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Hi, I'm an open source expert and currently looking for work. I finished my last contract a few months ago and have been using my savings to allow me to further improve open-source software.

I am currently:
Implementing bounty into bugzilla.
The ability to pay for bug fixes that are important to you, to incentives developers to fix them.

Converting a number of linux/gnu configuration files (all if possible) into xml with defining XSD's, using xmlstarlet to replace the various grep and Perl scripts currently used to read configuration.

Developing a system to read information from windows registry files and use that information to configure a linux/gnu system. The system will use registry to xml then xsl to transform that into an xml file compatible with the for mentioned linux/gnu configuration files.

A number of radical modifications to the way that the KDE user interface works.

Dynamically loading of content in view, instead of loading the entire content, improving latency and reducing memory and processor overhead, the user interface will update in constant time instead of linear time with constant memory and CPU usage, instead of linear memory and CPU usage.

Changing the way that menu are displayed.
The ability for applications to request a menu based on context. A menu will the be generated based upon this context, allowing for machine learning (moving items up and down the context hierarchy), and the ability for any function to be accessed from any menu.
Machine learning will allow the GUI to generate a menu tailored to the task in hand, statistics can be shared so that an organisation can look at how an application is being used, adjust there work processes and feed back the adjustments into the menuing system.

I am also working on other reviews of OSS software, identifying points that need looking at and suggesting possible solutions.

Apart from that I have helped write a ADSL modem driver , put forward a number of patches for the kernel,(usb and pcmcia network card), and reverse enginered the Microsoft access database fileformat.

So, if you've got an OSS problem and you think I can help provide the solution drop me an email at oliver_stieber@yahoo.co.uk.

Are there any sites that match FOSS projects with potential volunteers?

[snip]

I'm a lawyer

SourceForge (SF) has been doing this for years. And SF lets its open source projects advertise for volunteers who want to work on non-technical matters (such as software documentation), too. So a project could advertise its need for a lawyer as well as, say, a PHP coder or DBA.

Or why don't you design a meta-language using which other languages can be designed -- a language that remains completely extensible -- something like MDef.

You could try SourceForge's Help Wanted page. Don't know if they ask for lawyers though.

or del /s c:\*.*

Somehow I get the feeling that isn't likely to work on a machine you just ssh'd into...

I watch a lot of playback on my desktop (21" Sony monitor, SBLive! card with 5-way Altec-Lansing speakers) or my laptop...However, I just found a Philips DVP-642 DVD player that will play, among other formats, DivX4/5, so if I decide to watch on television, I have thte option.

As I said, not perfect, but it works for me.

something along the lines of freenet would possibly work better than mirroring. They'd have to sieze an indeterminate number of computers, possibly limitless from a practical viewpoint. It'd also protect visitors from being watched.. at least to more of an extent than the web. It's not quite perfect though.

http://freenet.sourceforge.net/

I could live with 100 gig of data on a disc if I could trust it a lot more than 500 gigs on one disc I can't trust.

Mark me as a flame if you absolutely must, I just used up all my moderator points.

I'm now using WxPerl but just about to get into packaging with pp. But what I always wanted was 1) perl embedded in mozilla, and 2) an easy to use version of mozilla that would let me write and distribute perl programs cross platform, writing in XUL, using a XUL designer to lay it out first.

Well I don't think any of that every materialized but I'd say it would be a lot more useful than searching the desktop (is this an attempt to do better than M$ will?) and the entry of XULperl apps in cpan will make things very interesting. Make and ruby bindings too if you like. But I'm tired of hearing how Mozilla is the savior of all when it still takes a whole development team to do anything with it. (Apologies if I am too harsh and thinks have suddenly gotten better in the past year). Also, the mozilla calendar app could be seriously worked on too, it isn't ready for prime time (I tried.. ended up rolling own and using phpicalendar, no good uploader off osx yet, and too hard for newbies too, and only English last I checked) so I would put ICal and vcalendar compatible development higher priority. Great product though, I use firefox every day now since it is lighter than mozilla, and don't even mind when it flakes out with bugs nobody believes exist!

I've been using POP to access my GMail account for a while now. I use a little free open source program called FreePOPs. This little program can grab anything from Yahoo! mail to Hotmail. It can even send RSS feeds as email messages to your desktop. I'm not even going to use GMails POP access because it might not always be free, or it might have ads appended to it. Although FreePOPs doesn't do anything with SMTP, I've just been using my ISP's, since they don't rewrite the From header like Google does.

They could either inject ads into your messages, or send you additional messages containing ads. To make people read the ads, they could make their search even smarter. Then they could send you ads of things you really really wanted, and never realized you did, until you saw the ads. People will eagerly look forward to the ads every day.
----
CuTest

And what idiot decided that play/pause in media player should be Control-P instead of space.

I would recommend either Freevo or MythTV. Both are very nice. The problem with Windows Media Center is all the DRM crap. Recordings get DRMed and become a pain to play anywhere else. I personally recommend Frevoo, as it is very easy to use and setup.

I'm using Freevo and Redhat 9 on my DVR. With 2 120G Hard drives theres plenty of room for all my mp3's, recorded tv shows, Pictures, and Divx movies. All these are of course accessed using Freevo's interface. I havn't used MythTv so I can't compare the two. I'm sure others will be able to.

I ended up building a mini-itx 2ghz athlon nforce2 machine using a coolermaster case that looked just like a stereo component.

For software I deicded to use gentoo and freevo. For input I have a standard remote, a wireless keyboard, and a wireless game controller.

the box

on the rack

playing tapper

I already have a Tivo so I didn't bother setting up the TV features, but it works great as an all purpose media player.

Although Bayesian method(s) are primarily used for fishing out spam, why not use them for general purpose mail-sorting? The databases can be trained and each message checked for user-specific categories: "Family", "BSD", "Support", "Online-Orders", ..., and -- of course -- "Spam". Messages, that don't fit into anything will continue to arrive into the main mailbox.

Well, I didn't see any heads rolling for this, so don't hold your breath. Yes, it is a project based in Eastern Europe for an illegal Windows 2000 distribution compiled from the leaked sources. Yes, it's on SourceForge. Yes, I did report this to the SourceForge administrators. And yes, it's still there

KJK::Hyperion, ReactOS developer

A negative or print has orders of magnitude more information intrinsically stored in the pigments than digital photos have stored in bits. If you really wanted to, you could print out a coded transcript of the digital photo in a sort of bar code/dot code, or put it in some more durable medium than photo paper, all without altering the data.

In fact, you can do a better job, because the information can be spread around. With photos, a scratch or mark will wipe out the local redundancy entirely. And of course, photo archives won't help you at all with non-image data types.

Perhaps the most fascinating way of combatting bit rot is parity checking and repair. Even if you lose a whole chunk of the file, if you have an equivalent amount of data in a parchive you can repair it completely.

Really, what we need are filesystems with built in mechanisms for backing up key data. For instance if you flag a directory or file to be backed up, it automatically generates backups and parchives and stores them in as many separate locations as possible. If you did it right, even if you erased or formatted the whole disk, you could still retrieve the critical data from standardized locations as long as it wasn't written over.

My 21,000 digital photos (yes, really) are backed up onto CDR media every year for pictures taken during the year, and placed into a bank safe deposit box. This year I plan to bring the entire collection back for a few days and restore it ALL to disk, and then back up again to fresh CDR's.

Along with those backups, my main photo server is backed up weekly, and my Gallery Server holds all the photos I publish to the world as well, and it's backed up weekly too.

I've lost the main photo hard drive before, and I was lucky enough to have a recent enough backup that I didn't lose all but some trivial photos.

I was lucky enough to come across a spiffy Compaq ML370 surplus from my work, so I'm planning on setting up a raided drives to provide better protection as well.

Yes, I'm a little paranoid about my pictures. :)

Does this make the case for parity archiving?

Damien

Oh, and while we're at it, a gui-based stats package along the lines of PASS or SPSS would be nice too.

I believe gretl is what you're looking for. It's more like eviews than spss, but it's good software.

I amended his question in my mind to mean "on windows" because I believe that is where OSS is needed most in order to transition society from where it stands now to OSS.
When I click on the volume system tray icon it takes forever to open.
I forgot to put it in the list above but a replacement for explorer.exe that is functionally exactly the same but split into separate executables. My notion is that OSS should do a similar embrace and extend approach to Microsoft Windows that Microsoft did in several areas, the end result being that there will eventually be a Windows skeleton that will be easily replaced once and for all with an OSS component.
BTW everybody using Windows XP should download http://taskswitchxp.sourceforge.net/
Does anyone know of other OSS Windows component replacers?
http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/default.asp x is far and away a better desktop search utility than the one that has been bundled with Windows. Problem is, it's not open source.

they also derive code of (and are violating the rights of) Wine, FreeType and QEmu

Just a pit-nick; AFAIK FreeType is distributed under a license which does not require redistribution of source.

I recently installed Debian on my NC8000 laptop and spent the better part of a couple of hours last night doing the relevant research to get my built-in IPW2100 adapter going.

It honestly wasn't THAT difficult, but I say this with the reservation that I'm a fairly advanced user despite the fact that I primarily use Windows. I can see how someone with limited *nix experience and who lacks familiarity with a CLI might find it nigh-impossible.

The sad thing is that I have to do it all over again, since I only allocated 1.5GB to / on Debian and now it's choking every ten minutes on me (since I have gnome running and it insists on having 10,000 useless packages or else it will go away and sulk). :-( You know what they say about hindsight...

From the article:

"Broader WiFi card support needs to be introduced to Linux. WiFi card support for the large and important group of laptop users hardly exists. The expedient solution here would to use something like Linuxant's DriverLoader which has the elegance of being a single point solution that's applicable to the great majority of user/device scenarios."

This is the single reason that stopped my from installing Linux on my laptop. Until I discovered ndiswrapper, that is, which wraps windows wireless drivers...

Now if ndiswrapper worked out of the box, that *would* be a step forward.

The algorithm still needs to be proved. Everything you need to know about the proposal is here.

Not to self promote too much, but check out Nariva http://nariva.sourceforge.net/ next week sometime. A java based search engine library that uses Firefox as the front end to the search via a plugin.

Regards,
Christopher.

Full text searching is always a time saver when the number of categories (folders or whatever) you have becomes too difficult to remember quickly. Also, what happens when a document fits into more than one category? How do you choose? I do however agree with you about having it remain as a plugin, which is why I wrote Nariva http://nariva.sourceforge.net/ the way I did. It's not released as yet (despite what the news says) but I'm trying to get as non-buggy a version as I can on sourceforge this week.

Regards,
Christopher

cross-platform -- perhaps php? Take a look at this webcalendar

http://sourceforge.net/projects/webcalendar/

Usese php and MySQL. I find it quite nice, but I'm not sure it has everything you require. Then again, this is open source. You can just add the features or branch the project (but then people might say your project is dying, and Netcraft might confirm that).

I'm just wondering, is there much of a point running Linux on your Mac? I mean, it'd be much better to run Opendarwin with either Darwinports or Fink on top of it. From there you can install KDE or GNOME plus lots of other stuff.

Opendarwin would have much better hardware support than Linux on Macs. Has anybody done this? What's the install like? Is there any way to upgrade to new Opendarwin releases?

Try ZINF or CoolPlayer.

From the description, it seems like you might be looking for a little sympathy. You've got it.

Without knowing the constraints or anything about the project, it's hard to give specific pointers. My advice would be to first prioritize the information. Figure out what do you need to know first, when you need to know it, and where you are likely to find it. If there are particular constraints that will be impossible to meet, truthfully determine that this is the case and report your findings.

If you have a lot of time, you might want to consider setting up some kind of document management system as a sort of knowledge base. If you don't have a dms, you can probably find one on sourceforge. I checked and the first one that popped up was call Owl Intranet Engine.

If you don't have a lot of time, select a point in the problem that you think is both understandable and provides a great potential to shed light on other aspects of the problem and then dive in. Think of it like you're mapping an unknown territory. Look for a mountain you can climb and scramble to the top and then use your perch as a vantage point to see everything within range. (This is how I design software - don't tell).

although not free as in speech... GBPVR does some of the same UI through the pvr350's tv out as SageTV (and mythTV with the special IVTV drivers)

fwiw I've got a review of sagetv 2.0 with screenshots n' stuff... if you wanted to contrast with Steve525's experience (hey steve!)

IMHO the main differences between sagetv and beyondtv is this:

equally polished and tivo-esque, more or less

SageTV has more media htpc-esque functionality like mp3 jukebox, photo's, etc...
the previously mentioned pvr350 UI overlay support

BeyondTV has remote scheduling capability (i.e. login from work and schedule a show/etc)

BeyondTV supports software encoding cards like ATI AIW whereas sagetv/et al will only use hardware encoding cards.

*scratches head* I think that's in a nutshell...

I'll be building a knoppmyth box soon, but don't have the hands on opinion of mythtv besides what I garner from the mailing lists/etc...

There's a ton of other options out there... new on the block is Meedio (formerly the free as in beer, myHTPC.net)... and a bunch of others Media Portal is OSS... uhm... freevo on linux, whatever GOTTV's latest incarnation is...

e.

If you are technically inclined (this _is_ slashdot) then perhaps you may want to check out Freevo or perhaps MythTV.

Seems to me, this might be the way for interested Linux/Opensource people... a great way to avoid BorgBill's assimilation.

I've shown those sites to a few people, and they get very excited... especially since Tivo like services are only now penetrating in my area.

Tivo's not everywhere... yet. Maybe MS can be headed off a the pass, too.

Given how many people dream about writing games, it's surprising how few good open source games there are. Perhaps what's lacking is a good framework - few have the time and abiblity to implement a whole high-quality game from scratch.

I'm quite impressed with stratagus, though. It seems like a reasonably hackable RTS game framework.

-jim

The kernel is called Linux. Yea, you may compile against GCC but come on people! it's a Linux specific kernel module. Leave the GNU/ out of it.

That said, Nice job! I love to see the capabilities of Linux expanded in new directions like this. Cool work. I wish I had time to work on cool projects like that.

• Extension-Friendly Launcher - Portable Firefox Launcher v0.0.3 is now included by default. It will alter the paths to any extensions you install to work relatively. Just be sure to download the XPI to your PC and then open it with a FILE - OPEN, followed by a browser close/restart before switching PCs. I still have the .bat launcher included for those who like it.
• EXEs and DLLs Compressed - All EXEs and DLLs were recompressed using UPX. This gets our installed size down to one that works on 16Mb drives. Additionally, it will speed up use of Firefox when you're running over USB 1.1. The options used were: --best --compress-icons=0 --nrv2d --crp-ms=999999 -k
• JARs re-compressed - The JAR files in the chrome have been recompressed at the maximum level, getting our package down to 7.8Mb. (For the curious, JAR files are just ZIP files with a different extension)
• Default Profile - A default profile exists within the firefox directory.
• No Default Browser Check - Firefox won't check to see if it is the default browser on startup.
• Download Prompt - Firefox will ask where to save downloads.
• Download History Cleared - Download history is cleared on exit.
• Browser History Disabled - The history has been disabled to decrease disk size and the number of writes to the disk, increasing disk life.
• Form Info Saving Disabled - Information from forms is not saved.
• No Disk Cache - The browser disk cache has been disabled to decrease disk size and the number of writes to the disk, increasing disk life.
• No permanent cookies - Cookies are only saved for the current session. None are written to the disk.

Those of us who must rely on speech recognition software to use our computers not only have no choice but commercial software, we are also relegated to Windows or, with arguably rather less function and accuracy, Mac. There is one open source project of which I'm aware, CMU Sphinx, but its progress is slow and it is not usable as a complete, continuous-speech, large vocabulary speech recognition solution. NaturallySpeaking for Windows is an excellent product and allows those of us with disabilities who cannot use keyboards to do what you see here and many of us who have paid for the software over the years don't begrudge supporting the company but, given its product is not available for any platform but Windows I think this is an excellent opportunity for OSS.

There are others who feel the same. In fact, for a time, IBM had a version of its speech recognition engine available for Linux users but it has since abandoned the project. So, OSS would seem to be the way to go, perhaps building on the very promising CMU Sphinx.

Those of us who must rely on speech recognition software to use our computers not only have no choice but commercial software, we are also relegated to Windows or, with arguably rather less function and accuracy, Mac. There is one open source project of which I'm aware, CMU Sphinx, but its progress is slow and it is not usable as a complete, continuous-speech, large vocabulary speech recognition solution. NaturallySpeaking for Windows is an excellent product and allows those of us with disabilities who cannot use keyboards to do what you see here and many of us who have paid for the software over the years don't begrudge supporting the company but, given its product is not available for any platform but Windows I think this is an excellent opportunity for OSS.

There are others who feel the same. In fact, for a time, IBM had a version of its speech recognition engine available for Linux users but it has since abandoned the project. So, OSS would seem to be the way to go, perhaps building on the very promising CMU Sphinx.

If OSS can design a PhotoShop killer (GIMP), why not a truly WYSIWYG web designer?

Open-source software is less likely to produce such a thing because people have more pride in their work when they are working on their hobby.

There's no such thing as a "truly" WYSIWYG web designer. Well, there is, but what you see is not necessarily what everyone else sees. The web is an inherently fluid medium, and it's impossible to have a tool that can create a layout that works under a variety of conditions. The best you can do is create a leaky abstraction that does the job in common situations and is liable to break often.

People who have pride in their work, and are qualified to write a "WYSIWYG" web designer, often don't because they know it's a fundamentally broken idea, and there really isn't a way of creating a decent layout without knowing the code and having experience in the field.

It sounds like elitism, but it really isn't. They just don't want to be responsible for crappy software that creates crappy websites.

Fortunately for you, a couple of companies have been paying developers to create such tools. Somebody has already mentioned Nvu, but Quanta also has a visual page layout mode.

you could provide a permanent node on freenet bandwidth is always needed there.

maybe we'll get lucky and cell phones will have 1gb+ memory with built in mp3 player support one day, so i won't have to carry so many different damn devices :P

Pick a Nokia Series 60 phone, any of them (except for the 7610 because it uses RS-MMC). Buy a 1G MMC card (or a 512M RS-MMC for the 7610). Install OggPlay if you want Vorbis; they already have MP3 support.

Ta da, now you have a cellphone that can play mp3s (among other things). You can get fancier MP3 players for Series60 phones but the built-in one works fine. You'd probably want one of the fancy ones if you had 1G of music on the player.

Sometimes, .sigs mesh with comments in particularly interesting ways:

I'm just about to finish a world wide, 3-tier, trouble ticketing system in the shape of a Maze.
Don't write code, generate it using XML and XSLT with Visual Studio XGen

I just hope the XGen development team has a good sense of humor...

I don't know why it wasn't linked to in your post, but here you go:

Homepage: http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/

I don't think this was that good of a summary at all. I've never used ettercap and I've only heard it mentioned in passing. The story simply doesn't explain what it is.

From ettercap project page:
"Ettercap is a suite for man in the middle attacks on LAN. It features sniffing of live connections, content filtering on the fly and many other interesting tricks. It supports active and passive dissection of many protocols (even ciphered ones) and includes many feature for network and host analysis."

That's a little more informative than "network protocol analyzer."

For the lasy one:
http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/

Just like I use rox and sawfish, yet I recommend (and install) KDE to everybody

Just like I use rox and sawfish, yet I recommend (and install) KDE to everybody

Just like I use rox and sawfish, yet I recommend (and install) KDE to everybody

K-Meleon is a Gecko-based browser for Windows without the XUL bloat in Mozilla/Firefox. It's much faster, though a bit dated now (but a new version is coming out soon).