sales guys basically suck. Even programming language designers have been caught with their pants down... mixing 64 and 32-bit pointers sucks or is impossible in all top-ten, and most make it impossible to represent 4 billion objects with 32-bit object handles, including C++, C#, the JVM (not Java), and D.

I heard a great story about why Microsoft is forcing all future OS versions to be 64-bit only. Apparently, only the 64-bit modes of Intel/AMD CPUs are capable of enforcing DRM effectively. HD-DVD content will only be released to 64-bit versions of Windows. You gotta love the future.

You could try qmail-spp smtp plugins, or write your own spp plugin. I use about 4 plugins including local vpopmail user check. There are plugins for vmailmgr and others as well. Qmail has constantly moved forward, even though the base package hasn't changed in years.

(relatively) simple and effective WebCal solution: http://rscds.sourceforge.net/

• Adding and editing notes
• Highlighting important text
• Making "snapshots" for easy reference
• Interaction with LaTeX and PDFSync
• ...