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Harvest

BugBear

Just write the VM in NQC. Should be a walk in the park :o)

A peer to peer program Ants P2P has just implimented a Distributed Search Engine .Ants P2P is Based on Ant Routing Anlgorithms so it needed a solution to finding files on its network it found a solution that works .The Network also has a HTTP tunneling feature and its developer Roberto Rossi is creating a search solution based on simmilar methoods to search Web Pages published on the network .

Ants P2P is designed to protect the identity of its users by using a series of middle-men nodes to transfer files from the source to destination. As additional security, transfers are Point to Point secured and EndPoint to EndPoint secured.

1. Distributed search Engine - Each node performs periodic random queries over the network and keeps an indexed table of the results it gets. When you do a query you will get files with or without sources. If you get files simply indexed (without a source), you can schedule the download. As soon as Ants finds a valid source, it will begin the download. This will also solve the problem of unprocessed queries. This way you will get almost all the files in the network that match your query with a single search.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/antsp2p/

Nice to have a mainstream dev environment? LeJOS is a Java VM for the brick and will let you run Java programs on it - and it's been around for a long time now (I've been using it for a couple of years). Seeing some of the things people have done with it is impressive - a Rubiks cube solver, vision systems using RPC stand out.

I live in a fairly large city, and have had someone break into my (old) car before, as well as in the house. I think when they broke into the house, they had just started... we came home from the beach at approx 10pm and no lights were on in the house... come to find out they came in through the back door (poor simple lock). We came home to find the back door wide open but noone in the house. After that, I got some nice 3" deadbolts and many more locks and changed some of our habits. (This was also before we had central air, and there was a nice $500 air conditioner in the front window, I believe they were after that. It would have taken them some time, there were 3 inch screws into the window casings).

Here's what I would recommend:

- lights, plenty of them, get a timer or sensor for when it gets dark.

- good locks on doors, alarms on your car (we since have new cars and have never been broken into)

- don't keep valuables in the car. My last car, the most they could take was a few pennies. They used to break into it all the time, but it wasn't really breaking in, because I never locked it.

- make the house/apartment do odd things to make people think someone is home (or many people are home). Put a timer on tvs and lights to come on at and go off at odd times. A dim lamp in the living room might think someone is home, and watching them. (My living room is about 10 ft from my driveway).

- the jerk factor... someone could probably break into my basement windows. But, firstly, they'd have a heck of a time and would have to break some glass, and secondly, there's large furniture/shelves/objects in front of them... the chances of them coming in through those windows safely is very small. If they break in and break their neck, you only have to call authorities to dispose of the body.

- ok here's the geek one. Setup a network of linux boxes, usb cams and motion. captures still pics only when motion is detected... I was playing with this at work one time, got a bunch of cleaning people working in our office.

You can put together a home video security system on the cheap if you can hang a webcam somewhere usefull. I'm running Suse 9.1 on a Celeron 433 with a measley 128MB of ram and a software called motion that does motion detection and can save video or individual images to disk (or off-site) when it does.

When I travel I have the webcam pointed at the enterance and setup to ftp any captured frames to another server. When I'm home I put the software in streaming mode, point the webcam out the window and broadcast my view:

http://astroturtle.dyndns.org/

This won't prevent your mom's car getting broken into but I'll give you some ammo to hand over to the cops!

More linux video resorces here: http://www.exploits.org/v4l/

Good luck,
--
Luis Esteves
http://www.astroturtle.com

A Java environment for the Mindstorms has existed for quite some time. Appropriate or not, some people seem to find it useful.

Yes, but let's say I want to go to a Linux-only box (no dual booting). Am I going going to get the high quality fonts I want without scarfing them off of Windows somehow.

What part of "installed by default" didn't you understand?

On a related note, Microsoft no longer distributes it's "fonts for the the web" outside of Windows.

It doesn't matter, the original license was permissive enough to allow others to redistribute. Here, linky linky.

No more appropriate? Maybe not. But anyway:
Java: http://lejos.sourceforge.net/
C: http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nqc/
ASM (called LASM fro LEGO ASM): http://mindstorms.lego.com/sdk2/default.asp
Forth: http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pbForth/home Page.html

So, yeah, if it's small enough, it's been done.
-AC

No more appropriate? Maybe not. But anyway:
Java: http://lejos.sourceforge.net/
C: http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nqc/
ASM (called LASM fro LEGO ASM): http://mindstorms.lego.com/sdk2/default.asp
Forth: http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pbForth/home Page.html

So, yeah, if it's small enough, it's been done.
-AC

Why not use Lejos for Java?

There is a replacement firmware that lets you use C++ compiled binaries BrickOS. works well, I'm about to re-release a web interface for BrickOS. The old LegOS compiler is Here.

There already is one, it's called NQC (Not Quite C).

As you said it doesn't make a lot of sense to write a VM for the RCX, given the limited space and horsepower. I suppose it gives cross platform testing capability, but even so a language like NQC seems more effective. At any rate, it's still a cool hack.

Cringley's not the first with this kind of idea. In fact, the Freenet Project already implements something to this effect. Although not specifically designed for reliable backups, the distributed caching algorithms essentially replicate data towards where it's most often needed, helping to improve network performance and creating copies of important data along the way so that it won't be destroyed if a central server fails. Obviously not a commercial solution, but very interesting.

The corewars site linked to in the story has never been known to be active or complete.

The KOTH server is home to the "pro" hills of which 94NOP is the most active.
The most up-to-date site for info & links is Fizmo's.

There are beginner's hills and others at
SAL hills
Yellow hills

There's also an IRC channel at irc://irc.koth.org#corewars

Ant wars looks interesting - pity the event is over

here's what i was looking for - a robot programming game you can use any language in

There's a C++ variant as well.

There was a less interesting (but much more complex) programmable-robot game floating around in the BBS days which used a BASIC. Although it had a beautiful GUI (for the era) its biggest failing was that it allowed customization of your robot's chasis, weaponry, etc. Unfortunately this wasn't well balanced, and the competition we had running quickly degraded and we all lost interest.

Since it will have a G5 and (if I'm not mistaken) and probably something from ATi or nVidia, so we can assume that it will be transformable into a Mac clone without too much effort.

Contrary to the legend, there's nothing proprietary in today's Macs, except for the G5 itself. The rest is well documented (PearPC helped a lot in that array).

*That* would be an interesting mod!

IMHO around 128 kbps with lame is where it gets diffcult to tell the difference in an ABX test.

I use OGG a lot, too. It is pretty good.

There's also this open source Prism2 driver for OS X.

anonymous

TrueType font hinting is patented by Apple. To legally use TrueType hinting, you must pay royalties to Apple. This is why fonts look crappy in the free distros. (And no, antialiasing is not a substitute for proper hinting.)

However, I don't know which (if any) pay-ware Linux distros have TrueType font hinting enabled.

No it is not a plugin. It is a control (widget in Linux land) to allow your OWN APPLICATION to use the gecko rendering engine. IE the browser is really just a wrapper application around MSHTML the engine that does all the work. The same for Mozilla/Firefox. They are the GUI and gecko is the main engine that does all the displaying of content. With the gecko ActiveX control, you can program your _own_ web browser using gecko similar to KMeleon which is a light weight MS Windows browser that uses gecko. You can also do this in Linux such as Galeon and Epiphany, though they obviously do not use an ActiveX control.

Probably preaching to the choir on this one, but if you only use crappy fonts, you will not ever get good results.

There are plenty of good, free TTFs kicking around, starting with the Microsoft ones (yes Rheba, before they realised that competitors could use them too, the Evil Empire released some of the good things they make, for free. It's difficult to make insecure fonts, but I'm sure they tried :-).

But some make it easier than others; We run RH9 at work and I think it (mostly) looks great. It's also quite easy to install true-type fonts on RedHat.

There are RPMS available here to allow installing the MS core fonts (Arial, Comic, etc).

Most Windows users seem to miss a few of the MS fonts, and are infinitely happier when they are available and configured for use.

Nearly all of the applications use the KDE font settings and anti-aliassed fonts. It's only the few older apps that don't get used anyway that seem to screw it up.

I neglected to mention that my preferred WM is ratpoison. So not only do I get a dozen obnoxious popups, but they all run fullscreen!!! Awful... Just awful.

I think we should exhaust some other avenues first before creating a whole new layer. FreeNet project? ... maybe not ... although it does have potential.

set up a small network at home

And do it using User Mode Linux. UML is loosely spoken a way to simulate linux machines on top of another machine. Then you'll only need one machine, and you can experiment without needing to reinstall - backing up/restoring a UML machine is a matter of copying a single file.

Personally I've learned a lot from the Rute Linux Tutorial though it's a bit dated now.

Wireless networking would let me tap into my MythTV box from anywhere in my house, which is nice. I am not certain at the maturity of the project, but plex86 deffinately ups the value of this device for me. I wonder how much tweakage would be necessary?

• brickOS,
• LegOS,
• and Java-based one.

i got my Intel 2200 B/G working on a vaio tr2
with this

Or better yet, create what you want to watch

...I suspect that the software community will pickup the fragments and produce code to do whatever the original community want.

I think it is called MythTV and Freevo

Chop

If you've tried to stop Politics stories from showing up on your Slashdot front page by checking the appropriate boxes in your Preference page, you may still find them showing up. This is because of a bug in Slash that's been outstanding since July, when CmdrTaco said it'd be back "soon enough". If you're tired of seeing Politics stories go leave a comment in hopes that this bug will be fixed before we go mad!

ANts P2P realizes a third generation P2P net. It protects your privacy while you are connected and makes you not trackable, hiding your identity (ip) and crypting everything you are sending/receiving from others. Supports torrent downloads & auto-resume. Features * Open Source Java implementation (GNU-GPL license). * Multiple sources download. * Torrent download from partial files. * Automatic resume and sources research over the net. * Search by hash, string and structured query. * Embedded support for etherogeneus data types (not only arrays of bytes...). * Completely Object-Oriented routing protocol. * Point to Point secured comunication: DH(512)-AES(128) * EndPoint to EndPoint secured comunication: DH(512)-AES(128) * Automatic serverless peer dicovery procedure. * IRC based peer discovery system. * IRC embeded chat system. * Full text search of indexed documents (pdf, html, txt, doc etc) -> QUERY REFERENCE. * Distributed/Decentralized Search engine * HTTP tunneling. Sourceforge Page http://sourceforge.net/projects/antsp2p/ Programers Homepage http://www.myjavaserver.com/~gwren/home.jsp?page=c ustom&xmlName=ants

Grandma shouldn't be mixing repositories. Nor does she have needs outside say the 5000 standard packages. You are really trying to address is people with diverse sofware needs. But they aren't "grandma".


Because that lovely GNOME genealogy package (GRAMPS I think it's called) is never going to be needed by Grandma is it? Or some other obscure (to geeks) but useful package? Not everyone needs the same thing. Sure Grandma doesn't need all of those 5000 packages, but there will be a couple that she would really like that isn't included in the standard 1000 package repository.

I don't want to be told what the "standard" packages that I am allowed to install are, and neither does grandma. we all have our own peculiar needs. Packaging systems, and apt repositories are fantastic for organising and maintaining a large set of base packages - believe me, I wouldn't have it any other way - but it doesn't address the issue obscure, or special interest software any any way shape or form... and that IS an issue that needs to be addressed. Roll on autopackage.

Jedidiah.

I think Gentoo has a PPC ISO. I'm not 100% on that, though. I figured I'd install Linux on my Mac just to try it out, but then I found Fink. It was really all I needed.

looks a lot like,
http://irate.sourceforge.net/
which is really fun, but you have to wade through an awfull lot of crap for a few gems.

This seem to be based on the same concept as irate

Amail, Bmail, Cmail, Dmail, Email, Fmail, Gmail, Hmail, Imail, Jmail, Kmail, Lmail, Mmail, Nmail, Omail, Pmail, Qmail, Rmail, Smail, Tmail, Umail, Vmail, Wmail, Xmail, Ymail, and Zmail

Sorry.

I have the same preferences set up as of yesterday, and the filters do not work. This is a known bug, here's one of many bug listings for the slash code. There are a few of these, most are marked as duplicates, I found one the other day that went into some discussion on this issue, and it seems to come down to they can't decide exactly how they want the exclude feature to work.

Let me see.

On the site main page, there is a rendered image of a chessboard.

The bottom right square is black.

Closed window. Rotflmao.

B. Slower than Perl and Java.

This Sybase move now means that I can download and play with a serious database. It's a smart move because it means that I will be gaining skills in programming for that database engine, skills which are seriously marketable.

Interesting application. Is a Windows implementation of the "command" feature of the interface described in The Humane Environment.

There's a piece of software that many of us geeks can't live without. And while you hard core geeks might be thinking "That Jabber Author Guy" .. but most people I know, including myself, uses Gaim on Linux. Heck, there are many AIM clients even for Mac OS X that use the gaim core (ie. Adium and Fire) ... and a bunch of others even on other platforms.

While GAIM is radically different from when he passed on development to the community, let's not forget Mark Spencer for having brought us the original gaim, which evolved into the product that most of us use.

(Let's not also forget the current maintainers at: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/contactinfo.php )

The original question suggested mentioning people in your own company who push to open source a project against all opposition. Andrew is passionately devoted to open source, and without him the Kowari RDF database would never have been released, or become the project that it is.

Lots of us write open source code, but it takes people who'll lay it on the line like Andrew did to make a real difference.

It was Xerox, not HP. Read your history.

HP might well have been doing the same, but it happened to be a Xerox printer in that case. But now they have lovely open source^W^Wfree inkjet drivers.

Secondly, as I found this post by searching for "terra" (I knew someone would've asked about this already!)... What can be done to stop what's in motion already?

I love being able to access such photos for use with programs like Viking.

Is there something that we can do to stop the process, or should we sit around and bitch about it?

Designed and developed lout. Saved me from LaTeX hell.