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To be fair to python, you can get a lot of stuff onscreen at excellent framerates, but you do have to be careful how you do it. Extensive use of vertex arrays, or at least display lists is essential, but to be honest that's the kind of thing you'd really want to be doing with C/C++ anyway, it's just that it hurts even more if you don't do it in python.

One of the other replies mentions pysco, but to be honest I think that pyrex would be more useful, as it for most intents and purposes allows you to compile sections of speed-critical python code in C.

NTLM authentication works fine in recent versions of Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko, even on non-Windows platforms.

Well, for me it doesn't (Firefox/Linux). But i found that aps (NTLM Authorization Proxy Server) works perfectly. Just edit the configuration file so that it matches your u/p/domain, run the (python) script and point your browser to the ip/port it opens.

GIANT Software makes a product called Spam Inspector, and up until about 6 months ago, it was one of the best anti-spam products for Outlook. Then they started to demand yearly fees to use the program (when they originally sold it as a one-time payment.)

So yeah, I ditched the program and found Spambayes, and I haven't had a complaint. I'm bummed I wasted money on SpamInspector, though.

Always google before posting.

If it's the IAS proxy that requires NTML authentication, you can always pipe requests through this python rewriting proxy.

GAIM already offers two encryption plugins. It's cool to see another implementation being created.

gaim encryption uses RSA. There's also gaim-e which uses GPG.

I've used gaim encryption and it works very well. It requires the plugin to be installed on both ends but once that's done, it autodetects that both ends support it and enables encryption.

Oh, there's a binary available for windows and both source and packages for linux.
And, it's in portage!
emerge gaim-encryption

GAIM already offers two encryption plugins. It's cool to see another implementation being created.

gaim encryption uses RSA. There's also gaim-e which uses GPG.

I've used gaim encryption and it works very well. It requires the plugin to be installed on both ends but once that's done, it autodetects that both ends support it and enables encryption.

Oh, there's a binary available for windows and both source and packages for linux.
And, it's in portage!
emerge gaim-encryption

Actually, I like Xine better than any windows media player. Set it up right and you'll never need to download a codec again.

And you forgot to mention P2P (especially for youths). I think MLDonkey and Sancho do the job.

Cscope is a developer's tool for browsing source code. It has an impeccable Unix pedigree, having been originally developed at Bell Labs back in the days of the PDP-11. Cscope was part of the official AT&T Unix distribution for many years, and has been used to manage projects involving 20 million lines of code!

In April, 2000, thanks to the Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (SCO) (since merged with Caldera), the code for Cscope was open sourced under the BSD license.

• Allows searching code for:
• all references to a symbol
• global definitions
• functions called by a function
• functions calling a function
• text string
• regular expression pattern
• a file
• files including a file

Curses based (text screen) An information database is generated for faster searches and later reference The fuzzy parser supports C, but is flexible enough to be useful for C++ and Java, and for use as a generalized 'grep database' (use it to browse large text documents!) Has a command line mode for inclusion in scripts or as a backend to a GUI/frontend Runs on all flavors of Unix, plus most monopoly-controlled operating systems.

From the Split (a modern version of Lint) web site:

Splint[1] is a tool for statically checking C programs for security vulnerabilities and programming mistakes. Splint does many of the traditional lint checks including unused declarations, type inconsistencies, use before definition, unreachable code, ignored return values, execution paths with no return, likely infinite loops, and fall through cases. More powerful checks are made possible by additional information given in source code annotations. Annotations are stylized comments that document assumptions about functions, variables, parameters and types. In addition to the checks specifically enabled by annotations, many of the traditional lint checks are improved by exploiting this additional information.

As more effort is put into annotating programs, better checking results. A representational effort-benefit curve for using Splint is shown in Figure 1. Splint is designed to be flexible and allow programmers to select appropriate points on the effort-benefit curve for particular projects. As different checks are turned on and more information is given in code annotations the number of bugs that can be detected increases dramatically.

Problems detected by Splint include:

• Dereferencing a possibly null pointer (Section 2);
• Using possibly undefined storage or returning storage that is not properly defined (Section 3);
• Type mismatches, with greater precision and flexibility than provided by C compilers (Section 4.1-4.2);
• Violations of information hiding (Section 4.3);
• Memory management errors including uses of dangling references and memory leaks (Section 5);
• Dangerous aliasing (Section 6);
• Modifications and global variable uses that are inconsistent with specified interfaces (Section 7);
• Problematic control flow such as likely infinite loops (Section 8.3.1), fall through cases or incomplete switches (Section 8.3.2), and suspicious statements (Section 8.4);
• Buffer overflow vulnerabilities (Section 9);
• Dangerous macro implementations or invocations (Section 11); and
• Violations of customized naming conventions. (Section 12).

"What I would like to see is some kind of encrypted, p2p, email/IM replacement that doesn't rely on centralized servers"

Well why not go looking for them then, rather than writing it on slashdot. Many exist. Even something like InvisibleNet's IIP (invisible IRC proxy) would do lots of what you want, Konspire2B would do more, there are more encrypted P2P and chat tools than you can shake a stick at, plus protocols that offer what you want with many different clients. Or go all the way and try GNUNet (replacement for freenet) and such like.

People are always posting "oh if only there was a distributed deniable torrented video blogging system with a pseudononymous web-of-trust" or something, yet I never see you on my Konspire2B client. Just download the damn things and see what they do, some of the apps are really quite cool.

Does anything like this exist?

Yes. Sort of.

http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/
http://www.security-forums.com/forum/viewtopic.php ?t=24577

So did I, and I just found my old copy and got it to run inside DosBox http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/. It takes a lot of grunt to run it under and emulator, but it's still addictive, I've found I still remember all the shortcuts and cut scenes, but I'm playing everynight anyways. I'd love to find the collectors edition, but they seem to be nearly impossible to get a hold of.

Sorry, but that's contrary to my experience. Their L&F may look nice, but it doesn't work the same as Swing's default Metal L&F. As proof, here's a problem I encountered when working on a project of my own.

You'd do better to install SciTE, the Scintilla based Text Editor. Much better for editing standard text, and also very nice for editing code (not that your brother will ever care)...

.. .. .. ..
Kramware's mixSense, powerful software for digital DJ's...

It looks as though someone's having a go at porting Compiere to MySQL here. I haven't tried running what they've produced so far, though.

-Mark.

Contrary to napsters central servers, you can use any tracker host you can find or setup yourself.

Back in the later days of pirate-Napster, here was an OpenNap server as well. WinMX started out as a pirate-Napster clone for searching multiple OpenNap servers until it grew its own network.

Any of us Mac geeks here could go on for hours responding to your post (and undoubtedly somebody's writing up a 6,000 word post as I type this), but I'll answer it this way:

I'm an old school Mac user (print shop graphics since '88) and when OS X hit the scene, I was really looking forward to living my life at the command line, becoming an über hacker, since all my years of troubleshooting skills would need to be relearned. Only problem is, there's nothing to do.

Sure, in the early days (10.0.4) I was using unsupported machines (603 and 604e clones with G3 upgrades) so some trickery (thank you, Ryan Rempel!) was required to get it to install. But once installed (and I've since moved to a G4 tower), there's just nothing to do. It really is true: everything Just Works(TM), which in my case, has been something of a disappointment.

I've seen one kernel panic in the past two years, and that happened at the end of the install process for one of the 10.3 point upgrades. The machine booted fine after that, so I don't even really count it. I spend at least as much time using XP at work as I do using this thing at home, and even though my well specced office PC has ~5 times the clock speed, my Mac is *much* harder to bog down or destabilize.

Also, OpenOffice has been surprisingly good since I started using it recently. In addition to that, I recommend two additional apps for a new Mac user: A $25 app called Little Snitch for more fine grained control over IPFW, and a freeware app called Desktop Manager that gives you a totally freaking awesome virtual desktop implementation with mind bending eye candy.

In a way, it was actually easier ten years ago to convince people... all you had to do was point out that Macs cost four times as much, but we still bought 'em. Now that they're comparably priced, that argument doesn't work anymore. Ain't that a bitch? Well, no. Otherwise I'd still be using my old dual 604e tower.

Have you never heard of PearPC which emulates a PowerPC Macintosh under Linux, Windows and a few other assorted platforms?

The better approach is to create one or more large files of random data and feed that into the apps; this is better because it gives you a reproducible stream. (Or you can use a Perl script with a known srand() seed.)

The term "fuzz testing" comes from a seminal 1990 paper (and followups in 1995 and 2000) by Barton Miller et al., who, incidentally, found much higher quality in GNU tools than in their proprietary counterparts. Before my tendinitis got too bad, I used to run The Bulletproof Penguin a one-man project devoted to stamping out such bugs (my initial goal, easily achieved, was to eliminate all the bugs reported in the original paper). Ben Woodard was doing something very similar for a while, but I don't know whether he still does.

Incidentally, this makes a certain recent Slashdot story more embarrassing: it seems that free Web browsers crash on malformed input, the kind of case that free software normally handles better than its proprietary competition.

... you can compile the firmware under Linux. Right now, you need to use the TI-provided Windows-based compiler (and you have to register to get it); but wouldn't it be great if someone figured out how to get gcc to compile for the TI DSP chip in the Neuros?

• http://ostermiller.org/utils/com.Ostermiller.util Java Utilities - nice CSV tools among others
• http://protomatter.sourceforge.net/Protomatter - misc tools - object pools etc. (I know, I am lazy)
• http://jedit.org/ JEdit - lightweight, with tons of plugins highly customizable Java IDE/Editor (for those who find the great Eclipse too heavy)
• http://jetty.mortbay.org/jetty/ Great 100% Java Web Server / Servlet /JSP Container with JMX etc. etc.
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/quartzEnterprise Job Scheduler
• http://mandarax.sourceforge.net/Great open source java class library for deduction rules
• http://alphaworks.ibm.com/Alphaworks as a whole are full of java goodies
• http://eclipse.org/aspectj/Did you ***** up your design ? Your project is a zombie that should be trashed and rewritten ages ago ? Aspects will save your day ;)

• http://ostermiller.org/utils/com.Ostermiller.util Java Utilities - nice CSV tools among others
• http://protomatter.sourceforge.net/Protomatter - misc tools - object pools etc. (I know, I am lazy)
• http://jedit.org/ JEdit - lightweight, with tons of plugins highly customizable Java IDE/Editor (for those who find the great Eclipse too heavy)
• http://jetty.mortbay.org/jetty/ Great 100% Java Web Server / Servlet /JSP Container with JMX etc. etc.
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/quartzEnterprise Job Scheduler
• http://mandarax.sourceforge.net/Great open source java class library for deduction rules
• http://alphaworks.ibm.com/Alphaworks as a whole are full of java goodies
• http://eclipse.org/aspectj/Did you ***** up your design ? Your project is a zombie that should be trashed and rewritten ages ago ? Aspects will save your day ;)

• http://ostermiller.org/utils/com.Ostermiller.util Java Utilities - nice CSV tools among others
• http://protomatter.sourceforge.net/Protomatter - misc tools - object pools etc. (I know, I am lazy)
• http://jedit.org/ JEdit - lightweight, with tons of plugins highly customizable Java IDE/Editor (for those who find the great Eclipse too heavy)
• http://jetty.mortbay.org/jetty/ Great 100% Java Web Server / Servlet /JSP Container with JMX etc. etc.
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/quartzEnterprise Job Scheduler
• http://mandarax.sourceforge.net/Great open source java class library for deduction rules
• http://alphaworks.ibm.com/Alphaworks as a whole are full of java goodies
• http://eclipse.org/aspectj/Did you ***** up your design ? Your project is a zombie that should be trashed and rewritten ages ago ? Aspects will save your day ;)

I don't know why this didn't get modded up the first time, but here's the mirror again: bootchart.sourceforge.net.

Last year my Yamaha DX7 music keyboard battery died. I didn't know it at the time but when the battery dies, all programmed sound patches and modes are erased, even the factory presets. No problem, I had made a backup years ago with DX Android on the Atari ST so I could just restore from those backups. I got the battery replaced but when I got the Atari ST out of the closet it would not boot. I guess I could have searched ebay for a replacement but instead I got the Atari ST emulator, STeem from http://www.atari.st/ and was able to restore the patches from the backups using it.

I have emulators for most of the computers I had previously owned. I still have the software, just would not have a way to play them anymore if it wasn't for emulators. Some of the ones I use besides the Atari ST that I had previously mentioned are:
Amiga http://www.winuae.net/
Atari 800 http://www.concentric.net/~Twist/atari800win/
DOS Games http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
Another Atari ST Emulator http://sourceforge.net/projects/winston/

Last year my Yamaha DX7 music keyboard battery died. I didn't know it at the time but when the battery dies, all programmed sound patches and modes are erased, even the factory presets. No problem, I had made a backup years ago with DX Android on the Atari ST so I could just restore from those backups. I got the battery replaced but when I got the Atari ST out of the closet it would not boot. I guess I could have searched ebay for a replacement but instead I got the Atari ST emulator, STeem from http://www.atari.st/ and was able to restore the patches from the backups using it.

I have emulators for most of the computers I had previously owned. I still have the software, just would not have a way to play them anymore if it wasn't for emulators. Some of the ones I use besides the Atari ST that I had previously mentioned are:
Amiga http://www.winuae.net/
Atari 800 http://www.concentric.net/~Twist/atari800win/
DOS Games http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
Another Atari ST Emulator http://sourceforge.net/projects/winston/

You are aware, are you not, that most hard disk failures occur at spinup? If you have a system that gets power-cycled once every month, and a system that gets power-cycled once every day, the first system will last longer. Thermal stress caused by power-cycling can cause hardware failures after a few years. Turn off the monitor or do "xset dpms force off"; the monitor draws more current than the computer. If the computer isn't doing anything for more than half a second, it should start executing HLT instructions, which cause the processor to draw less power than normal instructions.

Laptops have to be turned off really (and there are lots of laptops where hibernating doesn't work properly in linux).

Er... why do laptops have to be "turned off really"? My Thinkpad A22p can last for 2.5 days in APM suspend-to-RAM, and it resumes from that in under 10 seconds. Last time I power-cycled the laptop was over a month ago, and it's gone 3 months between power cycles.

If ACPI/APM suspend-to-disk doesn't work thanks to brain-damaged BIOSes, there's always swsusp, which takes slightly longer to restore than "normal" suspend-to-disk but requires no ACPI or APM support at all. I've never tried this because suspend-to-RAM is all I need, but YMMV.

I totally agree. A simple example: I wanted to test drive Mantis recently. What I did was download PHP Triad on my laptop, deploy Mantis and try. I know that if we end up using it, it will end up on a Solaris or Linux box but it would have been completely unrealistic for me to do the trial on one of those machines. I would have given it a miss if I had been limited to a *NIX platform. The same goes for FireFox and OpenOffice. If those applications where only available for *NIX, we would not use them because we just can't have everybody on Linux.

Here's the mirror:
bootchart.sourceforge.net

EH MIRROR
(even mirror dot failed at mirroring)

The Openperl IDE here is a pretty spiffy Perl IDE, although it is windows only.

"Windows Support" is only in reference to Neuro's own track synching software, NSM. That's their client tool that manages your medial library, copies tracks to the player for you and builds the on-board database that the player needs for playback. As a standard USB device it works fine with Linux, it only needs a third-party tool such as NDBM to build the required database on the player.

Check out the top sourceforge downloads for the week.

Of the top 10, 7 are file sharing apps commonly associated with illegal trading of movies. Then you have VirtualDub and CDex, for ripping DVDs and CDs respectively. Rounding out the top 10 is gaim.

Is it only a matter of time before the MPAA comes after Sourceforge?

And does anyone else find it depressing that trading copyrighted works seems to be by far the most popular use for open source software?

It's nice to hear from some other people that share my perspective on the state of current EDA offerings. I have used OrCAD and Protel (windoze) professionally, and have found OrCAD's bugs to be less annoying than those of Protel's recent offerings. I'm continually annoyed to find that bugs I reported to Protel *years* ago are still present in their software. I'm currently using Protel and curse it daily.

I've used various OrCAD versions since SDT, and while using 8&9 I was hassling them to toss the source for SDT (the core of which they told me they'd abandoned) into someplace like sourceforge. I, too, liked the interface of SDT (which I used in college) and found it very efficient.

I've looked at Eagle, PCB and gEDA, and also Lasagne (http://lasagne.sourceforge.net/). Lasagne looks like a *very* promising start, but I couldn't get it to compile and work on Linux/PPC so far. I do plan to email the developer to see if he'd like some help stamping out what look like wrong-endian-specific bugs. Eagle had some promise and recently added MacOS support, although I've never used it for any large jobs...

I agree with you completely on PCB's choice of units. WTF were they thinking? All new SMT components are defined in metric, not inches. gah. Eagle at least uses some resolution in microns (can't remember what, exactly, though) that made TSOP and TQFP footprint design relatively easy.

Go check out Lasagne, and note the units indicated in the screenshots :)

whee!
Mike

Exactly.

I 'discovered" open source apps for Windows just this past year. I "found" hundreds of them. Most of them were ports of GNU/BSD apps. Some were pure Windows from the beginning.

Then I found Cygwin. After playing with it for a bit I realized that it would be much simpler just to switch to Linux.....

So, I came back to Linux after 4 years "away".

So in my case open source on Windows brought the advantage of an open source platform to my attention - front and center.

I think there's room for everyone...

In a sense Linux (and the open source movement perhaps) is already loosing big time to Mac OS X. With fink, I can get a good amount of open source tools to run on my Mac, with no regard of the open source movement, etc.

Aaron J. Seigo summarizes his reasoning in his blog: 'If the applications people want are available on Windows, they will tend to stick with Windows...by porting software to Windows, we eliminate the majority of the competitive advantage of Free Software desktops in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of consumers while Microsoft has all the rope they need to shut the door once again on us

This is so utterly, utterly wrong I don't even know where to begin.

Look. When it comes to the average user, the challenge is not getting them to ditch Windows for Gentoo. It is getting them to accept open source as a concept. The average user out there has a mind that is freighted with misconceptions about OSS products:

• They are for geeks only
• They are hard to use
• They are lower quality than their commercial equivalents
• They are less secure than their commercial equivalents

... and on and on and on. People have a seriously hard time wrapping their brain around the notion that there is software out there for free that is better than the stuff they are paying for.

This is why OSS products on Windows are insanely important -- because they provide a gentle way for people to experiment with OSS and learn just how wrong those misconceptions are. When I set someone who just wants to create a few PDFs of Word documents up with PDFCreator, or show them how Firefox stops them from getting infested with spyware, these are steps that encourage them to not reject open source solutions out of hand, which many, many of them do right now.

Will all of these people end up as full fledged GNU/Linux users? Of course not. But a lot will. It just takes time. And even the ones that don't will be growing the user base of lots of other valuable projects -- and not doubting the local IT guy's sanity when he starts talking about dropping IIS on the company Web server for Apache.

Mine arrived last night. Used it in the car today and it worked great. My drive goes from Frederick, MD to Columbia,MD. Kept it on 107.1 the whole time.

Then I found this this. I'm going to try it when I get home.

I've used Ultr@VNC extensively from school (OC3) to home (cablemodem).

Even with my cablemodem's poor upload (45k/sec), it was very usable. If really you think "VNC sends bitmaps", then you're about 2 years behind.. VNC will fall back to bitmaps (JPEGs actually) only if the region of the screen won't compress better using any of it's other built-in compression algorithms (which work great most of the time).

Although I haven't had a chance to excercise it's features too much yet, it definitely has an 'open source' feel to it.. yes I'm stereotyping, but by that I mean that it does a ton of really cool things and is functional but seems to be lacking that last bit of polish. A third party syncing agent (ndbm) is preferable to the official one, third party firmware (GarBage) is preferable to the official one etc... In order to really get the most out of a Neuros you really have to have some of the hacker ethic.
That said, having open source firmware is great, the remaining polish could conceivably come from anywhere..

Although I haven't had a chance to excercise it's features too much yet, it definitely has an 'open source' feel to it.. yes I'm stereotyping, but by that I mean that it does a ton of really cool things and is functional but seems to be lacking that last bit of polish. A third party syncing agent (ndbm) is preferable to the official one, third party firmware (GarBage) is preferable to the official one etc... In order to really get the most out of a Neuros you really have to have some of the hacker ethic.
That said, having open source firmware is great, the remaining polish could conceivably come from anywhere..

Many of my favorites have already been mentioned: junit, jdom, xstream, log4j, and many things from Jakarta Commons.

The other things I use regularly are HttpUnit, a virtual web client and Prevayler, a simple Java persistence framework.

Don't forget xmlenc, an XML output library.

It's simple, fast and the memory footprint is negligible. It does not have the overhead of DOM-based solutions.

Hasn't anyone heard of Austrumi?

Most popular unix tools already have windows binaries available, like GNU utilities for Win32 - http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
It's a little outdated but you can easily find newer versions of particular tools you like, also with practical GUI if you'd like. http://www.lexique.org/undows/
Then there's VNC, Putty..

Oops, forgot the link that proves my point: PXES

Very addictive programming game

I was hooked for all of high school and two years of college. It's open source under the Mozilla Public License. It is Windows-only though, until someone decides to port it. There's also a Linux game inspired by RobotBattle called RealTimeBattle.

Reflection helper class

This class lets you do basically any reflection using one line of code (call a method, get/set a protected variable). It caches the Methods and Fields so repeated access is sometimes as little as 1/2 the speed of a statically defined method call. This should be in the JDK core.

When I was in elementary school in 1994, my father, a college professor, ran a series of afternoon computer workshops aimed at middle and high-school students.

I tagged along, and the experience ended hooking me on computing along with some of the older students.

My dad worked up simple versions of Eliza, Hangman, and Conway's Game of Life in QBasic.

Though I doubt you could excite someone with QBasic today whether or not they know anything about computers, certain aspects of the way we went over the programs and later modified them would probably hold true for students today.

1. Either create your own example software or know thoroughly the innards of whatever program or technique you're showcasing. Prepare in your mind the way you'll present the concepts you want to get across before-hand.
2. Start the kids off with modifying program variables. For me, this involved adding words that Eliza recognized and changing the color of cells in Life.
3. Provide the students with some media to store their creations on. Floppies are relatively durable and even in 2004 widespread.
4. Enjoy yourself! In my adulthood I've had opportunities to teach children. The experience can be mutually rewarding.
5. Time is critical; don't get boring. Take cues from the kids.
6. Provide food and/or candy :)

Basic or Visual Basic might still be the way to go for introducing programming. Maybe Gambas would be your bag. Results with these languages are immediate and basic programming concepts can be illustrated easily.

Since I was introduced to computers, the web and web programming have exploded. I'd be weary of teaching web-design or HTML, though. PHP or Perl web scripting would require knowledge of basic HTML, and I'm not convinced HTML is the way to introduce people to computing. Though "instantly gratifying", I tend to think that starting someone off with a formatting language wouldn't instill in them the awe of realizing what a computer can accomplish when instructed, and this realization is the one that hooked me.

You're confusing ReactOS with WinuxOS (rejected Slashdot story, complaint ignored by SourceForge administrators - note how they even ripped off our mission statement). ReactOS exists since 1997 and has been written from the ground up