Slashdot Mirror

Cygwin or UnxUtils work great.

"now it can be done using the open standard VNC"

there are no less than four open-source IPMI projects

GnuWin32

CoreUtils
DiffUtils
FindUtils
Gawk
Grep
Sed
WGet
Zip/UnZip

NirSoft

All Utilities (Ignore False-Positive VirusScan Warnings)

http://www.pcworld.com/article/196595/how_to_install_android_on_your_iphone.html http://ipodlinux.sourceforge.net/index.shtml
All the fucking time, that's when.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see Windows XP re-establishing itself as market share leader

Or even Windows 98.

Can anyone please explain to me why there are no alternatives to the Windows "command prompt" aka cmd.exe? I know about Cygwin, but it's the same ugly cmd.exe window. I don't mean a bash or the powershell, I mean an alternative to the ugly window, that is black and you just have two scrollbars right and bottom.

This ugly window lacks many of the "advanced" features, like simple copy&past (right click copy, right click past), better fonts (why I can't choose from all the true-type fonts available?), maybe some tabs?

I don't know why MS took the effort and time to develop the powershell if it's still running in the 1991 cmd.exe window.

Like that project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/ (it's GPL and free of course)

I miss Console, great console tool with tabs and you can mix command.com, sh.ex and powershell.exe in the same window .... GREAT!!!

http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/handbook/Credits.html

(Pretty cool!)

* It's a very good defragmentation program, which is WHY I tried to help out their dev. team w/ this suggestion after seeing others complain of CPU usage & what-not in their forums...

APK

P.S.=> Process Priority Control is credited to me there (after I gave the authors some easily ported Borland Delphi + Windows API calls code (the REAL "active ingredient" was in API calls), in order to port it into C for UltraDefrag -> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2993462&group_id=199532&atid=969873 which is VERY easy to do for an experienced developer): "Will wonders NEVER cease..."...

... apk

http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/handbook/Credits.html

(Pretty cool!)

* It's a very good defragmentation program, which is WHY I tried to help out their dev. team w/ this suggestion after seeing others complain of CPU usage & what-not in their forums...

APK

P.S.=> Process Priority Control is credited to me there (after I gave the authors some easily ported Borland Delphi + Windows API calls code (the REAL "active ingredient" was in API calls), in order to port it into C for UltraDefrag -> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2993462&group_id=199532&atid=969873 which is VERY easy to do for an experienced developer): "Will wonders NEVER cease..."...

... apk

Agree, but I prefer http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ -- less powerful but plays nicer with Windows native APIs

It is: http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/

Shameless plug: why not record their sessions? use https://sourceforge.net/projects/rautor triggered on application use.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ttracker/
Basically, it does nothing but track the titlebars of every window that's open, and which one is in focus at any given time. And since every browser lists the URL in the title bar, it works like magic.

And it writes everything to a simple CSV file, so you can analyze it any way you choose. But it also has some nifty reporting screens, if you really care.

If you're only interested in web access, there's something else that you can do. Look into ".pac" files on windows. Basically, think a javascript file that gets run every time any URL is accessed by anything in all of windows. As in "return null" will make everything die, and "return slashdot.org" will make every URL return the slashdot homepage. You can easily write a five-line jscript file to log everything to a file through the FSO.

The basic idea is to take a computational chemistry package and run it through a genetic algorithm to search for suitable candidates that solve certain problems.

Here, try mine.

Chembench is a web-based computational chemistry tool, runs genetic algorithm based models (among others).
The physics were over my head, too, but that wasn't a problem. We used commercial descriptor calculation tools for a while. Now the open-source chemical descriptors provided in CDK are getting good enough to replace those.

How about dual N-back training instead?

Here's a somewhat platform agnostic version of the game to play with.

And... there's the Dual N-Back FAQ.

I assume this is an epic troll, but am going to give an honest answer anyway, because there are some legitimate questions buried in there.

I work with a aggregate.org a university research group which has a decent claim to having built the very first Linux PC Cluster, set some records with them (KLAT2 and KASY0 were both ours), and still operates a number of Linux clusters, including some containing GPUs, so I feel like I have some idea of the lay of cluster technology. It is *way* overdue for an update (and one is in progress, we swear!), but we also maintain TLDP's widely circulated Parallel Processing HOWTO, which was the goto resource for this kind of question for some time.

In a cluster of any size, you do _not_ want to be handling nodes individually. There are several popular provisioning and administration systems for avoiding doing so, because every organization with a large number of machines needs such a tool. The clusters I deal with are mostly provisioned with Perceus with a few ROCKS holdovers, and I'm aware of a number of other solutions (xCat is the most popular that I've never tinkered with). Perceus can pass out pretty much any correctly-configured Linux image to the machines, although It is specifically tailored to work with Caos NSA (Redhat-like), or GravityOS (a Debian derivative) payloads. Infiscale, the company that supports Perceus, releases the basic tools and some sample modifiable OS images for free, and makes their money off support and custom images, so it is pretty flexible option in terms of required financial and/or personnel commitment. The various provisioning and administration tools are generally designed to interact with various monitoring tools (ex. Warewulf or Ganglia) and job management systems (see next paragraph).
Accounting and billing users is largely about your job management system. Our clusters aren't billed this way, so I can't claim to have be closely familiar with the tools, but most of the established job management systems like Slurm, and GridEngine (to name two of many) have accounting systems built in.
The "standard" images or image-building tools provided with the provisioning systems generally provide for a few nicely integrated combinations of tools, which make it remarkably easy to throw a functioning cluster stack together.

As for GPUs... be aware that the claimed performance for GPUs, especially in clusters, is virtually unattainable. You have to write code in their nasty domain-specific languages (CUDA or OpenCL for Nvidia, just OpenCL for AMD) and there isn't really any concept of IPC baked in to the tools to allow for distributed operations. Furthermore, GPUs are also generally extroridnarly memory and memory bandwidth starved (remember, the speed comes from there being hundreds of processing elements on the card, all sharing the same memory and interface), so simply keeping them fed with data is challenging. GPGPU is also an unstable area in both relevant senses: the GPGPU software itself has a nasty tendency to hang the host when something goes wrong (which is extra fun in clusters without BMCs), and the platforms are changing at an alarming clip. AMD is somewhat worse in the "moving target" regard - they recently deprecated all 4000 series cards from being supported by GPGPU tools, and have abandoned their CTM, CAL, and Brook+ environments before settling on OpenCL, and only OpenCL. Nvidia still supports both their C

I assume this is an epic troll, but am going to give an honest answer anyway, because there are some legitimate questions buried in there.

I work with a aggregate.org a university research group which has a decent claim to having built the very first Linux PC Cluster, set some records with them (KLAT2 and KASY0 were both ours), and still operates a number of Linux clusters, including some containing GPUs, so I feel like I have some idea of the lay of cluster technology. It is *way* overdue for an update (and one is in progress, we swear!), but we also maintain TLDP's widely circulated Parallel Processing HOWTO, which was the goto resource for this kind of question for some time.

In a cluster of any size, you do _not_ want to be handling nodes individually. There are several popular provisioning and administration systems for avoiding doing so, because every organization with a large number of machines needs such a tool. The clusters I deal with are mostly provisioned with Perceus with a few ROCKS holdovers, and I'm aware of a number of other solutions (xCat is the most popular that I've never tinkered with). Perceus can pass out pretty much any correctly-configured Linux image to the machines, although It is specifically tailored to work with Caos NSA (Redhat-like), or GravityOS (a Debian derivative) payloads. Infiscale, the company that supports Perceus, releases the basic tools and some sample modifiable OS images for free, and makes their money off support and custom images, so it is pretty flexible option in terms of required financial and/or personnel commitment. The various provisioning and administration tools are generally designed to interact with various monitoring tools (ex. Warewulf or Ganglia) and job management systems (see next paragraph).
Accounting and billing users is largely about your job management system. Our clusters aren't billed this way, so I can't claim to have be closely familiar with the tools, but most of the established job management systems like Slurm, and GridEngine (to name two of many) have accounting systems built in.
The "standard" images or image-building tools provided with the provisioning systems generally provide for a few nicely integrated combinations of tools, which make it remarkably easy to throw a functioning cluster stack together.

As for GPUs... be aware that the claimed performance for GPUs, especially in clusters, is virtually unattainable. You have to write code in their nasty domain-specific languages (CUDA or OpenCL for Nvidia, just OpenCL for AMD) and there isn't really any concept of IPC baked in to the tools to allow for distributed operations. Furthermore, GPUs are also generally extroridnarly memory and memory bandwidth starved (remember, the speed comes from there being hundreds of processing elements on the card, all sharing the same memory and interface), so simply keeping them fed with data is challenging. GPGPU is also an unstable area in both relevant senses: the GPGPU software itself has a nasty tendency to hang the host when something goes wrong (which is extra fun in clusters without BMCs), and the platforms are changing at an alarming clip. AMD is somewhat worse in the "moving target" regard - they recently deprecated all 4000 series cards from being supported by GPGPU tools, and have abandoned their CTM, CAL, and Brook+ environments before settling on OpenCL, and only OpenCL. Nvidia still supports both their C

Maybe not. For a game with some awesome writing, play the Marathon trilogy. But expect nothing like SC2, it is hard sci-fi with little comedy.

Syndicate Wars is way better than the original. Some say that it is more arcadish, but the atmosphere and graphics make up for it. Also you don't need to run a DOS emulator, there is a reimplementation of Syndicate called FreeSynd and a SDL port of Syndicate Wars.

Ooohhhh! Thank you for this, AC! I did not know of the existence of these. There goes my evening when I get home....

Syndicate Wars is way better than the original. Some say that it is more arcadish, but the atmosphere and graphics make up for it. Also you don't need to run a DOS emulator, there is a reimplementation of Syndicate called FreeSynd and a SDL port of Syndicate Wars.

[...] I've been thinking of starting a personal project, an open-source game, I just hadn't decided what. I considered making a Syndicate clone, but with rumours of a reboot, I figured I'd hold off as I doubt I'd be able to make anything as good as a AAA developer like EA. Having heard this news, I'm seriously considering starting my project (Especially since Corporate Mayhem - http://mayhem.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] - seems to be long dead). It may never come to anything, but what the hell, it doesn't look like EA is going to do much better.

Let me know when/if that happens. Ill be happy to help out in the programming department ;)

Ok, I'll admit that like everyone else commenting so far, I'm pretty pissed off at this "reboot". It sounds, to me, that they've just ripped off Deus Ex, maybe put a small tweak to that formula here and there, but ripped it off none the less.

I have no problem with this.

I like Deus Ex and the game that they're proposing actually sounds like it could be good (The developers are decent, too). There aren't enough games out there like Deus Ex, so why not?

My problem is that I still want a new Syndicate game. This is Syndicate in name only, in much the same way that C&C: Generals was C&C in name only. I still want a strategy game that allows me to have a squad of 4 people running around a city, persuading an army, shoving them all into a car and going on a rampage - all in the name of corporate glory. There may not be many Deus Ex-Style games out there, but there's a hell of a lot more of them than there are Syndicate-style games.

Syndicate was ahead of its time and it still is by most measurements (So was Deus Ex. Human Revolution, while still a great game, is a cut-down version of Deus Ex)).

I have a degree in making computer games, but my day job ended up being a regular boring IT fair. I've been thinking of starting a personal project, an open-source game, I just hadn't decided what. I considered making a Syndicate clone, but with rumours of a reboot, I figured I'd hold off as I doubt I'd be able to make anything as good as a AAA developer like EA. Having heard this news, I'm seriously considering starting my project (Especially since Corporate Mayhem - http://mayhem.sourceforge.net/ - seems to be long dead). It may never come to anything, but what the hell, it doesn't look like EA is going to do much better.

Except bacula is an enormous beast to configure. My vote is for backuppc

I suggest Cppcheck: http://cppcheck.sourceforge.net/
- It is quite small
- It is a command line application (there is a small GUI also in case you would prefer working with that, but I would recommend the CLI first)
- It has very good unit test coverage (about 90% line coverage), so if you break something with your modifications, you will most likely notice it.
- The general idea is rather simple, source code is input, then it is preprocessed, then simplified, then passed to a number of different classes that try to find errors from the source. So following the execution path should not be very difficult.
- As it is a tool for static C and C++ code analysis, you will learn a lot about C and C++ language while working with it
- It is a tool, which you as a C++ developer most likely want to use yourself, so helping it improve will give help also you.

You are assuming that these things do not exist for terminal based editors. They do. It is all about customizing your environment. No, I wouldn't want to use plain old vi for anything other than a quick job, but I get all those things you listed with vim (for example) and I get what vi offers and I don't have to wait for any three rings circuses whatsoever. ;)

You front loaded part of my three-ring-circus-waiting-time with your customization efforts. I may have to wait 30 seconds for the splash screen and the IDE to load up the project, but you just acknowledged that you also spend some amount of time every time you begin developing in a new environment. (And I'd maintain that the graphical presentation of source or program architecture is also valuable, but again not everyone needs or wants it.)

Show me an IDE with a Turing complete context menu and I'll readily concede that point. :)

Here's one way to do it in Eclipse and here's one way in Visual Studio 2005. I've used it to create a plugin that automates the generation of CppUnit unit test skeletons. I've also created a plugin for VS6 (a very long time ago) that automated the maintenance of a project by watching a folder for new source code modules, automatically adding them into the project, and then building with them. I suppose if someone cared hard enough, they could implement ed in a context menu accessible dialog box, using ! as the menu accelerator key. That actually sounds kind of cool...hmm... anyway, it sounds better than Clippy for vi. :-) Anyway, the point is that both text and IDE environments are endlessly customizable.

And I totally get your point that some people prefer IDEs. The problem I have is the attitude those people often display is that IDEs are only for beginners or bad coders, which simply is not true. And many of them do it very arrogantly, which is quite off-putting.

I think the bad rep that IDEs get is that people don't see it as the difference between a performance enhancing tool and training wheels. Look at it with different users, though, and it becomes obvious why there can be differences of opinion.

• Do the productivity gains given by an IDE enable a bad coder to write more bad code? Yes, and I think that is heavily related to the biases against IDEs. It enables stupid people to make more mistakes per hour. But that's no different than a stupid person buying a fast car. It doesn't make fast cars bad, it just means stupid people can go faster.
• Will an IDE make a bad coder better? No, although that's a mistaken impression a lot of managers have because the bad coders are more productive. Productive != better.
• Will an IDE help a bad coder become better? (Note the distinction between the previous question.) I believe the complexity of the tools may often hinder learning by hiding important foundational knowledge inside "wizards" or "code generators." But because those tools make a good programmer more productive, they shouldn't be eliminated. Someone will become better only if they're personally interested in improving their skills, but that has nothing to do with their choice of tools.
• Will an IDE make a good coder worse? Absolutely not. There's a learning curve, of course, but anyone able to master programming will have no problem picking up such a tool.
• Will an IDE make a good coder better? I have seen that it can, especially when you're dealing with more than one programmer on a project. Plug in a real-time static code analyzer, and they find mistakes fast. Plug in an architecture visualizer, and they can instantly see if someone is violating layer encapsulation. Plug in a code generator and you el

Take a look at e4rat. It reorders the files loaded at startup to be sequentially on disk.

And my own shameless plug: http://code.google.com/p/ifreebudget-android/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/ifreebudget/

I guess it's time for shameless plug:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/infinite-wisdom/

Here are some more links:

• Sourceforge help wanted page
• A similar Slashdot story from before
• Some similar Stackoverflow questions: 1 2 3 (C related)
• One comment from above I especially agree with -- Look at GNOME Love -- Large enough projects have bugs marked as "easy to fix for newbies" -- This is for you!

Linky. It's easy to build, well structured, covers a wide range of discretely organised functionality, has simple demo apps, and you can immediately see the result of tinkering with it.

See also the companion volume Thinking Forth, on http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/

This was done in Java a long time ago. http://www.jnode.org/

--
Goldbox re imagined
http://goldchest.sourceforge.net/

See my comment here:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

Also:
http://thewaronkids.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Underground_History_of_American_Education

SourceForge supports Git. What's less certain is whether the site can handle the load of the Linux kernel.

I suspect that the mental skills required to use things like Visual Studio and Eclipse are much different from the skills needed to think through and communicate thoughtful programming.

Not in my experience - auto-completion does help enormously, especially if one
– names the variables in a meaningful way
– drops the awful style prefixing your variables with m_ and the use the hungarian notation.
I mean, what's wrong with this->name or this.name - quickly "picked" by autocompletion - instead of m_wszName/m_strName?

I wonder how the above stays in the way of "thoughtful programming"?

BTW: I googled "thoughtful programming" and found it mostly associated with Forth (is it because of Leo Brodie's Thinking Forth?), with some "tangents" coming from Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in..." series.
Not every helpful... therefore: would you mind please to share your definition of "thoughtful programming"?

On the difference between learning "just in case" in schools and "learning just in time" using laptops and the internet:
    http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

What we really need is a "standardized" open-source quantum computing language so that we can develop and exchange quantum algorithms to prepare for the day when quantum computers are real.

Right now we have the QCL language, QCF for Matlab/Octave, and the Cove framework that could be used with any language, but it looks like there is really only a C# implementation right now.

None of these have really taken hold as a "standard" though, and probably elements of all of them could be brought together in something multi-platform and all-inclusive.

Still, progress is progress.

I do not think MS defines that word as you and I do. They are focused on lock-in and retention models rather than functionality and utility to the end user. I'm pretty sure if I ever do use Win8, I will still install WinCDEmu.
Why? Because it does NOT:
1) Phone home every time I use it

2)Restrict my usability b/c of patent/license/drm handicaps

3)Work harder at obfuscating controls than being customizable/useable.

You can use "fuseiso" to mount not just ISO-9660 images but also proprietary formats like NRG (Nero) and CCD (CloneCD) without root priviliges.

There's already an existing GUI for another program: "CDemu", an actual CD drive emulator.
http://www.my-guides.net/en/images/stories/virtual-dvd-linux/gcdemu-2.png
http://cdemu.sourceforge.net/

I understand the sentiment, and partly share it (I used classic theme and start menu all the way until Win7); but Windows is a commercial product, and it is development is inevitably driven by the desire to appease the majority of its userbase. It doesn't mean that power users are completely ignored - after all, there are still features like PowerShell - but where there is a conflict it's obvious which option will be taken.

Even in Linux, I can't stand Gnome or KDE anymore, and have migrated to ICE, for the exact same reasons.

You have this option in Windows, as well. E.g. this might be of interest to you.

Look outside your tiny world a bit and realise that a large chunk of the world has settled on GSM for their phones.

A Quad-Band GSM phone would have no trouble connecting to something like this. With regards to licenses - if you're having to install something like this because of disaster recovery, then you can pretty much assume that any administrative level of government has its hands full with other stuff.

On a related note, there's an open-source GSM stack available, with a real-world island installation that (seems to) work fine -

http://openbts.sourceforge.net/

Mod parent up. This is exactly the kind of "fixing" that Microsoft has in mind for Windows 8: fixing by removing or neutering.

I am using Classic Shell which fixes quite a number of issues, but the search isn't still up to XP specs.

Way to ruin a good post.

The correct link is http://gbf.sourceforge.net/

CNET/ZDNet - They CAN be a "tough lot" to deal with... but this updater doesn't sound ALL THAT BAD really!

I was with you up to this bit - I personally don't agree that a downloader that rams toolbars onto the user's PC is a good thing at all. Is it possible you're confusing the Cnet Downloader with Cnet TechTracker, which is a program which checks for new versions of installed apps from download.com?

I mean, what's next? SourceForge with MS apps?? Doubt that, closed source & all, & just being "facetious" is all on this last account!

... apk

Actually, funny you mention that... MS has a few apps on Sourceforge, including what has to be the best Open Source installer packager for Windows - WiX.

What next?

How about AROS?

1. Install the Parcellite clipboard manager.
2. Choose 'synchronize clipboards' in the options.
3. Done.

I own a Sony PRS-900 and use it *only* to read PDFs (mainly Comp. Science papers). So far what have worked for me is using Briss to automagically crop all the headers, footers and margins from all the pages.

For multicolumn papers the PRS-900 has a great multi-column reading mode (dividing the page in 4 quadrants, zooming in the first one and as you select "next page" going into the adequate next quadrant).

I installed Calibre some time ago but deleted it as it was a huge beast (it really made my computer crawl). I tried converting one or two PDFs to Ebooks but as you said the headers/footers messed everything. Maybe combining Briss with Calibre would work.

I have a small batch file in my desktop in which I drop every PDF before reading it. It has soPDF and Briss. I have had no problems reading any PDF so far.

I have written a few apps using Tornado... So far it is my favorite framework for developing rich web applications. I contributed code/patches that the Tornado devs used to add SSL support to the framework. Also, just the other day I completed a Kerberos/AD/SSO authentication module for Tornado (I'll be making it available soon I hope).

My favorite feature of Tornado is the built-in support for WebSockets. It should also be mentioned that it is one of (if not THE) fastest Python web frameworks.

I also want to mention that for one-off/quick development web applications that don't need to be super fast I almost always use CherryPy. It is much simpler/quicker to develop with CherryPy than Tornado. You lose out big time on speed but the development time of CherryPy apps is very impressive. I wrote a reporting tool for my job that would examine a passwd file and then check it against Active Directory for uid/gid/shell/homedir conflicts and report the results on a pretty page using jqGrid. Users could even click a button to export the grid to spreadsheet format. Total development time: 16 hours (and that includes lunch breaks and five or six hour long conference calls)! Needless to say my boss was ecstatic, my coworkers were amazed, and the people who ended up using the tool asked me how much it cost (as if we bought it).

To bridge the gap between CherryPy and Tornado I actually wrote a MethodDispatcher that lets you port a CherryPy app to Tornado with a trivial amount of effort. Of course, it also lets you write a Tornado app "the CherryPy way" which, while a bit strange sitting on top of Tornado, is much simpler and allows for faster development time.

As for the differences between some popular frameworks I wrote up a pretty good explanation over at Stackoverflow.

For reference, here's some apps I've developed using Tornado: Gate One (still developing it), PyCI (no longer maintaining it though--I hope to revisit it some day when I have time, sigh), Escape From The Web, and here's a writeup of mine on how to develop an application similar to my reporting tool using CherryPy and jqGrid in no time at all.

If you were going to do this as a one off sure you would use libc if you are going to do the same thing 10000 times in a row as you entire program and care about performance you would look for something better (this would likely be libboost in C++).

For anything to do with strings python is far more expressive than c and this case could be the more elegant and robust solution (except for memory usage). For this example i guess you 'parse' (not sure if that's the correct term in C) the text before the looping and store the result in a structure and then while looping though pass the structure as an argument this requires new libraries or you to write your own. Unless you allow on the fly editing in python I think its still equivalent function.

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstdio/sprintf/
http://bstring.sourceforge.net/features.html
The first shows that the sprintf is bloated for the benchmarks purpose.
The second link is of library i found from google that says it has 3980% increased performance for string concatenation (other improvements are more modest) over libc if this figure is correct then a pypy has not beaten c and that sprintf is pretty bloated. I don't not check it had the equivalent functions for this problem. Its difficult to argue this as coming up with an alternative way to do nothing in C has arbitrary rules.

However, Debian GNU/Linux squeeze will not run on 386 or earlier processors. Despite the architecture name "i386", support for actual 80386 processors (and their clones) was dropped with the Sarge (r3.1) release of Debian[2]. (No version of Linux has ever supported the 286 or earlier chips in the series.)

That's not quite true. Despite the 286 lacking a memory management unit (MMU) Linux is available (admittedly without any hardware memory protection) as part of the ELKS project which apparently even supports the 8086 processor.

Now, if you actually meant no version of Debian GNU/Linux ever supported the 80286, then you'd be right on the money.

While ELKS obviously targets embedded platforms nowadays, I have personally installed Linux (can't remember whether it was ELKS) onto a bog-standard 80286 desktop (that had floppies, hard disk and originally ran MS-DOS) about a decade ago (when the original Pentiums were beginning to be obsoleted) as a lark. Beyond basic understanding of Linux and the command-line, absolutely no assembly or hacking required. That said, even back then, it wasn't a terribly productive usage of the machine.