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Since you already have Firefox running, just install the SpellBound extension and spell check your blog entries as you submit them.

For MSIE users, get ieSpell.

If I buy a TV tuner card, I don't want to examine the model numbers of all the chips on it just so I can use it to watch TV.

I get your point, but disagree with your choice of example. I've got a TV tuner card. I never had any problems with using it on linux, using RH 9 and now FC4 (test). Never had to check any model numbers. Nothing, eally. No more work than under windows. (and with more software to choose from, although I haven't really shopped around much)

the tvtime, program included in the FC4 distro is actually much nicer than the piece of crap windows software I got with the card. (Buggy and caused blue-screens often.)

Some day maybe.

If java wont bother you, this seems nice.

http://memoranda.sourceforge.net/

"Memoranda (formerly known as jNotes2) is an open source cross-platform diary manager and the tool for scheduling personal projects."

I did the same for my Todo list. It's an installable application to the Web Application Gateway (http://sourceforge.net/projects/wagateway/ (GPL).

Have to agree.

Used a plain text file edited with vim myself. Recently started to use hnb. Works great.

At work we've been using Mantis (awesome tool) for bug-tracking but we're about to start using NetOffice for Project and Task management, it has a nice bottom up approach (different from something like MS Project) and it's a breeze to set up.

It's worth checking out.

apt-get install gnome-themes-extras

See the librsvg site for screenshots.

What about your 'To Do' List?

http://php-todo.sourceforge.net/

In a similar vein, the seti@home project is currently developing a new project called "Astropulse" to scan the skies for optical signals from ET. This is also designed to use GPU code to perform the signal analysis. (It would be interesting to see how this woud perform on a PS3, especially now the PS3 is rumoured to ship with Linux pre-installed)

I value my information enough to keep it in a format that is at least readable, preferably free.

I use a php based web cal available on sourceforge. It's great for managing a simple cal but I'm not sure how advanced you want it to get. It's worth a look though: http://webcalendar.sourceforge.net/.

I've always been of the opinion that if you have to use software to schedule your meetings, you have too many meetings. I have no need or desire to share my schedule with others, so I found calendar/todo software pretty useless - until I found Mupo.

It's primitive, but the very important thing it gets right is the nature of to-dos. They can recur ("take out the trash" every Wednesday night), and they stack up if not completed ("water plants", set as a to-do for every Wednesday, will still be on my list Thursday if I neglect to do it). I have a lot more "to-do" items than appointments, and Mupo is very useful in helping track them.

I *love*hierarchical notebook - http://hnb.sourceforge.net/

HNB is a curses program to structure many kinds of data in one place, for example addresses, to-do lists, ideas, book reviews or to store snippets of brainstorming.

Lovely thing to log in to my server at work via ssh and have my todo list in a term.

The developer, Øyvind Kolås, is also a maniac for eliminating extraneous keystrokes during entry, which makes this prg rank #1 for me.

What? No one is using WebCalendar? ;-)

It is open source and will work on Windows, MacOSX, Linux, etc. You just need PHP and a database (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc.)

You can now use Sunbird as your UI to manage your calendar, and your events will be stored in the WebCalendar server. (Just setup a remote subscription to WebCalendar from Sunbird.) You need the latest code in CVS to do this, but it's pretty cool. You can do this with other ical clients (like Apple iCal), too.

http://webcalendar.sourceforge.net/

The one area where WebCalendar is lacking is hotsync-ing with a PDA. However, that is on the to-do list, probably using SyncML.

WebCalendar, of course!
http://webcalendar.sourceforge.net/

If you use gnome and haven't tried gTodo yet, you're missing out on the simplest/cleanest todo list program ever written... check it out!

I tried using iCal but it didn't quite offer me what I wanted.

I ended up using php-calendar (demo) set up on some webspace. It's very simple, but it does the job for me.

I can't help but feel that Google must be working on a calendar system akin to Gmail.

I tried using iCal but it didn't quite offer me what I wanted.

I ended up using php-calendar (demo) set up on some webspace. It's very simple, but it does the job for me.

I can't help but feel that Google must be working on a calendar system akin to Gmail.

It's not a calendar, but for a quick little Todo list, I just use GTodo (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gtodo/ for lack of a real home page). It's nothing fancy, just a list of items with a few fields and sorting by the various fields.

I know this is slashdot, and I appreciate all the Beowulf cluster jokes, especially since they're actually appropriate here, but nobody is asking any meaningful questions. By my calculations, the noise-to-signal ratio is illegal div_by_zero.

Where can I get Scout? What is the license? What platforms are supported? I'm working on an open-source scientific computing package for doing quantum simulations, and I'd like to use Scout for visualization, but this article provides no information on where to get Scout or even if the licensing would allow me to use it.

It's also not clear exactly how you'd link Scout up with an existing app. Does Scout produce machine code that you stick into your app somehow? Are there C or C++ wrappers for using Scout?

A good mame port?
Like this one?

That one uses virtual memory to allow you to play most games in the Mame library (since XBox has so little). Load times for bigger games can get up pretty high, though they usually run well once they're done (Most of my experiance here is with Neogeo stuff, Kof 98/2000 in particular).

Any open-source steganography programs

Why, yes! http://sourceforge.net/projects/steghide/

use mplayerplug-in. the streams work fine for me:

http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/

http://chromium.sourceforge.net/

> Its not the end of the world mind you but you can't kill a zombie since it is already dead.

Sure you can, just aim for the head. Haven't you seen the movies ? :-)

More seriously, I recently stumbled on this kernel module. I don't know what it's worth (still haven't tested it), and it looks old and unmaintained, but maybe that could help in your situation.

As our own common sense tells us, Armstrong had discovered a vastly superior radio technology. But at the time of his invention, Armstrong was working for RCA. RCA was the dominant player in the then dominant AM radio market. By 1935, there were a thousand radio stations across the United States, but the stations in large cities were all owned by a handful of networks.

....Armstrong's invention threatened RCA's AM empire, so the company launched a campaign to smother FM radio. While FM may have been a superior technology, Sarnoff was a superior tactician. As one author described, "The forces for FM, largely engineering, could not overcome the weight of strategy devised by the sales, patent, and legal offices to subdue this threat to corporate position. For FM, if allowed to develop unrestrained, posed ... a complete reordering of radio power ... and the eventual overthrow of the carefully restricted AM system on which RCA had grown to power."

....Armstrong resisted RCA's efforts. In response, RCA resisted Armstrong's patents. After incorporating FM technology into the emerging standard for television, RCA declared the patents invalid--baselessly, and almost fifteen years after they were issued. It thus refused to pay him royalties. For six years, Armstrong fought an expensive war of litigation to defend the patents. Finally, just as the patents expired, RCA offered a settlement so low that it would not even cover Armstrong's lawyers' fees. Defeated, broken, and now broke, in 1954 Armstrong wrote a short note to his wife and then stepped out of a thirteenthstory window to his death.

....This is how the law sometimes works. Not often this tragically, and rarely with heroic drama, but sometimes, this is how it works. From the beginning, government and government agencies have been subject to capture. They are more likely captured when a powerful interest is threatened by either a legal or technical change. That powerful interest too often exerts its influence within the government to get the government to protect it. The rhetoric of this protection is of course always public spirited; the reality is something different. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age, but that, left to themselves, would crumble in another, are sustained through this subtle corruption of our political process.

I don't know how well the multi-GPU support works with NVIDIA cards under Linux -- I can only testify that dual monitors from a single card works flawlessly. Others in this thread have indicated it should work well if you can get a new motherboard with dual PCI-E and slap a couple 6800s in it, but I haven't seen it in person.

What I do know is that you can go to a multi-node system and run DMX (Distributed Multiheaded X11), which was designed to run powerwall displays. You're in the unfortunate position of having a three-headed wall, as going to a multi box system feels like overkill for you. That said, three PCs with a gig-E interconnect is going to cost far less than one Onyx IR pipe, DMX scales well, and we've got much larger walls than that (I forget the number -- maybe 2x4) running beautifully on a cluster. It's stood up to demos to VIPs without crashing, and I believe that's the most failure-inducing state for any setup.

By the way, DMX is transparent to your application -- it looks just like a single X server with a single OpenGL context. Thus, it can be used with any existing OpenGL apps.

This is somewhat off-topic, but I've found Audacity to be a reasonably good successor to CoolEdit - and since it's open source, you can't beat the price.

Often, when I do find what I want it's in .wmv or .ogg. I use iTunes; I want .m4a or .mp3.

WMA I can't help you with, but if you find .ogg, then you should be able to use the Vorbis decoder for QuickTime to play .ogg files in the iTunes software or to transcode them to .m4a for use on your iPod player.

... and the rest of these..

I like GhostWord better than PDFCreator as GhostWord maintains links in the PDF output. It only works with Word, PowerPoint and Excel though

Any windows application can export to PDF via the miracle of PDFCreator.

Not as fast as an Oo.o export to PDF, but export to PDF is hardly a world-shattering feature.

Anonymouse surfing: http://www.anonymization.net/ http://www.anonymizer.com/ http://osiris.978.org/~brianr/ians/ http://www.guardster.com/ http://www.antiproxy.com/ http://www.attackcensorship.com/ http://proxify.com/ http://www.anonymous.as/ http://www.mezzy.com/s-index.php http://anonymouse.ws/anonwww.html http://unipeak.com/ http://www.urlencoded.com/ http://www.behidden.com/ Full system proxy systems: http://tor.eff.org/ http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ http://internet.flashback.se/ http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html http://www.privoxy.org/ http://www.silentsurf.com/ http://www.peacefire.org/circumventor/simple-circu mventor-instructions.html Ordinary proxies: http://www.atomintersoft.com/products/firewall/cou ntry.aspx/Sweden-se http://www.proxy4free.com/page1.html http://www.publicproxyservers.com/page1.html http://www.proxz.com/ http://www.digitalcybersoft.com/ProxyList/ http://www.freeproxy.ru/ http://www.samair.ru/proxy/ http://www.multiproxy.org/anon_proxy.htm http://www.rrdb.org/ http://www.free-proxy-servers.com/ http://www.proxylists.net/ http://www.proxywhois.com/anonymous-proxy-list.htm http://www.openproxies.com/ Plenty, as said.

WINE is not an emulator

Hey, look what miracles (for example, here, here or here) can be done with C++ templates!

Hey, look what miracles (for example, here, here or here) can be done with C++ templates!

Seconded. And with stuff like beamer (a presentation creator, e.g. to replace PowerPoint), LaTeX gets better and better. I use it to publish out-of-copyright books using POD.

There *is* a BlackBerry port of the J2ME VNC client software. You'll have to think of another reason to justify the money you spent on the Treo 650. There are a couple reasons - like perhaps you prefer to have to retrieve mail rather than have it pushed to you immediately.

You can try this at home with the Gimp: Refocus.

FYI, DOSBox gets rid of that problem, not to mention linux ports of SNES emulators. It's the wind0z games that's most troublesome for being M$-free.

BTW, how exactly do they "fire up" MSDOS? If they are running Wind0z X-P like all Joe Sixpacks, then their cmd.exe is utterly incompatible with MSDOS's command.com. Many games rely on DOS-only mode that is not achievable since Wind0z2000 (or was it since Wind0zME?). So, in order to "fire up" MSDOS... they will probably need to dual boot into true MSDOS (like 6.22) on a FAT16 partition---which, BTW, no Joe Sixpack can do.

... plagerist link-whores, ...

Glad to see you didn't install ASpell, we might have a fully literate artificial sentience on our hands; at least we can still confuse it with a simple phonetic soundex.

Ix-nay on the ower-pay!

I would give most anything for a working media player for OS X that plays oggs, flacs, and maybe shns.

Merry Christmas. Seen on HydrogenAudio -- the owner of that forum, Dibrom, is also looking at writing his own Mac player.

With my poor eyesight, I've been, in a manner of speaking, on the look-out for software that would enable me to type without a computer monitor, an nVidia-free computing experience.

To my surprise, I found it much easier to surf the Internet using a no-frills terminal reader like yasr with an HTML-aware line editor called edbrowse than using any "screen scraper" bolted atop a fancy desktop environment like Gnome or OSX. The author of edbrowse, a blind user and programmer, describes edbrowse as a "re-implementation" of the classic Unix line editor ed but "with browse capabilities built in."

For those who must have a transparent CLI for windows.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/console

Choose the 3rd coniguration file to see a transparent mode. Configurations for level of transparency, font size, color, background, etc are kept in a xml file, You'll get the idea.

Then get Cygwin!

ADOdb Site

I've never used PEAR, so I can't compare the two, but ADOdb is quite nice from my experience.

I guess the answer is "it depends". ;-)

If I'm doing anything half-ways complex in web-to-db, yes I do want OO. I'll choose OO DB access in the form of Hibernate, JDBC, JBoss and EJBs and XDoclet. And I'll build my UI with an MVC-based JSP/Servlet framework, usually home-grown, but maybe using JavaServer Faces or Struts.

In my opinion, this kind of OO sophistication makes building even half-ways complex projects better.

Sam

PHP is a horrible language. Even perl is a better programming language. Java and Python blow it away in ability to create easy to maintain and efficient data structures. I'm amazed and fearful of the monstrosities that have been cobbled together with PHP (I'm talking about you Mediawiki and Drupal).

PHP is to web programming as x86 is to microprocessor architecture. It's nasty and inefficient and I can't figure out why so many people use it.

And like many other no-declaration scripting languages PHP is sorely lacking in warnings and errors. Forgot a dollarsign or typoed your variable name? Sorry, yer screwed!

To let you know where I'm coming from, Apache Tomcat is my favorite solution. But it seems that the project I most want to tinker with is Scoop and I'm finding mod_perl pretty workable and the way they architected that giant mass of perl is pretty reasonable.
</rant>

On a slightly different topic, one wishlist item that I would like to see in PHP is Abstract Database Access. It's not really a good thing to hard code your application to a specific database, especially if it's a redistributable application. (e.g. PHPBB) The ODBC calls sort of solve this, but they do require that ODBC is installed, properly configured, and compiled into your copy of PHP.

- The algorithm used is breakable. A 4 character key in about one hour, a 6 character key in one day (on a Pentium 133 PC). This requires that you know some text that must appear in the file. An expert can break it for any key. When the text has been decrypted, this also means that the key can be revealed, and other files encrypted with the same key can be decrypted.
- Pkzip uses the same encryption, and US Govt has no objection to its export. Pkzip's public file APPNOTE.TXT describes this algorithm in detail.