Slashdot Mirror

Your front end combined with the Agent from http://ocsinventory.sourceforge.net/ would be a very nice combination. OCSInventory have a wonderful lightweight agent suitable for inclusion in logon scripts and versions Linux, makes a reasonable job of helping track down non-windows, non-redhat machines.

The only trouble with it is the web interface is a bit french.

Nice job though, I'll take a good look.

Jason

I write this software. http://winventory.sourceforge.net/ Next version is coming "soon", and will be called Open-AudIT - also on Sourceforge.

Whatever you do, don't toss the cds you do have. Sell them to an online used cd store like secondspin.com, so I can buy them all up myself. ;)

Seriously, I've amassed quite a collection of albums this way. $6 to $7 on average, great condition on average. I simply copy the music to my hard drive in flac format and put the album away for storage. Then I can convert to any lossy format I want, any time I want, as many times as I want, all the while retaining the original lossless flacs.

The one thing I *don't* have is a graphical net explorer that wlil also show me the net in real time in a format that shows the network structure with traffic, etc. 3M has a tool, but it is only so-so (last time I tried it) and rather slow on the older Windows laptop I have available. I'd love to have a good FOSS app for this, preferably for use under Linux, but Windows is aceptable.

I use etherape in combination with iptraf for this. Both are open-source Linux apps. Etherape uses Gtk/Gnome widgets; iptraf is a console app that runs nicely in an ssh'd xterm from the firewall. I'm not sure what level of depiction you're looking for, but these two are worth a try regardless IMO.

All of these are open source, built on LAMP, and run great on Windows.

HW & SW inventory: Winventory (http://winventory.sourceforge.net./
Trouble ticketing: Eventum (http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page ). The Anonymous Reporting Form is a time saver.
Cacti (http://www.cacti.net./ Graphs all parameters on your servers and routers.
Documentation: TikiWiki (http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php). It has articles, FAQs and LDAP integration.
FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Ma in_Page). Mind maps are a FANTASTIC tool for documentation and you can publish them easily on a web server (get 0.8.1 beta3).

These are free, and get the job done.
SysInternals's tools (http://www.sysinternals.com./ Process Explorer and TCPView are the most useful, and there are many other great utils.
KiXtart (http://www.kixtart.org./ The best language for login scripts, and just about all your scripting needs on Windows.
Network Notepad (http://www.networknotepad.com./ Draw your nework diagrams here, and then publish them on your web server.

All of these are open source, built on LAMP, and run great on Windows.

HW & SW inventory: Winventory (http://winventory.sourceforge.net./
Trouble ticketing: Eventum (http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page ). The Anonymous Reporting Form is a time saver.
Cacti (http://www.cacti.net./ Graphs all parameters on your servers and routers.
Documentation: TikiWiki (http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php). It has articles, FAQs and LDAP integration.
FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Ma in_Page). Mind maps are a FANTASTIC tool for documentation and you can publish them easily on a web server (get 0.8.1 beta3).

These are free, and get the job done.
SysInternals's tools (http://www.sysinternals.com./ Process Explorer and TCPView are the most useful, and there are many other great utils.
KiXtart (http://www.kixtart.org./ The best language for login scripts, and just about all your scripting needs on Windows.
Network Notepad (http://www.networknotepad.com./ Draw your nework diagrams here, and then publish them on your web server.

I agree. XML is old hat at this point. I especially love XPATH, it's the easiest way I know to address XML.

Recently in the Ajax world I've started using Googles AXPATH library to handle ajax xml responses at the Javascript client level. Even with old machines and very complex XML, googles xpath javascript library (open source) has worked miracles for recent projects! It's part of googles http://goog-ajaxslt.sourceforge.net/ library - and the xpath piece can be ripped out and used by itself.

Allow me to solve your problems right now:

http://tortoisecvs.sourceforge.net/ (For CVS Servers)
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ (For Subversion servers)

Tortoise will tell your users everything they need to know about the files status right through Windows Explorer. Teaching them how to do checkins and tree updates is also quite easy, thanks to the customized right-click menu. Advanced options like diffing, merging, and branching are still available through the submenus, but your users should be able to get their work done without resorting to those. (At least, not until they're ready.)

Of course, the fact that these are graphics designers may complicate issues somewhat. If they're using a Mac, they won't be able to use Tortoise. In which case, my next recommendation falls on SmartCVS:

http://www.smartcvs.com/

SmartCVS is great for Macintoshes, although it does take slightly more training than Tortoise. The only problem you may run into, however, is that SmartCVS chokes on massive directories of files. I don't know if this problem has been fixed or not, but it was a serious problem for one of the source trees I worked on. (Think gigabytes of data spread across thousands of files.)

CVS/SVN are by no means perfect solutions, but I can't think of anything better off the top of my head. Hope this helps!

A lot of the middleware that converts data to HTML and back can go away when you use the right XML tools. XSLT does a good job of presenting static pages, and it can be fast if you cache the results as well.

But for dynamic pages (and forms) XML to XSLT to HTML leaves some big gaps:

1. The hierarchical XML data gets flattened out into name/value pairs in HTML form fields.
2. For the return trip HTML->?->XML, XSLT doesn't work; you can't run the transform backwards.
3. For dynamic pages, you're left with JavaScript or the dreaded "postback."

These are some of the reasons we updated the W3C HTML forms module to take account of XML data directly.

How does it fix the above problems?

1. The hierarchical XML data your PHP or other server-side code outputs is transmitted directly to the web browser, where it remains while the user futzes with only the nodes that the form specifies. The middleware that converts the XML data to web browser data is just printing the XML.
2. When the form results are submitted, they come back directly in XML, so there's no need to pick apart the name=value pairs and try to put them back into your data. The browser just posts the XML directly back as XML to your PHP or servlet.
3. For forms, as the data changes, the UI changes with it. If a node disappears, or appears, or if a value changes, entire sections of UI can appear and disapear just by listing a dependency on that data. And if you want dynamic pages, you can use the background submission feature to retrieve instance data asynchronously, and the presentation changes automatically.

Nice work if you can get it, you say? Well, as everyone knows Microsoft hasn't yet implemented XForms. (Heck, they haven't even implemented CSS, though we hear they do have it as a goal now.)

So what can you do today:

1. Use Mozilla or FireFox XForms 0.4. It's a one-click install download from the Mozilla website. Yes, it's beta. Yes it has bugs. Yes, IBM and others are fixing them. But it's open source.
2. Use FormFaces for most modern browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera) FormFaces is a cool JavaScript/AJAX application that you import into your web page with a one-line include, and it does everything described above. If you need cross-browser support right now, want dynamic AJAX forms, and want to interface to XML, this is your best bet, if you can tolerate a JavaScript program in your browser (i.e., it's done using AJAX). It's available under GPL and commercial licenses.
3. Use Chiba for backend processing Chiba is an open source Java-based back-end that converts your XHTML+XForms page into either an AJAX page or a static HTML page (good for Sec 503 compliance). Chiba is a great choice for applications that have a Java back end, as it puts less load on the browser than the large JavaScript engine of FormFaces, but I put it below FormFaces here because of the emphasis on PHP. (But, about half of Chiba is an XSLT transformation so a PHP port is possible.)
4. Use Formsplayer as an IE plugin FormsPlayer is a deluxe XForms processor plug-in for intranet applications using Internet Explorer, and has lots of other features as well, such as sidebar support.

Here's a quick example:

Let's suppose you have a book list you want to view, avaialble at http://example.com/books/list.

<books>
<book>
<title>No Nonsense XML Web Development with PHP</title>
<author>Thomas Myer</author>
<book>
...
<books>

If you want to display this data

Unattended (http://unattended.sourceforge.net/ is a very nice automated desktop deployment package. I have limited experience with RIS, but this one won my heart. Easy to maintain, works on a shiteload of PC hardware, and it's based on open software. Highly recommended.

I'm currently interning at a company with a one-man IT department. When I arrived, their hardware/software inventory was spread over a half-dozen excel spreadsheets and (even worse) some pen-and-paper forms. I set up a server with the OCS Inventory tool and bam, it was as simple as adding a line to the network logon script -- now the hardware and software inventory of every computer is updated each time a user logs onto the network. It's absolutely the best inventory software I've ever encountered, and it's saved our IT guy a hell of a lot of time previously wasted on visiting each station to perform inventories.

I'm not sure what other information you want to 'manage,' but for hardware/software inventory, OCS takes the cake.

http://ocsinventory.sourceforge.net/

Crystal Reports was designed and developed by some of the most sadistic and shit headed sons of bitches ever. Any developer with any experience using Crystal Reports despises it, loathes it, has fantasies of strangling the ignorant shit headded fucktards that created it.

Ah, someone who shares my opinion of Crystal Reports :)

Fortunately, I convinced my company to switch to JasperReports. But I still have quite a few awful Crystal Reports to maintain until we get a chance to port them over.

BIRT also looks cool.

There is a NetBSD live CD called NeWBIE (Newbie). Right now its focus is on the desktop user but it will be used as a base for creating a NetBSD pentest live CD. Ironically, it is made by people who also make a Linux live CD for pentesting called Arudius. Search Google for "arudius" or check this link. Both CDs are described there.

Try DosBox. Works perfectly for the QFG series; I do have 4 crash out occasionally with a DOS error, but I suspect that's 4.

I got that game when it first came out, on floppies, couldn't beat it. Found out a few years later, when I was on the Internet and was thinking about it, and decided to check for a FAQ, that the game shipped with a plot bug that wouldn't trigger a visit from Katrina at a certain time to propel you into the end game.

Is this not User Mode Linux? How is it different?

http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/

No, what VMWare does is not emulation. For an example of how emulation works, have a look at Bochs.

with NetBSD you can build your own. there also is some desktop centric live cd called NeWBIE

I think you were being facetious, but you got my curiosity up.
Dang! It's real! (Well... LUnix - the Next Generation, instead of Linux) But Dang!
http://lng.sourceforge.net/

(Now where is BSD for Commodore?) };-)

Because it isn't always needed.

VNC? What if I'm only using it over a Cat-5 cable on a private network? Who am I encrypting it from?

You've always got FreeNet. But you aren't using it are you?

You can already enrcrypt the text portion of your favorite IM's.

Haven't you heard of GAIM-encryption. http://gaim-encryption.sourceforge.net/

There's also a plugin called Off-The-Record(OTR) from cypherpunks. http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

I've got both. First download gaim-enryption, then add the OTR. They're actually independent and don't work on top of each other. I've just got people that use one or the other, and I just select the one I need to encrypt the channel. Both are pretty seamless.

When GAIM finally gets voice, then I'm sure GAIM-encryption will follow with encrypted voice.

Look, nobody is using notepad/vi and javac these days to develop anything. And most of the Java software we develop these days doesn't simply run from the command line. Be it a J2EE application or an Eclipse RCP application, most *free* (as in speech or beer) tools don't do the greatest job when dealing with a predefined configuration, such as the aforementioned.

Please, someone prove me wrong on this, but I can't seem to find a decent code profiler for use with J2EE or Eclipse RCP applications. You can't simply launch them in a JVM and have your way with them.

I have used some plugins for Eclipse that almost do an OK job of this, but even they are limited. The best I've found to-date is:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eclipsecolorer

Even this one has major warts, though. Such as it only runs reasonably on Windows, while I do most of my Java development on a Mac these days.

I'm sure someone will come along and suggest JProbe, or another commercial product. If the price were right, I'd by any of these as well. Unfortunately, for the moment, it is more cost effective to pepper my code with Log4J statements providing profiling information in the form of a log file and to parse the results myself.

Again, if anyone can prove that I'm incredibly wrong, I'll buy you all the beer you can drink the next time I'm "in your neck of the woods."

Download jrat here

I've used it many times, and it's helped me find horrible Hibernate queries, Lucene bottlenecks, Batik rendering pipeline issues. It is fantastic.

Download jrat here

I've used it many times, and it's helped me find horrible Hibernate queries, Lucene bottlenecks, Batik rendering pipeline issues. It is fantastic.

I've been using Windows 98SE on my MacBook Pro since I got it.

If I took a photo of it, you'd notice it has no problems running full-screen, and video would prove it's most definitely not a static screenshot - and better still, Windows XP is no obstacle, and I could even have MacOS X for PowerPC, Linux, FreeBSD, RISC OS appearing in a similar manner with no problems whatsoever.

How?

VNC. Easy!

One thing I really like about IM is that I don't have to even care about the input format, so when the users upload their random collection of gifs, jpegs, tiffs, 30 meg bmps and picts, I can just give the whole indiscriminate mess to IM and get back a set of nice, shiny, sized and formatted pngs.

I once used TOAD a lot, but I've been using TOra for years. How does Oracle's tool compare?

If you can handle motion-jpeg (MJPEG) .avi files as output:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jpegtoavi/

I've been using this for years to string together snapshots from security webcams into daily/weekly/monthly time-lapse movies.

But seriously... it did have a hard time when I asked it for deck2omf (Google PR1). Not a surprise---sort of a project that maybe three people in the world care about---but that project also includes some really useful binary diff tools that folks might find helpful (specifically designed to aid in analyzing binary file formats). It also has some code for dealing with OMF files, and AFAIK, is the only available open source project that actually does, which at least a couple of dozen people in the world must care about.

In any case, its results for that one are so far off the mark, it isn't even funny. It returns only a single entry. That entry is for some random directory listing containing nothing but a list of additional directories, one of which is called deck2omf, which is completely and totally empty. And that's it. No reference to deck2omf.sf.net, no reference to sf.net/projects/deck2omf (which is #1 on Google's search for deck2omf), etc. I get about as close when I search for otneb.

Not impressed yet. Let me know when you've at least spidered sourceforge....

Note that your bar.tif file in your example is in PNM format (not TIFF, which is probably what you expect, seeing that you're using bar.tif rather than bar.pnm). PNM files can include multiple images. You probably want this:

tifftopnm <foo.tif | pnmscale -xyfit 640 480 | pnmtotiff > bar.tif

According to the tifftopnm and pnmtotiff man pages, support for reading/writing multi-image TIF/PNM files was added in version 10.27 from March 2005. So either identify is not recognizing that your PNM file or you could use a newer version (or, perhaps, gasp, pamscale does not support multi-image PNM files?).

So yes, you can probably give it a try. :)

Note that your bar.tif file in your example is in PNM format (not TIFF, which is probably what you expect, seeing that you're using bar.tif rather than bar.pnm). PNM files can include multiple images. You probably want this:

tifftopnm <foo.tif | pnmscale -xyfit 640 480 | pnmtotiff > bar.tif

According to the tifftopnm and pnmtotiff man pages, support for reading/writing multi-image TIF/PNM files was added in version 10.27 from March 2005. So either identify is not recognizing that your PNM file or you could use a newer version (or, perhaps, gasp, pamscale does not support multi-image PNM files?).

So yes, you can probably give it a try. :)

One thing i would change about the iPod is to get rid of the annoying dependancy on iTunes.
I've got an iPod, and I don't use iTunes. There are other alternatives, including EphPhod and gtkpod (my personal favorite) which work very well. I send my own gripped, DRM-free mp3 files to my iPod with gtkpod and am able to enjoy my device without the iTunes apron-strings (DRM, Windows, etc.).

MacOS - OphoneX
Windows - Netmeeting

As for solaris, I believe it will run Ekiga/Gnomemeeting itself anyways (guessing but very probable)

Hmm, I tend to find the approach of NetPBM easier to work with: having lots of separate utilities each doing a single simple thing and making it easy to use them together by piping the output of one to the next. Besides, reading/writing PBM files is trivial so you can very easily use these tools from your programs (by piping your image through them) or you can very easily create new filters that integrate well with the rest. I recommend you check out NetPBM.

If you need automatic processing of many images (the sort of thing ImageMagick is being praised for), I recommend you check it out.

those interested in command line image processing, should check out netpbm too. it's really neat

instead of a single image processing program, netpbm is a massive collection of programs all using a small set of proprietery formats (they are all compatible with each other). you use pipes for communication between them, giving you some more flexibility.

for example:

pngtopnm foo.png | pnmscale -xsize=600 ysize=400 | pnmtojpeg > foo.jpg

the other advantage is, their proprietery formats were designed to be easy to use, so coding your own netpbm programs is much easier than rewriting imagemagick for a specific task.

I have removed Adobe Acrobat reader from my systems. In it's place, I use Foxit Reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php) for reading PDF files. It's a lot faster to load, and I have yet to come across a PDF it can't read.

For creating PDF files, I use PDFCreator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator). It works like Adobe Distiller used to, you create your PDF files by printing to PDFCreator.

They're selling a crippled EEG machine for $500 which doesn't even give the read out of the brain activities. If you are semi serious about this, I would suggest you take a look at OpenEEG. It's a opensource DIY modular EEG machine that costs around $200 to build (there is also a partialy build version available). There are several free games, and the best thing is, it's not limit to the Playstation (supports Win, Mac, Linux, PocketPC, etc.).

Of course if you want to make sense of the readings, you need to know how to interpret the brainwave patterns. There are several book on this subject; the more popular ones are:
Getting Started with Neurofeedback
The High-Performance Mind

Check out User Mode Linux, they even list trying `rm -rf /` as one of the things people use the application for.

While I love and frequently use JustReader on my Zaurus, I'd still say a PDA isn't ideal for some types of books. Comics, technical manuals with lots of drawings, etc. still benefit from a larger screen or from old fashioned paper.

However, I'd take it over paper anyday for your everyday novel or novella. On that same note, everyone with access to a decent eBook reader should grab LocalRoger's Passages stories. They really are astoundingly well writen, given the medium (k5).

His latest story, with links to his earlier ones.

Now, I bought the Zire for other reasons, and not primarily as a reader. And I don't sit down and read things on it at home. But I've loaded a bunch of things on it (Mark Twain short stories, Machievelli, Plato) which is great if I find myself stuck somewhere with time to kill. It's great for business travel and waiting in long lines.

So it hasn't replaced my regular reading, but certainly has found a place in my reading habits.

i've been reading project gutenburg texts via weasel (formerly gutenpalm) for a couple of years now. Both are free, and more to the point gutenberg texts are, well, text of the non-drm'd ascii variety.

the thing that's really held me back is i've never seen a book i wanted to buy available for online purchase, let alone in a plain-ascii form unencumbered by a need for a particular reader or bizzare and frustrating licensing requirements. i'm well aware of the reasons publishers don't want to release their precious ip into the wild this way, but there you have it - the only form i'd be interested in buying an ebook, they can't sell it in. impasse.

Or, that's how you know a game is bad -- When cracking the copy protection is more fun than actually playing the game!

I spent four hours copying that darn map. That was not fun :(. But the game itself is excellent.

But don't take my word for it, go and download the completely legal remake from here. The copyright holders released the 3DO version to community, and community proceeded to port it back to PC. For legal trademark reasons the game was renamed to "Ur-Quan Masters", the subtitle of the original game.

My thoughts too. There is a Linux BIOS project. Could something be written that makes EFI boot into a Linux BIOS which then allows Vista to be booted?

That would be the biggest boot salad ever seen!

I mean, Real ROM -> EFI -> rEFIt -> eLILO -> Linux BIOS -> Vista!!!

I might be barking up the wrong tree here, but once we have a port of elilo for OSX we could probably boot it that way (not that im particularly interested in doing that anyway).

In anycase im not sure Windows has ever supported dual booting - It's been a while since i installed newer versions of windows. In the past installing windows meant rewriting the boot sector regardless - removing any dual boot menu that might be there (lilo or grub) a pain in the ass if you had linux or other on a different partition. If this is still the case then it really isnt news when Microsoft say "It isnt supported". That doesnt mean that its not possible, just that they havent gone to the effort of making it possible.

They use this one - http://goog-ajaxslt.sourceforge.net/

Your links're broken, somehow. It should be just http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ and http://freshmeat.net/projects/sdl_sopwith/

I'd like to see either a version of xine that isn't totally crippled, or else take it out. If it doesn't play mpeg, it's no good to anyone, and everybody on the Kaffeine mailinglist is sick and tired of answering questions about it.

FYI: there is a remake of Ultima IV (considered by many to be the best in the series), for modern machines, called xu4. Try it, it's fun. No, I'm not one of the devs, just a humble luser.

No, Report Manager is written in Borland's Delphi/Kylix. It has a Active X component to use for embedding in an application. Report Manager also has a web component and runs on both doze and Linux. They have started working on an .net version also? http://reportmanager.sourceforge.net/

UltraVNC is the best VNC, in my experience.

--
Loose Change. Interesting free movie.

It still had me misled. I thought it was going to be about the Java client of Titan.