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My first large project I ever attempted (HERMES, now abandoned, http://hermesweb.sourceforge.net/ had, I believe, reasonably pretty code. Architecturally, there were some pretty parts too. But overall, the architecture was a mess simply because I didn't know better. I eventually abandoned it because I realized it was going to be impossible to fix the initial design mistakes without entirely replacing a large percentage of the code.

My current large project is LedgerSMB. This deals with an entirely different magnitude of mess. Essentially we forked from a codebase which we have come to understand is nearly unmaintailable and yet we *have* to replace all the code because we have lots of users on the software who rely on it. Hence we are refactoring with an axe.

The older codebase (SQL-Ledger/LedgerSMB 1.0/LedgerSMB 1.2) has a number of architectural limitations and issues, as well as a lot of evidence of an overall lack of architecture. If that weren't enough, the code is pretty problematic too. It could be worse (at least the codebase is reasonably readible if you put enough effort into it).

I think it hits about 75% of the software programming antipatterns mentioned on Wikipedia, and extends some of them in weird ways. For example instead of just magic strings, we have magic comments (comments which are actually part of the program code and which deletion causes problems). And we have function calls which pass by "reference-to-deferenced-reference." In perl terms \%$ref.

Hence we are moving everything to a new and *cleaner* architecture.

y4mdenoise is a temporal video denoiser I wrote some years back. Oh, if I only had time to continue working on it...I'd love to port it to Cell. Damn day jobs.

From my project, I will give you a few examples of old code (horribly messy) vs new code (could be better but far less of an issue):

New code (not perfect by any means but not quite a F#$%*&^ mess).

Request handler: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/lsmb-request.pl
Login Script: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/scripts/login.pl
Template: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/UI/login.html

Old code (calling it a F%$^&*g mess is being too kind...):
Request handler: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/branches/1.2/menu.pl
Login Script: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/branches/1.2/bin/login.pl
What, no template? Notice all those print statements?

From my project, I will give you a few examples of old code (horribly messy) vs new code (could be better but far less of an issue):

New code (not perfect by any means but not quite a F#$%*&^ mess).

Request handler: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/lsmb-request.pl
Login Script: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/scripts/login.pl
Template: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/UI/login.html

Old code (calling it a F%$^&*g mess is being too kind...):
Request handler: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/branches/1.2/menu.pl
Login Script: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/branches/1.2/bin/login.pl
What, no template? Notice all those print statements?

From my project, I will give you a few examples of old code (horribly messy) vs new code (could be better but far less of an issue):

New code (not perfect by any means but not quite a F#$%*&^ mess).

Request handler: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/lsmb-request.pl
Login Script: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/scripts/login.pl
Template: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/UI/login.html

Old code (calling it a F%$^&*g mess is being too kind...):
Request handler: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/branches/1.2/menu.pl
Login Script: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/branches/1.2/bin/login.pl
What, no template? Notice all those print statements?

From my project, I will give you a few examples of old code (horribly messy) vs new code (could be better but far less of an issue):

New code (not perfect by any means but not quite a F#$%*&^ mess).

Request handler: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/lsmb-request.pl
Login Script: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/scripts/login.pl
Template: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/UI/login.html

Old code (calling it a F%$^&*g mess is being too kind...):
Request handler: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/branches/1.2/menu.pl
Login Script: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/branches/1.2/bin/login.pl
What, no template? Notice all those print statements?

From my project, I will give you a few examples of old code (horribly messy) vs new code (could be better but far less of an issue):

New code (not perfect by any means but not quite a F#$%*&^ mess).

Request handler: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/lsmb-request.pl
Login Script: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/scripts/login.pl
Template: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/trunk/UI/login.html

Old code (calling it a F%$^&*g mess is being too kind...):
Request handler: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/branches/1.2/menu.pl
Login Script: http://ledger-smb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ledg er-smb/branches/1.2/bin/login.pl
What, no template? Notice all those print statements?

The source for Tcl is widely considered by those who have worked with it to be unusually clean and clear.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freewerm/ - It has a lot fewer features than OrangeHRM, but it's fairly simple to set-up and use, and it comes with time clock features, also keeps track of employee information, including hire dates and absence history and stuff, and has Excel reporting capabilities on time clock records (including payroll) and employee profiles. It's web-based and uses MySQL for it's database environment.

GnuCash.org - it's more finance-oriented than HR, but this might be helpful for the stock and finance issue.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ck-erp/

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=37015

Not sure if it helps in this case, though.

Though DVDShrink works well under WINE I believe it's fallen into disrepair of late. K9Copy seems like nice alternative these days.

Maybe because you can create performant, cross-platform applications like:

    http://www.banghowdy.com/
    http://tribaltrouble.com/
    http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/

...or that in five years it will be hard to find a widescreen, 3D capable cellphone that does not support being programmed in Java?

...or that the iPhone can run Java natively in hardware?
    http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=338

Startup on Win32 is pretty fast, definitely a lot faster than Photoshop. If it isn't, then your font cache is broken as explained in the FAQ.

Yes, it would be good to finally figure out why this happens at all and there are people working on this (see bug 154968).

You might find

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dee-python/

interesting. This is an attempt to make
a 3GL (Python) work seamlessly with relational
data. As a relational language, it is not SQL, and its authors argue
that the Dee approach is better than SQL.

1. Turtle 0.03_____________-> 12.089.054 in 9,580 sec
2. LZPM 0.06_____________-> 12.800.532 in 30,809 sec.
3. Thor0.95(e4)___________-> 13.839.120 in 4,527 sec.
4. Quad 1.12 -f____________-> 13.274.400 in 15,391 sec.
5. 7Zip 4.41 LZMA Max Speed-> 17.747.266 in 13 sec.

http://quad.sourceforge.net/ says
QUAD is a high-performance file compressor that utilizes an advanced LZ-based compression algorithm. Its main features are high compression ratio and fast decompression speed.

Original 24,375,895 bytes
QUAD 1.12, -x 5,637,162 bytes
PKZIP 2.50, -max 8,182,951 bytes

I agree that there is room for both. That is why I have two blogs. My blog at the transition choices site is really for more more elaborate, in-depth articles. My blog at google's blogger site is for the more mundane reaction to today's news.

As you can plainly see, the transition choices blog site is more organized like a article publishing portal than a typical blog site. It has a three level navigation hierarchy, support for mini-sites, a rudimentary portal organization, an extensible search facility, and content syndication. All that and it's open source too.

aria2 -s 5 big.arse.file

that made me think how few UK "big ass" porn titles there are. It's right but it just doesn't look right.

Musicmatch 6.0 or so was an awesome player. It tied media into a nice clean interface, gave options to rip CDs, managed your library, etc. Fantastic piece of software.

When Musicmatch 7 rolled around, it was obvious that it was turning into bloatware. The interface was getting bloated and cumbersome, and as I recall it went from annoying (would you like to upgrade?) to flat out nagware (do you want to buy album? Do you want to download music like this for $xx?, etc). Beyond that, I haven't touched the software because once it started sporting the Yahoo! banner I knew it was complete garbage.

So, in my search for a Windows based music player, I happened across musikCube. It's a music player with most of the features of MusicMatch, 100% free, BSD licensed, and even supports ogg vorbis. Here's the Sourceforge page.

Screw Musicmatch, Winamp, Windows Media Player. Give me musikCube!

Really? I have 4,244 files consuming 41 gig of space and I find it to be neither slow nor memory intensive. Right now for me (and it's been running and constantly playing a few days now) it's using 41.8mb total (which includes the shared memory with KDE libraries so its actual footprint is smaller, though I can't tell you exactly how much smaller). It launches in about 2 seconds and all of its features respond instantly.

Compare that with iTunes on the same hardware (I have identical machines side-by-side one running Windows, and the other Ubuntu Feisty, using Synergy to control them). This takes around 10 seconds to launch and with exactly zero songs in its library consumes 38.6 meg.

So in comparing like for like, my 4,000+ song 41gig Amarok is faster with a similar memory footprint to the substantially less featureful iTunes with an empty library.

So I'm not really sure what your basis for comparison is. Maybe you're running AmaroK under Gnome and noticing startup sluggishness due to the KDE libraries needing to be initialized? (which you don't experience if you run AmaroK under KDE since these are initialized when you log in, and also the reported memory stays the same, but actual memory footprint is much lower since in that desktop so many of the libraries which count against AmaroK's reported memory are also shared with a variety of other apps)

The only thing I can think is that perhaps you're comparing it to XMMS or Winamp 3.x series (each eating under 10 meg of RAM and starting virtually instantly). Certainly if you want a music player that does nothing but play music you won't be satisfied with the performance loss to music juke boxes like AmaroK and iTunes. But in that case, may I suggest mpg123 as your primary music player since this will be even smaller and faster yet!

Possibly, The best software is often written in response to a need or just something for coolness. But, I have come to realize that a good math understanding is essential and I don't like mixed BASE-N math and anything more than a Bi-Nom give me an ache. :-( I go look it up on amazon for kicks though. --chris http://nxdos.sourceforge.net/

I don't know HOW many times I'm going to nned to say this, and I wish I'd hit this post earlier, but MS has been funding an open-source ODF blugin for months now (notice the date)... since Office 2007 was in beta, in fact (I know, because I tested it). I've had ODF support in MS Office since before Sun even appeared on the project's SourceForge page... in fact, I was quite surprised when I checked a few weeks ago (for a Slashdot post, incidentally) and found Sun there, as I do not believe they were initially a project contributor (but that's what I recall, no guarantees there). At best, though, news of a ODF converter for MS Office is old news.

Even if it turns out that this project is Sun's, exclusively (their license says so, but the liecnese on the SOurceForge project is extremely liberal) I'm not sure what all the hype is about. Supposedly the Sun plugin uses Java (or, according to the license, "may contain Java technology") whereas the MS/SourceForge one uses .NET (C# I believe) but otherwise they look about identical, right down to which versions of Office are supported and what file formats are supported.

It'd be interesting to see a comparison of the two plugins, but whoever thinks MS doesn't want Office to support ODF is, quite simply, wrong.

Seen the Dvdisaster project? It uses some of the space (15 percent by default) as parity data at the image level to make a disc a lot more secure from scratching or other forms of what would otherwise cause data loss. Hell set it to 50 percent and you can pretty much guarantee the disc will be recoverable however badly you scratch it.

Something you might find interesting anyway.

If you're using Windows, there's always PDF Creator which is a FOSS virtual PDF printer.

Have a look through SciTE, based on Scintilla (which is what the popular windows edtior Notepad++ is based on also)

It uses xml config files to format various languages, so it's easy to edit all at once. And then you can use whatever fonts and formatting for different elements you choose - although the only time I use proportional (and italics) is for comments

http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTE.html

Have a look at the known unresolvable issues.
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/features.html

Saving to file is an inherently lossy process and conversion from one lossy format to another rarely leads to equivalent results.

I'm willing to bet Sun's plugin is better than the converter for the simple reason that Sun's plugin has access to the internal datastructures of the word document, i.e. it has access to the information before the lossy conversion happened.

Exactly, I just don't understand why one would want to mess with something that has worked so well and across so many varied systems.

I went from a Tandy Color Computer 2 to a VAX 11/750 (WATFIV), then PCs, Mac Plus, VAX 11/780, more PCs, then alternating between Macs and PCs. The last thing that went through my mind was the column counts, except for WATFIV of course (first 8 columns and last 8 columns had to be kept blank).

Nowadays, I use iTerm and it works very well, regardless of the kind of machine I connect to. My only real source of aggravation is that in that rare occasion that I need to type a DOS command in a Windows server, the clipboard can't be accessed with keystrokes, it has to be done through menu choices.

I like to use PDF Creator: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/.

It installs like Acrobat in that it appears as a printer that you simply print to to create your PDF files. This lets you make PDFs of anything you can print.

I haven't encountered anything it doesn't do a decent job with.

Unlike Acrobat, you can't edit/merge your PDFs, but since it's free and makes PDF files, it's already doing a lot.

http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/ works for Office 2007.

The forth item in the list of contributors is thought-provoking.

So use a fully open source one. BSD licensed. Code available. And 1 year old.

(Of course I believe you're posting just to raise your google hits with your cut and paste link to your little splog, so never mind, a real answer isn't much good to you is it?

The plugin on sourceforge is a separate menu option, yes. However that's a good thing (in my opinion). Instead of getting lost as a file format under save it appears on the file dialog. Right there, in your face.

Rather an interesting piece of grandstanding from Sun I fear.

ODF Converter plugin sets, which are separate downloads for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Just one package from a big, albeit Sun not a too popular name for most users, and no big ugly "Open ODF", "Save ODF" menu entries in Word. For some reason Excel & PowerPoint don't receive as nice integration: it gets an "Import ODF Spreadsheet" menu and new "Import ODF" & "Export ODF" toolbar.

I already have .net 2 installed so not sure if its an additional requirement like the converter suite, there is however no need to install the Microsoft Office Open XML File Format converter pack.

Have a look at joda time http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/ a JSR for this libery http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=310 is also scheduled for Java 7

Many projects suffer more from lack of good sample or reference applications than good features. If you want to get attention, show people how to use a technology in a way they haven't thought of before. For example, one of the real accelerators for Ruby on Rails has been the success of BaseCamp, which is a really good sample application for RoR. In our project http://sourceforge.net/projects/activegrid/, we have posted a number of ToDos related not just to features but to providing examples of how to use the features http://dev.activegrid.com/community/?q=node/179 To misquote, a sample is worth a thousand features ;-)

To use the units of measurement easily it would be helpful if
Java had user definable operators or at least operator overloading.

That way a more "natural" notation of formulas would be possible.

Abstract data types would also help with measurement units ...

Greetings Thomas Mertes

Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net/
User defined statements and operators, abstract
data types, templates without special syntax,
OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch.

For number 3 (automatic clustering) try these:

http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/
http://openssi.org/
http://www.kerrighed.org/

All of these systems will let processes migrate between networked GNU/Linux machines.

why don't you submit a feature-request.

Unfortunately (like the Asian example you provide) this approach stops being useful very quickly. Images are also very important, and cannot be easily transformed to a 'simple' format, although you could argue PNGs could be used. However, in the National Archives I currently work at (as a code monkey), a high importance is attached to the look and feel of the original, i.e. they want to preserve the original layout whenever they can. This makes sense, because migration, especially for things like Word documents and databases has a terrible track record over a longer period of time; think 50 - 100 years here. Two or three migrations (and yes, even though using a simple ASCII format seems a solution now, people in 20 years will want something different) on and you've lost important information in the document. One approach we're looking at right now is emulation (and we've got a first version going: http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net/), allowing old software (and documents) to be run on any platform in the future. Of course, this brings along new problems such as storage, updating the emulator, etc.

Correct. And given the timespan these organisations plan for (well, at least the National Archives here in the Netherlands which I work for does), virtualisation is not an option - sooner or later the platform you're using becomes obsolete, and so any virtualisation software you have stops working. Remember that virtualisation can only reproduce the platform you're running on. That is why emulation is a possible solution. And that's what we're working on at the moment (shameless plug: http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net./ Currently we're using Java and the JVM as an intermediate virtual machine, but the idea is to in the future create an independent virtual layer (see "Key Features", http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net/dioscuri.html), which is the only thing that needs to be adjusted; the emulator should run forever!

Correct. And given the timespan these organisations plan for (well, at least the National Archives here in the Netherlands which I work for does), virtualisation is not an option - sooner or later the platform you're using becomes obsolete, and so any virtualisation software you have stops working. Remember that virtualisation can only reproduce the platform you're running on. That is why emulation is a possible solution. And that's what we're working on at the moment (shameless plug: http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net./ Currently we're using Java and the JVM as an intermediate virtual machine, but the idea is to in the future create an independent virtual layer (see "Key Features", http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net/dioscuri.html), which is the only thing that needs to be adjusted; the emulator should run forever!

For a solution which converts documents to openly specified file formats (not OOXML), see XENA at https://sourceforge.net/projects/xena

While it is a good first step that Dell is selling Ubuntu machines, and not charging you (as much) for a license that you aren't even purchasing, HP has been doing this for quite a while though they don't seem to get much press for it.

If you look at hp laptops and desktops in their "business" section many of them will list "FreeDOS" as an available os, or if they have a "Configure PC" link under the model often times it means you can choose between Windows and FreeDOS in the configuration options. One difference may be that if you get a FreeDOS pc from HP, format the drive and put Linux on it HP probably isn't going to give you any software support whereas maby Dell (or Canonical?) offers some level of support included in their price. Though if you are willing to forgo softwate technical support and just want hardware warranty coverage (for example if you are a large institution purchasing many computers is bulk) you can get a larger discount for non-windows machines from HP than Dell. The price varies but for most of their business notebooks and desktops the difference between a model with Windows XP/Vista and that same model with FreeDOS is usually $75-$150

Hopefully Dell's apparent success in selling Ubuntu desktops (and the publicity that has come with it) will push HP into doing something similar, I am a bit surprised Dell beat them to the punch on this one considering HP has:
been encouraging the use of Debian on the server end for a while
http://h20331.www2.hp.com/services/cache/442406-0- 0-0-121.html

Already provides good driver support for Linux with regard to printers
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/

And the current "Linux CTO" is a former Debian project leader
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bdale_Garbee

I would expect to see more announcements like this in the near future from the OEMs. Whatever argument the OEMs still had against selling desktop Linux and thereby irritating Microsoft was recently dealt a significant blow by Microsoft's announcement that they would begin selling their own machines http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/ 28/181204
which from the OEMs perspective has changed Microsoft from an annoying element that everyone has to deal with and who gets a cut of their profit, to a company that is now moving towards being a direct competitor.

Believe it or not, not only does such a converter exist, it is an open-source project sponsored by Microsoft, and has produced both an independent converter and an Office 2007 plugin. Using the plugin, ODF files can be opened in MS Office, saved in either XML-based format (I don't think it allows direct conversion to legacy formats), and OOXML files can be opened in Office and saved as ODF (or legacy versions). The conversion is largely done with XSL transformations.

It also appears that Novell is working on a Linux port and OpenOffice.org plugin as part of the same project. The whole project is .NET code so presumably Linux's version will use Mono.

The license is BSD-like and very simple.

SourceForge project site: http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/
Download site: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?grou p_id=169337

Believe it or not, not only does such a converter exist, it is an open-source project sponsored by Microsoft, and has produced both an independent converter and an Office 2007 plugin. Using the plugin, ODF files can be opened in MS Office, saved in either XML-based format (I don't think it allows direct conversion to legacy formats), and OOXML files can be opened in Office and saved as ODF (or legacy versions). The conversion is largely done with XSL transformations.

It also appears that Novell is working on a Linux port and OpenOffice.org plugin as part of the same project. The whole project is .NET code so presumably Linux's version will use Mono.

The license is BSD-like and very simple.

SourceForge project site: http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/
Download site: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?grou p_id=169337

http://a760.sourceforge.net/

I don't think that's a fair characterization. I run beagle on some quite old hardware and while there might be some slowdown while indexing (crappy IDE pretty much slows everything down when random disk access occurs) it is overall quite fast and not at all a resource hog. Unless if you count 28MB of memory as resource hogging.

I have on the other hand been bit by bugs in both beagle and meta tracker where they seem to get stuck in infinite loops indexing the same data over and over again, or decide for some unknown reason not to index a particular file. Beagle seems to have gotten better at this lately, still waiting for a new release of tracker to test and see if it's got some of these little bugs fixed.