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Check out the RUR-PLE Python Learning Environment - http://rur-ple.sourceforge.net/

Darik's Boot and Nuke. Run it once, and you'll never be asked to fix your friend's computer again.

Stupid pointy-hairs and their desire for data visualization.

It is pretty difficult to see how any serious business would use Google Spreadsheets. I reckon most businesses would find OpenOffice to be a more attractive option. As a side-note... I loaded up OpenOffice Portable on a computer I was working on today, and a few people who saw it commented that MS Office wouldn't survive now that there's OpenOffice Portable. I found that interesting.

What I did is writing my own Whirlpool Perl module, which is included in the main program. The XS file is here. It depends on whirlpool-*.[ch] as available in my Ruby Whirlpool library.

UTD="${0%:*}:"

if [ ${#UTD} -gt 2 ]; then
UTD="${PWD%:*}:"
fi

export ZDOTDIR=$UTD/unixtools
export ZSHROOT=$UTD/unixtools
export UTD

exec $ZSHROOT/sh.exe

And of course we need a .zshrc (you need to replace ls with a version I don't recall where is at this moment for DIRCOLORS to work). You can see I have set up some aliases, most notably for gvim (this demonstrates the use of $UTD):

export PS1="[%n@%m %d]$ "
export PATH="$ZSHROOT;$PATH"
export SHELL=zsh

eval `$UTD/unixtools/dircolors.exe $UTD/unixtools/DIRCOLORS`

alias ls='ls -F --color'
alias clear=cls
alias vi="$UTD/gvim/PortableGVim.exe"
alias awk=gawk
precmd () {
title $USERNAME@$HOST: $PWD
}

One app I like to use on the USB drive is freecommander. Unfortunately, this program relies solely on its INI file, and does not take parameters for browsing. To fix this, I wrote the following script called 'browse' for launching it:

#!/sh.exe

FCINI="$UTD/freecommander/freecommand er.ini"
FCTMP="$UTD/freecommander/freecommander.t mp"

if [[ -z "$1" || "$1" == '.' ]]; then
DWP=`echo $PWD | sed -e 's!/!\\\\\\\!g'`
else
DWP=`echo $1 | sed -e 's!/!\\\\\\\!g'`
fi

TRHOME=`echo $HOME | sed -e 's!/!\\\\\\\!g'`

sed -e "s/^Dir2.*/Dir2=$DWP/" $FCINI > $FCTMP
sed -e "s/^Dir1.*/Dir1=$TRHOME/" $FCTMP > $FCINI

exec $UDT/freecommander/freeCommander.exe

Notice above that I can actually use a 'shebang' line, thanks to the $ZSHROOT environment set up in our startup script. Very cool! This even works if you install activestate perl on your key disk. I put perl in unixtools/perl. That means that from your zsh, you can do things like './test' where 'test' has '#!/perl/bin/perl.exe -w' as its first line. I think this is very cool!

I should put this all on a web page one of these days :) Some other things I have on the key disk, that didn't involve quite the devotion of time:

• Sylpheed. I have my home mail server set up to use imap over ssl and smtp auth with ssl. Those two things were a little bit of work to set up. You can always use ssh forwarding instead v

This is true. I use emacs and ipython as my Python IDE. They work fairly well, but don't look nearly as slick as Eclipse. There is IDLE and PyPE, but they are a lot less ambitious (or, from another perspective, overfeatured and bloated) than Eclipse. But, I wouldn't generally use them as I've rarely found that sort of development tool useful. And I've made a go of using them for a long time too because everybody else has raved so much about them. I've come to the conclusion that they prefer an illusion to reality.

But, I personally find Eclipse to be cumbersome and to do a great deal to obscure what's really going on. I find it highly amusing that a tool like that is all the fashion in Java. It reinforces my opinion of it as the new COBOL. A hand holding tool for programmers who don't really want to know how their computer actually does anything and want a tinkertoy programming environment that attempts to dumb down complicated things so they appear superficially simple.

Funny how I shrugged at the rash of thumbdrives out there, that is, until recently. They keep getting cheaper and cheaper and I kept buying them. I have since, stopped, however, it was only after the 12 step program.

Now, what do I keep on mine? Slax - Kill Bill, of course it really has brought me the level of standardization that I need from one computer to the next and it can do all (like many other small distros) the things that I need. I would however recommend something like Truecrypt for ensuring the security of your information. I would also recommend that you back your drive up on a regular basis, these things can be a bit unforgiving.

I could go on and on about the various apps, it really all depends on what you are doing. I do find the following though, very useful: Wireshark (Ethereal), Open Office and the usual suspects, samba, Etherwake, NVU, Thunderbird, rdesktop, various vnc flavors and other well known management utilities.

If I did not emphasize enough earlier, if you are going to rely on these little gems, I think you should always have an identical spare, and additionally, perform a backup on a regular basis. You might want to get creative and build a library of tools which could be easily accessed remotely to keep your drive lean. I would also highly recommend encrypting data you wouldn't want public.

GParted LiveUSB

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/liveusb.php/

Funny, I also carry a thumb-drive with a removable memory card slot. It's this generic one floating around online: http://www.supermediastore.com/supermedia-handy-4i n1--usb-20-flash-memory-card-reader-yellow.html

I think they're a great idea, because I can move with the SD card market as flash memory becomes denser and denser. Speed hasn't been a problem, either. The thumbdrives support USB 2.0 and my SD card seems to be capable of a very decent data transfer rate.

I have a collection of Windows tools on the drive. Not Linux tools, because I can usually accomplish whatever it is I'm doing in the Linux environments I encounter day to day.

Network Tools:
* Raw TCP/IP transfer -> netcat ( http://www.vulnwatch.org/netcat/ )
* SSH/Telnet -> putty ( http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ )
* Port Scanner -> SuperScan4 ( http://www.foundstone.com/resources/proddesc/super scan.htm )
* Classic Port Scanner -> nmap ( http://insecure.org/nmap/download.html )
* Packet Capture and Analysis -> WireShark setup ( http://www.wireshark.org/download.html )

Editors:
* General -> vim 7.0 ( http://www.vim.org/download.php )
* Hex Editor -> xvi32 ( http://www.chmaas.handshake.de/delphi/freeware/xvi 32/xvi32.htm#download )

Development:
* Tiny C Compiler ( http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/tcc/ )
* nasm ( http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=6208 )

Misc:
* Lightweight Windows md5sum -> md5summer ( http://www.md5summer.org/download.html )
* Process Explorer ( http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplo rer.html )
* MP3 Encoding -> RazorLame with lame ( http://www.dors.de/razorlame/download.php )
* Terminal Emulator -> TeraTerm Pro ( http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.h tml )

The folder is 26.7MB.

I teach computers at an international school in Tokyo Japan. My students vary in age from grade 6 to grade 9. As you can imagine, they also vary in English language ability. Here is my curriculum:

Grade 6: Drape - A drag and drop programming language (No longer free but you can downloa it from my homepage).

Grade 7: Game Maker - A more complex drag and drop programming language created by the same person who created Drape.

Grade 8: Kids Programming Language - A BASIC-like programming language with easy to use graphics (sprite) capabilities and built in functions such as collision detection. Note that an updated version with 3D graphics capablities will soon be released (around Sept. 2006).

Grade 9: JavaScript - I use a program called Max's HTML Beauty++ for editing JavaScript and NVU for web design.

I have also used Small Basic and my own JavaScript Interactive Fiction engine.

You can find downloads of most of these programs and some lesson plans at my homepage.

Feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.

I've just set up a SpamAssassin plugin called FuzzyOcr, which is designed for exactly this purpose. It converts the image into a bitmap format in multiple ways (including analyzing individual frames of an animated GIF, since spammers sometimes use that trick), as well as various color filters, then uses gocr to convert the results to text, which is matched against a (customizable) word list with Perl's String::Approx module.

The OCR is terrible. I suggest using the latest developer release of gocr, as it seems to work a lot better than the previous versions. Fuzzy matching helps to match words even when the OCR doesn't work well... but it also finds false positives, which can be a problem if you receive e-mailed screen shots that include any text at all.

What this doesn't handle is image-based spam where the image (of the text) has been split into multiple images, which are pieced back together with HTML.

I updated the project homepage, atomic-ptr-plus with the latest patent application, 20060130061 "Use of rollback RCU with read-side modifications to RCU-protected data structures", from Paul McKenney, inventor of RCU and "Rusty" Russel, one of the Linux kernel developers. Also some usenet postings from me contemporaneous with what was the basis of that patent. So you can get a real life example of an incremental patent on stuff in the public domain. Though it's not clear from the patent application what part is in the public domain and what part is covered by the patent.

...thus marking the first time that using XML ever made any data representation more compact.

I realize you're going for funny, but this isn't true. This paper evaluates a number of XML compression techniques. They compared binary formats to uncompressed XML to compressed XML. The paper states that "three methods compressed the XML to less than the size of the corresponding binary file." One of the best compression approaches is XMill.

I am seeing a lot of posts about how the person in question should have wiped her drive in a better way. The judge didn't sanction her through default judgement because she wiped her hard drive (regardless of how obviously or subtly she did it); the hard drive wiping is merely a manifestation of the real reason - interfering with his order to preserve her hard drive for evidence (and most likely honking off the judge in the process).

A judge in the U. S. judicial system is the closest thing to an absolute dictator Americans have; it's NOT a good idea to flaunt their instructions or orders. It wouldn't matter if she used DBaN, had electromagnets in the doors, or played games with the power leads; the point is that once the judge ordered the disk to be copied for evidentiary purposes, she was supposed to turn the hard disk over. She didn't just passively obstruct the order by failing to give up the hard disk, she willingly and deliberately performed actions to prevent the order from taking place. IANAL, but I stronly suspect the reason the judge went for the "nuclear option" was because of the willing and deliberate nature of her obstruction.

There may be a better way to set a judge totally against me than lack of respect for him and the entire judicial institution he represents, but darned if I can think of one offhand.

If she had used DBaN to wipe her disk at the very first contact by the RIAA, before this even went to court, I suspect she would not have been hit near as hard by the judge, if at all. Now, her best shot is probably to hope a higher court can rule the action was disproportionate, given the typically weak state of the RIAA's case when actually brought to trial. Unfortunantly, she's now got to overcome any judge's reluctance to give a break to someone who in their eyes has no respect for their position or institution.

I am seeing a lot of posts about how the person in question should have wiped her drive in a better way. The judge didn't sanction her through default judgement because she wiped her hard drive (regardless of how obviously or subtly she did it); the hard drive wiping is merely a manifestation of the real reason - interfering with his order to preserve her hard drive for evidence (and most likely honking off the judge in the process).

A judge in the U. S. judicial system is the closest thing to an absolute dictator Americans have; it's NOT a good idea to flaunt their instructions or orders. It wouldn't matter if she used DBaN, had electromagnets in the doors, or played games with the power leads; the point is that once the judge ordered the disk to be copied for evidentiary purposes, she was supposed to turn the hard disk over. She didn't just passively obstruct the order by failing to give up the hard disk, she willingly and deliberately performed actions to prevent the order from taking place. IANAL, but I stronly suspect the reason the judge went for the "nuclear option" was because of the willing and deliberate nature of her obstruction.

There may be a better way to set a judge totally against me than lack of respect for him and the entire judicial institution he represents, but darned if I can think of one offhand.

If she had used DBaN to wipe her disk at the very first contact by the RIAA, before this even went to court, I suspect she would not have been hit near as hard by the judge, if at all. Now, her best shot is probably to hope a higher court can rule the action was disproportionate, given the typically weak state of the RIAA's case when actually brought to trial. Unfortunantly, she's now got to overcome any judge's reluctance to give a break to someone who in their eyes has no respect for their position or institution.

Notepad on the other hand... has it even learned to do syntax highlighting yet?

Ahhh, Notepad. So small, so simple. But truly, if you want a really useful notepad (that's also GPL), try Notepad++. I've made it a standard part of every Windows install.

I dunno, maybe I'm just living in the past. I still use vi on Linux, I still use Notepad in windows whenever I can

Notepad??!?? Are you insane? It doesn't remember more than 1 undo. It can't even handle UNIX formatted files. How can you use something as powerful as vi in Linux and then use something totally half-assed like Notepad in Windows?

Have you tried Notepad++? http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

DBAN is the best I've seen.

Darik's Boot and Nuke - 35 passes of a guttman wipe; they shouldn't have been able to pick data off of that, but would it still go as destroying evidence? Drop a fresh windows install on it and some programs, a bit of spyware and some family photos and it might look convincing...

DCL. Double Choco Latte is pretty good. FOSS and I like it too!

on my opensource site, atomic-ptr-plus, and put a list of patent applications by other companies for that stuff. I have to add in another one by IBM for some stuff I worked on, with them no less. I'm working in stealth mode from now on.

Some of the problems with 'virtual firewalls' can be solved through real firewalls on ... virtual machines (i.e. Sieve at http://sievefirewall.sourceforge.net/ or at http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/24 5)

Better news: there is a Linux version. It's called Pioneers http://pio.sourceforge.net/, and it's a near-exact copy of the board game

If you want to play it without having to shell out for a console, there is a open source java version here.

Best way to play it though is of course around a table with some good friends.

If they had a non XBOX 360 version of this, one for the computer, in other words, then I would definitely get in on it online.

apt-get install pioneers-*

There have been a variety of open source implementations of Settlers for
a while. Pioneers is my current favorite.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pio

Same problem here. Tried using Ubuntu Dapper, but apparently it has known issues, that will NOT be fixed. I have an Edgy CD (which has apparently resolved this issue), am gonna try again this weekend... If this fails, I'll try Inst Linux.

I'm totally excited to hear that Settlers of Catan (along with Carcassonne and Alhambra) is coming to Xbox Live Arcade! I absolutely love the board game, and if the XBLA version is decent, this is going to be a big, big time sink for me.

Have you seen the Microsoft implementation of Settlers of Cataan? I gave it a try, but thought it sucked bad. If you want to play a decent online version, get this. It requires Java, so you may not be able to play on your XBox, unless the MS game dev kit for XBOX lets you sneak Java in. It's pretty decent game play and a simple, easy to read and use interface.

Use your own operating system. Something like Anonym OS will keep you safe, and you permanently change nothing. Just make sure that there are no hardware keyloggers, but that would make you REALLY paranoid...

I've actually been working on just that. An open source social networking project that's distributed, called Appleseed.

We have two test sites, and we're just starting to get into the distributed part (single sign-ons, cross-site communication, P2P searches, etc).

Maybe the same thing will hapen to them that did to OpenGFS developers ;)

just take a look at their last news: http://opengfs.sourceforge.net/

See http://gridblocks.sourceforge.net/ and their gbdisk.

ac because of open wlan....

Has been available forever here.

Developement on a native port is relatively new though, see here.

Has been available forever here.

Developement on a native port is relatively new though, see here.

... http://otrs.org/ for ticketing, http://ocsinventory.sourceforge.net/ for hardware tracking and http://glpi-project.org/?lang=en for software license tracking.

The ticketing and asset pieces aren't integrated and you might be able to get GLPI and OCS to work with a barcode scanner if the scanner will dump to a text field in the web page. I haven't had your specific needs but I thought I'd tout what worked for me, since I haven't seen them mentioned.

At my organisation, we went with two open source projects,OCS NG and GLPI. OCS NG is a client-server solution that uses a client, written in php, but compiled as an exe installer and running as a service on Windows (There's also clients available for Solaris, Linus and OSX), that collects information on hardware and software from the client computer (the source is avaiulable and you can edit it if you want). The OCS NG server collects the data from the clients via an xml-rpc call and sorts and stores them (you can delete clients, filter software into categories etc). The GLPI server is the main helpdesk and tracking app. It works hand-in-hand with the OCS NG server and is really good, and provides detailed data on clients, plus the ability to do financial info on them and reporting.

We have both running on a gentoo server and the level of control is excellent.

The downside is that both are from France. The English translation is less than perfect (but we're in switzerland and so we use it in French). I can only recommed the software though. No licensing issues or huge costs from proprietry vendors adn the ability to modify the source code is a god send. We modified GLPI to print labels via an xsl transform of the xml output to xslfo for Apache's FOP.

Have a look at OCS Inventory NG, it's an asset tracking system. It can also integrate with GLPI, which is a helpdesk system. They're FOSS. I'm thinking of giving them a go at the non-profit where I work. It looks pretty cool, the only thing that bothers me so far is the shoddy translation.

I am disappointed to see that Justin Korelc and Ed Tittel entirely missed eCryptfs, which is already in the -mm tree of the Linux kernel.

A similar project of note is pam-mount, a pam module to mount (usb|smbfs|losetup+crypt|LUKS|whatever) on login and umount upon logout. Too bad this is a performance-centric article, there are some very interesting things one can setup with (LUKS|device mapper|losetup). For instance encrypting your /tmp+swap with one-time keys from /dev/urandom.

Now, this might not be a common thing in the US. But here in India, a lot of companies have team laptops which we pass around (on-call duty for server pages, for instances).

And somebody from Delhi, did something up which works for exactly that. qryptix encrypts your home dir and mounts using your passphrase when you login, built as a pam.d module.

Except for the fact that I wanted a truecrypt built into it, so that I can have a hidden volume even after I pass-phrase in to the first volume, this works well enough for most purposes.

The FSF is not comissioning any new large scale undertakings at the moment.

This is just blatantly wrong.

What do you call Gnu Flash? Other projects FSF is directing include Free Bios and an open 3D Card driver. More projects are listed here. Just like gcc was needed in the 80s, these are the utilities users need now.

At the risk of being modded for flame bait, I'll also point out that it seems most criticisms of the FSF are based on plain ignorance.

You really don't think running a computer 24/7/31/365 won't cost any money?

You don't need to; nearly all modern PCs have the ability to switch themselves on at pre-scheduled times. Just set up MythTV to schedule a wake-up (using nvram-wakeup or similar) and automatically power off the PC when it's idle. (It's slightly arcane to set up, but it works; I only gave up on it because my current PC is very loud when it first powers on, and I have to sleep in the same room as it.)

"We have a serious problem. Whenever I try to pitch Linux to anyone under 30, the question I get is: 'Will it work with my iPod?," he said. "We are not yet as a community making the painful compromises need to achieve widespread desktop market share. Until we do, we will get locked out of more hardware."

If this helps wake people up to the fact that anti-virus programs simply don't work, all the better. For example, at one time or another, nearly every antivirus package has declared applications with NSIS installers as malware. I remember having a McAfee trial on my computer, that would regularly make up infections. Yet, when a slightly updated version of a worm comes out, you're unprotected.

Nice work! I have a similar project, but using J2ME, works on cell phones, palm and pocket-pc.
You can download Here, and is free. When I get some time, will upload it to sourceforge, i already have the project name reserved, SmartMap.
Would like to start it as a Google Project instead, but it says the name is taken :(

..in various posts, let me summarize how the article's implication of poor ipod support is total bullshit and ipod works with linux just fine (in fact, better than with windows).

libipod ( http://libipod.sourceforge.net/ ) is the library that interacts with the database on the ipod that stores your music.

Several music players on linux like amarok ( http://amarok.kde.org/ ), rhythmbox ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/ ), gtkpod ( http://www.gtkpod.org/about.html ),( http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/juk.html ) etc have plugins/embeddings that can interact with the library seamlessly

Ipods are detected just fine by the USB mass storage driver with no probems in any modern linux distro.

Itunes can be run thru wine (though I've never tried it), and Sharpmusique
( http://nanocrew.net/software/sharpmusique/ ) can connect with itunes, buy music, download and strip off the DRM so that the files can be played anywhere.

CD-ripping and transfer to ipod can be done seamlessly in amarok (if you have lame etc installed). It's easier than in windoze thru third party rippers and itunes where there are all sorts of restrictions and issues.

Both "pc-compatible" (fat filesystem) as well as "mac-compatible" (HFS filesystem) will work equally well on any linux box coz linux has drivers for both filesystems.

Last but not least, there is ipodlinux ( http://ipodlinux.org/Main_Page ), where you can install linux firmware in your ipod itself. Advantage is that you can play videos in your nano, music management is thru filesystem rather than database so just treat it as a mass storage device in any OS, and a host of other linux stuff will work on it, and you can play any music format that can be played on linux, not just mp3's (ogm,wma etc). You can even play quake on it if you want.

My nano ran just fine with my Mandrake box with no probs. Anecdotally, I had more problems with it on windoze (usb connection to it acted wierdly, though the usb bus was fine; I didn't care enough to analyze what was up).

Does anyone have any fucking clue what anyone else is talking about in this discussion? Have anyone here even tried to use an iPod under Linux? There's a dozen tools to do it, it's not like the iPod's database is rocket science, and there's a library to do it, which lists half a dozen projects using it, including amaroK, the most popular Linux mp3 player.

It's slightly more complicated than other mp3 players, where you can just drag and drop, but that's exactly as true under Windows. (And, under Linux, there apparently is, indeed, a user space filesystem that lets you drag and drop, although setting that up is more complicated than just using amaroK or Rhythmbox.)

The only shortcomings on Linux is you can't use iTunes and the Apple music store, which are, indeed, shortcomings, but they're hardly Linux's fault, or an iPod support issue. It's due solely to the fact that the Apple music store or whatever the name is, is limited solely to working within iTunes. The word 'iPod' didn't even appear in that sentence. If Apple would port iTunes to Linux, the store would work perfectly fine.(1)

If the question is 'Can I used my Apple purchased music in, and copy it to my iPod from within, Linux?', people under 30, the answer is 'No'. That music, as you probably were told when you purchased it, required a Mac or PC. If you do not use the Apple store, you are completely and perfectly supported under Linux.

And, as an added bonus, almost all music copy protection schemes either fail completely, aka, the autorun ones like the recent Sony debacle, or can be trivially corrected for, like the incorrectly formatted CDs designed to trick computers. (Most of the time this correction is automatic.)

1) Of course, they can't do that, because it would utterly trivial to crack iTunes's DRM on Linux. OTOH, it's utterly trivally to 'crack' it anyway by burning it to a CD and ripping it again. You can even use a single CD-RW repeatedly. (I'm not sure if there's such a trivial way to crack the video DRM, though.)

Wrong.

We developed a motion capture system for a bit of a different application (6-DOF joint movement tracking for biomed research). Getting the cameras working is trivial compared to the processing required to actually get 3d motion capture working reliably. Of course, we were going for something that probably has to be much more accurate than what you need, but it's not a trivial manner to write the software for something like this. Of course, there may be stuff out there you can use. Anyway, here's a brief rundown of what we were using and what might help.

We used 3 point-grey cameras (the flea). They might be a bit expensive for what you want, but all their cameras are top-quality, and they are intended for use in computer vision applications, and thus come with some source code pre-written that you can use for the interface. http://www.ptgrey.com/

We actually used windows machines at the request of the lab, but we did originally look into linux. The cameras are firewire, and the best linux drivers we've found for these types of cameras are the the libdc1394 drivers on sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/libdc1394/

The Open computer vision library is also invaluable. It has a lot of pre-written functions to deal with the more basic processing problems. It's got most of the major filters and algorithms in there that you'll need to extract the info from the camera pictures. Here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary

I'm not sure how you're planning on combining or calibrating the system, but we used a static set of known coordinates and used DLTs to actually give the real 3D coordinates. A good tutorial is here: http://www.kwon3d.com/theory/dlt/dlt.html

Lastly, good trackers can really help the processing a good deal. Our trackers used a 4-ball system because we needed the accuracy and refrences for the angular rotations, but even a 1-ball tracker can be well designed. If the ball is a significant bright point on the image, simple thresholding is all that is needed in terms of preprocessing before you extract location in the image. Reflective paint or another bright source is KEY. If you're going colour, a distinct colour is also a good option.

good luck.