Slashdot Mirror

http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/

Base64... http://makcoder.sourceforge.net/demo/base64.php

My favorite part of their site is the quote from the FAQ:

"Q:Is FreeMat 100% compatible with MATLAB? What about IDL?"

"A:No. FreeMat supports roughly 95% (a made up statistic) of the features in MATLAB."

Mathematicians making jokes about made up statistics, hee hee :-)

How about Maxima, or Scilab? A commenter further down also suggested MayaVi.

Ah, if you are looking at VTK based software, you should look at MayaVi. It lets you do some fantastic scientific visualization and has a neat GUI, too. And oh, you can also do some really cool CFD stuff with it. Check out the screenshots.

Back in the day, I used to be friends with the guy who did this stuff (met him at one of the LUGs). Turns out that he's now a prof at one of the better schools in India.

Anyway, Mathematica rocks, too. There is a lot more that you can do and it has some pretty neat capabilities. Besides, the strength of Mathematica is not merely the engine, it is the libraries and the wealth of demos and code out there.

Ah, if you are looking at VTK based software, you should look at MayaVi. It lets you do some fantastic scientific visualization and has a neat GUI, too. And oh, you can also do some really cool CFD stuff with it. Check out the screenshots.

Back in the day, I used to be friends with the guy who did this stuff (met him at one of the LUGs). Turns out that he's now a prof at one of the better schools in India.

Anyway, Mathematica rocks, too. There is a lot more that you can do and it has some pretty neat capabilities. Besides, the strength of Mathematica is not merely the engine, it is the libraries and the wealth of demos and code out there.

And couldn't anyone just download a song, then import it in an audio editor like Audacity, delete the 10 second ad in the beginning and export it back?

IIRC, this would recompress the lossy file, making it sound like shit. I'd rather have the ads. There is however mp3-splt that won't reencode.

Audacity? Wouldn't that reencode the mp3s? You want to use something like mp3-splt

How are they going to stop you using something like that?

Microsoft has released "open source" software. IronPython is released under a fairly liberal license, allowing modification and redistribution. In fact, there is already a (minor) fork of IronPython, the IronPython Community Edition.

If you consider how many non desktop devices run on 'Open Source' than you can still consider it hasn't reached its full potential. TiVo Inc, Sky+, and the BBC all sell a DVR although I'm not sure what's under the hood. The question is why Dell , Compaq and the rest haven't moved into this lucrative embedded market.

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT4612631999. html
http://www.dream-multimedia-tv.de/Bereiche/Produkt e/DM7020.php
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7385804211.html
http://freevo.sourceforge.net/about.html

All video games are violent.
Even Tetris... http://sphere.sourceforge.net/flik/images/20071002 .png

It actually has quite nice quality/features for a cheap camera: metal body, LED's that turn on in low-light, and the picture quality is actually quite nice. I recently started using it again and just went through the process of digging up drivers that would compile against my newer kernel.

One point of confusion is between the article's GSPCA/spca50x drivers, and the SPCA50X drivers on SF.net

The latter I had run into first, but it won't compile against my newer 2.6 kernel. Luckily, I was able to find the mxhaard drivers, which worked nicely, and get the thing going after a little while.

All said, big Kudos to Michel for gifting us all with well-working cheap webcams!

However, as I'm thinking about it now, I guess the original idea isn't too bad. The basic solution is that you would have to have a Wiimote mounted on each bone in the simulated hand (one for the palm, 3 for each finger, 2 for the thumb, so 15 Wiimotes for a whole hand). Then for each bone, obtain the angle, then just use simple vector addition to get the relative positions for each of the joints. However, this still leaves you with the quandry that you have no idea where in space your hand is located, or if there is any yaw (left to right twisting), and you're back to needing a static reference point like the IR sensor bar. In other words, you would have a very accurately simulated human hand that would be correct as long as it wasn't accellerating, and it wouldn't let you simulate anything from the wrist-up. If you mounted 2 more Wiimotes to the player (one to the forearm, and one to the bicep), then you could have shoulder-down reproduction, and that would give you some decent control to pick up objects (again, just in a plane, since the Wiimotes could not detect yaw for the arm to turn from right-to-left).

I guess now all we need is some smart-guy to strap about 13 Wiimotes to his body and use the vector addition to make a simple stick-figure of himself dance around on the screen. :) It wouldn't be nearly as accurate as standard motion-capture tools (since the pitch/roll angle calculations are so limited by assuming zero linear accelleration), but it would be accurate enough to make a cool YouTube video and get posted on Slashdot. :)

Bar charts work just fine. For fancier plotting options your best bet is R.

> the codec used should be non-proprietary and completely free to implement and redistribute

the BBC has their own open source codec:

http://dirac.sourceforge.net/overview.html

(but, as others have pointed out, the content creators will insist on drm etc)

Some of the open source JavaScript toolkits can be used to draw charts on a browser window with inline SVG and VML. This makes it possible to draw charts on the web browser instead of having the web server draw them.

Some examples:
Dojo Toolkit
I think I've seen a live charting demo on Dojo's official website, but it seems to be no longer there.

WT Toolkit
This one seems to be a new project, judging from the activity charts on their SourceForge page. The way they can draw 3D charts (like, pie charts, 3D bar charts) with inline SVG and VML is quite amazing though.

Some of the open source JavaScript toolkits can be used to draw charts on a browser window with inline SVG and VML. This makes it possible to draw charts on the web browser instead of having the web server draw them.

Some examples:
Dojo Toolkit
I think I've seen a live charting demo on Dojo's official website, but it seems to be no longer there.

WT Toolkit
This one seems to be a new project, judging from the activity charts on their SourceForge page. The way they can draw 3D charts (like, pie charts, 3D bar charts) with inline SVG and VML is quite amazing though.

'Slick, well organised presentation rooms are an important issue when selling to enterprises. Hell, so is coffee and biscuits delivered to the room every couple of hours on a full day visit, instead of walking your visitors to the vending machine :)'

I believe you that RedHat made a presentation to an enterprise sized company using a cardboard prop and then marched the visitors to the vending machine for the coffee and biscuits break. I bet they even used pre-owned broken biscuits.

Content is more important then presentation. I worked for a Fortune 500 company that provided consultancy services to top companies. They had standerdised on Win2003 and were for ever restoring broken Exchange profiles and rebooting the FAX server, which used to go down on the weekend. A Fortune 500 company that can't receive faxes ?? The sum total of their expertise being a Macro that generated unique file names based on initials+dept-code+project-no. Eg CG.GR.VF.ppt. GR being the graphics dept. I forgot to tell you all their reports were in PowerPoint. Actually a consultant is someone who predicts what happened last year.

''I was trying to sell a bank on Linux, and my boss was a typical head of IT type - he's used to being woo'd by the vendors... Tickets to sporting events, slick presentations''

He sounds like the typical non-techie manager, if you don't mind me saying so. Who in his right mind would decide IT policy based on 'slick presentation' and bribery. You would find out who else was using the technology and could you see a working example.

''There's also a lot to be said for having the media on a disc should you need to quickly build a machine''

Are you seriously telling us you gave RedHat £300K and they didn't even give you the media?

''there just isn't a Linux vendor who can play in the enterprise space in the way that these people are used to being treated''

Alllow me to describe how the average company is treated. I once worked for a company that sold a CAD system based around Windows and a third party CAD design, to be used in kitchen design. The software would freeze at rendering a view. Microsoft said talk to the CAD company, the CAD company said it's a Microsoft problem. End results, loss of the contract and end of our attempt to get into the small office business. Contrast that with this. A while back I emailed the lead developer on mpeg4ip and you know what, I actually got a response.

was Re:Redhat cardboard © ..

Notepad++

So now you need third-party tools to get what was included in the previous version? Seriously, if that isn't a reason not to upgrade, I don't know what is. Well, apart from being the last person on earth running WinWord 2.0 that is :) If Word 2003 or Word XP works for you, keep it. Nobody forces you to upgrade (and companies who force the upgrade through should not be surprised that people need to be "upgraded" as well to work with those new products - or suffer some serious productivity loss. That's the price you pay for those new "features").

Note that I didn't mention anything about how well ribbons work, the new document formats (btw. there is a plugin for open document format that works in both Word 2007 and 2003/XP), Microsoft's inability to listen to their customers or how bugfree their software is on release day... but that isn't what this article is about anyway, right?

(*goes back under his rock*)

I do most of my work in Perl, and the lack of a good chart package has been annoying for a very long time. GD::Graph will give you very basic (and not terribly ugly) line and bar charts relatively quickly, but that's about it; it's missing even rudimentary features that make it less than useful (eg error bars).

There just isn't a general purpose charting package for Perl that would even come close to JFreeChart. Grace can produce some nice results, but the Perl interface to it is just a wrapper around their terrible command line interface (maybe it's improved in the last few years, but when I tried it it was almost entirely undocumented and nigh-unusable).

So, if you want publication quality charts you basically still have to learn gnuplot, which is great, but sometimes just a little too involved.

At least this thread gives a nice summary of what the other languages have to offer: the PHP and Ruby packages aren't faring any better, but Python's matplotlib looks freaking beautiful.

There is a sourceforge project called spam-abuse that analyzes spam to find the abuse address of the ISP that is on Received line just before your MTA. It then composes a polite reuqest to the ISP about the spam and sends the request plus the email source to the ISP.

I have been using it for about a year to complain about most of my spam and I get about a 10% response rate, with some ISPs much better than others. Smaller ISPs seem to be the best, since it really costs them in bandwith, while the bigger ones most often send a canned response.

... there's matplotlib and there's reportlab for PDFs. Both are excellent open source packages, and I can tell you from experience that reportlab has outstanding support. I recently posted a question to their mailing list and received three intelligent replies within an hour.

OCS Inventory is an OSS tool we had deployed once upon a time. I see the most recent version support application deployment.

Otherwise, if your Vista/XP/2000 machines are on a domain, you can deploy software though domain policies, though I didn't find a really clean way of doing that in the short time I did IT.

Raid (any level) does NOT protect you from anything other than hardware failure.

If an app b0rks and starts filling your HDD full of zeroes then you have a nice redundant array of zeros. A lot of people I know have RAID controllers on their machines and have NO backup regime... scary..

You still need to protect yourself from data corruption!

I use backuppc running on a Ubuntu powered NAS box to back up my win and lin systems.

http://kevin.sourceforge.net/

The software he was using merely allowed him to access the network and internet from his own computer. If his computer became compromised, it would be his computer that was compromised, not the entire network. This is about client-level security and verifying that (Windows) clients are patched, have virus scanners, etc.

Also note that there exists a piece of open-source software that offers the same access that the the student wrote, has already been reported to Cisco, and is available as a binary for Windows computers: http://kevin.sourceforge.net/

Check out the Wayback revisioning file system for Linux. "Anything you can do, I can do better!" :)

http://wayback.sourceforge.net/

*Darb

What parent said. WYSE terminals aren't that bad, given that a lot of the medical data industry got it start from what is now known as VistA. By some strange coincidence, the name of its predecessor was DHCP. Anyway, it worked on dirt-old VAX systems and output to text-only terminals over serial lines. Worked just fine.

This is a horrible way to do it. Whip out the hard disks and turn them into Thinstations or LTSP systems. Even the old pentiums.

Turn what's left of the better machines into an array of X servers.

Let's expand the parameters a bit - disparate hardware, maybe someone wants one of your existing PCs to run Windows occasionally (or a teacher with a Mac wants onto the shared box): Try XRDP. It sets up quickly, can be access by multiple platforms, and on the client end just requires an rdesktop command.

The swedish consumer agency has coded a test for bandwidth testing. It works as far as I know up with 1GB connection, but could probably work with much higher speeds. The project is open source.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tptest/

It's a great tool that many of the ISP's in Sweden asks there customers to use before reporting in bad *DSL bandwidth.

http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/Iperf/

Very configurable, and if u want GUI or network tuning.. read the FAQ, they give suggestions.

TPTest http://sourceforge.net/projects/tptest/, an open source test suite from "Post och Telestyrelsen" http://www.pts.se/, a division of the Swedish goverment. Even a 200 MHz Pentium MMX running Linux could test a 100MBit/s fiber reliably.

DUDE!! take a look at GnuDIP. It's do-it-yourself GPL and free Dynamic DNS system. It interfaces with a standard BIND installation so you basically register a domain, then add hosts to your domain, and they can automatically update from a client installed on remote equipment. Give it a try. http://gnudip2.sourceforge.net/

Does anybody there know a wheel that has good force feedback features in Linux? If I had one I would start contributing code to some project like torcs or rars.

Does anybody there know a wheel that has good force feedback features in Linux? If I had one I would start contributing code to some project like torcs or rars.

The public key support for eCryptfs can handle more than just public keys. It includes a communication mechanism with a user daemon that can be queried from the kernel on file open events. There is a pluggable key module interface accessible through that daemon. OpenSSL is currently implemented, but there is nothing stopping anyone from writing a module to use GnuPG or any other key management/encryption backend, all in userspace. The module just needs to accept a key signature, and it can perform encryption and decryption based on whatever that signature refers to.

In other news, eCryptfs has recently been given the go-ahead for inclusion into Fedora:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi? id=218556

In the meantime, you can grab all the userspace stuff from the eCryptfs SourceForge site:

http://ecryptfs.sourceforge.net/

http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

Works great. Haven't been able to play with it in a while due to school policies on networking (give me my hub back, fackers), but there ya go.

http://ryanc.org/nic/update.php.txt

I wrote this a while ago, it runs with MyDNS. It works with ddclient and probably other software for updating dyndns hosts.

The software is as-is, but feel free to do whatever you want with it. Enjoy.

- Ryan Castellucci

No, it's API compatible at the source level. I have my own GNUstep build on my Slackware box, and on it, just because it can be done, I have Emacs on Aqua.

I don't actually "do" emacs, but I have my own home-made build system, and I put various things in it for toys to play with, including GNUstep and other interesting bits and pieces.

Flex has always been open source.

http://flex.sourceforge.net/

I don't know what Adobe's product is, but it is not Flex.

http://flex.sourceforge.net/

Adobe should concentrate on opening sourcing something of worth instead of reinventing the wheel. ;)

They blocked most ports used by file sharing at our university. Somebody set up a DC++ server and now everyone uses that. Our university is pretty big (you'd know it if I mentioned it, but I don't know if the admin has caught on yet), so there's a lot of stuff available, plus leeching is actively controlled.

I agree. Personally, I'm looking for a version of wikifilter that works with compressed versions of the XML database. That way, an entire snapshot of Wikipedia articles could be put on one DVD.

The problem is, right now, the XML database must be decompressed, and that way it takes 10-15GB.

Have you tried Thingamablog? I love it. Easy, small, quick, works great whether you're hosting your blog locally or remotely.