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http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/q/all_hacks
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Tips-HOWTO.html
http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/how_to_linux_and _open_source.htm
http://cyberciti.biz/nixcraft/vivek/blogger/blogge r.html

Personally my favourite thing about Windows is Autohotkey, basically an open source hotkey and macro program. I have looked and not found the equivalent on Linux, and until I do, I won't be switching to Linux full time.

Try xpybind for a lot of the key stuff you're talking about... As for the rest of Autohotkey's features... well, actually, I've just been given developership of a project (http://pywm.sourceforge.net/), and my plans involve a component that would certainly be capable of such things. Unfortunately... I have not really gotten much actual work done on the project yet.

However, I will keep this utility in mind, and possibly when I get the event catcher/handler to a workable point, I'll write some scripts (that's the key about this window manager, everything is scriptable!) that will try and implement at least a subset of those features, if not all of them eventually. My plans involve writing things in such a way that you could run the event catcher/handler completely independently from any of the rest of the window manager. The event catcher would catch every X event, and then pass them on to the event handler, which would be completely scriptable (written most likely in python.) So, perhaps, if I ever get around to doing anything, we will have your Autohotkey utility for Linux!

Personally my favourite thing about Windows is Autohotkey, basically an open source hotkey and macro program. I have looked and not found the equivalent on Linux, and until I do, I won't be switching to Linux full time.

Try xpybind for a lot of the key stuff you're talking about... As for the rest of Autohotkey's features... well, actually, I've just been given developership of a project (http://pywm.sourceforge.net/), and my plans involve a component that would certainly be capable of such things. Unfortunately... I have not really gotten much actual work done on the project yet.

However, I will keep this utility in mind, and possibly when I get the event catcher/handler to a workable point, I'll write some scripts (that's the key about this window manager, everything is scriptable!) that will try and implement at least a subset of those features, if not all of them eventually. My plans involve writing things in such a way that you could run the event catcher/handler completely independently from any of the rest of the window manager. The event catcher would catch every X event, and then pass them on to the event handler, which would be completely scriptable (written most likely in python.) So, perhaps, if I ever get around to doing anything, we will have your Autohotkey utility for Linux!

For the DIY crowd, some links on linux thin clients:

* PXES
* Linux Terminal Server Project

my friend and i wrote exactly what you're talking about for our senior project. dotorg. that will do what you want; it's pretty easy to set up, you can share files, it's easy to secure (uses jaas) and you can write your own plugins for it.

Try Drupal [http://drupal.org/%5D it is simple but powerfull CMS/Blog system. With easy user interface (at least I think so) and writen very well (meaning code) - it is clean, object oriented mostly, and modular. The tarball is just half megabyte.

Or maybe go with MediaWiki [http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/%5D it is the engine behind WikiPedia - it uses simple wiki markup, supports images, stories and stuff. Also it has access control, revision control etc. - it should be suitable for such tasks.

And to be honest dont go with anythink with *nuke in name - this is spaghetti code shit. It is very awful for me. Unclean, not modular.

Since the article didn't really say anything about managing LDAP or playing with OpenLDAP, I thought I would share a useful utility my team has recently started using for LDAP management and administration.

Have a look at JXplorer (or alternate Sourceforge link).

It's a really nice open source LDAP administration and management utility that not only lets you do the easy entry editing stuff but a lot of the more complex tree management operations. It also has some really nice search building interfaces. I'm in no way connected with this project but it has replaced a number of free and commercial utilities we used to use.

It also lets you play with populating an OpenLDAP installation so you can begin to understand some of its real power and tuning potential.

I still use my floppydrive at home and at work. Examples? Okay:

- Keepass can use a floppy to store the security key
- etherboot floppy (in combination with thinclients)
- save configurations
- bootdisks, for those BIOS's that can't boot from cd
- ever had to fix a laptop that had a fdd, but the customer/friend/whatever left the cdrom drive at home?

I could probably come up with more examples, but these are the ones i use. I think it's overkill to switch to a more conventional storage method, like compactflash or an usb stick when all i need is a few kb free space, or when i simply can't use anything else.

That said, the one aspect of it I like is the ease of extensibility. Daisy chaining these units is quite an attractive thing.

I have been considering some form of distrubuted storage cluster. In other words an array of machines which presents a single logical drive with redundency on a machine basis. Do people here have any experience with this (GFS et al.)? Care to comment?

[shameless plug] In case anyone is wondering, the backup s/w is my own concontion yarbu. Which automates hourly, daily, weekly and monthly backups. I've been running this for about a year with ~1TB of backup under its control, spanning about a dozen machines. It's a lifesaver (not as fancy-shmancy as some others but very reliable).

Model railroading has gotten quite a bit of tech to it.

Used to be that you plonked the engine on the track, pushed some DC, and off you went.

That was then, this is now.

Digital Command Control (DCC) by Digitrax, EasyDCC, some pretty cool electronics interfacing stuff by Dr. Chubb (over at JLC Enterprises, or you can go with Protrak's system, Grapevine, and WOOT! WOOT! Some Open Source stuff from JMRI (and see the quote about controlling someone's layout from 600 miles away...)

You want sound with that? No Problem!

Yeah, model railroading has gotten high tech alright. No, you can't run my stuff over the internet, yes, I could if I wanted to let you. No, you'll have to come to an open house sometime. If you think you might like to get involved with it, check out The NMRA and find a club local to your area... but the hobby shop might be a better bet.

According to the Dirac FAQ they can't do streaming yet, but they've already got better compression "performance" than Theora (not clear whether that means better compression speed or size).

I wonder when it'll be usable. Sure hope it's soon.

According to the Dirac FAQ they're aiming to get it into beta by the end of 2005.

The Java version of Cocoa was never very well supported (lots of features not available) and the documentation always sucked. Plus, it was hard to use, as Java and ObjC have a lot of big differences which made using Cocoa APIs from Java very awkward. You pretty much had to learn the Objective C version of Cocoa first anyway, before trying to use the Java version, in order to really get it. And at that point you might as well just write your program in Objective C. (Unless you were just trying to put a native interface on top of existing Java code.)

Also, Cocoa and Carbon have yet to reach feature parity ... when you complain, Apple will just tell you to call the Carbon API, which of course you can't do from Java. So in addition to Cocoa features which weren't available in Java, there were plenty of things which aren't in Cocoa yet and were thus not available to Java.

The Java version of Cocoa was never terribly popular, because it was weird, hard-to-use, lacking features, and most Java programmers want to write platform-agnostic code anyway. (Although for any real application you have to, as Mac users tend to expect a GUI which matches the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines.)

Apple would be better off promoting the Python-ObjC bridge, PyObjC. (Or Camelbones for Perl). Python and Perl fit into the Cocoa model much better than java.

Of course, Apple needs to continue to improve their Java environment, with improved Swing support, and perhaps some new com.apple.swing.* classes to add some of the additional Cocoa widgets to Swing.

I'm guessing Apple dropped it because too few people were using it, and it was just too hard to support. (The big differences between ObjC and Java [such as memory management, and the whole late binding thing which makes ObjC so fun] made it a lot of work to expose Cocoa APIs in Java, and in some cases were really ugly and difficult to use as a result.) Also, future integration between Cocoa and Carbon (I want to see HIView and NSView cooperate in a single window, damnit!) may have further complicated things.

The Java version of Cocoa was never very well supported (lots of features not available) and the documentation always sucked. Plus, it was hard to use, as Java and ObjC have a lot of big differences which made using Cocoa APIs from Java very awkward. You pretty much had to learn the Objective C version of Cocoa first anyway, before trying to use the Java version, in order to really get it. And at that point you might as well just write your program in Objective C. (Unless you were just trying to put a native interface on top of existing Java code.)

Also, Cocoa and Carbon have yet to reach feature parity ... when you complain, Apple will just tell you to call the Carbon API, which of course you can't do from Java. So in addition to Cocoa features which weren't available in Java, there were plenty of things which aren't in Cocoa yet and were thus not available to Java.

The Java version of Cocoa was never terribly popular, because it was weird, hard-to-use, lacking features, and most Java programmers want to write platform-agnostic code anyway. (Although for any real application you have to, as Mac users tend to expect a GUI which matches the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines.)

Apple would be better off promoting the Python-ObjC bridge, PyObjC. (Or Camelbones for Perl). Python and Perl fit into the Cocoa model much better than java.

Of course, Apple needs to continue to improve their Java environment, with improved Swing support, and perhaps some new com.apple.swing.* classes to add some of the additional Cocoa widgets to Swing.

I'm guessing Apple dropped it because too few people were using it, and it was just too hard to support. (The big differences between ObjC and Java [such as memory management, and the whole late binding thing which makes ObjC so fun] made it a lot of work to expose Cocoa APIs in Java, and in some cases were really ugly and difficult to use as a result.) Also, future integration between Cocoa and Carbon (I want to see HIView and NSView cooperate in a single window, damnit!) may have further complicated things.

The device detection problem is a big one. Tim is right on this. URLs are how we identify sites that we want to go to, not how we identify content. There should be one URL for all content types and the site should do the right thing for the device.

That's a complicated problem. There are about 1,000 different mobile devices currently in use. Keeping track of them, and the different types of content they need, is tough.

Most devices can handle one of four different types of content:

• Full HTML: desktop computers, etc
• Mobile XHTML: newer phones
• WML: older or mid-range phones
• cHTML: DoCoMo i-mode phones in Japan

• Screen size: How big should images be
• Image types: PNG, GIF, JPEG, or WBMP?
• Media types: can it play videos, etc?
• Java types: MIDP1, MIDP2, DoJa, or perhaps even J2SE?

Creating another domain shifts more work to users (in the form of marketing the other URL, remembering it, using it). Users shouldn't have to do work. Tools should do work.

Anyway, if Slashdot ever wants to get a license to our software to have a mobile Slashdot you can read on the phone, contact us: info@chiralsoftware.net.

It seems a little wierd to call it a page dedicated to their opensource projects. All the DIRC one serves as is link to their sourceforge project. Not too exciting.

It seems a little wierd to call it a page dedicated to their opensource projects. All the DIRC one serves as is link to their sourceforge project. Not too exciting.

We've had this debate in the driving simulator community for years. How do you know if the car is behaving as it should if you can't see the code? Hence stuff like this. /shameless plug

They'll probably hike on an MPEG-4 AVC codec like H.264 to get the bitrate tolerably below 1mbps, and implement a hardware chip with adequate post-processing filters to improve image quality.

Playing back a 704x469 pixel x264-encoded video at 1mbps with stereo 48khz MP3, and using a few ffdshow filters looks damn fine to me on a Sony WEGA CRT - at around a GB for a 2+ hour movie. Though stereo MP3, obviously, is out of the question...(though it'd be a good idea to give an option between stereo and surround, so the stereo folks can save some on bandwidth.)

They might be able to squeeze it down some in resolution to account for people's general insensitivity to digital video and audio quality. Hell, a ton of my friends sadly can't tell the difference between analog TV and DVDs sometimes. So I think Netflix can afford some frugality with file size. Definitely 700 MB is tolerable in the mainstream if they go with MP4-AVC, lower the res and audio bitrate. But like you said, most people who would go for this would probably have 5mbps-download cable service that could easily take a couple mbps stream.

With Netflix's huge selection, an on-demand streaming service is an extremely tempting deal. Just wonder how much the set-top-box would cost...

A few days ago, someone broke the logic that checks this, and now you often get a message saying you have to wait 2 minutes between posts, and it's been [something more than 2] minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.

Fixed in CVS and should be live in a couple days - jamiemccarthy, 2005-06-08 13:47.

FWIW, this has only bothered me posting anonymously - it's normally OK posting logged in.

If there's really demand for Java support of new OS X features, someone else can write a bridge for it- how to do this is well understood. There are already third party Cocoa bridges for Python, Ruby, and Perl.

If there's really demand for Java support of new OS X features, someone else can write a bridge for it- how to do this is well understood. There are already third party Cocoa bridges for Python, Ruby, and Perl.

If there's really demand for Java support of new OS X features, someone else can write a bridge for it- how to do this is well understood. There are already third party Cocoa bridges for Python, Ruby, and Perl.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/armagetronad/ Have a look, it could always use more players.

But maintaining Cocoa-Java means they need to create a Java facade for the Objective-C APIs, and they need to create Java equivalents for C constructs and Objective-C Categories which don't quite map cleanly onto Java.

Exactly. It's much easier for Objective-C to call Java than vice versa because all ObjC method calls are resolved at runtime. (Which allows an ObjC proxy object to take the invocation and transparently forward it to a Java object). Note that more dynamic languages can be better integrated with Cocoa, for example see PyObjC.

No wireless network. Its not needed.

Ah, the soviet management model. Always assume the worst in people, and give them as little as possible. So common with system administrators. But why not have the Sate take your car if you are caught driving with an expired license? And freeways? Not needed, people will just go too fast and blow up.

For a refreshingly different approach, based on respect and responsibility, read about my Open Slate project, where students build their own slates and manage the school network.

Your post depicts the bias I often encounter pitching my Open Slate project. Imagine hundreds of high school kids with trumpets, flutes, and drums. Imagine hundreds of kids playing football, baseball, and soccer. Imagine thousands of kids playing massively multiplayer online games. The result is not a nightmare, although it probably intrudes on your comfort zone. Do not dismiss teenagers for failing to act like adults -- make the most of their strengths.

The goal must be open source content. My Chalk Dust concept lays out a structure in which such projects could be undertaken. Since developing those ideas, the Wiki technology has offered an interesting and useful alternative solution. My contention is that good content must go far beyound web pages. In fact, it should look a lot like Final Fantasy XI.

Perhaps you would care to join my Open Slate Project? All we need is a few energized people and it can happen, despite the reluctance of educators and textbook publishers.

After reading your post and staring blankly at the screen for a few moments in disbelief, I can only come to the conclusion that:

A) You're a troll
B) You're drunk
or
C) You work with a bunch of saboteurs that intentionally crash their Treos to get paid downtime.

I've had my Treo 600 for about 2 years, now, and have experienced none of the problems you've described. The GP's description of no more than 1 crash per month is very accurate. Anytime it has crashed, it quickly boots right back up. I've never had to send it in to be serviced.

For those that think that a Palm is just an "organizer" and a PokcetPC is a "pocket computer", don't buy into stereotypes. I use my Treo as a computer. I have an ssh client installed that I use frequently to work on some servers I admin for. The thing came with a capable web browser, but I have many options to install something else, if I want. I also have a Samba client that works great, an FTP client, a VNC Client, and an Instant Messenger. Somebody already mentioned the superb movie player TCPMP, but that's not all, I also have a Video recorder that makes use of the Treo's built-in digital camera. I use a perl script I found to convert the video to mpeg1. I use a Photoshop-like image editor that has support for complex things like layers and blending modes. My Treo is also my mp3/ogg player and I use it to listen to podcasts in the car. I read ebooks and even /. using Plucker. I take audio notes using SoundRec. I even have a Python interpreter, and can code native apps in C right on my Palm. I won't even bother to mention all the games that are available. You can google for them yourself. I've seen apps out there for viewing/editing Word Docs and Excel files, but having never had a need for that, haven't installed them.

After reading your post and staring blankly at the screen for a few moments in disbelief, I can only come to the conclusion that:

A) You're a troll
B) You're drunk
or
C) You work with a bunch of saboteurs that intentionally crash their Treos to get paid downtime.

I've had my Treo 600 for about 2 years, now, and have experienced none of the problems you've described. The GP's description of no more than 1 crash per month is very accurate. Anytime it has crashed, it quickly boots right back up. I've never had to send it in to be serviced.

For those that think that a Palm is just an "organizer" and a PokcetPC is a "pocket computer", don't buy into stereotypes. I use my Treo as a computer. I have an ssh client installed that I use frequently to work on some servers I admin for. The thing came with a capable web browser, but I have many options to install something else, if I want. I also have a Samba client that works great, an FTP client, a VNC Client, and an Instant Messenger. Somebody already mentioned the superb movie player TCPMP, but that's not all, I also have a Video recorder that makes use of the Treo's built-in digital camera. I use a perl script I found to convert the video to mpeg1. I use a Photoshop-like image editor that has support for complex things like layers and blending modes. My Treo is also my mp3/ogg player and I use it to listen to podcasts in the car. I read ebooks and even /. using Plucker. I take audio notes using SoundRec. I even have a Python interpreter, and can code native apps in C right on my Palm. I won't even bother to mention all the games that are available. You can google for them yourself. I've seen apps out there for viewing/editing Word Docs and Excel files, but having never had a need for that, haven't installed them.

Of course I'm assuming that that VPNs, SSH can be supported. It would not surprise me in the least if the aircraft only supported http through some kind of proxy.

And that would stop stop me how exactly?

When will we get a vector-based Linux desktop?

They have icon themes, there's talk of Cairo, and all that Luminocity good stuff, but when, oh when, will we actually have a fully scalable desktop?

Hell, I'd be happy if I could just have a file manager, console, and calculator that were resolution-independent. How far off is that? There seems to be no central clearinghouse for this sort of information.

--grendel drago

Document Indexing/File Organization: A Wiki is the proper tool for this job, in my opinion. It makes it very easy to edit, and hyperlinking is instictive. You can easily attach documents to pages, you can usually export the whole thing as a directory tree. Most Wiki software also keeps track of all of the versions of a page, so you can worry less about making bad mistakes.

I've used both MoinMoin, which is a traditional web based Wiki, and WikiDpad, which is an IDE environment for Windows that does Wiki-like things. Both of these programs are open source, Python based applications.

You also might want to check out ThumbsPlus by Cerious Software, which stores thumbnails of images in a database (including SQL backends), along with keywords and user fields. It can help you as well.

--Mike--

I'm not on XP at the moment, so can't check. If it pisses you off, then get BBLean, change the windows in the taskbar to icons instead of icons and text, then you've got room for 20+ applications, running at the same time, and you will see an icon in the taskbar at either the bottom or top of the screen, all at the same time, and hover text will let you find out which one is the one you want. Also handy, left click the icon in the task bar to restore/maximise windows, right click icon to minimise.

BBLean is a variation of Blackbox and can be used to reduce the work that Explorer has to do. Explorer still runs obviously, but Blackbox.exe runs too, masking a lot of eye candy and giving some changes to the usability/functionality of the interface. To try out, just download and run the executable (if you trust it). To keep, choose the option in the right click menu "Blackbox->Install". Unlike other versions of Blackbox/Openbox etc, BBLean keeps icons in the task bar, rather than in a submenu of the right click menu.

Everything in BBLean is Windows oriented, and you can see the animations of minimising and maximising windows too, if you want to.

Not all funcions of Explorer are performed when Blackbox is in use, for example, if using Blackbox, your "Recent Documents" menu that is in the Start menu is not modified, so parts of Explorer are either disabled or ellided. YMMV concerning performance, but I find it stable. Also, it's nice that you right click once and you can navigate to any folder on your hard drive by a series of pop-up menues. This can be achieved on Windows with the same implementation by right clicking the taskbar, unlocking it, add in the Desktop menu button, then clicking the new Desktop tab, and navigating through the popup menues.

/*did the foregoing stray on-topic during any part of its ramblines?*/

http://ktouch.sourceforge.net/ is great piece of software to learn either qwerty or dvorak. it has big layout at the bottom of the screen so it'even better than regularly when your fingers hide letters on the keyboard. you type letters in automatic scrollin bar... it is fun and effective...

dvorak lesson for ktouch could be find at:
http://www.lnxsys.ca/software/ktouch/

Intel have been working on something big. It was previously rumored that this something was the Pentium V and that Microsoft would be releasing a special version of Windows specifically for the processor.

"Windows Elements"?

What the hell is that? I'm thinking that the Pentium V has something so revolutionary that it prompted:

1) Microsoft to release a special version of Windows, specifically for the processor and,
2) Apple to change sides.

I also think that Intel expected to be much further along on the Pentium V at this point. It seemed like they were expecting to use it in order to quench AMD's 64-bit lead and, when the design was set back, they scrambled to come up with EMT64 as a stop gap solution.

So just what is this Pentium V and the "stackable" design, anyway? IMHO, it will be unified processor and NVRAM (not flash, something new). There will probably be at least a few gigs of a very fast NVRAM right on the processor. This NVRAM will be as fast or faster than SRAM so there will be no need for a cache or external system memory - the operating system will be installed right in the processor. The stackable design is for expansion.

Intel's NVRAM page. Nothing to indicate that any of this is true but some interesting reading, nonetheless. This could also explain MontaVista's PRAMFS.

If the backing-store RAM is comparable in access speed to system memory, there's really no point in caching the file I/O data in the page cache. Better to move file data directly between the user buffers and the backing store RAM, i.e. use direct I/O.

In fact, the vast majority of the software tools I use have no centralized comercial backing. I prefer to use PostgreSQL over MySQL because it is a better RDBMS, for example.

Have you looked at the Firebird RDBMS ? if so what do you think of it?

There's a nice little Windows application that sits in your systray waiting for you to double-click on it to change the layout from QWERTY to Dvorak or vice versa. You can also set a hotkey, which can be quite handy. It's a tiny self-contained executable, so you can just run it when you get on there, and close it when you get off.

There are caveats though; it cannot be extended to support other keyboard layouts, which would be extremely useful. In addition, it's billed as an open-source program but I have searched everywhere and sent emails to the creator asking for the source to no avail.

Nevertheless, you should try it out. Works like a charm on the computers at my school.

http://clabs.org/dvorak.htm

SourceForge Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvassist/

http://sourceforge.net/

This is Marc "Suck My Dick" Fleury. He already looks like a knob.

His software's great, but he's certainly trying to out do larry ellison in the fight for 'biggest ego in technology'.

Example:

Timemachine is a small JACK application that records the previous 10s of audio from any JACK input. There is absolutely nothing like this in any commerical audio software AFAIK, and certainly nothing with the cross-app flexibility of a JACK-based application.

That could just be an issue with fonts. You might want to try downloading more TTF fonts from here:
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

If it's going off the page it could also be a problem with one of the controls. It's hard to say which one based on your description.

If the only dependancy is with idiosyncracies with IE and other browsers, maybe they should have a look at Sarissa, http://sarissa.sourceforge.net/doc/ a cross browser DOM wrapper.

I've been using Smoothwall Express for over a year and have been extremely happy with my decision to use it. Plus, I installed Adzapper to block virtually every web ad on the sites I visit (including all the ads here at /.).

There is an open source project related on OpenGL and Linux - it's called MesaGL.

Where's a FireFox spell checker when you need one?
Here.

I was talking about people who did not lose their password or encryption certificates, obviously.

The problem is that Windows XP makes an additional password, one that is not backed up using any of the tools or documents provided. That automatically generated password is necessary, as well as the user account password, to decrypt the files.

If a computer is stand-alone, not part of a domain, then backing up everything, reformatting your hard drive, and reloading Windows XP will result in not having access to any of your EFS encrypted files.

The hidden, automatically generated password is not documented in any place that I was able to find. Microsoft Technical Support representatives agree with what I've said here.

The open source Truecrypt may be a far better choice, but I haven't tried it yet. Sourceforge hosts Truecrypt.

Wake me up when the OSS community allows someone else to run programs on my machine, without having to go the install procedure, and with no need to specify the root password... ;-)

Err thats exactly what zero install is for - anyone with a user account can run any program that supports Zero Install. Perhaps you should read their website: http://zero-install.sourceforge.net/

I would like to add to your software installation management section:

Zero install which allows you to run programs without having to go the install procedure, and with no need to specify the root password.

It might not be everyone's ideal way to manage software, but it's still a huge innovation from the Open Source community.

There are tons more I can add, but this is one I found out about quite recently and I think it will become more popular in the future.