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A good CLI audio player you say? Ever looked at mp3blaster? Not sure if it meets your definition of full-featured. I used it happily for quite some time before I installed Gentoo, then I discovered Amarok and fell in love.

CD ripping: abcde. Easy to control and customize.

Text editor: vim Yes, it is bigger than, say, nvi. But on most any machine, it usually runs lightning fast.

Shell: zsh. Not one of the smallest CLI shells, but very capable and well-documented. In many ways, easier to use than any GUI shell (and much lighter compared to any GUI shell.)

Calculator: command-line wcalc

Finances: Ledger whips everything I have ever tried; I would never switch to a GUI program for this again.

Lists and databases: colon-delimeted plain text files. Search and get records with awk or grep. Quicker and easier than spreadsheets, and I could (should) easily encrypt them with GPG.

Nutrition tracking: see sig (immodestly)

Task tracking: todo.txt

Photo sorting: just use GNOME's Nautilus and folders; all the photo album apps seem to be too much trouble. Wrote a zsh script to pull photos from memory cards, rename them so I know what camera they came from, rotate them, and dump them into a hard-drive folder so I can sort them out.

Light doesn't always pay: I got tired of trying to configure Fluxbox and Gentoo; now I'm on GNOME and Ubuntu. Light also doesn't pay for things done infrequently, as light often comes with a bigger learning curve. I usually resort to GUI tools to, for example, add users to the system.

I wish I could find a good CLI audio player--full featured, but CLI. MPD seems to come closest, but it can't get me away from Amarok. Similarly, GNUpod is pretty good for ipods, but I move stuff in and out of my iPod fairly rarely so I found Amarok is just easier to use.

• I like to use mrxvt http://materm.sourceforge.net/wiki/ as my terminal -- it's nice and lightweight, has tabs, can do pseudo transparency and is pretty configurable. Much more lightweight than Konsole or Gnome terminal.

• I use ROX-filer http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/ for file managing -- a little different to alternatives like Konqueror, but well worth checking out. Pretty lightweight and fast to use, with plenty of useful features (drag-n-drop works properly, in-filer window shells, sensible options when you drag a file somewhere (symlink, copy, move etc), configurable menus ...) As an added bonus, it can also be used to give pinboard on the backdrop/wallpaper for putting clickable links to files, applications etc.

• I like to use mrxvt http://materm.sourceforge.net/wiki/ as my terminal -- it's nice and lightweight, has tabs, can do pseudo transparency and is pretty configurable. Much more lightweight than Konsole or Gnome terminal.

• I use ROX-filer http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/ for file managing -- a little different to alternatives like Konqueror, but well worth checking out. Pretty lightweight and fast to use, with plenty of useful features (drag-n-drop works properly, in-filer window shells, sensible options when you drag a file somewhere (symlink, copy, move etc), configurable menus ...) As an added bonus, it can also be used to give pinboard on the backdrop/wallpaper for putting clickable links to files, applications etc.

ROX Filer

It's freaking fast, responsive, intuitive (similar to the Mac OS Finder), and hackable.

It's so fast, I've used it to replace some menus I used to use, in some ways.

Requirement for compiling:

gcc
ncurses development library version 4 (should work on newer version)
glibc 2.1 and above
A fast computer (because libmpeg3 is a high quality decoder)
8MB RAM

http://lienmp3.sourceforge.net/

The best non-bloat app ever!

You may also be interested in the mud-dev mailing list. Schubert and others contributed to the original list, the archives of which are available from Raph Koster's site

The archives cover a lot of interesting ideas that largely have yet to find their ways into mainstream MMOs.

One of my personal favorites was genmud, which featured a completely procedurally generated world, in which NPC populations battle each other for survival. By contrast, modern MMOs generally still use static "spawn points" to determine where new creatures enter the game world, which are usually inserted by hand by developers/level designers.

I can't live without it...

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

aria2 is a lovely light weight command line BitTorrent/Metalink downloader.

I particularly like Juice for podcasts...and it's FOSS.

Because that question doesn't seem to exclude non-commercial, non-graphical applications, or specify particular operating systems, my response might be painfully boring (and just as painfully obvious) to some people, but I would have to say the original Berkeley vi and, of course, c-kermit. Sorry vim people, but with GNU Emacs available for extensibility, I honestly don't know why you would want to bloat something as lean, mean and beautiful as vi.

1. Foxit Reader instead of Adobe's Acrobat Reader. The difference is ridiculous. This if far-and-away my #1 choice.
2. TeraTerm Pro + TTSSH as a ssh client on Windows. Fits on a floppy. I prefer it to PuTTY.
3. Command line "zip" instead of WinZip. Download here (along with other handy win32 ports of gnu tools).

Burn OSX. GPL. Much lighter-weight than using iTunes for Audio CDs.

Here's my list: OpenOffice, e-Sword, Firefox, Google Desktop, TightVNC, Thunderbird, Picasa, AVG Anti-Virus, GIMP, IrfanView, VLC Media Player, FileZilla, 7zip

Stupid lame filter nuked my <ul>

Here's my list: OpenOffice, e-Sword, Firefox, Google Desktop, TightVNC, Thunderbird, Picasa, AVG Anti-Virus, GIMP, IrfanView, VLC Media Player, FileZilla, 7zip

Stupid lame filter nuked my <ul>

  When I was getting interested in this, I also came across kdb a relational database based on the K programming language. kdb is also a column based store with one huge benefit, the interpreter that analyzes the columns,K fits inside a level 1 cache. The throughput of kdb is immense which is why it is mainly used to track and analyze financial data and other streaming and real-time data. It used to be you could try it out for free, I'm not sure what the state is currently, but I suggest at least giving it a try, it's not cheap but it certainly changed my view of databases.

Just my two cents.

What the article is saying is that the PLOT should revolve around the main character. (The player.) Not necessarily the world. The two are quite different.

A good example of this is the classic game Star Control II, (now available as opensource awesome) which was a marvelous space epic. But what it did really WELL was convey the feeling that the galaxy was proceeding along, whether or not you did anything or not. Now, if you didn't do anything, it would proceed right along to a lot of planets being blown up, ending with earth. But there was a very definite feeling that, while the player was a force in intergalactic relations, they weren't the ONLY force, and that if the player sat back and spent too much time lazing around and mining, that events would continue either way.

The player should feel like the PLOT revolves around them, meaning that they are constantly put into interesting situations that reveal things about them, the world, or whatever the designer is aiming towards. But if the world revolves around them, and events only happen when they show up and it's obvious the game is "waiting for them to get somewhere" before things happen, then it starts to feel forced. (A classic example are people such as in halflife, that you can see from a long way away that need rescuing, and who fall to their deaths or otherwise die, JUST as you get close to them. Stand away from a distance, and they'll linger indefinitely. Get close, and down they go.)

JRuby is one of many languages that can be run on the JVM. It has been around since 2001 (IronRuby was announced in 2007). Jython, a Python implementation on Java, was started even earlier, in 1997. There is also Groovy and JACL and many others.

Some of the effects look like they were lifted from http://effectv.sourceforge.net/ (windows port http://pbx.mine.nu/effectv/) and if that's the case, where's the source? :)

The software side of things was already complete: libaa.

But don't expect the Wing Commander series to be released as freeware any time soon. It's own by EA now. :(

check this out

I am (well, was, at least) an Erlang Programmer. I was toying around with Erlang for some small projects with distributed programming.

I've been looking forward to Joe's book for a long time, as he's one of the few big names in the Erlang community, and has done a lot of work (both code and, even more importantly, documentation) for the community -- first that jumps to mind is his important look at Yaws vs. apache.

There are serious problems with the Erlang language as a whole and the community, right now. The mailing lists are actually pretty good, but quite frankly, the documentation online is terrible and the Erlang interpreter is pretty rudimentary. Not to mention basic problems with the syntax and grammar of the Erlang language itself. When I was learning Erlang a few months back, I was pretty frustrated that about the only source of documentation was on erlang.org, and they.. weren't great. For instance, there needs to be a big warning right at the beginning explaining that atomic values always start with a lowercase letter and all other variables must begin with a capital letter. This must be a huge problem for other beginners (at least, I hope I assume I wasn't alone..) compounded by the unfriendliness of the error messages produced by the Erlang interpreter.

Now that I've switched over to doing as much as I can in Python, which has a great user community, wonderful docs, a healthy standard library, and a reasonably helpful interpreter.. I don't really worry about Erlang that much anymore. It would be wonderful if I could write, say, web crawlers (I work in web security) in Erlang. But the mysql support in Erlang looks alpha-quality at best, and AFAIK there's nothing even remotely similar to Python's urllib2 for basic web client functionality in Erlang.

I think it says a lot that so much attention is paid to a language that is so rough around the edges, unfriendly, and lacking in documentation. Even given all that.. the ease of use of the concurrency and message passing in Erlang is so fantastic that it almost makes up for the rough spots.

On a final note, I'd like to point out to anyone interested that I think there's a huge void out there for a language that's as easy to use and learn as Python, but with the concurrency and message passing in Erlang. It actually might not take that much work to build a network-transparent message passing interface as a Python module (I've looked into Pyro a bit.. it looks rather cumbersome and makes easy things too hard, correct me if I'm wrong). Also, modern languages need basic support for splitting up the workloads of map() or similar trivially parallelizable functions across multiple processors/cores (I know the Perl6 group was thinking about this.. not sure if this works in Parrot now or what). Basically, modern languages like Python/Perl/Ruby should really think more about making simple modules to mimic the message passing that Erlang has. Really, a little bit of code could go a long way. The Google team put together sawzall which looks kind of cool, on this note..

At least Linux won't be impacted.

In that case, it might interest you to know that the code was released as open source a few years ago, though the name of the game wasn't. It's now Ur-Quan Masters. That might help your review a little.

And in my opinion; If you are familiar with more common languages like C and Java you should take a deeper look into Erlang unless you prefer to study Prolog or Cobol. Just take a dip or a deep plunge, you never know when you end up in a project where knowing Erlang may prove useful - it is actually developed to be used in real applications and not as a theoretical study object.

And Erlang is designed to handle concurrent programming from the bottom, which is a real problem in large multi-user systems. You can of course use C or Java and solve concurrency problems with semaphores or synchronization, but the solution in Erlang may be much more elegant.

And for all of you that are familiar with the Eclipse development environment; There is a plugin called Erlide.

As a matter of fact, I *am* an applied mathematician, and I do work in this field.

I am just a beginner, though. Here are is a solution of the shallow water wave equations in a circular tub:

http://platinum.linux.pl/~jordi/movies/sw-solution .ogg

(Ogg Theora. If you can't play it, get VLC or any other free software player.)

The method I used is a very flexible meshless method that is a relatively modern alternative to finite element methods. Btw, finite volumes are much more popular for fluid dynamical problems, but the other big two methods (finite elements and differences) are also widely used. The meshless method I used (of which there are also many available) is radial basis functions, what looks to me like a thriving area of modern research. Pros is that you avoid all the mesh generation that takes about 80% of the computational time with finite elements and you manage to keep the flexibility of meshes by allowing finer detail at problematic sites (just put more basis functions where the problems could happen). Cons is that you get ugly matrices, but if you play your method right, you can arrange it so that you only have to factorise the ugly matrix once and then just do forward and back substitutions at each iteration. I did unsymmetric collocation for my matrices, since experience seems to show that the extra work required to make the matrices symmetric yields only very small dividends. There are also ways of coupling this method with domain decomposition in order to get smaller matrices. This is in fact my thesis work. :-) If you're interested in more details and seeing my C++ source, contact me at jordigh@gmail.com

As for visualisation software, I indirectly used VTK through Octaviz, a visualisation addon for Octave. The movies I generated with mplayer's encoder, mencoder.

HTH :-)

I'm a plasma physicist and I work in the domain of radiofrequency waves propagation and absorption in fusion plasmas. I've been busy developping a code that solves the Maxwell's equations, which are equivalent to the wave equation (3-D full-wave calculation). The case of a plasma is tricky because it both time *and* space dispersive.
I won't be able to even start explaining this stuff in this post, but my code uses finite elements for the radial direction and Fourier decompositions for the two periodic directions of a fusion device. These numerical methods work well. I also know finite difference codes which work well. So, I think you should look a bit harder, because FE or FD methods usually do the trick, even for "variable wave speed at different points in the domain"... Regarding the boundary conditions, well, you'd better be very careful, because they will usually completely determine the solution. Again, it is my experience that Finite elements are well adapted to this task but you'll have to do some research.
Finally, for the vizualisation, matplotlib and vtk work for me.
First, try to determine and explain more precisely what it is you want to do: "to obtain good numerical approximations to the classic second-order wave equation, preferably in three space dimensions" sounds a but vague. Pick up the right textbooks, scientific journals, learn, exchange with the community. I know my post sounds a bit patronizing but this is science, and this kind of effort takes dedication, time and patience. I think Slashdot and Google are hardly the right places to start...

Try Jon Claerbout's free books ( http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/prof , especially "Imaging the Earth's Interior") and the Madagascar package for seismic data processing, modeling and inversion: http://rsf.sourceforge.net/ , GPL-ed.

AAA = Triple-A?

http://triplea.sourceforge.net/mywiki

Anyway, that's what I thought when I saw the headline...

OCaml : http://eclipsefp.sourceforge.net/ocaml/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocaml-eclipse

Granted, I haven't tried it, but then I do mostly Java/C/C++/Objective-C work.

OCaml : http://eclipsefp.sourceforge.net/ocaml/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocaml-eclipse

Granted, I haven't tried it, but then I do mostly Java/C/C++/Objective-C work.

OCaml : http://eclipsefp.sourceforge.net/ocaml/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocaml-eclipse

Granted, I haven't tried it, but then I do mostly Java/C/C++/Objective-C work.

You might enjoy FindBugs. The project also offers an Eclipse plugin.

You might enjoy FindBugs. The project also offers an Eclipse plugin.

There are a lot of good suggestions here, so I'll add mine. I apologize if this has already been mentioned; wasn't interested in scanning through each and every post.

Use Thinstation. It's a stripped down distro of Linux that can be easily configured to startup FireFox. It runs quite well on old hardware and can be booted from the HDD, flash stick, CD, or PXE. The config file is pretty simple and can be inserted into the ISO for quick Live CD action.

There are other great suggestions above with using OS X or all permissions removed from a Unix box. Basically you just need something that runs as a kiosk and wont be susceptible to malicious sites.

OK, let me give you the overview. Once upon a time, there was Microsoft Word .doc files. This is a format that has changed over the years and is not a good format for long-term storage of files. So, government bodies wanted there to be a standard format. So, the OpenOffice (Linux's big free office suite) developers developed ODT, a format whose description is open and one that can be read without having to be reverse-engineered (at least in theory).

Well, ODT became an ISO standard and government bodies have started requiring documents to be in this format. This, as you can imagine, does not make Microsoft happy. Microsoft publically claims that ODT is a limited format. However, many people suspect that Microsoft's opposition to ODT is that a widespread adoption of this format will make it so people don't feel forced to use Microsoft Word in order to communicate with business associates, since Word is a closed, proprietary format. So Microsoft invented OOXML, which is a, in theory Open Format that is basically a Word .doc file converted to XML.

OOXML, to put it mildly, is an extremely messy format. The general consensus seems to be that, OOXML, as specified, is very complex and the spec is incomplete, making it impossible for third parties to make effective OOXML import/export filters.

what Microsoft is trying to do now is make OOXML an ISO standard, so PHBs (pointy-haired bosses) can claim that OOXML is an open standard (really, it's not), and force people to continue using Word to make documents (since no other program is ever going to have an effective OOXML import/export filter). Microsoft, quite bluntly, is playing very dirty pool in order to make OOXML an ISO standard, and a lot of people are crying foul.

So now, the current battle is to stop OOXML from becoming an ISO standard, so that Microsoft no longer has less of a monopoly on document exchange formats.

Yes, Microsoft could actually help ODF catch on by making it a format that Word can read or write (such as what this converter does for MS Office), but they don't seem to want to do that.

I haven't tried it, because I no longer have a functioning headset for my computer. But a quick Google search, and: here it is.

It's not in a usable state yet, apparently, at least not with the Gtalk people -- although there are plenty of other ways to voice chat on Linux. My personal favorite, if I ever bother to setup a server, is mumble, which really should be killing Ventrilo (but somehow isn't).

I've generally found Kopete to have all the features I want, and then some. It also has some issues with its protocol support, compared to Pidgin -- it seems to disconnect every few hours, which isn't a huge deal, because it reconnects automatically, and the conversation window is still open. And it occasionally crashes for no apparent reason -- I'm on amd64, but that shouldn't matter.

But, other than that, it's been great. Even the crash isn't a big deal, because it takes something like three seconds to open again, and it connects to KDE Wallet for passwords, so I don't have to enter a password the second time.

What ads?

There is a Java Swing version of SWT.

http://swtswing.sourceforge.net/main/index.html

Congratulations: you've got some of the potentially most interesting classes to use technology in - but that potential will be wasted if you just use the tablet and projector to show Powerpoint slides.

When you're designing your class, think: what can the tablet do that would be useful that could not have been done without it. Powerpoint fails this test miserably - an overhead projector would do just as well.

Here are some possible uses that do pass the test:

• Use symbolic math software to help students visualize the math, and to explore interesting problems that cannot be handled without it. Mathematica is everybody's pet favorite, of course - but I would argue that it's grotesquely overpowered and complex for most of what you'll need. Instead, take a look at something like Ron Avitzur's Graphing Calculator - the name doesn't do justice to what is a particularly elegant little program.
• For Physics, use the tablet to analyze physical data. One of the best uses here is to film objects in motion, then transfer the video to the tablet (or get a cheap webcam and record directly on the tablet), and analyze the results frame-by-frame - your students will come out with a much better understanding of motion. A free package for video analysis is Physmo.
• For more sophisticated experiments, check out what the folks at PASCO have to offer - their sensors are reasonably inexpensive.
• If you do a Google search, you'll find a wealth of Java applets that simulate concepts in Physics - when contextualized by discussion, physical experiments, and "what if" explorations, these can be tremendously useful. Without this framework, though, they are no better than the film loops of old.

One last suggestion: don't hog the tablet - let your students use it too. You can set up a problem, and invite students to come up and work through it individually or in groups, showing their thought process to the rest of the class. The students will learn much more, and everybody - including you - will have a lot more fun.

Good luck!

With the tablet you could use something like

http://jequation.sourceforge.net/

to write handouts for your students.

multiple language support, plugin support, open source:

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Windows has one. It's called the Windows Installer. It's kind of like any of the various Linux package system. Or really any package system.

With the exception that it's created using a proprietary binary format, installers are ridiculously hard to create using it, a lot of developers just opt not to bother with it, and, since most Windows software is closed source, Microsoft can't just create them for developers that don't.

Check out the Windows Installer XML Toolset (WiX) and keep in mind that it's the easy way to create Windows Installer packages without forking out money for a tool like InstallShield.

Any mention of the old "date handling is pathetic" complaint about Java has to be answered by pointing out Joda-Time, which will become the standard date and time library starting with Java 7. And yes, it's better (cleaner API, more functionality, etc.) than the .NET equivalent.

I don't think Joda-Time was available 4+ years ago, so I feel your pain if you had to do a lot of date/time manipulation with Calendar and all that crap. Luckily, Joda-Time became more or less a de facto standard soon after it was released so -- unless you're in an environment that prohibits 3rd party libraries -- Java has had better date handling than just about any other language/platform for a number of years now.

The condition that the user insert a prominent notice of attribution does not limit the scope of
the license. Rather, Defendants' alleged violation of the conditions of the license may have constituted a breach of the nonexclusive license, but does not create liability for copyright
infringement where it would not otherwise exist. Therefore, based on the current record before the Court, the Court finds that Plaintiff's claim properly sounds in contract and therefore Plaintiff has not met his burden of demonstrating likelihood of success on the merit of his
copyright claim and is therefore not entitled to a presumption of irreparable harm

That all depends on the program you're altering. Some programs are so indecipherable that the amount of time one would spend tracing/understand them is far greater than the amount of time it would take to simply rewrite it. I'm speaking from experience here. There was a VT100 emulator that I wanted to incorporate into something else, however, I'm pretty sure it would have qualified as a problem for the obfuscated C contest. Luckily, I found http://rote.sourceforge.net/ (one of the most beautiful libraries I've seen written in C) and my problems were at an end.

If you have Mono or .Net, there's http://www.mp3vcr.com/ljsec/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/ljarchive/

If you use Python, there's http://hewgill.com/software/ljdump/

LJArchive and LJDump both make backups of your LJ account. LJ-Sec allows you to copy your LJ account from one service to another, as long as both use the LJ software.

Did he ever try portable Tor? (I want to know weather to wast my time with it ;p )

A couple of days ago I was thinking about what would an ideal scripting language would look like.

The first thing I'd like are some of my favorite features from Common Lisp, like first class functions, ability to do procedural, functional, and object oriented programming with the same language, dynamic typing, macros, closures, and lexical scoping.

Having a C-like syntax would be good for people who are used to C or Perl and don't want to learn about s-expressions. Automatic memory management is a must.

So I was thinking about how much work it would take to implement something like that, and I realized that Javascript has just about every one of those features, although some are implemented in odd ways. The scoping rules are a bit strange, and the "this" operator is handled poorly, IMHO, but everything else is almost exactly what I'd want.

I think Javascript gets a bad rap because you have to worry about browser compatibility. But if you ever use it while only targetting a single browser, it's a dream to work with, and all of the annoyances go away.

And it's much more powerful than I used to think, before I started working on my now half-finished Javascript app. (Shameless plug there.)