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* Approximate figures based on CD-quality WMA (64 Kbps) I call BS... 64 Kbps isn't even close to CD quality. Even with a top notch encoder such as LAME, 128 is the bare minimum for something you can consider CD-quality.

First point to remember, diplomacy is a great idea, and it sometimes opens doors you cannot open otherwise. It may be too late now when they are already criminalizing the guy like this, but it may still be worth a try:

At my college, p2p is similarly blocked. But at least nobody kicked me off the net for just trying it. In fact, I was able to do a little [social] networking and find out who sets these policies. I didn't follow up on it, but I was told there is a good chance he would allow me an exception for a legitimate download. Some netlords have heard of Linux, some haven't. YMMV.

Second point, again it is too late for this in his case, but ALL students these days need to seriously think about preemptively setting up some security:

1.) Use truecrypt http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/, and keep any questionable materials hidden on a plausibly deniable encrypted partition, in case your computer is suddenly grabbed by school authorities for inspection.

2.) Use tor http://tor.eff.org/ or freenet http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ or whatever, encrypting your pipes so the netlords can't easily know what software you are using. Them blowing smoke about your bandwidth usage is legitimate, but puts you in way less hot water than p2p usage.

3.) Use (or develop) [if your encrypted tunnel doesn't already do this], p2p programs that do everything via port 80 http, since hardly anyone tries to block that. BitComet's UDP NAT-piercing technology is ingenious, but port-blocking firewalls still destroy its usefulness. Somebody needs to adapt the torrent algorithms to not depend on those red-flag port numbers. Heck, if everything was already on port 80, those netlords probably wouldn't have even noticed him--no encryption necessary!

Anyone got pointers to easy-to-install stuff along these lines? Or do we need to work on developing it ourselves?

First point to remember, diplomacy is a great idea, and it sometimes opens doors you cannot open otherwise. It may be too late now when they are already criminalizing the guy like this, but it may still be worth a try:

At my college, p2p is similarly blocked. But at least nobody kicked me off the net for just trying it. In fact, I was able to do a little [social] networking and find out who sets these policies. I didn't follow up on it, but I was told there is a good chance he would allow me an exception for a legitimate download. Some netlords have heard of Linux, some haven't. YMMV.

Second point, again it is too late for this in his case, but ALL students these days need to seriously think about preemptively setting up some security:

1.) Use truecrypt http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/, and keep any questionable materials hidden on a plausibly deniable encrypted partition, in case your computer is suddenly grabbed by school authorities for inspection.

2.) Use tor http://tor.eff.org/ or freenet http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ or whatever, encrypting your pipes so the netlords can't easily know what software you are using. Them blowing smoke about your bandwidth usage is legitimate, but puts you in way less hot water than p2p usage.

3.) Use (or develop) [if your encrypted tunnel doesn't already do this], p2p programs that do everything via port 80 http, since hardly anyone tries to block that. BitComet's UDP NAT-piercing technology is ingenious, but port-blocking firewalls still destroy its usefulness. Somebody needs to adapt the torrent algorithms to not depend on those red-flag port numbers. Heck, if everything was already on port 80, those netlords probably wouldn't have even noticed him--no encryption necessary!

Anyone got pointers to easy-to-install stuff along these lines? Or do we need to work on developing it ourselves?

If you're one of the latter, please slap yourself on the wrist, clean the stuff off your PC

Here's the sourceforge download link

If you use a Mac: ...don't worry about it. Hit "secure delete"
or not. Nobody really knows how to do data recovery on a Mac anyhow.
(Hint Hint, anyone planning to break Federal laws: use a Mac.)

If you use *nix: Figure it out yourself.
Do I look like tech support?

P.S. I coulda sworn that AZ updated over good 'ol http. doesn't it?

For those interested, check out the Tempus MP3s. Very good stuff!

PS MOD +1 Informative re: your take on DIY digital recording. There is so much involved. I can see a home-built system used to lay down idea track in the middle of the night when inspiration strikes you, but it would take a lot of cash to build a true production facility worthy of the name...

If you want to make a resume, even LyX mixes formatting with data too much. Use the XML Resume Library. A lot of HR departments parse incoming resumes into the HR-XML standard internally, but if you want to use that, you probably have to come up with your own output stylesheets.

Heh, heh - of course, aparently GPL "hawks" didn't like the fact that thousands of companies run modified code without distributing it (and therefore without having to distribute the modified source).

This is a confusing point, because even a FAQ on the GNU website gets it wrong- but it's almost impossible for a company to make productive use of modified code without distributing it.

That's because the majority of companies have more than 1 employee, and when one employee transfers a copy to another, that is distribution, an action which is illegal under copyright law, unless you have permission from the original author. It's no excuse that both copies are still controlled by one legal entity- they have been spread out geographically and electronically, and that is (by definition) "distribution".

If you have trouble understanding this, just imagine Wal-Mart buying a single copy of Windows XP for their 20,000 managers' PCs, and making the excuse "copies for internal use aren't really copyright infringement"

The conclusion is that if a manager directs a programmer to alter a GPL program, and then provide that program to a different employee to use, he has given permission for either employee to post that source code on sourceforge. If he tries to stop them, then he is in violation of GPL section 10 ("You may not impose any further
restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein"), meaning the company can't make copies of the altered program.

not really, unless you mean that it's possible legally. technically speaking P2P can encrypt payload and fake RTP packets. P2P can very effectively fight back intelligent firewalls. see, for example, http://larytet.sourceforge.net/btRat.shtml

I have two words for you:

Des Proxy

(It's a method to tunnel obscure ports over 80)

As long as you're using the school's network, you have to abide by the school's policies.

There are alternatives though.

At my school the IT department recently decided to disallow "all illegal p2p" use under penalty of being permanently banned from the network. This is being carried out by someone just shutting down the port of anyone who trips the schools IDS (snort) or a second system that detects several p2p programs. Needless to say there are tons of false positives.

After numerous written and face to face requests for clarification of the nonexistant policy, attempts to explain legitimate uses, requests to know specifically what we where doing that was illegal, and even asking for a refund on our tuition fee, it became apparent that the IT department just doesn't care.

So for better or worse a number of other ways to circumvent or change these restictions where found:

Prevent them from identifying your traffic. This can be done by setting having friends at other schools set up proxies. These include socks with "ssh -g" on http://cygwin.com/ along with socks-cap or tsocks, individual ssh tunnels, or vpn.

If they cite excessive bandwith caused by p2p make your point by having everyone use a lot of legitimate bandwith with http://porntoolkit.sourceforge.net/
for example.

Here they got frustrated with not being able to identify traffic, so they just started shutting off people for excessive bandwith. The solution to this is to use onion routing like http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Tor or a similar method within the schools network so that the load of bandwith leaving or entering the network is distributed evenly between many people. I couldn't find too many solutions for this that I liked too much, but a couple hundred lines of python did the job.

Finally, especially if the blocking is being done by hand, you can do some less nice stuff ranging from overloading thier logs with thousands of palse positives to filling the lan with random mac addresses and doing banned stuff with spoofed IPs. This, however, is probobly a bad idea and rather script kiddiesh.

Additionally you may be able to unblock yourself with "ifconfig hw ether NEW_MAC_ADDRESS_HERE" on linux or http://ntsecurity.nu/toolbox/etherchange/ on windows.

So there are alternatives to just living with it if all reasoning and begging with your school goes nowhere. And remember, if all else fails there's always usenet over ssl! Good luck.

For assistance falling asleep, consider meditation. I find that what really keeps me awake is thinking. Over the years I've practiced a basic form of meditation in which i simply supress the constant stream of thoughts most of us experiance during the day. When I do this I generally fall asleep within a couple of minutes.

It might help to practice with an EEG for biofeedback. The OpenEEG project is a useful source for hardware and software for setting up your own home EEG. You can order the assembled hardware if you aren't up to building it yourself. It is said that after several weeks of meditation practice with EEG feedback many people can achieve meditation as deep as many 20-year practitioners (as show by EEG traces on said practitioners).

Other suggestions regarding regular scheduals, not spending time in bed for activities other than sleeping (and sex, if you're into that), and regular exersize will likely help extablish a normal routine as well.

Personally, I find that exersize shortly before bed helps me to fall asleep quickly (usually 30-45 minutes of weight training or nekkid aerobics with the wife). Evidently I'm a bit different than most people in this respect, but it might be worth a try.

For waking up in the morning, you might find a Screaming Meanie effective. Fair warning though, if a cat sleeps on your bed at night, you may want to sleep in jeans.

Well under a minute. GNU talk filters.

Maybe B1FF would have been funnier:
1 DONT REELLY TH1NK THAT THE 1NTERNET HA5 HAD A GREET 1MPACT ON 5PELL1NG & L1TERACY. I MEEN, 1 DONT EVEN U5E NET5PEEK, 1 JU5T SPELLL THINGS NERMALLLY ONLINE.

I'm a cheat. My normal posts go through spellbound

No wonder people use sites like 3guploads.com or PitPim to put ringtones on their phones.

I think you meant bitpim.

why did they record video shots from the monitor?

If I'm not mistaken, things like xvidcap don't work when direct rendering is enabled. These effects depend on direct rendering for them to work.

This is off topic, so don't mod me up, but anyway, I suspect it's a bit of both, because I've run other programs under GTK2, and they've had different issues.

I have 2 monitors, monitor 2 is larger than monitor 1. With GAIM, conversations tend to appear in the area above monitor 1, left of monitor 2; the top left corner of the full virtual desktop created by the two monitors. This area just happens to not actually be displayed on any monitor, so I have issues.

With Crossfire, it opens the windows on monitor 1 only. Heaven help me if I want it to start on the second monitor. However, it does open properly positioned on the monitor, and appear in the same dead space as new GAIM conversations. With Crossfire, I suspect the issue is some wierd code that handles the positioning of the window in some buggy window managers under the *nices.

This is off topic, so don't mod me up, but anyway, I suspect it's a bit of both, because I've run other programs under GTK2, and they've had different issues.

I have 2 monitors, monitor 2 is larger than monitor 1. With GAIM, conversations tend to appear in the area above monitor 1, left of monitor 2; the top left corner of the full virtual desktop created by the two monitors. This area just happens to not actually be displayed on any monitor, so I have issues.

With Crossfire, it opens the windows on monitor 1 only. Heaven help me if I want it to start on the second monitor. However, it does open properly positioned on the monitor, and appear in the same dead space as new GAIM conversations. With Crossfire, I suspect the issue is some wierd code that handles the positioning of the window in some buggy window managers under the *nices.

A free tool to convert Word docs to PDF with hyperlinks intact would be a godsend.

That's a good point. I'd assume the guy who wrote it.

But then again, it has a purple snake for a mascot, plus a theme song (mouse over the musical note).

I think it balances out in the end.

Please visit Slashcode bug #981137 [sourceforge.net], which concerns automatically hyperlinking URLs in "Plain Old Text" mode, and add a comment to show your support for a speedy resolution. No progress has been made on this trivial feature request for longer than six months.

Redistribute this comment at will.

Clam AV seems to be the biggest one out there, but if you're using POP3, P3Scan is worth a try...

Actually, I do have a Yahoo account. :) My Yahoo account doesn't have free POP access, but I downloaded a program like YahooPops http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] which emulates a POP3 server and allows you to check your yahoo mail through thunderbird or your email client of choice.

I run apt-get (for RPM), freshrpms and kde-redhat. This may not answer the question in as nice a way as you wanted, but if you're going to run a RedHat/Fedora box they can be life-savers:

FreshRPMS
KDE for Red Hat Linux

Since you have the luxury of not having locked yourself into a language, you have the ability to survey all the offerings out there, whether minority and up-and-coming, or well-known and entrenched.

After considering various languages to switch to for my scripting needs (ironically, it was prompted by the fact that PHP won't handle unsigned integers), I took a look at Python and Ruby and thus I would suggest taking a look at Ruby. I was one of those people turned off by Python's "significant indenting", and some other quirks. Ruby has a heck of a lot of niftiness beneath the surface.

Here is a ruby-gtk+ faq. I am currently studying Ruby on Rails myself, and lovin' it!

I have ASSP, it integrates with the ClamAV database. World-Wide Stats as well as my own stats indicate it's blocking viruses. Though I still have some viruses get picked up by my Exchange server, however there are a very large number blocked.

Since I have separate AV on my Exchange server, and had it before the ClamAV integration with ASSP, I never bothered to troubleshoot why ASSP misses some of the viruses that it should be catching.

So based on this, I can't say I'd use it as my only mail AV solution, but then again I haven't tried to either.

I have ASSP, it integrates with the ClamAV database. World-Wide Stats as well as my own stats indicate it's blocking viruses. Though I still have some viruses get picked up by my Exchange server, however there are a very large number blocked.

Since I have separate AV on my Exchange server, and had it before the ClamAV integration with ASSP, I never bothered to troubleshoot why ASSP misses some of the viruses that it should be catching.

So based on this, I can't say I'd use it as my only mail AV solution, but then again I haven't tried to either.

Or just install the fantastic PDFCreator, which creates a Windows printer that generates PDFs. It's awesome, and free. Based on Ghostscript, too, I believe.

Visual Basic and Java and Python and Oberon and Object Pascal and Boo and Nemerle and Component Pascal and Forth and Lisp and Smalltalk and Logo and Tachy.

Some of the packages are still in the larval stages, but they're out there, and more are on the horizon.

Visual Basic and Java and Python and Oberon and Object Pascal and Boo and Nemerle and Component Pascal and Forth and Lisp and Smalltalk and Logo and Tachy.

Some of the packages are still in the larval stages, but they're out there, and more are on the horizon.

I'm surprise nobody mentioned THIS yet
pdfcreator
Been using it for years
Only "cost" is that it doesn't give me a DRMed pdf file when I print a DRMed pdf!! Whoops!

Or a completely open source alternative, PDF Creator.

For those that don't know... it's a windows printer driver that makes PDFs of your document when you print to it... very handy.

Damn, what you found was actually exactly what I was looking for! Two weeks ago that is. I don't need it now.

I was sold on Monster cables the day I replaced the wire between my computer and my Bose computer speakers. (This was the wire that came with my Bose speakers, BTW.) With a Monster cable, all of a sudden I was getting a LOT more bass. Songs I'd heard a zillion times sounded a lot better.

Some time ago, I noticed that DVDs on my mom's player didn't look much better than normal TV programs. I looked deeper, and found that the video cable between the DVD player and the TV was one of those thin-wire cheap pieces of crap. I replaced it with a spare composite-video Monster cable I had lying around, and the picture quality improved dramatically.

I use nothing but Monster cables in my home-based video studio (a 100% Linux creation, with a Canopus ADVC-300, kino, smilutils, and mjpegtools. Given the experience above, and especially given all the RF interference generated by a typical computer, I didn't dare try anything else.

In the end, it comes down to whether you can see/hear the difference. Not everyone is wired the same. I can see and hear details that most people can't sense -- so much, in fact, that I'm starting to wonder if I have Asperger's Syndrome or something.

I suspect more developers would be coding their pages for wireless devices if it were a simple task. CSS makes it fairly straight-forward, but there are very few nice WAP browsers for the desktop. There's a project called Mobilizer but it's development activity is slow if anything. More work in this area will be necessary before any real progress will be seen.

HP sold one a few years ago called the Jornada 820. I still use mine everyday. It has a 90% sized keyboard and a VGA screen w/VGA port. Includes Modem, Touchpad, CF slot, PCMCIA slot, microphone, speaker, 12Hr battery, and a USB port that seems to work with USB mice. It syncs with latest version of Outlook. I use AvantGo on it with a CF-WiFi adapter.

There is even a effort to port it to Linux.

Roblimo: It seems to be part of the chronic open source question...

Ahh, open source chronic -- an unattainable panacea. I've search low and high, but what I've found is not exactly what I'm seeking. The obvious place to look returns a 404 error -- not the 420 I had hoped for. I've performed numerous searches, but haven't gotten many hits. Please help, I'm buggin'!

High Times,
Letter

Roblimo: It seems to be part of the chronic open source question...

Ahh, open source chronic -- an unattainable panacea. I've search low and high, but what I've found is not exactly what I'm seeking. The obvious place to look returns a 404 error -- not the 420 I had hoped for. I've performed numerous searches, but haven't gotten many hits. Please help, I'm buggin'!

High Times,
Letter

use YahooPophttp://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/. Its great

What if somebody uses it to change books or articles on your hard drive remotely? What if you wanted to refer to your legally purchased, digital copy of Free Culture in a paper you were writing you were writing, and you found that the section about Jesse Jordan had been changed to read that he was a file trader who had been legally prosecuted by the RIAA for various acts including terrorism and that he was currently serving three consecutive life sentences for his nefarious activities? Would that be okay?

DRM is not about piracy. DRM is about control. DRM gives remote parties the right to alter your data at any time for any reason without regard for the law.

What if somebody uses it to change books or articles on your hard drive remotely? What if you wanted to refer to your legally purchased, digital copy of Free Culture in a paper you were writing you were writing, and you found that the section about Jesse Jordan had been changed to read that he was a file trader who had been legally prosecuted by the RIAA for various acts including terrorism and that he was currently serving three consecutive life sentences for his nefarious activities? Would that be okay?

DRM is not about piracy. DRM is about control. DRM gives remote parties the right to alter your data at any time for any reason without regard for the law.

What if somebody uses it to change books or articles on your hard drive remotely? What if you wanted to refer to your legally purchased, digital copy of Free Culture in a paper you were writing you were writing, and you found that the section about Jesse Jordan had been changed to read that he was a file trader who had been legally prosecuted by the RIAA for various acts including terrorism and that he was currently serving three consecutive life sentences for his nefarious activities? Would that be okay?

DRM is not about piracy. DRM is about control. DRM gives remote parties the right to alter your data at any time for any reason without regard for the law.

Yahoopops.

Free software that runs a pop server at localhost and lets your mail client access Yahoo through pop3. Only downside is you have to either run it in the background all the time, or start it up every time you want to check Yahoo. I'm thinking of mangling it into a plugin for my mail client to make that automatic.

The reason people are still saying this is because of MySQL AB's attitude in the first place, i.e. "You don't need foreign keys, stored procedures, views, or any of that crap. All that's a waste of time; look at how fast our database is!" Then, all of a sudden, they get foreign keys in v3 -- not v1, not v2, but v3 FFS! -- and *only with InnoDB*, which wasn't even written by them (by Heikki Tuuri, I seem to recall) and was not included in the "standard" package so was never deployed by most ISPs and was therefore unavailable to most of their users. They then proclaimed that foreign keys are great, but that you still don't need rubbish like stored procedures or views.

Anyone with a clue about ACID databases would feel somewhat resentful that MySQL had called them an idiot for wanting proper referential integrity for their data, then turned around and pretended that they'd been saying the same thing all along. THAT is why people still bad-mouth MySQL, and I can't say that I entirely blame them. Things may have changed greatly since V3, though you say it's taken until v4.1.5 for foreign keys to become standard which is a bit shocking for a database that claims to share the same enterprise space as MS-SQL, Oracle & DB2, but the mud stuck a long time ago for most...

(Disclaimer: I use MySQL and think it's great for basic website backends and the like.)

I'm also quite surprised that no-one's mentioned Firebird:
http://firebird.sourceforge.net/

Based on the highly-stable code of Borland Interbase, Firebird "...is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL-99 features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names since 1981." It rocks. (end plug!)

People that are interested in POP3 access for yahoo should have at least a look into this:
http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/

As I understand it, Google's POP access is a very buggy feature.

I've never tried it with a PC email client, but having tried to get it to work on several mobile devices, including a Sony Ericsson S710a, Motorola Razr V3, and and Palm Treo 650, I can say that it doesn't work at all for them.

Apparently, this is a well-known and widespread problem with Gmail as well. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be a need for sites like gmailwireless or Sourceforge projects like gmail-mobile.

Don't get me wrong, I love Gmail so much I've abandoned all my other email accounts, but the POP access definitely needs some work.

Seriously, I only use Gmail as my email account but I use Yahoo's calendar and, I have been tempted to start using my account for emails.

here is The Register story, they add that paying customers will get 2 GB! (and also they extra family accounts), and it will now disinfect your attachments if they have viruses (it previously only scanned and warned you).

--
Comment checked with spellbound

Regards Adium, it uses libgaim, which also powers the Windows port of, er, Gaim. http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

You obviously don't understand the argument. This isn't about whether or not DRM is 'okay'. DRM is fundamentally flawed. It is impossible. You might as well be asking for reverse friction to propel your car instead of those evil fossil fuels.

Has it ever occurred to you that if you consider the entire industry and its artists creatively bankrupt that you don't have to patronize it in any way, shape, or form?

Yep. See iRate and CD Baby for more information.

After all, it's the commercial tripe that's on the iTunes Music Store anyway, right?

Wrong again. Meet Brad. Brad is an unsigned, open source musician. All his files are available for free download at his website. Not just the tunes, but source files too. You are encouraged by Brad to download his music and source to remix and share with friends in just about any fashion possible. Not only does Brad lack the RIAA's bad attitude, but Brad has talent. Brad's tunes are also available on iTunes for $0.99 each.

If it's so horrible, it seems that you shouldn't have any problems not using the iTunes Music Store, eh?

You'd rather downloaders go "steal" music rather than pay for the song? You aren't defending artists. You're defending RIAA policy.

As long as we're talking about Battletech, the game has a free, OSS implementation for the basic board rules in MegaMek , which is actually supported by the IP holders. They've even been nice enough to give us developers official rulings on some of the edge cases that nobody bothered to think of before (like firing a leg mounted SRM-2 from underwater at a dry target). Its not perfect, but it is a good deal of fun for fans of the board game. And a good way to waste a couple of hours if you want to join the development team.

There are quite a few regular expression tools available, with different capabilities and purposes. For the novice who doesn't want to learn more or doesn't have time, the best is probably txt2regex, which walks you through the construction of the regexp and generates output for 20 different programs and languages. It is one of the few tools that I know of that isn't specialized for a particular language or program. My own tool, Redet, provides an interface to 29 regular expression implementations. It is aimed at people who know something about regular expressions or are willing to spend some time learning but helps out by providing palettes showing the notation for each program and a history system, so that you can first construct the pieces of a complex regexp, then assemble them. It also has features aimed at providing a search environment that may be useful for people who need no help constructing their regular expressions.

regex-coach uses PERL-style regular expressions. Its particular virtue is that it can single-step through the match and show the parse tree, so it is useful if you want to understand the matching process in detail. Similar in that it helps to understand the implementation of regular expressions is re_graph, which given a regular expression draws the corresponding finite state automaton.

A couple of nice tools aimed at Python users are Kiki and Kodos.

These and some other tools and libraries are listed on this page.