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It bears mentioning that RAR was designed from the get-go to support the features mentioned, and has for what, seven years now?

RAR was not designed from the get-go to support Reed-Solomon repair. This was a feature added for 2.0 (released 1996). So, it has supported it for 8 years, but it was also back-ported.

You also don't need to use RAR to use the same file recovery mechanisms. Use PAR on ANY type of file to benefit from it!I'm not trying to trash 7-zip, but I'm also not going trying 7-zip when RAR has the track record it does for doing what it was designed to do.

7-zip does what it is designed to do as well: use an open source program to both create and extract archives with very high compression ratios.

7-Zip is a one-man project that needs help to add features
or at least manage its SourceForge support and RFE forums.

Drag-n-drop has been requested for almost 2 years and now,
some of its users are defecting to TUGZIP because of it.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=deta il&aid=663095&group_id=14481&atid=364481

Either the guy is too busy, doesn't care or just doesn't want to share control.

Maybe it's time to fork 7-zip?

Goneme was a project started in 2004 by someone who didn't like the placement of "accept" and "cancel" buttons and who spent countless hour trolling in osnews/slashdot. The only patch released is from July 2004, and it weights 24 KB. As it can be seen, the mailing list is full of everything except patches.

I only can define it as "dead project" - you really have to have something more than "button order preferences is wrong", "I hate windows registry" and "spatial nautilus is broken" to fork a project. Wow, "Mac OS X is better" - what a surprise. Tell me something I don't know. Not using gecko, use KHTML? Well...wow.

I'm not against forking projects, but this fork is ridiculous. No real reasons, real gnome problems are not mentioned, half of it can be solved by changing the default preferences and no code, etc etc

Goneme was a project started in 2004 by someone who didn't like the placement of "accept" and "cancel" buttons and who spent countless hour trolling in osnews/slashdot. The only patch released is from July 2004, and it weights 24 KB. As it can be seen, the mailing list is full of everything except patches.

I only can define it as "dead project" - you really have to have something more than "button order preferences is wrong", "I hate windows registry" and "spatial nautilus is broken" to fork a project. Wow, "Mac OS X is better" - what a surprise. Tell me something I don't know. Not using gecko, use KHTML? Well...wow.

I'm not against forking projects, but this fork is ridiculous. No real reasons, real gnome problems are not mentioned, half of it can be solved by changing the default preferences and no code, etc etc

I'm surprised nobody mentioned that Bram changed the license, and no longer supports CVS on SourceForge (apparently he's using a private Codeville server). The license was MIT, but is now "BitTorrent Open Source License".

The new license looks more restrictive as it's GPL-ish.

Recent examples include things like displaytag library, Hibernate and HTML Area.

Of course, this means I must take a wide berth around GPL'd code, but there is enough stuff under BSD/Apache/whatever to get the job done.

7zip? Unmature? It is perfectly usable. I finally deleted my licensed copy of Winzip because 7zip does its work better. 'nuff said.

Plus, how would a 3D video card improve 2D performance?

Fixed links:

http://66.42.197.91/FromPearPC.gif

http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/screenshots/osx_inst all.png

lzip, of course http://sourceforge.net/projects/lzip/

A few minutes of hex searching revealed that Arben was not diligent enough in removing the embedded images from PearPC's code. In CherryOS.exe, at address hex 0xF9140, you'll find a PearPC gif (see attached link) that is the ChangeCD image used in PearPC (in the stable build I have, at address 0xA6330) (see second attached link). Any questions?

http://66.42.197.91/FromPearPC.gif/

http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/screenshots/osx_inst all.png/

While it doesn't include much in the way of a client, there is another C++ based library called - um - libtorrent (as opposed to LibTorrent mentioned above - note the caps) released under the BSD license. It doesn't really include a client (just a 'demo' CLI client that shows how to use the lib), but this is slashdot and we should all be able to write our own clients using other peoples' libraries, right?

When I started writing my OS X client (Shameless plug: Hurricane. Early beta.) I shopped around for BT libraries and found libtorrent to be better documented than LibTorrent (Sheesh - could that naming issue be any more confusing?). Also, the developer community seems very receptive and active - always a good thing!

Cool Features? Sure! It runs all torrents over a single port in a background thread, offers configuration and stats for damned near everything BT can do, 'fast resume' data for quickly restarting a download and various other niceties.

And great documentation - a rarity for an OSS project ;)

To give you one tiny example, several months ago I was working on a rewrite of the floating point library for the SDCC C Complier. Yeah, I'm a small-time free software developer, and in that project you can find code I've contributed (mostly in the libraries).

I started working on the trig functions. There's a method called CORDIC (the alternate approach is polynomial approximation). Sine, Cosine and Arctangent are pretty documented for the CORDIC method. For Arcsine and Arccosine, not so easy. The widely published methods work, but they're not very accurate over the whole range needed.

Turns out, there's one paper in an old IEEE journal with a modification to the standard CORDIC algorithm which makes it accurate for these functions over the entire 0 to 1 input range. I searched for days, and found lots of brief mentions of this paper, and lots and lots of descriptions of only sine, cosine and arctangent with only brief hints that it's possible to apply CORDIC to the others.

I wasn't willing to pay about $80 to download the paper, and not $250... this was just a little side project to improve the float library for that compiler for a particular architecture (coding it in assembly).

Fortunately, one of the other developers was an IEEE member and had access to the paper. After a couple days of fiddling, I figured out the matrix multiply embedded in the equation (funny how those papers hide the messy details like that), and I wrote some C code as a prototype for the algorithm.

I did end up committing lots and lots of float library code to the project.... assembly optimized versions of all the basic operations, conversions and comparisons, and natual log and e^x. Someday I'll probably get back into those trig functions... but the CORDIC code isn't a big win anymore, now that the basic operations and heavily optimized and are used by the old polynomial approx code.

So, in this one little case, there was no way I was going to shell out lots of real dollars for access to an old IEEE published paper for that algorithm. It was old, published many years ago. Having it on-line for free download probably wouldn't cost IEEE anything in lost sales of recently journals.

But not having access to the information would have cost me and the SDCC project access to the algorithm, which someday (when I get the time to get back into the project) may get coded nicely into the library and benefit all sorts of people who may use the compiler and need those two trig functions. Especially on such small chips, assembly optimized libraries are a big deal and end up saving precious bytes of ram and code space. CPU speed is also improved... but not a giant win over the polynomial approach built on top of assembly optimized basic functions.

I might use dtach for that.

It doesn't directly address relative compression ratios nor benchmarks. And it's mostly about the formats themselves, not the libraries that implement them. But it's still good for a birds-eye view, I think.

[1] http://darbinding.sourceforge.net/about_dar.php (The chart is at the bottom of the page.)

Linux on the desktop is getting real long in the tooth for me. I'm trying real hard not to boot Windows but I keep doing it day after day even though I'm wasting all of my free time trying to assemble some usable "free desktop".

I'm finding quite the opposite. I have 3 machines with 3 monitors all sharing the same keyboard and mouse using Synergy (which is a really a great piece of software). I can mouse over to any machine and use it with ease. The machine that I spend all my time in is Debian Linux. The Windows machine is almost always off (except when I want to write a quick test app in VS.Net) and the OS X machine basically just runs iTunes (though its no Winamp 5) and I occasionally use it to web browse when I need the extra screen real estate.

Granted I spend a lot of my time writing software and tinkering around doing things that a UNIX-like OS is best for. I guess for me, I've had a usable desktop in Linux for quite some time now, so it just feels natural and I don't have to spend time anymore to get things working. OS X is a new toy for me, and will probably get more attention at some point, but for the kinds of things I do I am just more efficient in Linux. OS X is UNIX, but the UNIX tools are lacking. For example, the Fink tools and repository just don't even come close to the quality found in Debian (unstable at that). I have yet to find a decent terminal app. Don't run OS X because its UNIX, run it because you want to run native OS X apps (which is where OS X really shines).

I have found that the best way to go if you're even semi-serious about BT is to just dedicate a machine to it (I'm using an old 400Mhz Celeron). RAID a few good sized drives and install BNR if you have a decent usenet feed. Use VNC and run it headless.

This post brought to you by the letters TLA.

Speaking of new features in Azureus. If you install the latest version from CVS, http://azureus.sourceforge.net/index_CVS.php, you will notice a few things, one being "decentralized tracking"...

Azureus updates itself using a torrent.

...just sayin'.

I don't know if it fits your definition of high quality, but there is CTorrent, a console client written in C. You can check it at http://ctorrent.sourceforge.net/

Full code is in the CVS, nice GUI, you can either /home, /home and configs or everything back to the LiveCD. Save Incremental changes or full changes. CD-Persistent allows the use of a CD-r or even a better CD-RW. For further details see the HowTo with screenshots. (Disclaimer - I am the main developer for this module)

I was just discussing this earlier about whether Knoppix could do just that..

Morphix a modular based which basically takes away the hard work of re-mastering a Knoppix CD The base, the part based upon Knoppix contains the kernel, kernel modules, hardware detection, etc. This base is left untouched. You can either a change a mainmod or add lots of minimodules to make different liveCDs

I submitted a note on the Knoppix mailing list, in May 2004 offering to add this code/feature to Knoppix, but did not get much feedback.

I feel I was the first to have a liveCD save data back to its own CD - all code GPL'ed, buy hey that development, he who shouts the loudest.

I find it tragic that noone has released a high quality POSIX C client.

I use CTorrent, a console torrent client in plain C. Feature is a bit limited, but it works and has relatively small footprint.

Jgrasp

Source-navigator

Jedit

On OS X, I'll stick to Azureus. It's had all these "new" features for months now, possibly years, plus many others. And it's a pretty active project, too, so I guess they'll be up-to-date in a few days, if it need be.

For one, the ability to set per-file settings without having to run multiple instances was a major advantage some time ago. According to some comments here, it still is, at least over the "official" client.

Use the Java VM >=1.5 to keep CPU usage from going through the roof though :)

Azureus runs just fine on OS X as an Aqua application. It's probably the best OS X BitTorrent out there.

has had a far better interface and featureset for years.

If you're that crazy about about a lightweight desktop, you should probably be aiming for Encompass.

"...used as a very lightweight browser on desktop?"

Uhm, sure. Except it has already been done.

I suggest you check out K-Meleon.

If you are using Java, I would like to recommend Cruise Control for automated, continuous builds. We use it at work and decided on it after looking at Mozilla's Tinderbox and some other similar tools.

Umm, not hoping to get any free publicity... honest, but there is a Latex plugin for Eclipse called Ecletex http://sourceforge.net/projects/etex The current version (0.0.4) is a bit shakey, but the cvs is upto date and much more stable. Okay advert over.

Oh and its more "Lazy Coward" than "Anonymous Coward"

Anjuta is also nice.

Yeah. It would be easier to encrypt a loopback volume, but that would involve writing a new volume whenver data changed, right?

Sounds like a job for FUSE.

I think it would be easier just to have a live cd used for putting OS data, and a USB pen drive for personal data. That way you could have /home mounted from that drive no matter what live distro you were using.

I haven't found a good C++ unit testing framework yet. If you find one, please let me know.

Well, since you recommend jUnit, why not use CppUnit ?

Not often, but sometimes. I try to keep the same style if possible. Engineers seem especially bad about writing cryptic, compressed, broken code.

Artistic Style (astyle) is what I use to reformat code.

There is cppunit for C++, I haven't tried it though so I can't say how good it is.

I have used CPPUnit with VS .NET and found it to be difficult to get working. I found it easier just write my own basic testing framework and have it write the results to a text file or the console rather than bother with trying to get CPPUnit to work. The only thing I lost by doing it this way was the fancy GUI interface that displays the results.

You might want to check out http://easyunit.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=exa mple&lang=en. From the example it looks much easier to integrate into a current project.

As a PHP/Perl/JavaScript/HTML developer, here are some of the things I think I do well:

• I use liberal comments in most of my projects. I always try to use /* and */ to make multiline comments that are easy to quickly add to without worrying about a lot of pretty formatting.
• I have recently started to play with PHPDoc to create self-documenting code.
• When creating any character(s) implying "open" I immediately create the "closed" character(s) too. For example, I type "if () { }" and then fill it in. As I write this, my LI tags are all already typed, I am just filling in text now.
• I use text editors with syntax highlighting, such as HTML-Kit -- no drag & drop GUIs.
• I use tools like WinMerge, Subversion (only a little, not so good at it) and ReplaceEm to maintain large codebases.

Where I fail at coding:

• I know OOP, but it isn't natural for me, so I'm still a procedural boy, even when Object-Oriented Programming might help.
• I have no idea what vectors and matrixes are.
• I'm self-taught, my schooling is as an English major. So I have absolutely no Computer Science education behind what I do. While I try to do well, my solution to a deep and complicated problem is going to be basic compared to a guy who spent years of his life learning algorithms.

Speaking of which, I was recently browsing sourceforge, and happened to notice this project which MUST be a good one since its home page has an error screen:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare fecha2mysql() in /home/groups/c/cp/cphp/htdocs/funciones.php on line 4

Not to mention they misspelled 'functions'!
This project can be found here, and there homepage here.
Oh yeah, if you happen to be reading this, agustindondo, no offense intended :)

Speaking of which, I was recently browsing sourceforge, and happened to notice this project which MUST be a good one since its home page has an error screen:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare fecha2mysql() in /home/groups/c/cp/cphp/htdocs/funciones.php on line 4

Not to mention they misspelled 'functions'!
This project can be found here, and there homepage here.
Oh yeah, if you happen to be reading this, agustindondo, no offense intended :)

Speaking of which, I was recently browsing sourceforge, and happened to notice this project which MUST be a good one since its home page has an error screen:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare fecha2mysql() in /home/groups/c/cp/cphp/htdocs/funciones.php on line 4

Not to mention they misspelled 'functions'!
This project can be found here, and there homepage here.
Oh yeah, if you happen to be reading this, agustindondo, no offense intended :)

The copy/paste bindings work in the Apple terminal, however that is nominally a Quartz app (although it interfaces with X). I don't recall whether or not they work in the actual xterm app, because I typically use the Apple terminal. I can't speak directly on Emacs, because I've long since given up on it in favor of jEdit (on all of the platforms I use). However, after some brief googling, I found this, which seems to imply that while it is possible to copy/paste between Aqua and Emacs you end up using the keybindings specific to the software that you are dealing with. Hardly surprising I suppose, since they come from fundamentally different interface paradigms. I gather that it is possible to remap the Emacs keybindings to conform to the Apple standards (I've seen at least one .emacs file out there to do just that), in which case you would presumably be able to work seamlessly with Emacs. But why bother when there's jEdit ;)

Nobody's mentioned Jikes yet. It's an open source (CPL) java compiler from IBM. It's written in C and is significantly faster than javac which runs in the vm.

If you want your java code to run on the vm, jikes may be a good idea. If you want native java code, then there's also gcj .

*** Disclaimer : I'm one of the founder of Jamendo ***

Reading this /. thread, sorry about this, I can't resist explaining what we're doing here in Luxembourg.

We started jamendo beginning of 2005. The aim of Jamendo is to help artists use P2P technologies and particulary BitTorrent to get to a larger audience. We combine Creative Commons Licence with BitTorrent to have artists publish their work, and promote a legal use of BitTorrent or eMule or Shareaza or ...

Thanks to our jamloader , artists put their demo CD in their PC/Mac/Linux and automagically their work get published as a torrent on jamendo and accessible with eMule. The software rips the CD to FLAC, ask to choose one of the 6 creative commons licenses and uploads the datas to our servers. On our servers we do the rip in other various formats, Ogg, MP3, AAC, and do the creative commons watermarking. We also do some kind of community moderation, in order to avoid the ones that upload the latest Britney Spears or the ones that upload the latest neo-nazy band. Bands have to link back to our website from their official website as a control ( see godon for exemple )

Finally we use iRate as our core technology to do the rating of the music, and do intelligent propositions to our audience. Our XMLRPC-iRate server ( http://irate.jamendo.com/ ) supports the latest features of the iRate protocol but today, there's not enough client software, but we have the project to write our jamplayer that will combine iRate and BitTorrent and foxytunes.

What about the money ? Our business model differs from the one of magnatune for instance ( I quote magnatune because John Buckman made a very nice and cool entry in his blog, thanks again to him). We have a more ad-centric model were the service is free for the artists, is free for the audience, but the web pages are ad supported (no popup), the streamed music may be ad-supported up to 1 audio ad every 3 songs, the published archive in P2P networks are high quality archives with no ads. The idea is : bandwidth heavy is ad-supported, bandwidth friendly (i.e. BitTorrent) is ad-free ! We are not a label but rather a "community driven music hosting company" , we allow the bands to put their paypal button to receive donation on their jamendo page, jamendo takes no margin.

Sorry again /. crowd to present our project in this thread, but I really felt it was on topic ! So if you want to listen to indy music coming from Luxembourg, Belgium and North of France point your favorite BitTorrent client to jamendo.

Laurent.

*** Disclaimer : I'm one of the founder of Jamendo ***

Reading this /. thread, sorry about this, I can't resist explaining what we're doing here in Luxembourg.

We started jamendo beginning of 2005. The aim of Jamendo is to help artists use P2P technologies and particulary BitTorrent to get to a larger audience. We combine Creative Commons Licence with BitTorrent to have artists publish their work, and promote a legal use of BitTorrent or eMule or Shareaza or ...

Thanks to our jamloader , artists put their demo CD in their PC/Mac/Linux and automagically their work get published as a torrent on jamendo and accessible with eMule. The software rips the CD to FLAC, ask to choose one of the 6 creative commons licenses and uploads the datas to our servers. On our servers we do the rip in other various formats, Ogg, MP3, AAC, and do the creative commons watermarking. We also do some kind of community moderation, in order to avoid the ones that upload the latest Britney Spears or the ones that upload the latest neo-nazy band. Bands have to link back to our website from their official website as a control ( see godon for exemple )

Finally we use iRate as our core technology to do the rating of the music, and do intelligent propositions to our audience. Our XMLRPC-iRate server ( http://irate.jamendo.com/ ) supports the latest features of the iRate protocol but today, there's not enough client software, but we have the project to write our jamplayer that will combine iRate and BitTorrent and foxytunes.

What about the money ? Our business model differs from the one of magnatune for instance ( I quote magnatune because John Buckman made a very nice and cool entry in his blog, thanks again to him). We have a more ad-centric model were the service is free for the artists, is free for the audience, but the web pages are ad supported (no popup), the streamed music may be ad-supported up to 1 audio ad every 3 songs, the published archive in P2P networks are high quality archives with no ads. The idea is : bandwidth heavy is ad-supported, bandwidth friendly (i.e. BitTorrent) is ad-free ! We are not a label but rather a "community driven music hosting company" , we allow the bands to put their paypal button to receive donation on their jamendo page, jamendo takes no margin.

Sorry again /. crowd to present our project in this thread, but I really felt it was on topic ! So if you want to listen to indy music coming from Luxembourg, Belgium and North of France point your favorite BitTorrent client to jamendo.

Laurent.

Well, cheap+reliable == linux + softraid + Enhanced Network Block Device + Enterprise Volume Management System (or LVM2). It is often faster than non-hw-raid (fake-hw controllers.

The anti-Mentifex snobbery is a prime example of what is wrong with Wikipedia -- self-appointed experts fawning over the AI Establishment and arrogantly dissing independent scholars, who make their own serious contributions but who are not part of the attention-demanding priesthood of artificial intelligence.

AI has been solved -- but the vicious holier-than-thou Wikipaedophiles try to chase away all news of the slumbering, still awakening, solution to artificial intelligence.

AI algorithms are now freely available on the 'Net, memetically spreading the news that AI has been solved, in spite of the head-in-the-sand ostriches that infest Wikipedia -- the ha-ha free-for-all encyclpedia. Now watch the same manner of nattering nabobs come in and insult any open-source AI software developer who dares to throw out the exceptional but true claim that AI has been solved.

Theory, not software, is where AI has been solved. People should not use the primitive nature of the AI Mind software to debunk or dismiss the sincere claim that AI -- in theory -- has indeed been solved. Now, would a-n-y-b-o-d-y like to write a non-partisan, fair-minded Mentifex AI article on Wikipedia, or is that goal totally impossible?

The anti-Mentifex snobbery is a prime example of what is wrong with Wikipedia -- self-appointed experts fawning over the AI Establishment and arrogantly dissing independent scholars, who make their own serious contributions but who are not part of the attention-demanding priesthood of artificial intelligence.

AI has been solved -- but the vicious holier-than-thou Wikipaedophiles try to chase away all news of the slumbering, still awakening, solution to artificial intelligence.

AI algorithms are now freely available on the 'Net, memetically spreading the news that AI has been solved, in spite of the head-in-the-sand ostriches that infest Wikipedia -- the ha-ha free-for-all encyclpedia. Now watch the same manner of nattering nabobs come in and insult any open-source AI software developer who dares to throw out the exceptional but true claim that AI has been solved.

Theory, not software, is where AI has been solved. People should not use the primitive nature of the AI Mind software to debunk or dismiss the sincere claim that AI -- in theory -- has indeed been solved. Now, would a-n-y-b-o-d-y like to write a non-partisan, fair-minded Mentifex AI article on Wikipedia, or is that goal totally impossible?

The anti-Mentifex snobbery is a prime example of what is wrong with Wikipedia -- self-appointed experts fawning over the AI Establishment and arrogantly dissing independent scholars, who make their own serious contributions but who are not part of the attention-demanding priesthood of artificial intelligence.

AI has been solved -- but the vicious holier-than-thou Wikipaedophiles try to chase away all news of the slumbering, still awakening, solution to artificial intelligence.

AI algorithms are now freely available on the 'Net, memetically spreading the news that AI has been solved, in spite of the head-in-the-sand ostriches that infest Wikipedia -- the ha-ha free-for-all encyclpedia. Now watch the same manner of nattering nabobs come in and insult any open-source AI software developer who dares to throw out the exceptional but true claim that AI has been solved.

Theory, not software, is where AI has been solved. People should not use the primitive nature of the AI Mind software to debunk or dismiss the sincere claim that AI -- in theory -- has indeed been solved. Now, would a-n-y-b-o-d-y like to write a non-partisan, fair-minded Mentifex AI article on Wikipedia, or is that goal totally impossible?

The anti-Mentifex snobbery is a prime example of what is wrong with Wikipedia -- self-appointed experts fawning over the AI Establishment and arrogantly dissing independent scholars, who make their own serious contributions but who are not part of the attention-demanding priesthood of artificial intelligence.

AI has been solved -- but the vicious holier-than-thou Wikipaedophiles try to chase away all news of the slumbering, still awakening, solution to artificial intelligence.

AI algorithms are now freely available on the 'Net, memetically spreading the news that AI has been solved, in spite of the head-in-the-sand ostriches that infest Wikipedia -- the ha-ha free-for-all encyclpedia. Now watch the same manner of nattering nabobs come in and insult any open-source AI software developer who dares to throw out the exceptional but true claim that AI has been solved.

Theory, not software, is where AI has been solved. People should not use the primitive nature of the AI Mind software to debunk or dismiss the sincere claim that AI -- in theory -- has indeed been solved. Now, would a-n-y-b-o-d-y like to write a non-partisan, fair-minded Mentifex AI article on Wikipedia, or is that goal totally impossible?

I t certainly will not apply to the casual seller on eBay

Vega Strike http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/ has made a big step ahead artwork-wise in its recent 0.4.3 release.

Day Of Defeat (reportedly) started as a free mod, before it was bought by Valve. There are still fans who make their own custom maps and release them for free.

So things are difficult but not hopeless.