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With an ordinary photograph you can play with the Refocus GIMP plugin. But you'd have to manually choose the radius of the circle of confusion. I don't think it will be possible to automatically get the whole range of focus ranges shown in their example images.

lame.sourceforge.net

Nuance's (formerly Scansoft) Omnipage

and then a number of smaller players like SimpleOCR

In the open source world, some places to start looking are:

GOCR

and GNU's OCRAD

Both Nuance and Abbyy offer an SDK for OCR integration at a code level which might suit depending on your budget. Certainly the price (probably between $500 and $5000 for a license) represent a good deal if you look at the costs and time it would take to write anything that does serious OCR work yourself.

BTW, if anyone out there knows of any good document layout analysis code available to have a look at, I would be particularly interested. I am looking into document layout analysis for a personal project and although there is a fair bit of academic research available at Citeseer, I actually haven't found much in the way of good sample code that I can use as a starting point for some of my own ideas.

I have switched to Galleon to stream music to my Tivos. It works fairly well.

Ogg Vorbis, Png, and Odt benefit everyone, even the people who have never used any of these three formats. Ogg Vorbis benefits everyone because it stops Thomson from taking any legal action against the free Lame mp3 encoder and XMMS mp3 playback library; Thomson knows that if they have their lawyers even look at the Lame web page, the entire Open Source community will perform a mass exodus to the Ogg format.

The PNG format, in addition to being far superior to GIF, kept Unisys from taking too much legal action against GIF; the little legal action they took increased cross-browser PNG compatibility to the point that people can safely put non-transparent PNG images on their web pages today.

Odt will benefit everyone because this format gives Microsoft a clear message to open up their .doc file format.

If you need to make high level node-arc diagrams of the structure of a site, take a look at GraphViz (http://www.graphviz.org/) It's very powerful, with a very simple text syntax, and saves you the trouble of manually routing the arcs. You might also want to take a look at Asymptote (http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/)

Since the late 1950s, computers have been used to assist with the design and study of combat vehicle systems. The result has been a reduction in the amount of time and money required to take a system from the drawing board to full-scale production as well as increased efficiency in testing and evaluation. In 1979, the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) (now the U.S. Army Research Laboratory [ARL]) expressed a need for tools that could assist with the computer simulation and engineering analysis of combat vehicle systems and environments. When no existing computer-aided design (CAD) package was found to be adequate for this purpose, BRL software developers began assembling a suite of utilities capable of interactively displaying, editing, and interrogating geometric models. This suite became known as BRL-CAD.

Now comprising almost a million lines of C code, BRL-CAD has become a powerful constructive solid geometry (CSG) modeling package that has been licensed at over 2,000 sites throughout the world. It contains a large collection of tools, utilities, and libraries including an interactive geometry editor, raytracing and generic framebuffer libraries, a network-distributed image-processing and signal-processing capability, and a customizable embedded scripting language. In addition, BRL-CAD simultaneously supports dual interaction methods, one using a command line and one using a graphical user interface (GUI).

You're on your own finding roms.

You should take a look at Galleon (not to be confused with Galeon). It includes videocasting support.

You should take a look at Galleon (not to be confused with Galeon). It includes videocasting support.

The next step, I believe, is creating a more realistic "standard" emulation structure for software. /i>

Like Java? It's standard, it's cross platform, and it's already in widespread use. Plus performance has already been tuned to extremes, not to mention the sheer number of Desktop and non-desktop libraries available for it. Thanks to its popularity, you can use Swing, SWT, wxWindows, GTK, QT, or any of your other favorite crossplatform front-ends for your Java apps.


Now that processors are incredibly fast, we're likely to see little performance increases in the tasks that 90% of the world uses PCs for:

Unfortunately, this is a falsifyable statement. As much as we'd like emulation to keep pace with technology, even the fastest processors today have a hard time emulating something as "simple" as a 286 or 386 from days gone by. This has been extremely frustrating for those of us who remember old games but can't get enough performance to actually make them work well. Research is still underway, but don't expect miracles from emulation technology. The really fast stuff (e.g. VMWare) actually only virtualizes the hardware, but lets the instruction set run on the real processor.

errr, I mean gtkpod

Dvdisaster works best on image files? Then you can't include the recovery files on the same media, which is inconvenient.

I really like Parchive2. I do wonder if dvdisaster is faster & allows finer-grained recovery, though.

I've just done a prototype in C++ for the Tor GUI context http://tor.eff.org/gui/index.html. If you don't believe me just see http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=tor mgr.html.

The AI4U textbook of artificial intelligence was thoroughly trashed with vicious reviews by malevolent miscreants on Amazon.

Complaining by the textbook author to one of the reviewers accomplished nothing

Association for Computing Machinery publishes the truth, but Amazon won't.

A rebuttal to Amazon AI4U reviews had to be published prominently on-line.

Slashdot coverage of AI4U was fair and open-minded, but there is no official review of AI4U on Slashdot -- until some brave, truthful, AI-savvy soul submits one.

AGI Radar is the ultimate antidote to Amazon review treachery.

If you're using Swing, have a look at Napkin -- it gives you a great 'sketch-style' look-and feel. As the author says 'the idea is to try to develop a look and feel that can be used in Java applications that looks informal and provisional, yet be fully functional for development. Often when people see a GUI mock-up, or a complete GUI without full functionality, they assume that the code behind it is working. While this can be used to sleazy advantage, it can also convince people who ought to know better (like your managers) that you are already done when you have just barely begun, or when only parts are complete.'

It's very easy to install, and is set up to be easily administered. I now recommend it to users of my recently released DMO software, which provides a kind of Object-based DB layer on top of MySQL.

This was one of my biggest gripes for a long time. It isn't completely fixed, but it is pretty darn good.

Though others may have mentioned NDISWrapper, which is a neat little hack which recreates the windows environment for the wireless card. So you can use Windows drivers with it. This is a little tricky to implement, unless you use a distro that does it automatically. I know Mepis and Ubuntu do it, and I've heard SuSE does too. Give one of those a shot. If you want to do it with a different distro check this site

Otherwise wikipedia has a pretty good list of hardware that plays nice with linux.

Usual response is to disable it from bios

One possible solution (code patch)

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg _id=12403341

Other threads with hyperthreading problems (slowdowns)
http://sourceforge.net/search/?forum_id=6330&group _id=9028&words=hyperthreading&type_of_search=mlist s

Usual response is to disable it from bios

One possible solution (code patch)

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg _id=12403341

Other threads with hyperthreading problems (slowdowns)
http://sourceforge.net/search/?forum_id=6330&group _id=9028&words=hyperthreading&type_of_search=mlist s

A better example - try playing any of the .voc files from the original soundblaster - and that's only a decade or so ago.

I believe sox can handle these good old VOC files, so you can convert them to a format that is more readily playable these days. I still have a bunch of those somewhere...

Now, if I could only find a way to convert the proprietary video format used by my SH501is phone into something I could actually use!

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

Now you can save your time and bullets.

But in hindsight I should have used OpenBSD, just forgot to get the bloody CD's out.

I managed something similar a year or so back, in an attempt to create a 'babelfish'. Of course the input/output had to be specified, and it had a very limited range of languages - certainly no universal translator but it did use all free software (as that's all I have).
0) Input recording of English languagge
1) Voice recognition software (Sphinx) pipes output to
2) Script using online translator to convert between language
3) Festival stumbles out an imhuman gramatically-wrong rendition of the input.

It wasn't exactly in realtime, I just fed it recordings, for which it would then output an audio file in the other language. The worst step was the voice recognition, which didn't work great even when given the output of the voice syntethisier.

Sphinx http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.ph p

I have also used the unattended project extensively at a hosting company with around approx 5,000 servers.

I simply PXE booted the box, and on the menu I had something like this

1) Install RHEL3
2) Install FC3
3) Install W2K
4) Install W2K3

Select the # and whala. Your OS choice installed! (Of course I also had options in the PXE boot menu for custom installs for all the OS's) unattended can also use mysql/CSV to keep a list of various software packages to install on machines based on the MAC address.

Works over serial console/LOM cards, and if your doing that I hightly recommend enabling EMS/SAC (out of band) on Windows, it's like having a crippled console! It lets you do simple things, like change IP, reboot the server, and load a command prompt. Supposedly SAC is always available even if the box BSOD's.

Unattended is a really great project, unfortunately it has a little bit of a learning curve to get it 100% right.

EMS/SAC http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=174 352&seqNum=3&rl=1
Unattended http://unattended.sourceforge.net/

Vs pgAdminIII ?
Nice GUI admin tool. I like that much better than silly web applications.
beeing multiuser is just as easy in postgresql as mysql..

But if you for some unknown reason must have a web tool, there is phppgadmin

Slim devices contributes to a GPL'd Server that is typically used to stream to their SqueezeBox player hardware. But, get this, there are software versions of the Squeeze box, namely 'soft squeeze' that emulate nearly perfectly the hardware features, and in some cases, is more useful. If nothing else, WinAMP can be used as a client as well, and it's playlist can be controlled via Slim Server (though some features are lost).

Here's some features of Slim Server that make this worth considering for your whole-house idea:

A. Any cheap PC with a JVM can be a client player
B. The server can keep multiple players in-sync
C. All clients can be controlled centrally from the server's web-interface
D. The server can proxy web-casts/streams to your players
E. The server allows you to bit-peel/transcode audio for a given client (ideal if you wanted to stream your audio to your office/hotel/etc)
f. Fairly Robust indexing/browsing.
G. iTunes integration

Check it out at:

Slim Server Download, all platforms

Soft Squeeze @ Source Forge

Connecting to M$ SQL Server from Linux...have you tried SQuirreL-SQL client http://squirrel-sql.sourceforge.net/?

the replacement format for JPEG is JNG

Which is just an allegedly patented JPEG bitstream in a MNG wrapper.

Have you thaught about flac? http://flac.sourceforge.net/. it is another open source royalty free codec that supports lossless comporession which might be a good opion if you want high quality and no data loss because of compression.

All my *important* stuff is on the Linux half of this machine, and since Microsoft *still* doesn't have an ext3 filesystem driver, it's safe from the kiddies.

It isn't Microsoft's responsibility to supply a ext3 file system driver. It's ours (the Linux geeks), and we did. Here it is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd

If someone can root your box, they can install this driver, so your Linux stuff is not safe from kiddies, never was.

In my experience, there is only one app that makes it impossible for the companies I've worked at to switch over to an alternative OS: Microsoft Access.

Love it or hate it (mostly hate it), it lets companies quickly create interfaces to larger databases. It's so simply and easy to do, that many developers don't realize (or perhaps care) that they'll be paying heavily for their choice later on when either their needs scale beyond Access, or Microsoft releases a new (usually incompatible) version.

Sadly, just about everyone I've spoken with has considered Access support to be unimportant to office conversions. "They should use a real database," they say. While that's a fine stance to take, that doesn't help companies that are already relying on MS Access. And if you take the emulation route to get Access support, you might as well just run Windows in the first place.

It's really too bad that the Access format is so widely ignored. Much of the groundwork has already been laid for reading/writing the format, and StarOffice/OSS have a real chance to make Access work correctly. IMHO, managers given the opportunity to use their existing Access applications on a better platform would jump at the chance to save money and support calls.

Better tell them to read http://wyoguide.sf.net/guidelines/coding.html or even better read http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/guidelines/content .html.

O. Wyss

Look at clonezilla (http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/). Meant for this only.

But we can freely recommend unattended installs ( see unattended.sourceforge.net ) that *do* use linux, and arcane unix commands! (Well, ok, perhaps no arcane commands. Linux though.)

Unattended is really nice for varying hardware. I used unattended in our lab at work, where we started out with quite a few different kinds of machines (imaging would have been nearly useless).

It uses dosemu to run the win32 installer under linux (and then there are a few reboots for the windows installer). It is sweet to watch the win32 installer running via the serial console.

http://unattended.sourceforge.net/

There, I've linked it for you.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/kmag

http://sourceforge.net/projects/magnifier

http://www.incontrast.org/

...to mention only a few.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/kmag

http://sourceforge.net/projects/magnifier

http://www.incontrast.org/

...to mention only a few.

Our coding standard is a little like this:
Write clean code that can be easily understood by reading it. That is, good variable and function names, try not to make any absurdly complicated statements, and have your comments explain the logic of the operations. As for style, try to stick with the style that the original author started with. And finally, all people who use Hungarian notation are locked in the basement and given menial tasks until they repent their sinful ways

Well that's a good start, with good intentions, but you need to have a standard definition of what constitutes good function names and good variable names. If you have 5 different programmers on a project, you'll have 5 different opinions on what good names are.

Make sure your coding standards are DOCUMENTED.

If it's a java project, the best source would be Sun's java coding standards. A very useful tool for this is Checkstyle. You can decide which rules to enforce (some of the ones enabled by default are more annoying than anything) but if you take the time to get your code to where Checkstyle likes it, you'd be amazed how easy it is for humans to read.

As for my department, we use CVS for version control.
Every time code is checked into CVS, it is formatted by Jalopy. So, it'll look nice and neat the next time it's checked out.
Also, we have a script that does nightly builds, and then emails the result to everybody on the team. So if you checked in something that breaks the build, everybody knows about it the following morning. :-)

We have a regular release schedule. All work is done on the main CVS branch, but when it's time for a code freeze, the new version is branched off and tagged in CVS. During QA testing, bugs are fixed in the branch and the mainline. New features are only added to the mainline.

When we are ready to deploy, we tag the release in CVS. The deployment script checks the tag out of CVS, builds it, and packages everything up into the relevant .ear files which Operations can then take.

This is all a very strict process, but things rarely fall through the cracks this way. If you don't have any processes in place now, it's best to implement them a step at a time. Get everybody used to working with CVS or some other version control, get them used to the notion of tagging and branching, and make sure there's actually a document detailing whatever processes you have.

And lastly, have code reviews every week or two. Review a different person's code each time and make sure everybody on the team is allowed to have input. If you're not at the coding stage yet, have design reviews.

Mondo is a extremely impressive product. It does what you want. If you don't like Ghost images, use Mondo Rescue. If you wanna do filesystem-based incremental backups, use BackupPC. Stupid name, but truly enterprise-ready(tm).

Etherboot (http://etherboot.sourceforge.net/) + ThinStation (http://thinstation.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php /ThIndex)

Then start hacking your Thinstation dist around. Easy to maintain over time (just upload new Thinstation images). Write a quick shell script to ftp down an image off a server and use dd. The user could pick an image or alternatively use some hardware identifier (using lspci, etc.) to automatically pick one for a user.

Another idea would be to use a floppy-disk based Linux dist which does effectively the same thing. Maintenance is harder (new floppies / cdroms each time you want to change the system).

This also keeps your process nice and open for the future =)

Etherboot (http://etherboot.sourceforge.net/) + ThinStation (http://thinstation.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php /ThIndex)

Then start hacking your Thinstation dist around. Easy to maintain over time (just upload new Thinstation images). Write a quick shell script to ftp down an image off a server and use dd. The user could pick an image or alternatively use some hardware identifier (using lspci, etc.) to automatically pick one for a user.

Another idea would be to use a floppy-disk based Linux dist which does effectively the same thing. Maintenance is harder (new floppies / cdroms each time you want to change the system).

This also keeps your process nice and open for the future =)

Well, UNIX/Linux has had Emacspeak for ages:
http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

and new versions of KDE also support the blind. Therefore, OOo need not support the blind directly - KDE provides that.

Between a creating a slipstream windows xp cd and something like unattended you should be good to go.

System imaging solutions such as Symantec Ghost are good solutions for most people, but are not always the right solution.

What may be a good solution that is adaptive to your needs is this solution : http://unattended.sourceforge.net/

Combine this with a good method for getting a PXE boot setup (and devices that support the feature) and you will be able to create a menu that will allow you to automate system installs of Windows, Linux, and possible other systems, plus installing their related applicaton software later.

With this setup you can do system installs for any type of hardware that comes your way. Laptop vendor change the network card chipset without bothering to change the spec sheet? No problem, just add the driver to the above build instructions and life goes on.

I guess this shows which one has better support for the protocol. ;^)

I doubt you'll get any of these to run on it, though.

Rather than imagine, why don't you just run my software?
http://jaimbot.sourceforge.net/

Agree.

Same thing happens with software documentation:

Analysis, Requirements specifications document.
Design: Design Specification document [with or without UML, DTDs, etc].
Quality control/assurance: (Quality testing metrics documents).

Nobody (at least not programmers) likes to spend their time doing that, which results in a lot of good Open Source projects (just look at sf.net) that have only the source code available. So, when/if someone wants to start helping (be it a programmer or a non programmer) they must dive into the source code, reverse engineer it and (to their better understanding) see how is the program working.

When developing a propietary software for anyone, documentation is the one most important thing, and often the one that programmers hate to do. That is why System designers are better paid than programmers.

In open-source world, nobody cares about documenting [and mantaining the domcumentation] of their software. My personal experience is with VirtualDimension multi-desktop software. I wanted to enhance the program with some ideas I had, but I hated that the only place to understand how it worket was the CVS repository C++ files. Although I know C++ (and I am good at it if-u-ask-me) it is the "logic" of the program what I wanted to find and, well, my time is worth more than what I needed to understand the inners of the program.

The same happened with jabref. I would like to contribute to those projects with programming, but bah, at the end, all of them are just a mess.

Returning to the accessibility issue. The only way accessibility could be handled is by creating a base framework (from the GTK, or QT or JSwing or any other GUI toolkits) that provides accessiblity features to the interfaces. This means that the application developers will not need to worry (too much) about accessibility because the "text control" will contain the features by default*(and this is the "most-most-important-issue"*. And, the programmer will just have to addere to a set of minimum accessibility rules (like using system defined colors and fonts [something, the great Mark's sysinternals process explorer doesn't do for example, as after I changed my font DPI to 144, the process list font is not changed and I also use background color as Black and font as white, but it is not adopted by this program)).

* Talking on this "default state" of the features, it is the same story with accessibility as with security. For an example, I know that Java has some interfaces wich allow for accesibility properties (although I have not used them). It also has some classes for secure comunication. But these are not the DEFAULT classes which everyone uses.

Iff Java had implemented security and accessibility in the common controls/classes used by everyone, of course it would be more work for the developers but it would help them to LEARN to implement those features.

Add this bot to your buddy list: "javaaimbot". There is an AI engine in there somewhere, though it may be hard to believe by some of it's responses.

webiste is here: http://jaimbot.sourceforge.net/

What is wrong with being KDifferent?