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I use an RSS reader; it is a heavily modified version of rnews, which I customized for my own needs.

What my RSS reader does is it limits how often I make the request. So, it won't make a request until X minutes after the last time I made a request.

To be a good netizen, I don't set that to anything less than 30 minutes.

But the real beauty is that if I don't bother looking at the news for, say, 3 hours, it won't bother retrieving it. It will retrieve it when I look (so what if I have to wait a few seconds for it to download the feed?) and resets the timer to not check (no matter how often I reload the page) until X minutes have passed.

If people adopt an "on-demand" policy instead of scheduled, it should help push out the lifespan of this tech in its current form.

Take a look at Konspire. It has a lot of the properties that you describe. They claim they are more scalable than Bittorrent.

I'm using Liferea version 0.5.1 under Linux right now. Compiles from source fine on Fedora Core 2 and has worked great for me so far.

bbh

Buy a little TV capture card from Hauppage with FM capability like this one. Plug it into your linux box and use xawtv's streamer application to record Loveline every night (or whatever your favorite radio show is). Then use lame to convert that to MP3.

Then, listen at work. I've been doing this for years. Its not great for productivity, but it keeps you from getting bored and getting even more off task.

Yet another place where linux rules for simplicity and functionality! The box doing this is a PII/333MHz, which also records video (a la Tivo).

Also, you can tune into Shoutcast's various comedy channels.

RSS Bandit (Windows)
Syndigator (X)

There is also a rss thunderbird extension Formzilla but you have to be using a version of thunderbird build with the xmlextras extension... it is all described in the post.

RSSOwl - http://rssowl.sourceforge.net/ is pretty good.

Having said that, I code *really* simply; most of my code, in fact, is just simple junk that I have a few shell or perl scripts spit out, since most of my code constitutes image or photo galleries - rendering text browsers (lynx, links) useless. (Most recent implementation I brought in for another site was Gallery, but the people who make that seem to be pretty sensible - I mean, hell, it puts out code for Netscape for OS/2.)

So after all is said and done, I don't test my code anymore because as a general rule, if it rendered for the last version of $browser correctly, it'll do the same this time, and if it rendered slightly weird, it might continue to do so. And since most of my stuff is simple stuff like tables (the most complex thing in my code tends to be the color implementations for a cell on a table), unless you've screwed with your browser's colors, it'll all come out the same tomorrow if I cruft up another page.

If anyone hasn't heard what the parent is refering to, then see the announcement here. RIP to him and my thoughts to his family.

Actually. You can get a program called PearPc which allows you to emulate a mac. It's was in constant developement before one of it's programmers got hit by a train.

I don't think you can run OSX on x86 using any emulator/vm yet

PearPC

If you do a little search, someone (on OSNews.com I think) managed to install OS X...

It's not perfect (yet), but it's better than nothing!

On a side note: checking their webpage, one of the Dev died of an Accident on July 2.
23 Years old. I guess only the good die young :(

So who is going to be the first to make a homebrew mindball system using an OpenEEG interface?

You could probably build the entire thing for less than $1000 in parts.

FLAC for Macs (and Linux, Windows, Amiga, Irix, and Solaris).

As to iTunes, I don't think it supports FLAC directly, but there seems to be some effort to write a plugin, and a couple of workaround methods currently. I *know* the iPod doesn't.

Well, pardon me, but open source databases are more than MySQL. The significant open source databases, in terms of features, not number of users, are:

• MaxDB, formerly SAP DB.
• Firebird, a fork of Interbase 6.0
• And ofcourse PostgreSQL, as others have mentioned.

it's easier [...] to debug perl than many languages simply because you have less lines you have to look at to figure out whats going on.

since you get to look at regex patterns to figure out what's going on (looks to hard to manage? get over it. Regex is a small, orthogonal set of commands).

sudo apt-get install changetrack

Your move Bill.

:P

I'm sorry that you feel you have been ignored, I like to think this isn't so.
Please remember these things take time, we are not able to work full time on this project.

As for the current MusE running only with Jack, we have received numerous requests to bring back the standalone mode. And believe me, we take it seriously. But for 0.7.0 it was just not an option to put it back in. Nothing has been decided but I would think there is a strong chance it'll be back in one of the coming point releases.

As for the PPC problem, the one "dangling" problem I can remember is that MusE supposedly no longer starts under PPC/Linux. I'll freely admit that I don't have much clues to what this problem is but I did send a request to try a small patch so I do think I atleast tried.
The message is here:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg _id=8614229

Adding OGG support to iPod also means that Apple would have to add it to QuickTime for OSX and Windows so that iTunes works with it correctly.

Ogg containers and Vorbis audio in QuickTime? Done.

You'd expect the purveyors of PHP tools to answer developer requests, and they have.

There are several alternates around.

If you want to try something a bit different, there's this or this.

A friend of mine and I, at the first Indie Game Jam (IGJ0), wrote a game in a couple of days called "Wrath".

It was bascially a two-player RTS-ish game where you had various tools that you could use to manipulate the 100,000 humans running around the board. One player played God, the other Satan. You could place attractors or repulsors, you could raise/lower terrain, you could convert them to your side (save vs damn), and you can kill them. The object is to basically convert-and-kill. Whoever ends up with more souls in their domain when the time runs out wins.

The IGJ0 page is here.
You can see a screenshot of the game in action here.

Or you use the freely available Turck MM Cache which has similar or better performance compared to the commercial Zend engine, and provides memory resident caching besides just storing post-compile scripts.

Fine.
Done.
Here you go.

Does this mean we get to stop listening to you whine now?

Fine.
Done.
Here you go.

Does this mean we get to stop listening to you whine now?

lack of familiar professional mixing/software

Have you looked at JAMin?

There's a debian equivalent for those who like the super-cow power at http://fink.sourceforge.net/

Take a look at http://wact.sourceforge.net/examples/

You may not be able to use iTunes, but you can still use the iPod with linux.

http://gtkpod.sourceforge.net/

Will it handle the X11 dependency gracefully? I spent many, many hours trying to get Fink either to recognize that I had XFree86 installed as a binary or to compile it from source without getting errors all over the place. I'm not a newbie to package managers like apt and ports, but despite this I eventually ended up giving up trying to install X11 apps with Fink because I just didn't have the time to spend trying to get it to work properly. As a result, I am now using Quicken instead of GNUCash.

you musn't of seen Turck mmCache
when a php script it first run after change it is kept (cached) in it's bytecode form, thus eliminating compile time for subsequent requests.
true there is no JIT in php, but for a web application the bottlenecks will most likely be elsewhere.
And of course, if the best performance it required, intensive bits of the application can be offloaded into a C extension.

> anyone know how this compares (quality-wise, cpu-hunger-wise, functionality-wise) to ardour.

You don't have to pay for its manual, like you do for ardour.

this Morphix mod is what I am looking at to mod for our web registration kiosks.

Sera

Here's what it takes to get OGG into the iPod: ACTUAL MARKET PENETRATION. Like it or not, OGG is the realm of Linux/anime/audio geeks and/or open-source zealots (categories may overlap)--this market is tiny compared to the vast majority of iPod buyers. Yes, they might get money from selling to you, but I'm sure a cost/benefit analysis has been done, and it comes out saying the cost of adding OGG support doesn't justify the benefit. The general public knows what MP3 is, and that's the population buying this device. Really, MP3 is all they know; most have no concept of lossy encoding, much less other formats, even other formats the iPod supports.

Besides, you could just install Linux on it, you crazy, lovable Slashdot scamp, you. OGG playback at about 80% of realtime. Go help them out! Because, let's face it, the kind of people who'd install Linux on their iPod are the kind of people who have OGGs. I'm not either of those categories, and my iPod suits me just fine.

We've also switched to Firefox for our desk and office machines, and that has worked wonderfully. I've just had to delete all of the shortcuts to IE so that nobody uses it "accidentally". It's reduced my problems with spyware from a flood to a trickle.

Well, I took a look at the feature list (http://lmuse.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/New_F eatures), and it looks pretty impressive. I'm new to home recording in general, so not all the terms were familiar to me.

Muse doesn't look like it can provide everything I need in one package, however. I play guitar, and have been looking at windows software packages such as Cubase. In addition to the audio/MIDI editing stuff that Muse now has, I'm looking for some decent guitar-oriented analog effects. Does anyone know if there's a linux package that does meets this need?

Also, for the couple dozen linux guitarists that are out there: what does everyone out there use to reduce hiss in the incoming guitar signal? For that matter, is anyone doing anything more exotic than just running the guitar cable to your soundcard's line in?

Keyboard shortcuts are useful. The Delphi IDE is a good example. For me, it is routine to press Ctrl-S (save) before I press F9 (run). You know, during debugging the IDE can crash, and you don't want to loose your changes with that, do you?

One could do the same thing by clicking the Save button and then the Run button, but it simply takes more time, even if the buttons weren't as small as they are now. So if one would throw away the keyboard shortcuts from Delphi, I would probably never save anymore before running (takes too much time). And we all know that isn't a very good idea.

On the other hand, for keyboard shortcuts to work, they should be consistent, very consistent. For example, take Windows 98. In almost all applications you can use Control-S to save your document. There is one exception to this, and it is called Notepad. If you press Ctrl-S in it, nothing happens. And this is very bad, because I have often been editing webpages with Notepad and asked myself why Internet Explorer wouldn't show me the things I changed.

This point is a very true one. If you use Windows and want a good example of this, look at the top two of these screenshots. On the left one, you configure the ports and IP addresses on which the server starts listening. Then, on the right you can map folders to these sockets. Now look at the right screenshot, and especially at "On IP address:". Does it make sense that there is an edit box after it?

As I developed this UI, I thought it does make sense. You could either enter an IP address from the Ports tab to do real virtual hosting, or you could enter a domain name for HTTP header based virtual hosting (now that I look at the sources again, I removed the HTTP header based virtual hosting...) However, it is still bad usability. It is used for two kinds of entries, and what do we have for that: the radio button. So if this would be properly designed, you could choose the appropriate virtual hosting method with a radio button, and then you could either enter a domain name, or choose an IP address from a drop-down list. And of course the entry that you shouldn't use is grayed out.

Great that I have now found out one more usability problem in my application, but I only did because of this article. Normally you, as a developer, code and make sure the UI works for you, and maybe you even make sure that it looks clean and simple. Yet looks can certainly be deceiving.

I'm totally clueless on most of these things but I got two comments:

You could use the Mac OS X approach of buffering everything, but that consumes huge amounts of memory.

But that's not a big problem, is it? My graphics card has 128 MB RAM - and it's far from new, I bought it nearly two years ago. Modern cards all have at least 64 MB and go up to 256 megs. If you run a 1280 x 1024 resolution at 32 bits, that'll use up 40 megs leaving 20 to 200 megabytes free for buffering individual windows that are hidden. I guess the way my system works right now is that I use 12 MB (for 1024 x 768 x 16) in Windows and the remaining >100 MB are wasted. Maybe I should make a RAM drive on them...

Under Windows, users need to learn [...]

I don't know if it applies to you, ie if you're actually running Windows, but if you are or know someone who is, try Media Player Classic. Highly customizable (the useful kind - no skinning though!), small, open-source. And MPC plays QuickTime and RealMedia. Doesn't save you from installing the Apple and Real junk players since it uses their libraries, but it does allow you to watch QuickTime in beautiful full-screen glory.
And to keep some inkling of being on-topic, the user interface is beautifully simple: it looks just like another window, no bells and whistles - similar to the old Windows Media Player, which explains the name.

galion? ... i would recommend Galeon

Mod parent up. I've been down for years and I know how it can affect your bottom line.

There's a hack for linux somewhere that'll allow you to use bad memory - I dunno if it works on the fly.

I am on a notebook that is compiled for a 386 enviroment so I cannot be of any use for compiling this code for a 586 enviroment. However, I would not regard that as a straight up gpl violation, so much as lazy packaging.
here is one instance of linphonecore.h

and here is osipua.h

it is also worth noting: That there have been issues getting linephone 0.8 working, thanks to the latter file.

good luck, and I hope someone with the right enviroment can compile this. :-)

However I wonder if gaim-vv will end up replacing phonegaim.

Even Javascript has some nice features if you are scripting other components (i.e. in a XUL application) but the next time I ask someone how to itterate through a hash table in Javascript, they had better not say "you don't..."

var hash = Hash.fromArray([["one", "eins"], ["two", "zwei"], ["three", "drei"]])
hash.each(function(value, key) {
alert(key + " => " + value)
})

Of course I first need to load ruby.js, an implementation of some of Ruby's standard library in JavaScript...

Yup, with MacOS the monitor can only do 60Hz at 1152x864 (ouch), but in Linux it can do 1280x960 at 82Hz!! Thank you, modelines. Fuck you, autodetection.

This is a real example of how Linux works. You can take the easy out (autodetection) and get average results, or do something hard (write your own modeline) and get good results. Linux is usually "harder" but you get better results in the long run.

Speaking of modelines: http://xtiming.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/xtiming.pl

Aqsis [tagline - REYES for everyone!] is an open source REYES renderer, RenderMan-compliant. Its web site is a decent source of information on the subject, the links contained within are better.

It's a fine idea, but it won't stop p2p traffic, and may not even reduce it significantly.
The fact is that none of the music services have ever song, and most of the commercial services skew towards more commercial music (that is, fewer indie labels, and no unsigned bands). Plus there are all of these 'partial albums', and full albums with the one song you want missing - guess what someone who really wants to hear that song is going to do? Buy the cd? Uh-uh.
I've been blogging my experiences using rhapsody, and the main thing I'm finding is that services of this kind are fine as long as you never leave your computer. Since most people eventually want to go outside and keep listening to music, they need to be able to transfer files to a portable player, something that this subscription won't allow. So it'll be a nice perk for the students, but they'll still download whatever songs they actually want to keep.
As for recording streams, it's doable, but not everybody will bother. Until it's as easy to record a stream as it is to download from kazaa, most people who really want free digital music will use the p2p networks.
If you really want to record streams, audacity does a good job and is free, although total recorder is good too (it is not, however, free).

I have more details in my Kuro5hin diary:

• Two Thousand Spams a Day - mostly racist messages intended to affect the recent German elections
• Four Hundred Megabytes of Spam a Day - mostly the zafi.b virus

My hosting service had the ClamAV antivirus software installed for a little bit, but had to disable it because it was using too much CPU time, I think because the host was getting so much mail.

raptor, like that?

Emacro hacker Bruce Ingalls is a mathematician, free software writer AND plays curling. How 'bout that for a hat-trick.

(No I'm not him.)

One would think that a system like this would be designed...

See DougWebb's comment. I think he nails it on the head with regard to the evolvement of the code.

One would think that a system like this would be designed so that the HTML generation is seperated out well enough so it can be easily replaced.


That's been being worked on over the past year (maybe more?)....' Get the rest of the HTML out of the code and into the templates'.

It's (imho) very nearly done. That work is largely what's enabled people to begin work on new themes (html4/xhtml).

All help appreciated, obviously. Submit a patch and help out if you can spare the time.

You do realize that MatLab runs in Linux if you're willing to licence it, which it seems you are under windows...

Anyway, a quick freshmeat search showed me that Nulab, Yorick, Scilab, FrAid and Lush are all possible replacements, depending on the application. Moreover, many of those refer to Octave which might be suitable, depending on your needs.

Likewise National Instruments makes LabVIEW for Linux, and freshmeat says to look at Flow Designer and TACO as potential free replacements.

If the two are used for related purposes, then consider RobotFlow which came as a result under both searches...

Just in case you decide to retry the system at a later date...

You do realize that MatLab runs in Linux if you're willing to licence it, which it seems you are under windows...

Anyway, a quick freshmeat search showed me that Nulab, Yorick, Scilab, FrAid and Lush are all possible replacements, depending on the application. Moreover, many of those refer to Octave which might be suitable, depending on your needs.

Likewise National Instruments makes LabVIEW for Linux, and freshmeat says to look at Flow Designer and TACO as potential free replacements.

If the two are used for related purposes, then consider RobotFlow which came as a result under both searches...

Just in case you decide to retry the system at a later date...