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I was looking for that a while ago and I found ConsultComm.

You can define a number of projects and groups and you switch between them by clicking on the one you want.

I use Mac OS X and Linux at home, so some of this may not apply...

I wrote a script that rips a CD to properly tagged flac based on command line inputs of Artist, Genre, Year, Album Title and Mac OS X creating a /Volumes/CDName with "TrackNum TrackTitle.aiff" files using GraceNote CDDB. For compilations, soundtracks, etc., I also have some scripts that let me paste freedb.org web page data and retag everything in a given directory.

I store two identical copies of the flac on one of my desktop machines and a server, using rsync from desktop (where I rip or scp the rips) to server. The flac tree is artist/album/*.flac. I put an albumart.jpg (may soon allow for multiple jpgs, albumart*.jpg) in each album directory.

On the server, I use another script that takes as input the flac root, a list of album dirs to process, and the mp3 root. It checks file timestamps to only convert modified or new flac files to mp3. It converts filenames to something shorter with no spaces and populates the mp3 tree with artist-album/*.mp3. It decodes the flac and uses lame to encode MP3 at a command line specified bitrate & constant/variable flag. It populates all the id3v2 info in the mp3s it encodes, adds albumart, and runs mp3gain across each mp3 album subdirectory it writes files into.

The mp3 root is scanned every 300 seconds by mt-daapd, which shares the library out on my local network using Apple's proprietary protocol. iTunes clients pick it up. Mostly this is for the benefit of the guest room (old style) iMac, which has not the disk space for a collection, but is nice to provide guests with browsing, email, iTunes. My laptops maintain a live iTunes library since they do go with me at times. One of them puts all that data on my iPod.

I also have MPD running with its output going to a Griffin iMic USB audio card (GREAT electrical isolation from noisy components in the computer), into an amplifier with multi-room capability and an FM transmitter hanging off one of the tape outputs. By setting the inputs up properly and hooking up amps, I will eventually get time-synchronized output in my home theater, living room, and on the deck, as well as FM transmission to anything capable of receiving it on my property. There are many clients that can control MPD - it would be nice to use something like this to control it, but we'll see if it ever gets released and open sourced. I mostly like iTunes (except no FLAC support), but I'm not willing to have a user session open and sitting there just to play audio through my stereos - MPD is a much better solution, though I've not figured out a way to have a "carry it around" remote control for it.

My workflow is generally to use a laptop to rip the flac from the command line (though I'm building a CamelBones-based frontend for my wife to do it with a GUI) to local storage. I usually grab a large-size JPG from amazon.com while it's ripping, and copy it into the flac directory named albumart.jpg. I then scp the directory to the desktop machine according to my naming scheme where the "master" copy is. If I'm anxious, I can kick off the script that rsyncs then mirrors to mp3 manually, otherwise it just happens at the next scheduled interval. Once the mp3's are in place on the server, I just load them into my iTunes library - they show up under the mt-daapd share automatically. I've not figured out a way for automatic scanning on MPD, but since I'm not using that much it's not an issue at the moment.

It already has one. httpd for the palm.

Verdana, hands down, is the best font for current low-resolution computer screens (I'm saying this as a Linux fanatic who looked at all of the Bitstream Vera fonts and carefully comparing them to the mail Microsoft web fonts). While Microsoft no longer has this font on their web page, it can be found here:

http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

Note that Verdana looks like a cheezy 30s art-deco font when printed out. Note also that FreeType has to be recompiled with the patented hinting enabled for Verdana to look nice.

Check out DenyHosts: http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/

It will protect your ssh server from evil hackers.

But ultimately, as things stand at the end of 2005, Windows is a better platform for gaming than Linux or MacOS -- the support is there, the games are there, and things generally work with little pain.

I am sick of having to create :lang(x) CSS formatting for every single one of the dozen languages I use in my website and linguistics-related weblog just because there no font that is both readable and covers enough of Unicode. Bitstream Vera and Verdana are pleasant on the eye so I have those set for the default, but when I present text with IPA, lesser-known Cyrillic characters, or polytonic Greek, I have to switch to fonts like Lucida Sans Unicode or Arial Unicode MS that simply aren't as readable (and this last one is rarely illicitly acquired and installed by non-Windows users). Things are better for my print stylesheet, since I can specify serif fonts like TITUS, whic looks good and covers almost everything, but the acceptable-looking sans-serif fonts are not Unicode-friendly.

Lucky the DejaVu project is extended Bitstream Vera to include more of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic forms, it isn't widely installed yet. Would that all Linux distros include it by default.

Darik's Boot and Nuke should work nicely. Some contend that multiple drive overwrites are unnecessary with modern hard drives due to their density, but it couldn't hurt.

You wouldn't be able to do it on hosted webspace - those things usually only allow you to use the http daemon provided. You'd need to actually rent a server, which is usually quite expensive.

For SSL proxying, you'd need to use something like this - never set one up, but it looks about right. Of course, the server would need to be outside the UK to avoid getting logged. If you don't want to go to the trouble of setting up your own, you could try something like FreeNet*, Tor*, JAP** or just a random anonymous SSL proxy (Proxomitron or MultiProxy might prove useful here). If you're a little less paranoid, you could use a CGI proxy.

* Warning: using these systems may mean that child porn is passing through your system, iirc.
** I know that at one point this system was discovered to have a government backdoor in it, but I think they cleaned up their act.

Most come with "ordered" mode enabled. It's faster than full journalling, and, for a desktop at least, usually just as effective:

Ext3's ordered mode guarantees that file data gets written to the disk before the corresponding metadata gets committed to the journal.

It's called "Freenet" - http://freenet.sourceforge.net/

Download Locomotive to get a working Rails environment on OS X lickety-split.

i take it i should stick to a very solid LAMP base then look into ruby on the rails once i have some real code under my belt?

Perhaps - it's not exactly the simplest of platforms to get. You'll definitely benefit from understanding the basics of web development.

make sure i don't learn some trendy language that dies in a couple years?

A valid concern, though I personally wouldn't be too worried. Even in case Rails might fail to gain momentum, at least Ruby language should be able to stick around - it's already getting established as the part of the landscape. Plus, Rails uses the hot paradigm of MVC web apps - there's competition on this area too, and people are using it a lot in other languages, so knowing the paradigm itself might help.

and i assume this isn't a good language for someone with very little (essentially no) experience to jump into and try to learn?

Ruby might, in itself, be a simple and easy-to-learn language, but you'll probably start to appreciate those things only after you know how to program somewhat, as in know how to do many tasks in other scripting languages or how to do complex things in OO languages.

As for Rails itself, knowing some Ruby and good idea of some things OO can do would be a good idea.

also, how is this implimented? does it preform operations serverside that output the html/xml/whatever code in a similar fashion as php?

Yep, that's the basic idea. Though the way you separate your code and HTML, and how you organize the code, is quite different from stock PHP.

does it include database software in the ruby framework or do you still need something that is/is like Mysql to handle databases?

Yes, if you are going to do a database-backed app (and most Rails folks usually are doing just that), you need an external database. It tries to make the thing abstract enough so you don't practically need to care much about what DB you use - MySQL and PostgreSQL are both supported, as is SQLite (so you don't need an actual database server running, though sqlite isn't exactly full of neat features) and many others.

Though there's other things that can be used as the data backends, like Madeleine, which is used by Instiki. But some serious wizardry is needed for that, I hear...

Here is one such secure file wipe/delete utility....

http://wipe.sourceforge.net/

(By the way did I mention that with some special modules like weave it already is pretty simple to inline C/C++ code in Python and I am experimenting with that for scientific computing and so far I am pretty impressed, it surely beats Java in my benchmarks.)

Wikipedia redirects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narwhale to the correct Narwhal page instead of barfing up a "NO DUMBASS!" error. Merriam-Webster online does a similar thing when it should actually suggest alternatives.

Someone at Wikipedia had to correct "monceros" and replace it with "monoceros". The poor Narwhal must be jinxed.

BTW: My Firefox Spellbound extension correctly flags "Narwhale" as incorrect.

Windows - http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/ Linux - http://wipe.sourceforge.net/

Here are some links I thought you might be interested in: nant nunit

Now, about your reply, I want to be sure I'm reading you correctly. I know I don't like being misunderstood.

You mean to say that selecting .NET as a development platform on Windows over Java is ignorant, indicative of a lack of talent, and "pure zealotry"? Further that all Microsoft shops are zealots by definition, who never choose the right tool for the job because that there is never a reason to choose .NET over Java? Does that pretty much sum it up?

Also, if you would be kind enough to point out the correct way to measure productivity, I'd be grateful.

Here are some links I thought you might be interested in: nant nunit

Now, about your reply, I want to be sure I'm reading you correctly. I know I don't like being misunderstood.

You mean to say that selecting .NET as a development platform on Windows over Java is ignorant, indicative of a lack of talent, and "pure zealotry"? Further that all Microsoft shops are zealots by definition, who never choose the right tool for the job because that there is never a reason to choose .NET over Java? Does that pretty much sum it up?

Also, if you would be kind enough to point out the correct way to measure productivity, I'd be grateful.

In my mind LAMP is Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl (I've spent most of the past 5 years working in perl) and i'd argue that Java has a far more complete OM than perl does.

Oh, certainly. Perl's entire object model is a bolted-on hack :)

Python and Ruby, on the other hand, have a much better object model. Everything, including classes, methods and imported modules are objects, and can be treated as such. Java lacks this, but partially makes up for this by suppling a vast number of wrapper objects: classes can be wrapped in the Class object, methods can be wrapped in the Method object; but Java's wrappers are very clumsy in comparison to the real thing.

I'll give you the introspection is needlessly complex and that autoboxing is something of a hack, but I feel interfaces are very useful and perhaps more-so than multiple inheritance. Of course Java was my first real-world experience of OO programming, so i may view it differently just because i'm not very used to working with C++.

Certainly the languages you know affects how you view programming, though multiple inheritance done properly is a superset of interfaces. Anything you can do with interfaces, you can do with multiple inheritance. An interface is, after all, just an abstract class with no variables.

However, to get back to the original point, I felt that java was very flexible in terms of end result. I can think of loads of things i can't do in visual basic without resorting to some nasty hack. OTOH the only thing, that springs to mind, that i've had trouble with in Java was getting a servlet to accept a large (8GB) file encoded in an HTTPS post. Perl had no qualms about it.

Certainly Java is better than VB, and easier to read than Perl. In that, we are in complete agreement :). But Python and Ruby, at least to me, seem significantly better again.

You might also want to check out Nice. It's a language that compiles into JVM bytecode, the same as Java, and can use Java classes (Groovy and Scala are some other interesting JVM-based languages). Nice looks a lot like Java, but boasts some pretty interesting advantages, which are listed on the front page of the website. Multi-methods, value dispatch and anonymous methods are my favourites :)

it doesn't need code recompilation nor does it need the developer to be aware of what the platform actually does beneath

which of course is why there are seven different distributions of azureus, each one OS-specific.

"php is dying", eh?

if anything, the long term graph shows it's java that is dying.

sorry that should be: wget http://ovh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/fluxbox/ fluxbox-0.9.14.tar.gz i guess it wasn't so easy.

looks right to me...

http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php? form_cat=160

Java also supports Ruby and Python and Tcl and Eiffel and...

Java also supports Ruby and Python and Tcl and Eiffel and...

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/fluxbox/fluxbox -0.9.14.tar.gz
tar -xzvf fluxbox-0.9.14.tar.gz
cd fluxbox-0.9.14
./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

now wasn't that easier? :)
good thing there is that desktop switcheroo program...

This is a Hyperbolic curve: http://glx.sourceforge.net/examples/2dplots/hyperb ola.png. So unless you mean that around the beginning of time the ability to enforce antitrust laws was somewhere in the realms of infinity, I'm guessing you mean exponentially: http://ghs.gresham.k12.or.us/science/ps/sci/ibbio/ ecology/pics/exponential.gif .

I can't claim K3b is the best CD burning because as of now, it does not support burning CDs when the data comes from a network/remote machine.

Since Linux FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) became part of the 2.6.14 mainline Linux kernel, any user (not just root) can mount remote directories set up under KDE. The remote directories appear fixed in the local directory tree (ie. /home/JoeUser/network/school_server), so applications like K3B can access those files just as they would any local file. I think Novell will include FUSE by default in the next SUSE release, and hopefully so will Kubuntu.

This is a tremendous example of good collaboration through the Free Software stack, from the kernel to the Desktop Environment, to the individual applications. It allows not only K3B to burn data coming from network/remote machine, but just about any other legacy application (shell, Motif, GTK) to do the same without being modified.

If Aqua was only available for linux... :-(

Aqua is available on Linux if you follow Linus' advice and use KDE.

Enlightenment is up, just not at enlightenment.org.

I looked through the discussion and i don't see any criticism of GNOME's techincal frame work, only user interface design decisions. Dsepite the fact the GNOME is written in C and not C++ or one of those other fance languages it still: *Uses an object system: the GObject System *Is extendable for example VMWare has their libview and also has thing like gnome-vfs and themes with pluggable engines which you lumped with this category

#11. Seed AI installed on your users' machines will cause a Technological Singularity in 2006.

#12. Hotshot AI coders will waste countless hours learning to program good old-fashioned artificial intelligence (GOFAI) in old-fashioned stack-based Forth.

#13 Association for Computing Machinery will use your organization as a poster-child test-case for Seed AI gone amok.

#14 AI4U will lie around on people's desktops as a mark of prestige and sophistication, or as a last-ditch Christmas gift for obnoxious know-it-alls who have never been truly challenged in their pitiful lives.

#15. User Manuals will be totally disregarded or rewritten and sold on eBay.

#11. Seed AI installed on your users' machines will cause a Technological Singularity in 2006.

#12. Hotshot AI coders will waste countless hours learning to program good old-fashioned artificial intelligence (GOFAI) in old-fashioned stack-based Forth.

#13 Association for Computing Machinery will use your organization as a poster-child test-case for Seed AI gone amok.

#14 AI4U will lie around on people's desktops as a mark of prestige and sophistication, or as a last-ditch Christmas gift for obnoxious know-it-alls who have never been truly challenged in their pitiful lives.

#15. User Manuals will be totally disregarded or rewritten and sold on eBay.

Mark Shuttleworth and now Linus Torvalds seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which which many must-have KDE apps. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

AmaroK music player -- The most feature-rich and polished music player on the Free Software platform.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

Mark Shuttleworth and now Linus Torvalds seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which which many must-have KDE apps. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

AmaroK music player -- The most feature-rich and polished music player on the Free Software platform.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

Reverse engineering of software can be accomplished by various methods. The three main groups of software reverse engineering are:

      1. Analysis through observation of information exchange, most prevalent in protocol reverse engineering, which involve using bus analyzers and packet sniffers for example for listening into a computer bus or computer network connection, revealing the traffic data underneath. Behaviour on the bus or network can then be analyzed for producing a stand-alone implementation that mimics the same behaviour. This is especially good for reverse engineering of device drivers.
      2. Disassembly using a disassembler, meaning the raw machine language of the program is read and understood in its own terms, only with the aid of machine language mnemonics. This works on any computer program but can take quite some time, especially for someone not used to machine code.
      3. Decompilation using a decompiler, a process that tries, with varying result, to recreate the source code in some high level language for a program only available in machine code.

Yes, I was very confused that it comes with opera instead of webcore. After all nokia is the one that ported webcore/khtml to gtk in the first place!

http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/

i used to use komodo or ptkdb or print "something" for perl debugging but recently i have been using epic, the perl IDE for eclipse.
 
it has a graphical debugger and a heap of other useful features for developing in perl (see the sf.net page for more details...). another advantage: if you need to develop in other languages, there is likely a plugin for them as well, so that you can do everything without leaving your ide (yes: i know about emacs. no: i never did take the time to learn it...)

:wq

--

"i would rather maintain someone else's language than someone else's perl..."

Log4Perl You know it makes sense.

The only real way (the perl debugger sucks beyond belief and is only there for little bittie programs, and I've tried using it to debug client/server problems) is to use the perl debugger is through emacs, and the GUD interface, but I've given that up in favour of Log4perl.

I've found myself lately using the open perl IDE (http://open-perl-ide.sourceforge.net/) for debugging. I can set breakpoints in it and trace variables in a little bar on the side. It isn't perfect--I don't know how well it works in a multithreaded environment in particular, but it has saved my ass many times. Of course it can't fix the "Not a SCALAR reference" crap when dealing with various data types, but that's where Perl 6 will fix things.

Everyone who thinks otherwise may come over and get them shitty binary drivers (and their evil companion, the installer) to run on my 64bit SuSE 9.1 (a lot of that is probably due to SuSEs directory changes, but without fucking docs from Ati there's no way to correct this). One of the reasons I still keep a WinXP install, otherwise I would've gone wine long ago.
Gladly, there's the R300 project (not usable, but on the way...)

Can vi(m) run a shell in an editable buffer, or are you just talking about the :shell command? If the former, I'd like to know how to do it - it would be handy to use that when I'm on a system that lacks Emacs.

TeX is a fully fledged language, so you can make any calculation you want in it, including programming a spreadsheet if you feel so inclined. I'm not aware of any real attempt though...

However, on the presentation side, the Beamer LaTeX package is excellent.

On that sense, VI is clearly better!

If you're looking for something with the best of both Emacs and Eclipse, I found two packages which add a lot of IDE functionality to vanilla Emacs. CEDET http://cedet.sourceforge.net/ and ECB http://ecb.sourceforge.net/ together take care of all my needs. YMMV.

If you're looking for something with the best of both Emacs and Eclipse, I found two packages which add a lot of IDE functionality to vanilla Emacs. CEDET http://cedet.sourceforge.net/ and ECB http://ecb.sourceforge.net/ together take care of all my needs. YMMV.

Well, at least for some of these, I still use Eclipse.
For Perl:
http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/
For Ruby:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rubyeclipse
For Latex:
http://texlipse.sourceforge.net/
For C++:
http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/

More and more languages are finding support in Eclipse with plugins. Granted, emacs is good for editing in the general sense, but for any serious development, I find myself turning to eclipse.

Well, at least for some of these, I still use Eclipse.
For Perl:
http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/
For Ruby:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rubyeclipse
For Latex:
http://texlipse.sourceforge.net/
For C++:
http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/

More and more languages are finding support in Eclipse with plugins. Granted, emacs is good for editing in the general sense, but for any serious development, I find myself turning to eclipse.

Well, at least for some of these, I still use Eclipse.
For Perl:
http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/
For Ruby:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rubyeclipse
For Latex:
http://texlipse.sourceforge.net/
For C++:
http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/

More and more languages are finding support in Eclipse with plugins. Granted, emacs is good for editing in the general sense, but for any serious development, I find myself turning to eclipse.

http://emacs-chess.sourceforge.net/