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FTA: We ultimately want to see internet TV Channels that download video in the background and let you watch at your convenience (a TiVo for the internet).

Why do you need internet channels when there's a perfectly legimate tv network already in place? I use Azureus as my Bittorrent client with a plugin to import any torrents from an RSS feed that match my criteria. Although I've never actually used TiVo I think the basic premise is the same, record the shows you want automatically and watch them whenever you have time.

FTA: We ultimately want to see internet TV Channels that download video in the background and let you watch at your convenience (a TiVo for the internet).

Why do you need internet channels when there's a perfectly legimate tv network already in place? I use Azureus as my Bittorrent client with a plugin to import any torrents from an RSS feed that match my criteria. Although I've never actually used TiVo I think the basic premise is the same, record the shows you want automatically and watch them whenever you have time.

Seriously, why would you go to the trouble of obediently sitting down in front of your TV at the appointed time, and watch a bunch of retarded commercials? I had forgotten there was actually good stuff on TV until BitTorrent came along.

It looks like Open Office is targeting MS Access in their next release.

I have been testing the 1.9.mXX releases (currently preparing for their first beta release) for a few weeks now, and most issues have been minor formatting changes, and a couple crashes here and there -- all of which have been reported. The one major issue I have come across is the problem where graphics are lost after saving changes to a document Issue 36459 where the fix has already been checked into 1.9.m64.

The pre-beta milestones have improved import/export filters, and many new features most people will like. It needs people to stomp on it in their worst way (ie, regular usage :). Does Open Office 1.9.mXX render a document differently than your other office suite (be it Word, Wordperfect, Works or etc)? Do your part:

o Create a seperate file with only the portion that changed from the other suite.
o Create a PDF of the document from the other suite.
o Create a PDF of the document from the latest development snapshot of OpenOffice (using the same pdf program if possible -- I use the Open Source PDFCreator which is a ghostscript front end).
o Zip the files (I use the Open Source 7-zip program)
o Report the issue (and create an account if you don't have one) with your best description of the problem with a step by step list of what actions need to be performed to reproduce the problem.
o Attach the zip file of the three files you created before.

The development code needs more people who are able to write bug reports -- that means don't install it on grandma's computer. If you think "it doesn't work" is a good bug report then please move to the next message, thanks.

It looks to me like this is precisely as you presume -- RSS/XML METAR feeds.

I glanced through the NOAA site but didn't see a forecast portion in either the RSS or XML for a randomly chosen airport.

And here I was hoping this would allow Meteorologist to finally divest itself of that horrid abomination of Weather.com data. :-\

Maybe partially...

Not that an RSS METAR feed would be entirely unwelcome to this pilot, though. Someone just needs to come up with a decent software product to wrap it in, and figure out how to push it to a cell fone...

p

• Portable Firefox - Web browser
• Portable Thunderbird - Email client
• Portable Sunbird - Calendar application
• Portable NVU - HTML Editor

• OpenOffice (PDF) - Office Suite
• Miranda IM - Instant messaging
• FileZilla - FTP

I dig LyX but I have switched to Kile LaTeX Editor (KDE Project) due to the skeletal support of the Memoir Class within LyX, amongst various other classes that may not be as commonly requested and therefore aren't natively supported in LyX. Both are wonderful applications.

I equate LyX and its WYSIWYM to be getting better yet too often I have to insert ERT and so I decided to just learn LaTeX directly and write in Kile. I build chapter templates quite simply with Kile. Customizing the appearance of output in Kile and its Master-Document Hierarchy is smooth. The Preamble hastles in LyX that most often are due to lack of documentation aren't evident in Kile.

Kile is a sweet front-end with many difficulties in LaTeX accounted for through wizards and other special templates.

And I've yet to worry about pdf output with Kile on Debian.

I'm looking forward to LyX 1.4 and hope it lives up to the redesign promises.

I'm actually working on a portable IM client. It currently only supports AIM, but it has all the vital features and is only 700k. It has the option of saving settings to a file rather than the registry, so it's perfect for USB drives.

If you want to try it, check out the latest beta here: http://terraim.sf.net/TerraIM.exe

No idea as to what you can make LyX do i'm afraid - I use Kile which most certainly does let you do things like that if you so choose. Sorry I couldn't be more help.

Jedidiah.

Even as a full-time Mac and part-time Linux user, I don't mind that Portable Firefox is Windows-only. I keep it, along with Putty and a selection of Unix utilities ported to Win32, on my USB drive for the times I'm stuck sitting at a Windows machine without an SSH client or decent browser (ie, most Windows machines). OS X and Linux already have these areas covered.

Well, I guess the cat is fully out of the bag now anyway. I was planning on mentioning this on Slashdot once I got everything over on MozDev finally (my server went over my bandwidth limit last month just from all the blog and tech site mentions... first time that's happened since I released Portable Firefox back in June).

In the past couple days, I've added launchers and instructions for Portable NVU and Portable Sunbird. Ready-to-use, fully-compressed packages will be forthcoming over the next week.

The releases are Windows-only for now. The launcher uses the Nullsoft Scriptable Installer System at the moment, which isn't compatible with Mac OSX.

I'm currently working on automating the full build process and switching to 7-zip for compression. Once done, I'll be releasing Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird in all localized languages supported by Firefox and Thunderbird.

Future plans include:
- Sync utility, running from the portable install, to copy bookmarks, extensions, cookies, etc back and forth
- Multi-OS install on the portable media, so the applications will run from every computer you use.
- Support for Enigmail/GPG out-of-the-box (Another developer has repackaged Portable Thunderbird with these included. I'll be updating my launchers to support this by default)
- Single, combined launcher for all products
- Full theme support
- Lots more?

I bought an old Palm IIIxe for this, and I've read dozens of books on it quite comfortably. Although some people may not be able to get used to the low res screen, the long battery life (weeks on 3 AAA batteries) and convenience of being able to carry at least ten full length books (IIIxe has 8MB) in such a small form factor more than outweighs this. You can probably pick one up on eBay cheap cheap.

If you do use a Palm definitely check out Weasel Reader (http://gutenpalm.sourceforge.net/).

Filezilla is a freeware ftp prog that is seld-directory-contained. Very handy for accessing your files at work when you can't remember your webspace password.

Please, for the love of RMS, please please sepll check
I has downloaded SpellBound 0.7.1. I have done it for RMS, not for you. :)

Plus with all the modifications they did for Firefox, such as Download History Cleared, Browser History Disabled, Form Info Saving Disabled, No Disk Cache, and No permanent cookies... it won't take up a very large footprint. Mind you, Firefox installed only takes up a meager 8.6Mb.

Thunderbird on the other hand compresses EXEs and DLLs with UPX. They also recompressed the JAR files (which are ZIP files).

"What they need is a GForge site instead"

Hmmm, decisions, decisions...
Option 1: Install sourceforge, host the respositary, job done.
Option 2: Private non-profit U.S. academic institutions can also become members by signing the GOCC Operating Agreement through an authorized representative. The signatory or their designee can then appoint additional members within their institutions. People belonging to a government entity or private non-profit academic institution that has not signed the Operating Agreement can participate with an Observer status. Representatives of non-profit associations of public entities can also participate as Observers. Observers have to be sponsored by a Member. Observers are able to join the GOCC list server to receive announcements and participate in discussions and are encouraged to participate in the GOCC bi-weekly conference calls.

If you heard that Website A had managed to get 5 programs hosted, and Website B had 91,783 programs, could you guess which one was run by the government, and which one was run by hackers?

"Can anyone see a business model here? Read the GOCC.gov charter and you discover that it has built one more bureaucracy to oversee its existing bureaucracy, with oversight over the new bureaucracy."

Does anyone have a list or can at least rattle off any other gave development sdks there are for other interpteted languages (besides java). For example does ruby have any? how about lisp?

That being said, I know of two such projects in nicely working state for Common Lisp. CL-SDL provides a set of raw wrappings around SDL (and OpenGL from there), a bunch of handy utility functions on top of that, and many examples and demos. I've used it, and it is basically like using SDL in C (so you get the best of both worlds). There is also Kenny Tilton's Cello, which uses his very, very slick constraint engine to drive OpenGL, Imagemagick, and he says he has OpenAL working too (I'm not sure how relevant it is anymore, though - cross-platform audio is definitely a problem compared to video). I haven't used it yet, and it's not specifically targeted at games.

There is Isis, a new dialect of Lisp developed by the pointy-headed researchers at the MIT Media Lab for multimedia. In addition to OpenGL, GLUT, SDL, and X11 bindings, it has audio through ALSA, and comes with video capture utilities, and video and image processing tools, networking stuff, etc. That makes it Linux only though. I've installed it but haven't had time to play around too much, but it seems that it has pretty much anything you'd want!

I tried to implement Gallery on my site but couldn't because it requires PHP to be run in Safe Mode. As an alternative, I set-up Coppermine.

I also use Flickr, mainly because it easily allows me to restrict access to certain photos and I can post images directly via email (such as from my phone). And in all honesty, I don't mind someone else managing it. There are other features that I'm only starting to play with, too, like their APIs.

Use a DynDns account and azureus. It facilitates the making of the torrent file and has a nice web based tracker. You'll also need the Java JRE to run Azureus, btw.

WASTE does this. Sort of.

There's an open source network called Gnutella, developed using open standards, and with many open source implementations.

Originally it was only a point-to-point download service negotiated by a peer-to-peer query-flooding system. Times have changed.

Today's Gnutella (go check out gtk-gnutella or any of the other fine clients for details) is more like a fully decentrallized BT. There are still some flaws in the protocol with respect to poisoning, but it's certainly at the point now where I can use it to fetch operating systems, television (I've used it to catch up on shows that my TiVo has missed several times now, shame on me for show-loyalty ;-) and lots of great digitial photography (yes, you can find some amazing art that actually involves no skin-tones).

Some links:

Indlinux A project localising FLOSS apps into Hindi and providing support for other teams working on other Indian languages.

Indlinux wiki has got a fortnightly newsletter and other pieces of info.

Kannada Localisation Initiative a project localising and translating FLOSS applications into Kannada

Indic computing project Similar to Indlinux in structure, but focussing on documentation and support for ISV's, linguists and Developers

Some links:

Indlinux A project localising FLOSS apps into Hindi and providing support for other teams working on other Indian languages.

Indlinux wiki has got a fortnightly newsletter and other pieces of info.

Kannada Localisation Initiative a project localising and translating FLOSS applications into Kannada

Indic computing project Similar to Indlinux in structure, but focussing on documentation and support for ISV's, linguists and Developers

A network with no central servers or even 'supernodes' reduces the effect of DoS-attacks, and leaves no single person or company to attack with a lawsuit. But that alone isn't enough. Other problems remain, like the privacy issue. Many P2P networks reveal IP addresses of nodes on 'the other end'. Thus, after retrieval of a file, you know from what IP address(es) the file came from. That leaves the network vulnerable for attacks or legal steps against individual users.

To prevent this, it must be impossible to find out who/where a retrieved file (or search query) actually came from (IP, geographical location or otherwise).

Besides the well known Freenet, there's another promising one called ANts. From what I can tell, it works by passing data between nodes, without passing info on the endpoints where data is coming from/going to. Each node passes data on, but doesn't know if the next node will keep it, or in turn pass it on to yet another node in a path. IP addresses are replaced with a virtual 'network ID' (regularly discarded), and combined with encryption, a single node can't tell what it's passing on, where it came from, or where it's going. IP addresses are only known for a few neighbours it contacts directly. For an analogy, think anonymous remailers. The project page also mentions something similar called MUTE. I guess you could call projects like this 3rd generation P2P networks. Looking forward to it! (and please add if you know more like these)

A network with no central servers or even 'supernodes' reduces the effect of DoS-attacks, and leaves no single person or company to attack with a lawsuit. But that alone isn't enough. Other problems remain, like the privacy issue. Many P2P networks reveal IP addresses of nodes on 'the other end'. Thus, after retrieval of a file, you know from what IP address(es) the file came from. That leaves the network vulnerable for attacks or legal steps against individual users.

To prevent this, it must be impossible to find out who/where a retrieved file (or search query) actually came from (IP, geographical location or otherwise).

Besides the well known Freenet, there's another promising one called ANts. From what I can tell, it works by passing data between nodes, without passing info on the endpoints where data is coming from/going to. Each node passes data on, but doesn't know if the next node will keep it, or in turn pass it on to yet another node in a path. IP addresses are replaced with a virtual 'network ID' (regularly discarded), and combined with encryption, a single node can't tell what it's passing on, where it came from, or where it's going. IP addresses are only known for a few neighbours it contacts directly. For an analogy, think anonymous remailers. The project page also mentions something similar called MUTE. I guess you could call projects like this 3rd generation P2P networks. Looking forward to it! (and please add if you know more like these)

ex-Gnome Fan here.

Firstly WELL DONE for the KDE team !!
These guys are pro and seriously want to give the best window manager experience all-round.

Again well done!

KDE is just too superb now.

* You can customize for a window button - to stay always on top.

* You can embellish and eye-candy your environment as much as you want (or trim it down too) (or optimize even)

* Movies now show a preview when in thumbnail mode. Yeah I know it took them sometime but before I had to fire Nautilus just for a quick preview of what saved naughty movie to watch.

* The very best feature I find is this: right click on a file and expand the menu - navigating through the folder - until you are offered a "Copy Here / Move to Here" .. if you have that - you know what I am talking about :)

I would hug a member of the KDE team right now
(provided the member was a randy german lady with big boobies and 6 feet tall
.. I love german girls they are so randy .. I love KDE !!)

Says I editing this from BlackBox oops.

You might want to keep an eye on the ipodlinux project page. If ogg support is going to hit ipod-ville, this is most likely where it'll show up first.

You'll want to have a bit of linux experience under your belt before you go hosing your ipod with it, though (and it doesn't yet support 4G ipods...)

Many unsigned and independent artists provide free downloads of their music as a way to promote themselves. Of course the hard part for you is to find this music at all, let alone find the music that you're going to like without actually downloading and listening to it all.

iRATE Radio solves this problem for you. It is a collaborative filtering MP3 downloader and player. It is Free Software, licensed under the GNU GPL.

iRATE's central server has a database of about 50,000 MP3 tracks available from a number of music hosting services such as the Internet Underground Music Archives. The iRATE client fetches a few URLs from the server, downloads the tracks, and then plays them for you.

As you listen to each track, you rate it according to your preferences. The client then uploads your ratings to the server, which then correlates them with ratings submitted by other users. Future track recommendations will be based on these correllations. Basically what that means is that if you and I like the same music, then iRATE will download for you all the same music that I rated highly.

iRATE Radio is very close to its 0.4 release, which offers many improvements over the current 0.3 release. We can use your help in testing the upcoming release. If you want to help, please download one of the unstable builds. Subscribe to the mailing list and submit bug reports via the sourceforge bug report form.

There is a new distribution page at www.irateradio.com that is aimed at the non-technical user. Downloading from there gets you the 0.3 release right now, but soon the 0.4 release will be available there.

iRATE Radio is written in Java and welcomes contributions from new developers.

Many unsigned and independent artists provide free downloads of their music as a way to promote themselves. Of course the hard part for you is to find this music at all, let alone find the music that you're going to like without actually downloading and listening to it all.

iRATE Radio solves this problem for you. It is a collaborative filtering MP3 downloader and player. It is Free Software, licensed under the GNU GPL.

iRATE's central server has a database of about 50,000 MP3 tracks available from a number of music hosting services such as the Internet Underground Music Archives. The iRATE client fetches a few URLs from the server, downloads the tracks, and then plays them for you.

As you listen to each track, you rate it according to your preferences. The client then uploads your ratings to the server, which then correlates them with ratings submitted by other users. Future track recommendations will be based on these correllations. Basically what that means is that if you and I like the same music, then iRATE will download for you all the same music that I rated highly.

iRATE Radio is very close to its 0.4 release, which offers many improvements over the current 0.3 release. We can use your help in testing the upcoming release. If you want to help, please download one of the unstable builds. Subscribe to the mailing list and submit bug reports via the sourceforge bug report form.

There is a new distribution page at www.irateradio.com that is aimed at the non-technical user. Downloading from there gets you the 0.3 release right now, but soon the 0.4 release will be available there.

iRATE Radio is written in Java and welcomes contributions from new developers.

Anonymity is the main object of some new "next generation" P2P networks like ants and mule unfortunately it doesn't seem to be possible to achieve anonymity without a considerable performance penalty.

There is. FreePOPs supports tons of different webmail providers (hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc...)

I run gallery as well and it actually integrates perfectly into geeklog. (Shamesless plug http://www.becauseimbored.com/ No its not Pr0n :) I am also currenlty working on another site based off of Gallery2 which has some great improvments. The CVS source is fairly stable, and the features which have been added to gallery2 are great.
Linking to webcam images - These images will auto-update at an interval that you decide.

New panaroma module that allows viewing panaromic pictures taken with a digital camera. I havent tested this module yet, nor will I ever get a chance, but a very cool feature none the less.

Shopping Cart I havent used this yet, but for an amature photographer to sell his/hers works this could be a really nice feature.

Displaying of movies - Im not sure on the compatibilty with this particular feature but it uses ffmpeg to display the movies. I tested this on a episode of futurama standard MPEG2 encoding and it seemed to work fine

New user registration/creation of new user albums - When a new user registers it will automagically create a album based on that user.

User Comments - users can make comments and vote on pics.

Nokia Upload API - Apparenlty certain certain nokia phones can interface with this API and upload pictures taken from the camera phone. I currently do this using a bash script a perl script called galleryadd and postfix. Postfix receives the email forwards it to procmail whcih calls the bash script which then invokes galleryadd. (another shamless plug http://www.wapcams.net/Email pics@wapcams.net if you want to add something :)

Like Gallery1 it used a MySql backend and php scripting. Themes are also being addressed in G2 to make it easier for the admin to customize the look and feel of his/her site.

There is also talk of implemting a "Click to buy" function which will allow you sell your pics through gallery. Overall its looks very promising. And new features are being added all the time. Check it out http://gallery.sourceforge.net/

The decoders that support it mostly are using software (rather than hardware) decoding. They're using a general purpouse processor like say an ARM that also has a hardware mp3 decoder, so the ARM chip decodes ogg in a software mode (running the decoder like an application) while mps's are simply fed to the dedicated decoder logic, that knows specifically how to handle mp3 data to decode it, and uses less power.
And actually the 'typical' 35 minute 'commercial' CD release would weigh in at around 546MB in FLAC in 5.1 surround... FLAC won't take off for the simple reason that vendors won't have custom hardware built to decode it etc etal... sure it's already got an online audiophile community, but that base won't grow further just because 'lossless is better'
If you want Ogg to be an mp3 killer, you go start the IC firm and build the logic chip that decodes an .ogg file using the least amount of power possible, and then start selling the decoder chip to mp3 player makers ;) well someone beat you to the punch http://oggonachip.sourceforge.net/
But they were only doing a masters degree research thing, apparently they forgot the
"..." and "Profit!" steps ;)

Twelve Step TrustABLE IT:
Virtualised Linux Standard Base (VLSB)
in Virtual Demilitarized Network Zones (VDNZ)
from Trusted Build Agents (TBA)

Back in August 11, 1998, Microsoft's Vinod Valloppillil and Josh Cohen released a memorandum titled Linux OS Competitive Analysis: The Next Java VM?, in which they predicted that Linux would become ubiquitous as a services platform. However, the title of the paper could be even more prophetic.

Consider the following.

[1] It is well known that Linux is quite portable, in fact only NETBSD comes close to the number of hardware platforms supported.

[2] What is less well known is that the Linux kernel has even been ported to run on itself, as client for a virtual Monitor platform, and even to run virtualised on other operating systems including Win2K and XP.

[3] Other operating systems, such as BSD and Sun's Solaris can also use a compatbility layer to run applications compiled for Linux directly, without the need for virtualisation.

[4]The Linux Standard Base Mission Statement is to

To develop and promote a

set of standards that will increase compatibility among Linux distributions and enable software applications to run on any compliant system. In addition, the LSB will help coordinate efforts to recruit software vendors to port and write products for Linux.

[5] The above standard also defines a generic subset of the standards for each hardware platform as a source level application interface. In fact for an application to be certified for the LSB it must be tested on two of the plaforms supported by the LSB, one chosen at random by the testing body. Following the standard, it's not that difficult a job to write portable C and C++ code : Write once, compile for each platfom.

[6] The GNU Compiler Collection's future GCC 4.0 Release Series now divides the task of compiling into two stages based around Static Single Assignment trees. It should be possible to use the new GCC front ends to compile each language into a SSA tree that represents the common generic subset of the Linux Standard Base: [5].The resulting SSA tree for a build could be dumped into files, analogous to Java's JVM intermediate format, and then complied to native code for the target platform: Write once, run everywhere.

Be it open or closed source, every binary or script you execute represents a risk. It is possible to introduce hostile code at any point along the build chain, before the point where the binary is checksummed and the result digitally signed.

[7] It is possible to use constraints built into any Linux or Unix like operating system to isolate and restrict what a binary executable has access to or can do. Even without employing SELinux's manditory access controls or chroot/jail'ed environments, it is possible to run a process under a different user identity and group identity. Unix servers have used this te

Well, there's QEmu, and Bochs, which can run Windows in Linux and so on. However, they are full CPU emulators, and are as such much much slower than VMWare. If all you're using VMWare for is like Outlook in Windows (and some organizations I know do exactly that), then these solutions might suffice, but for anything else VMWare wins hands-down.

Sounds alot like Waste

Or Firebird.

I completely agree with the statement made that the tracker/non-tracker distinguishment is a problem in bittorrent. Each participant in the network should have full power to include new members to the network. An outside member should be able to point at any of the existing members and get whatever initial setup information is needed to join.

It sounds like Exeem is also addressing the cataloging/search problem, which grows the scope from file transer to a distributed filesystem. Gnutella's flood searches may be less than optimal but they're great for adapting to changes in the topology.

the funny thing is these problems have almost certainly been solved by the almighty p2p protocol: freenet.

waste is also interesting because it provides a "walled garden"/native application approach to a distributed filesystem.

I completely agree with the statement made that the tracker/non-tracker distinguishment is a problem in bittorrent. Each participant in the network should have full power to include new members to the network. An outside member should be able to point at any of the existing members and get whatever initial setup information is needed to join.

It sounds like Exeem is also addressing the cataloging/search problem, which grows the scope from file transer to a distributed filesystem. Gnutella's flood searches may be less than optimal but they're great for adapting to changes in the topology.

the funny thing is these problems have almost certainly been solved by the almighty p2p protocol: freenet.

waste is also interesting because it provides a "walled garden"/native application approach to a distributed filesystem.

How is Freenet not mentioned in this context. It is decentralized and other than the dropped packets / routing needed for anonymity it is swarming dowloads since any node might have the data you need.

A few years ago I bought up some of those Virgin WebPlayers and I-Openers from eBay and other places, and proceeded to hack into them with the instructions provided.

The WebPlayer I'm using in the living room has Windows 95 on it reduced down using LitePC, and has Opera running as a web client. Also installed is Identafone, a piece of software that will display caller-id information on the screen. Add a cheap USB network adapter, plug in the phone line to the modem, and fire up the web browser to bring up a variant of the Block-random script provided by the Gallery distro, and you have a Photo Frame/Caller-ID box that has a small footprint and has no moving parts (no fan or hard drive).

I've also done the same thing with the I-Openers, installing a small 10-Gig laptop drive or so using a custom IMOD2 Kit. They both run very well and you end up with a much more configurable picture frame than a store-bought one for around a third of the cost.

Now, I wish I could do something with some type of Linux distro on these guys, and I'm sure that it's possible, but I just haven't had the time after doing these. Ideas anyone? Would a Linux distro run on these boxes and still have enough memory to run a GUI to display photos?

I'd much rather see a truly modular system, so the the user is free to pick and choose a window manager, a file manager, a browser, a messenger etc. and have them all play nice together, regardless of whether they are part of KDE or GNOME or standalone projects.

I agree, that's exactly why I use xfce. For instance, I didn't like the default taskbar that comes with xfce. Its lacking in functionality, you can't even right-click on a task to minimize, close, etc. So, I just edited the startxfce4 script, commented out the entry for xftaskbar, and added an entry for gnome-panel. It even uses the gtk theme I've selected through xfce.

And the file manager that comes with xfce is... ugh... weird. So, I just use ROX-Filer. Works great with xfce.

If you like icons on your desktop, you can use iDesk. Its really really flexible. I have icons for various directories and devices on my desktop, single-left-click to open it in ROX, single-right-click to open in in an xterm. It can do a buttload of other stuff too.

In case anybody is interested, this is my setup: xfce 4, ROX-Filer (I think the link is http://rox.sourceforge.net/ but it seems to be down at the moment...), gnome-panel, xfwm, and iDesk. And it runs relatively fast on my old 366mhz laptop which is a huge plus.

Didn't mean to hijack the thread, I really like KDE as well.

Serious nerds want the ability to host their own sites and customize everything. This flickr site seems cool, but because the tinfoil blocks the waves of complacency, I know better than to trust others with my photographs unless I have TC (total control). I am considering the options. I really want advice instead of a flame war. What are the relative merits of Gallery and Coppermine?

I have read a little. It seems that the 1.4 branch of Gallery has many kludges, and the next big update might be a while yet. Coppermine looks good, but maybe it's development and use are somewhat less. What are the big issues? Are there other good alternatives besides these two?

ASCII Star Wars / Matrix would be easy. Just use aalib to render the output of e.g. Mplayer.

Unfortunately, it seems to be very particular about what webhosting services it likes - both of my office's hosts, Readyhosting and Interland don't have enough PHP access to make it work. It works just fine for me at home running XP Pro, Apache and PHP.

It's pretty vanilla but it supports multiple users with permissions, you can add comments, rotate, do batch uploads through either Java applets, a html form or from a URL. I was using statically generated pages from Jalbum and while these lack the prettiness of Jalbum, they are HUGELY more flexible.

The Japanese robots -- or any kind of robots -- may be made truly intelligent by means of artificial intelligence based on a collaboratively worked out theory of mind for AI.

The Japanese robots -- or any kind of robots -- may be made truly intelligent by means of artificial intelligence based on a collaboratively worked out theory of mind for AI.

This thing is written in C# (and I gather the # stands for RAP) and I only know java.

I've been writing a PVR system in Java for about a year now as a home project (running on a win box) , and I've got it working pretty sweet. Its not pure java, as it uses VirtualVCR for the grabbing and XMLTV for grabbing the listings. My next job is going from the WIMP style interface to something a little more set top box like. I'm also considering using a wireless joypad as a remote.

It just a shame that the UK source for XMLTV has been so unreliable over the past year. First ananova stop serving listings data, then the radio times changed their site to block xmltv, before relenting and releasing the listings in an alternate machine readable format. Lets hope the RT guys keep that going.

Relevant sites:
VirtualVCR : http://virtualvcr.sourceforge.net/
XmlTV : http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/

Oh fer heck's sake... that's just too geeky... And I'd gotten to grips with ./configure, make and make install, but that's several steps too far... so to install Freya, I've got to fix the dependencies??? why haven't those fixes been passed up to those projects already??? sitting on the details in an out of the way forum is not helping matters.

But I thought it was mentioned on Fblend's website- the stable version won't run in Linux, you need the latest unstable version.

I think it's here-> yup

Anyway, here's some really good stuff on getting everything *but* dumb and dumbogg running on Linux (and he also made it really easy to get it runnning on arch linux): here

Hope that helps.