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Doug Lea's Concurrency Utilities - If you haven't yet made the plunge to Java 5.0, this is indispensable for anything thread related.

Trove4J - High performance collections that work with primitives. We do wire-speed packet capture and flow analysis with this stuff. 'nuf said.

Yajul has all the the little things you normally have to write and test yourself.

It has lots of obvious classes that you'd almost expect in the JDK like TeeOutputStream, ByteCountingOutputStream, Cache, and StringUtil.

These guys are working on a linux based KVM-over-IP project with software and the hardware design being made available as open source. They have a Sourceforge project site too.

Ngspice is a vast improvement its predecessor in at least one important area: Ngspice is eminently hackable and fixable because it uses normal makefiles and GNU configure. (Try fixing Berkeley Spice for a real pain in the ass. It has the most asshole make system you have ever seen).

Xalan for XSLT and XPath processing. Here's a tip: Never, ever use SAX for XML parsing of application-specific data structures. SAX is a nice low-level interface for building upon, but unless you're programmatically emitting a document from scratch, it's painful to use -- you always end up writing a stack-based content handler to keep nesting state. XPath makes parsing a breeze.

JGroups (formerly JavaGroups) is a protocol stack for building reliable, fairly efficient network communications based on, among other things, multicast IP. The entire stack is user-defineable, so you can pick and choose the level of reliability and which features you want (TCP support, pinging, group membership management etc.).

Lucene is a text-indexing engine. It's actually pretty crap, and does not scale very far (we're talking a few seconds for result sets of only a few thousand documents), and the code is pure spaghetti (abstract base classes! Inheritance!), but if you need a little indexing engine or some decent text tokenization classes, and your performance requirements are modest, it works well enough.

SableCC is a good BNF-based parser generator that generates type-safe parse trees that can navigated at runtime. Unlike the more well-known JavaCC, it's easy to get started, not least because the BNF-like grammar is so simple.

... which, for me, it's a showstopper and forces me to use EAGLE (which is excellent and available for Windows and Linux, but not OSS). PCB seems to be powerful, but i simply cannot get accostumed to it's interface.

The rest of the package is quite good though, and i have to agree, they've come a long way in these six years. Kudos to the developers!

In no particular order...

Commons Logging. Yeah, you said you wanted to avoid extra libraries, but the overhead of commons logging is so incredibly small, and the extra libraries you'll want to otherwise use are going to require it anyway. It's a measly 28KB last I checked, and well worth it.

HttpClient If you want to do any form of HTTP transfers, avoid HttpUrlConnection (built in to Java) at all costs. The HttpUrlConnection code is broken in many ways (too many to list), so you'll need another library. HttpClient does a good job of hiding the HTTP transfer behind the scenes, and has easy ways of letting you extend/change what you need.

JGoodies Looks Swing is getting better every day, but for that extra polish, you'll want to use the JGoodies Looks library. It does a great job of making Metal look just that much better, and also helps out the Windows L&F in some places.

Xerces I'm not sure if the bulk of this is included in the latter versions of Java, but Xerces is definitely a must-have for any XML parsing.

Other goodies...

For rendevous (multicast DNS) support, use jmDNS. It just works.

If you need i18n handling (normalization, etc..), IBM's icu4j does a great job.

Check out AnonBT from the azureus page on sourceforge. http://azureus.sourceforge.net/doc/AnonBT/

I'm not crazy about using iTunes as a general-purpose media player, but it's very handy for streaming audio over a network with shared libraries.

You can use daap to share music without itunes. An excellent (very fast, faster than itunes) daap server is can be found here

And there are plenty of clients... you can even get gnome-vfs-daap and browse itunes music shares with nautilus (or anything that uses gnomevfs)

It would also be possible to run the application in DOSBox. This would allow them to keep their existing application and run it on newer hardware if/when the old hardware finally dies.

the most exciting one is making everything distributed. Everyone caches a bit of sites and only checks a timestamp when they get a query

Freenet uses a scheme similar to this. Content is inserted into the network with a unique cryptographic key (*nb). The data is inserted with a 'depth' parameter, specifying an approximate TTL value for the insertion directive. Hosts along the way cache the data and pass it to the next host until the TTL expires (hosts usually, but not always, decriment the TTL). When a query for a particular key comes through, many hosts can return bits of the file. The more popular the content, the more likely it is that many hosts will have a copy.

Of course, once content is inserted, its permanent, but there are schemes in place to handle superceding old issues.

Dowser provides local cache searching, as well as automatic keywording, cross engine searching, cache browsing by keyword, and probably other stuff that's not coming to mind right now.

There are one. It's called Spellbound though you have to open a separate window for it, you can't have it automaticly underline errors in the input box. If they fix that, I think we have the chance of seeing a great improvement of the spelling on the web. :)

Galeon

isn't a haven for malware, looks identical to how IE renders pages,

Right away, I can tell you that's not going to happen. IE's rendering engine is buggy, quirky, broken. Furthermore, the bugs, quirks, and breaks are often specific to each version of IE (5.0, 5.5, 0.0, 6.01, etc)

Therefore you're not going to get anything that renders "identical to IE" unless you embed IE's rendering engine itself. Which is obviously do-able, but there goes your "isn't a haven for malware" requirement. Either you live with IE's fucked-up "unique" rendering and malware facilitation, or you don't. You don't get to pick and choose. Sorry, that's the way IE is.

The only possible solution I see is to have some kind of constantly-updated web proxy that scans all web traffic and removes any known exploits or malware from the HTTP traffic before it reaches IE. Then perhaps you could have your broken IE rendering engine with "safety" from malware... but when you tack on the proxy server, there goes your "no bloat" requirement.

Are you understanding how IE (and its rendering engine) is simply a shitty, broken, answer yet...?

If you are willing to give up your insistance on IE's broken rendering engine, you have a couple of possibilties. One, you could try K-Meleon, a Windows-native Gecko-based browser that's "slimmer" for those of you without monster amounts of RAM.

Another option, if your primary objection to Firefox is the memory usage, is to give Firefox another shot and reduce the amount of pages it caches in RAM. It's still kind of high, but you can restrict it to around 30-40MB usage this way.

I don't really get your other objections to Firefox. Mouse gestures are an optional component, you don't have to use the tabbed windows or themes if you don't want to, and I'm baffled by your insistence on a browser with no bookmarks... it's not like browsers MAKE you use them, and why on Earth wouldn't you want them? You *like* typing in huge URLs?

The links provided are very slow... here are normal ones.

Scott Berkun
basic principles of web browser design
del.icio.us integration
unified tool
Open Text Summarizer

Alternately, DOSBox has gotten a lot better at running Privateer since 0.62 was released (current is 0.63). It went from really choppy and stuttery to playable at a frameskip of 3 on my P4 1.7 GHz machine. Since the game is designed to run at 20-30 fps, not much difference can be seen, especially since I played the game at slower framerates on a 386 originally.

You can try your vision with this Demo of Zoomworld. This system is part of The Humane Environment project.

For nice plots, there is an extra package:

Look at:
http://epstk.sourceforge.net/epstk/

Looks better than gnuplot

Try looking at the link, if you want a symbolic toolbox for octave..

Cheers

D.

p2pradio.sf.net accourding to the site:

P2P-Radio is a program that can distribute audio and video streams (MP3/Ogg Vorbis/NSV) over the Internet in a peer-to-peer manner. It's possible to create your own internet radio station with P2P-Radio!

P2P-Radio is programmed in Java and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and many other systems.

I'd really like to get a portable MP3 player for use at work, on airplanes, etc. But I just haven't seen anything that even meets my bare minimum requirements:

1) Must play Oggs
2) Must work with Linux
3) Must be durable and reliable
4) Must have at least 20GB

Ideally, I'd like to have a player that has the following features:

5) Can upgrade hard drive to larger capacity, using a standard (laptop probably) hard drive, not an overpriced special-order one from the manufacturer
6) Can connect to home network by ethernet
7) Can connect to stereo with SPDIF and RCA jacks
8) Doesn't require funky, annoying software to transfer new files (though optional software for extra functionality is ok, as long as it runs on Linux). As an addendum to this, can be used as generic HDD storage device when connected via USB.

1-5 and kinda 8 are met by Neuros. I have a 40GB one 1st gen one and am quite happy (although if I waited a few months I could have gotten the 2nd gen one...). I use linux exclusively and all of my CDs are ripped to OGGs. I use ndbm to sync. I am 99% sure you need some kind of software to sync, but you can just mount the drive and put other files on it for the generic HDD part of 8.

This guy knows all about 5 and can do it for you.

Every time a discussion of math packages comes up, Octave is always mentioned right away, but Euler gets ignored. I'm curious why people seem to prefer Octave over Euler so much that Euler is virtually unknown.

By the way, I'm using Maxima to supplement my calculus class. It's helpful to be able to use a full-fledged CAS to go through problems that I missed and see where I went wrong, or to do fancy graphing, or do quick rational arithmetic and save me the trouble, or any one of a number of things. Thank you, to everyone who's helped with Maxima.

By the way, graphing seems pretty slow---unless I throw in some floating-point numbers. Is Maxima trying to use arbitrary-precision rationals for graphing?

If you want something like Maple, but open source, try getting Maxima. It runs on Windows and Linux, can do algebra, calculus, and a good amount of other stuff, and you can use TeXmacs as a front end.

I've been using this as a replacement for Matlab until I get a student ID and have a chance to purchase Matlab. It works, and I like using python and all, but the graphing capabilities of Scipy are just horrible. You simply don't have as many options as Matlab for visualizing your data, which is an important feature to me.

I've also tried matplotlib but it lacks many features and crashes often on my machine.

I would recommend Mathcad as the simplest, easiest to use math tool. It's not as powerful as Matlab, but much easier to use.

It relies on you to glance at the "pantry" list and confirm that you really do have the items listed. I know it's not nearly as cool as scanning barcodes, or tracking what size containers things come in, or tracking how much you use based on the recipes you use, but in my mind, it's the only system that makes sense for a real kitchen -- one where food appears and disappears all the time in ways no computer or system can hope to account for.

It relies on you to glance at the "pantry" list and confirm that you really do have the items listed. I know it's not nearly as cool as scanning barcodes, or tracking what size containers things come in, or tracking how much you use based on the recipes you use, but in my mind, it's the only system that makes sense for a real kitchen -- one where food appears and disappears all the time in ways no computer or system can hope to account for.

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

But, of course, I'm a lot of talk and no action. I run Synergy across 3 machines and it *has* changed how I use my computers and it has become a must have. There is certainly a lot of room for creative new interfaces and I'm sure using a 3D API opens up a ton of possibilities.

I lead the Maxima project, http://maxima.sourceforge.net/. Maxima is a full-featured GPL'd computer algebra system under active development. We don't hear much from people who want to use Maxima for high school mathematics, but we would welcome the input.

Each of these visualization clusters boast huge resolutions, but little is said of geometry performance. Asking Chromium to distribute OpenGL calls from a head node to N graphics nodes for such a large scene will surely eat bandwidth in enormous quantities. Naturally, throwing Myrinet or Infiniband at the problem will help. Just like the old IBM mainframes, you might not want to trade in that SGI Onyx just yet. There may be some problems for which it can excel (and accel).

I'd like to see some geometry perf specs for these hi-res screens and comparisons of various interconnects. Anyone got a link?

I also think that a 3D UI would be awkward. A ZUI (Zooming User Interface), however, has proven to be a very efficient and friendly way to organize data on a computer. The infinite desktop model allows for spatial organization and quick navigation.

Jef Raskin always has interesting GUI ideas, as well as a ZUI Demo.

Here at UCSD, Jim Hollan and friends have produced a ZUI called Dynapad. The video on that site shows a bunch of photos on the desktop, but in general any file or process can be accessed and arranged in the same manner.

Zoom, zoom, zoom!

It is being actively developed. While William Schelter was maintaining it (for 19 lonely years), development was very slow indeed. I gather that most of the work was done by him, and some of his graduate students. Since his death in 2001, a number of other people have come on board, and there is a lot of catching up to do.

Some documentation has been rewritten, a great many bugs have been squashed, the package has been ported to several Lisps (yes, it does matter to users), there has been at least one new Emacs mode written for it, it can be used with Texmacs, and so on. Some of the people who are working on it are big names in their spheres, like Richard Fateman, who worked on the original Macsyma.

Version 5.9.1 was released in September '04, and the next big step will be the GREAT SOURCE DOWNCASING. Maxima is so old that most of it is written in all caps. There is a lot to do to bring it into the 21st century, and most of what's being done right now is behind-the-scenes stuff.

As you say, it's decent software now. It's fully usable, with a useful GUI for Windows (developed on Schelter's watch, as I recall). It is probably better for memory intensive work than Maple or Mathematica; that's what initially got me started using it.

It is being actively developed. While William Schelter was maintaining it (for 19 lonely years), development was very slow indeed. I gather that most of the work was done by him, and some of his graduate students. Since his death in 2001, a number of other people have come on board, and there is a lot of catching up to do.

Some documentation has been rewritten, a great many bugs have been squashed, the package has been ported to several Lisps (yes, it does matter to users), there has been at least one new Emacs mode written for it, it can be used with Texmacs, and so on. Some of the people who are working on it are big names in their spheres, like Richard Fateman, who worked on the original Macsyma.

Version 5.9.1 was released in September '04, and the next big step will be the GREAT SOURCE DOWNCASING. Maxima is so old that most of it is written in all caps. There is a lot to do to bring it into the 21st century, and most of what's being done right now is behind-the-scenes stuff.

As you say, it's decent software now. It's fully usable, with a useful GUI for Windows (developed on Schelter's watch, as I recall). It is probably better for memory intensive work than Maple or Mathematica; that's what initially got me started using it.

In addition to Octave (which I've played with a little but can't really comment on), I experimented a bit with a number of symbolic math programs. My problem was that I had a really freakin' big machine-generated equation that I was hoping could be reduced to something sane. As it happened, the answer was no, but I tried out a bunch of programs.

(Disclaimer: it's been a while and I didn't put too much effort into investigations so I Could Be Wrong About Stuff.)

JACAL managed to actually do the reduction (instead of flailing away for a while before dying or my killing it) but that's not all that useful for students. My main complaint was that it didn't seem useful if you didn't know Scheme, or at least how to cope with a Scheme interpreter. So if you typed the wrong thing, it dropped into the Scheme debugger. Also, no graphics.

Mathomatic choked on the Giant Equation and died. On the other hand, it built painlessly and seems reasonably simple. Once again, it's text-only. I wasn't very impressed with it, but on the other hand, I gave up on it as soon as I realized it couldn't handle my equation.

YACAS seemed better organized. It has a C-ish interpreted language that seems to implement a lot of the system and it looks pretty well-documented. When I tried it on my equation, it ran for about 24 hours without returning a result so I killed it. Once again, it's textual but it'll talk to a plotting program called Superficie to, uh, plot stuff.

You may want to try these out and see if they'll do what you want.

It is a decent Matlab clone now. The missing piece? Libraries. Matlab has lots and lots of libraries that do tons of stuff.

Well, Octave does too thanks to Octave-forge. There's even a symbolic engine (as this is probably the most popular thing used). There are now a few areas that Octave rises above Matlab in performance - albiet very few.

The biggest lacking area now is Simulink. Matlab could be used to run hardware through a simulation engine. That's not going to happen with Octave until someone needs to do it.

But for school apps, and for algorithms in general, Octave is more than good enough.

Actually, for the past few years, I've been a TA for the Freshman Engineering course at Purdue University. The majority of this is course is about learning Matlab.

I can attest that everything we have ever had the students learn will work in both Matlab and Octave+Octaveforge.

As to price, that is not what they charge educational institutions. It's more like $100 per license. Also, most specialized engineering applications are actually quite expensive; this is nothing new (Autocad, Synopsis, and Cadence are some of the others I've come in contact with at school).

Maxima (formerly macsyma) is a nifty tool I use. Command-line and GUI versions are available at the site, but the Emacs mode is much better looking.

At National Mu Alpha Theta this summer (a math tournament), I had brought my OS X laptop which happened to have Maxima on it. I use Mathematica at home, but I only have the Win32 version. Maxima is difficult to learn (not user-friendly, but it's almost as powerful as Mathematica -- in fact, its predecessor, Macsyma, was one of the first CASes, predating Mathematica. I used Maxima to verify some lengthy integrals after one test when the answer posted differed significantly from my answer.

Oh, and it's GPL, and it works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X (via Fink).

BTW, you probably know this, but if you can afford Mathematica or a Math'ca-based product, or at least a student license, it's going to be a lot better and more powerful than any OSS math product today. Math'ca is really an excellent product. Unfortunately, the price matches its quality.

This is exactly what Brandon Wiley's Alluvium is doing, except that it uses Oggs instead of MP3. Its basically an implementation of the whole "Judo Radio" concept where you download and cache the files ahead of time and just receive a playlist that tells you the order the files should be streamed.

Having said that, if the kid wants to do math, don't let him near a computer. If he needs a computer or a calculator or anything but some paper and a pencil, it's not math.

A couple of suggestions...

Jsoftware (sort of APL but ASCII) not FOSS but free as in beer.

Also GPL'ed Maxima is good.

Maxima:

It's the closest thing I know of to an OSS Mathematica. It is to Mathematica what The Gimp is to Photoshop. Namely, it's a fair way behind the front runner but still very usable.

Maxima and Axiom.

Check out Maxima, my Calculus 2 teacher tries to give it a plug in class about every week. Its actually very powerful. http://maxima.sourceforge.net/ http://www.ma.utexas.edu/maxima.html

I suggest you get a palm (hey, they do wonders for everything) and get easycalc. It's open source (duh) and does wonders for all that graphing stuff, and if you get bored, you can always do other things on the it (the palm) :)

Look at http://maxima.sourceforge.net/.

I've managed to rip my entire (along with a few samplings from buddies, but don't tell the RIAA) music collection of about 300ish albums. It's much less time consuming than you apparently think.

Cdex or EAC are the two apps I'm most familiar with (stay away from MusicMatch, it's bloated beyond belief) and I'm sure someone else can offer even more options. Both of these programs will rip/encode (into FLAC, LAME MP3, or Ogg Vorbis)/tag in a single click of the mouse. As long as you've got a web connection they'll look up the tag information via CDDB and even set up your ripped files into a directory structure (artist/album/ or year/artist/album or ... well.. pretty much anything) to keep all those MP3's organized. Heck, even if that fails there are programs like The Godfather that can help you mass edit and identify those tags you forgot to get the first time..

I don't know if it's any harder to transfer these files to an iPod than the AAC's you get off iTunes, but I haven't heard any complaints about it so I'm sure it's intuitive enough. Personally, I prefer my Rio Karma for its vorbis/flac support as well as gapless playback (even on MP3's, which don't natively support gapless playback).

Heck, most players (not my Karma, but I digress) are recognized as external USB hard drives (via MSC, so they should even work on Linux) nowadays. All you have to do is drag and drop your MP3's onto the disk (possibly a specific directory, but still no big deal).

Anyway, I'm rambling.. Bottom line is, ripping your CD collection is terribly easy, and with hard drive prices what they are, you really have no reason NOT to back up your collection (FLAC is best for archiving purposes, once again keeping in mind that storage is dirt cheap these days).

I think you ment "most hated". There is an open sourceTeddy clone, but it seems to have gone windows only...