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errr....Gaim anyone?

It's nice to see MS embracing an open source window manager like this.

Although I have seen some alternate window managers for Windows. It'd be cool to see an actual Blackbox port for Windows.

Sure, it doesn't always happen.. you didn't do it.

You could have though, right? In my department at work, we needed a Java coverage tool and I prefer open source. JCoverage was largely dead, so Mark (a co-worker) forked it. Now Cobertura has lots of involved folks and is growing well.

http://cobertura.sourceforge.net/faq.html

If your favorite open source project is dying, fork it, announce it on Freshmeat and see if you can get the community behind it. You don't have to do all the work, but you do have to get the ball rolling.

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=6 87783&forum_id=21304

Read, and behold.

Quest basically acquired Tora to kill-off one of the biggest "competitors" to their Toad product.

A GPL version is still available from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tora/

But, for how long? Will development continue?

A new company called JasperSoft (http://www.jaspersoft.com) has formed to invest in JasperReports and offer support, services and complimentary commercial products for JasperReports.

Unless, of course, he meant "complementary"...

Seriously, the above statement seems to be saying that they will be offering mostly support and add-ons, not taking the core product private. The JasperReports software is currently under the LGPL, so there is some assurance that the original will still be available in the future, if anybody cares enough to fork the project.

A new company called JasperSoft (http://www.jaspersoft.com) has formed to invest in JasperReports and offer support, services and complimentary commercial products for JasperReports.

Unless, of course, he meant "complementary"...

Seriously, the above statement seems to be saying that they will be offering mostly support and add-ons, not taking the core product private. The JasperReports software is currently under the LGPL, so there is some assurance that the original will still be available in the future, if anybody cares enough to fork the project.

I think if you take a look at the TOra project, you'll see an example of the closed fork doing worse than the open one. TOra stands for Toolkit for Oracle, it is a feature competitor to Quest Software's TOAD toolkit.

I was thrilled when I found TORa, and when I found the project had a windows port. It's DDL/Data extraction is by far the best feature for my day-to-day work.

At some point, Quest Software hires the TOra developer, and closes the source on the Windows port. I was still so enamoured with TOra that I pestered the Quest sales staff monthly to find out when it will hit the price sheet, so I can buy the now closed version. I don't think they ever intended to sell a competing product, though.

So, 9-12 months later, the Windows port is defunct, with Quest claiming that all features of TOra are now available in Toad.

I wouldn't call this a successful acquisition, unless you count Quest Software (for squishing a competing product) or the original developer of TOra (which, I admit, has to make a living some how). Perhaps you could count Mac and Linux users as winners here, as they still enjoy an open-licensed version, whose developer is now on a steady payroll related to the project.

Had they kept TOra intact for Windows users, and priced it competitively with TOAD, I would have been happy to be a paying customer.

This is essentially what Borland did with Interbase. Check the Firebird web site, especially the project history and you'll see how Borland changed their mind but only after the cat was out of the bag.

This is essentially what Borland did with Interbase. Check the Firebird web site, especially the project history and you'll see how Borland changed their mind but only after the cat was out of the bag.

According to http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/message.html:

JasperReports will stay open source forever

So it's probably premature to cry wolf.

I'm also curious about this. I'm thinking about the Diablo series (both 1 and 2 have *great* coop modes). FreedroidRPG also has a coop mode, but I haven't played it yet (only single player). It's very Diablo-ish, and can be a relaxing hack-and-slash RPG (even though it's not finished, it's got a fair bit of fun content).

LOL fanboy,
Yes it does have both an MP3 player and a video player so yes I could listen to them, otherwise what would be the point storing them.

Here is the vnc client if you were wondering.

"One by One" ripped just fine for me with CDex and autorun disabled.

For gods sake... don't use bloody Windows bloody media player to rip to MP3. You're simply asking for trouble using that crap.

Try CDEX instead. It's a far superior tool and is open source to boot. Windows Media Player stinks I tell ya, positively stinks

And don't forget all that DRM goodness it'll be adding to your files too. A mate of mine recently lost his music collection because he'd ripped it to WMA format. His hard disk failed and he had to reinstall XP on a new hard drive. So he restored his WMA files from a backup CD and guess what ? Media Player now tells him he isn't licensed to play his old WMA files. Ho ho ho :)

Still this gave me a good opportunity to remind him that I told him two years ago not to use WMA, not to use Media Player etc. etc. At least he's learnt his lesson and is now re-ripping his CD collection to mp3 using CDEX.

And if my portable devices would play OGG I'd not even bother using MP3.

So stop using Windows Media Player - it's crap.

• GmBaAp (a GTK-based editor for Linux).
• GBA Map Editor (another GTK-based editor).
• Tile Max (Java-based, works under Linux).
• Mappy (Windows only, but works under WINE).

• GmBaAp (a GTK-based editor for Linux).
• GBA Map Editor (another GTK-based editor).
• Tile Max (Java-based, works under Linux).
• Mappy (Windows only, but works under WINE).

Have you tried any of the accounting packages on web services like http://sourceforge.net/projects/ck-ledger? There are a couple under there. eGroupware is lining up with accounting and ERP solutions like this, so take a look at them.

Hmm, That is not the first one, there are lots of other tools around, the most famous one Player/Stage has a well developed architecture and many universities, companies and people around the world are using that.

Here's one:

http://oap.sourceforge.net/

Here's another (warning only 128 kbps uplink):

http://gramlich.net/projects/robobricks/index.html

It sure would be nice if people who start these projects would shoot a message off to the comp.robotics.misc news group to try and minimize overlap. The current state of affairs is that there are plenty of projects and very little of the hardware from the projects is interoperable.

-Wayne

Disclaimer: The last URL is mine and I started it back in 1998.

IP scan is one of major parts in Rodi network. Rodi peers penetrate NATs/Firewalls and find each other using IP scan and port scan. see http://larytet.sourceforge.net/btRat.shtml

But does anyone know of a good Mapper for Linux of a different type? I do a little bit of GBA home brew, and on Windows, I use Tile Studio, but it doesn't have a Linux port. Does anyone know of similar tile based mappers for Linux?

I think i am gonna start all my C functions with some extras free(NULL);free(NULL);free(NULL); statements from now on! :)

sure I could put

if (ptr!=NULL) free(ptr);

/* Check for special cases. */
if (unlikely (! mem)) return;

Sure C doesn't hold your hand the way java does, but that's part of the fun I guess.

Anyway, bedtime...

This is a common misconception about the capabilities of SVG. Many people think that it can do only one thing: Scalable Vector Graphics -- it's in its name, isn't it? And you cannot blame them for that: this is how they see SVG used these days. But, the same way Flash is mostly used for banner ads and site intros. Does that say anything about the real capabilities of Flash as a application development platform? I used to build apps and small games back in the old days of Flash 5 and I already know that it can be done (probably a lot easier in Flash MX). However, after being involved in real programming I no longer think it is a very good platform for the development of most games -- but it is still a valid choice for most arcade and kids games.

Returning to SVG, with SVG+JavaScript you can do EVERYTHING you did in Flash. Yes, you can develop full fledged applications or games, and a friend of mine is working on a widget library for a SVG editor written in SVG. Can you do a Flash editor in Flash?

With SVG not all things are as easy as they are in Flash (yet). It is a lot easier to build "crappy banner ads and stupid site intros that serve no purpose" with Flash. But, for real application development the complexity is similar. The difference is that with SVG you get to use a collection of open standards and are not tied to one particular platform, vendor or authoring tool while with Flash you are tied to Windows, Macromedia (Adobe Systems now) and Flash.

-----

PS: Yes, I know that for "crappy banner ads and stupid site intros that serve no purpose" you can also use SwiSH and others. You are still tied to Windows though.

Do they mean something like Dockapps ,GDesklets, or Superkaramba? Or perhaps gKrellm?Yeah, that is new. :)

I found the cybermen more scary than the daleks, what with their elite stair-climbing skills, and how they could kill people and then re-animate them with nasty control-helmet things on as proto-cybermen.

The daleks did have a spot in Paradroid on the C64 though, one of the better games of the era, and faithfully reproduced in Freedroid

Have you tried DosBox?

No, JPEGs can't be replaced by PNGs because PNGs (and GIFs) are lossless, whereas JPEGs are purposely lossy in order to achieve much better typical compression than PNGs (or GIFs). What you want to replace JPEGs with is the open-source, patent-free DjVu.

Or you can just store your passwords along with when they expire in an encrypted database which you can open with a master-passphrase and/or a key-file (thus using both something you know [the password] and something you have [the key-file, which you should presumably put on some sort of removable storage you keep with you {more brackets}] for authorization purposes). I highly recommend keepass for that job - it's minimalistic (>500Kb), secure, and open sourced if that matters to you. You can easily keep it along with your key-file and database file onto a floppy disk, if you're for some reason lagging behind the times.

This is the second time I'm recommending keepass in this story, but it's just so damned useful. I swear I'm not affiliated with it in any way ;-)

I use a 25 character pass-phrase (a meaningful to me quotation that I find easy to remember) along with a 'key-file' to decrypt a database of all my passwords which in turn are relatively long meaningless strings of random ascii characters. That way I only have to remember one passphrase, and can copy paste all my other ones from the database. And if I feel *really* paranoid, I can put my database along with my key file onto a USB dongle to which only I have a physical access to.

If anyone is wondering I use keepass to keep my passwords - it's an open source 'safe' for passwords and posseses pretty much every feature you can wish for while mantaining a minimalist interface and being less than 500kb - enough to fit on a floppy.

And thanks to tools like RadioRipper http://www.radioripper.net/ and StreamRipper http://www.streamripper.sourceforge.net/, I have a perfect record of all that has been streaming audio!

He is a critic because there is so much bad security; futhermore security is always imperfect.

Bruce Schneier has made a number of positive contributions to the field of security. Among them are the Password Safe program (now moved to Sourceforge). He also wrote Applied Cryptography and other books.

Note: I'm the project's admin on SourceForge.

Strong passwords will be a necessary evil for the forseeable future. How many phones, public/coffee terminals, and home computers have biometric authentication gadgets? How many of these gimicks work together? My users need the ability to access nearly everything on our systems, from anywhere. This includes our WAP portal, email from their phone, our various web-apps, SSH/terminal servers, and their IMAP/SMTP email clients. How many of these systems could even possibly function with anything but passwords. Take the IMAP/SMTP system for example, how would you tie biometic authentication into standard SMTP AUTH? How about a web app - how is a fingerprint entered there? Or consider our WAP gateway, how are users going to enter a fingerprint on their phones?

We cant just mandate users access our systems from "approved" sources - that flys in the face of what management is asking for: A system accessible anywhere, with reasonable security percautions in effect.

Though centralized authentiation schemes like LDAP are working well for us, "legacy systems" (ie: accounting, payroll, and factory/inventory management) dont integrate with central authentication systems. Meaning that's yet another password to remember...

With users accessing our systems from so many sources, strong and frequently changed (90-180 days) passwords are a necessity. Though they need the ability to save them:
1) How important is the data in your wallet/purse. Why not just write the passwords down, store them in your wallet/purse, and then manage that. After-all, if your wallet/purse has been stolen or rumaged through, there's a good chance you'll know.
2) Consider this two-factor authentication system:
Something you have: cell phone
Something you know: password to program

How many folks now have MIDP/Java enabled phones. Why not provide them with an app to securely save their passwords on their phone? With a tool like FreeSafe They could not only store all their passwords on their cell phone, they can generate both random new passwords, and One Time Password hashes.

Now if FreeSafe could only store notes, and have some sort of backup capability (which the developer says he's working on)...

This generates strong passwords, and you don't have to remember or type them even once: http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/

Give keepass a try. I've been using it for about a year now and I am really happy with it. It easily works on a USB key or in combination with a PC and USB key.

keepass

I've been using Password Safe for a number of years now after encountering similar problems trying to remember a dozen passwords or so. You can use PS to automatically generate random passwords when you add a new entry (according to a configurable policy), so you no longer need to share passwords between sites. PS stores passwords in a Blowfish (or maybe AES now?) encrypted file so no need to leave your passwords lying around in plaintext on your system.

I use password safe to keep all my passwords. I used to have password overload and ended up using the same password for tons of sites. I eventually came to the decision this was a really dumb idea and shopped around for a solution. Now I just use password safe to generate proper random passwords for all my web sites and accounts. All you have to remember is one master password.

The only problem is that it is not very portable in that if I am not on my own computer I don't have access to the password data base.

I found a tool for reading rss-feeds with a bayesian filter on it so that you only get to see the items you're interested in. After learning 100-200 items it works pretty wel. The program is called 'sux0r' and can be found here.
For those who like to give it a try, check my site.

You want Borland to release a GPL version of VCL, for Linux? Done:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeclx/

You mention that RSS has no means of viewing older content, and again I'd say its not meant for that. It's meant to be used to show what's the latest thing out there on the site, and if archival systems were implemented it'd likely take out the 'simple' from the name.

Here's how I use RSS. That site is set as my homepage, and uses the wonderful Magpie RSS PHP script to parse the RSS feeds. Instead of having to check all of those sites to check for updates a few times a day, all I do is go to my homepage (from any browser, not just my machine), and voila! I can instantly keep up to date with my favourite sites!

Wikipedia Article.

There are still many users hanging out at the Yahoo! forum here, and there's even work still being done on the PC software for it here.

INBOX (effectively root and no mail can be stored here to my knowledge)
INBOX.Inbox
INBOX.Sent Items
INBOX.Archive (where I store old mail in subfolders)
INBOX.Archive.Webcomics

INBOX
Inbox
Archive
Archive.Webcomics

I decided to make a search on google for "just works"...seems its everyone's sales pitch at some stage or another:

- http://www.artima.com/spontaneous/upnp_digihome.ht ml
- http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2002/0715mustha ler.html
- http://www.apple.com/switch/whyswitch/
- http://bashburn.sourceforge.net/
- http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6037

... just to name a few.

Also here is a page with an interesting write-up about "It Just Works": http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ItJustWorks

Nothing easier. The Free Code Graphing Project can map any software (not just the Linux kernel). There are other utilities that can produce diagrams, charts and tables, as well, but the wheel chart of the Free Code Graphing Project is the coolest. :)

There's a product called Buddy that's been doing this for many years. Originally, the Buddy card was a combined PCI video card and PS/2 keyboard+mouse controller, which spit all the signals out an 8-position modular jack (RJ45 for the cretins), and a little breakout box at the other end of a (long, shielded cat-5) cable accepted the monitor and input devices. The software gave two Windows95 users the impression that they were the only one on the machine, and I'm still not sure how they did that on a non-NT architecture, but it worked and worked well. Only trouble is, the video bandwidth of the cable was limited, and the RAMDAC in the video card didn't support sync rates over 60Hz, so the flicker on the slave station was pretty obnoxious.

In the years since Buddy was first released, PCI video cards have learned to play nice with their neighbors, and USB has provided a way to connect oodles of keyboards and mice to the same machine. Thus, Buddy is reincarnated as BeTwin, a software-only product that associates specific keyboards, mice, and video cards with specific sessions on the machine. (I'm not sure how it deals with sound. Multiple soundcards would seem easy.)

They say it only supports 5 users, but that sounds like an arbitrary limit and I'm sure they'd tweak a 28-user version if you felt like it.

Related links... I'm going off-topic here, but playing stupid tricks with virtual hardware is fun.

Check out MaxiVista, a "virtual video card" which Windows treats as a second monitor, allowing you to do multi-head tricks. The data for the second display goes out over the network (a la VNC) to a client machine, which simply pipes it into the video buffer. Turn that scrap laptop into a second monitor! I stuffed a 10base-T card in my old lappy and it was perfectly usable for everything except fullscreen video. At 100 or gigabit, it'd be worth a try.

Xinerama is Linux software that does the same thing, creating one large virtual X display, which then chops up the image and sends it to a number of smaller actual displays, some or all of which can obviously be located across the network.

As long as we're doing silly tricks with virtual hardware, you should be aware of Virtual Audio Cable, which enables digitally-perfect audio patching between applications' outputs and inputs, even if the apps themselves think they have exclusive control over the soundcard. (Also enables multiclient sound output under 9x, even if your card doesn't support it, because it does software mixing.)

If video is your thing, try Softcam, to feed your videoconferencing software any old source you feel like. Switch between actual cameras, use your desktop screenshot as a "camera input", add effects, etc. Their WaveMux tool is a nice complement to VAC, too.

This won't help with OO.org, but if you still need to convert the Word files to pdf, check out PDF Creator

It's free and will let you print anything to PDF.

>Sure, I could buy a PDF converter, You might not need to buy one.
I haven't used this:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
it's a PDF creator as a printer driver.
Here's a blog including this and other methods:
http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2 004/11/word_doc_to_pdf.html

I have to agree with you about incompatability though.
My girlfriend's last minute job application (saved as a .doc under OO) crashed her work XP version. Not good.
.rtf anyone?

I use many java desktop apps in my day to day tasks on my linux desktop. There is no better way to connect to multiple databases than Squirrel , No better way to code in Java than NetBeans and no better editor than JEdit

I think Java 5 already has great desktop features like shared class data, and 2D acceleration for 2D acelerated hardware (which I don't have yet!).