Slashdot Mirror

Lisp community, OTOH, seems to think that only commercial implementations are worthwhile.

Twist it any way you want, one standard open source implementation would guarantee better library and tool support.

Lisp community, OTOH, seems to think that only commercial implementations are worthwhile.

Twist it any way you want, one standard open source implementation would guarantee better library and tool support.

iTerm

My web site is in a third world country, and 60% of the users still use 800x600 (at least just 1.5% uses 640x480).

People you need to check out Multi-Gnome-Terminal.

It supports everything that Gnome-Term does but has much better tab support (including moving tabs). Better shortcut key management. Allows splitting a terminal horizontally and or vertically within a tab. Has terminal "bonding" allowing typing the same thing in multiple windows. Supports background images with brightness contrast/tinting/gamma like Eterm, but configurable graphically.

Only thing is it hasn't been binary pkgs haven't been rereleased for current distros... but the old packages work pretty well!

Give it a try.. you'll like it!

And the final problem is that while CSS is great and cooks your breakfast too, there are still many browsers in use which don't fully support the latest standards. Sorry, but I ain't gonna alienate a good segment of my customers in order to use the latest standards, no matter how good they are.

And that's said as someone who does the website of a small venture in his free time - just like you said, I'm not a "real" web designer. But I like to think I do a better job than many of these so-called professionals. :) (hey, if your website is unreadable in links or requires javascript/java/flash/etc to navigate, you havent done your fucking job)

This still doesn't fix the problem of games under linux, unless someone's managed to port DirectX 9 and hardware-accelerated drivers for the major graphics cards...

Ahem, 4 insightful for having no clue that both Nvidia and ATI have started providing Linux drivers for quite some time? That Matrox is supported by MESA's own drivers? That UT, UT2003, UT2004, America's Army and all id games have been ported to Linux? That there even are open source high-res OpenGL versions of Doom for Linux (and Windows) even though the original Doom used 8-bit 320x200 software rendering)? Well, ok...

As for DirectX being ported to Linux, winex is doing this, but for native apps developers can simply use SDL and write games that are 100% portable across an incredible range of OSes.

...it existed at a time so far before many languages that pathetically failed to implement its features, so I'm a little confused at the way the computing world has ignored it, instead of trying to work its principles into modern languages.

Linux won't run on Apple's hardware?

MacOS won't run on other PPC systems? I guess it won't run on non-PPC systems either?

I suppose I won't even ask about Darwin.

PEEP the Network Auralizer This project, cooperatively developed by a faculty member and student in the Tufts University Comp. Sci. dept. answers this question. PEEP applies sounds to network events. Its really cool, i had checked it out, but didn't have much time to get very far with it. I imagine this software's authors will appreciate it if you give it a gander, and let them know.

It's not impossible, but there's nothing that's anywhere near as mature as Tortoise. Here's an early version of one for Subversion and here's a similar tool for CVS, also very early in its development lifecycle.

Though it should only be of minimal concern to an end-user, the license on cvsfinder may prove questionable. It's BSD-licensed, but it apparently uses unsanity's APE sdk, whose terms in my (non-lawyer) opinion may forbid this. The unsanity guys seem decent and unlikely to pursue this, but if you're thinking of contributing code to it, read the APE agreement very carefully and form your own opinion. Also, I do seem to recall some intention on the part of the devloper to switch away from APE (to mach_override IIRC) so, if this is done already, then it's completely a non-issue.

And if you use Outlook, you can also use SpamBayes

Clearly if you think that vi et al can't handle your feature list starting 'tab completion...', then you are wrong. One might say that 'you have never used vi, and it shows.'

Personally, I prefer vi, and good heavens I would use emacs ahead of an IDE. But while I refuse to make generalisations, I know I am not alone.

You might want to take a look at Wargus if you are talking about warcraft2.

WineX or if you're talking about old Warcraft DosBox.

I eventually found myself doing exactly that, and running POPFile as an anti-spam proxy POP3 server, which can be run on multiple operating systems including Windows and Linux, and allows you to run use your email client of choice.

I've also heard good things about K9 on the Windows side, which supposedly has a smaller memory footprint than POPFile, but can only be run on the one OS.

> Good texture maps, and especially bump maps can alleviate the need for a lot of triangles.

Technology is called normal mapping. It's not new anymore. E.g. Cryengine implements it.
See PolyBump section

Also, there is already open source (LGPL) mesh optimizer called GNU Triangulated Surface Library. There are some impressive screenshots how well it performs.

> Good texture maps, and especially bump maps can alleviate the need for a lot of triangles.

Technology is called normal mapping. It's not new anymore. E.g. Cryengine implements it.
See PolyBump section

Also, there is already open source (LGPL) mesh optimizer called GNU Triangulated Surface Library. There are some impressive screenshots how well it performs.

It's not exactly sockets, but you can do an awful lot with the XmlHttpRequest object. Microsoft did it first, I think, and Mozilla has a complete clone. Check out the XulPlanet documentation, the Mozilla documentation, the Microsoft documentation or this tutorial called Using the XML HTTP Request Object

The XmlHttpRequest object is poorly named. Really you're just making an HTTP request, and if the response happens to be XML, there are convenience functions for getting a fully-parsed DOM view of the document. If the response is anything else (plain text, JavaScript, Perl, HTML, etc.) you can do what you want with it, including calling eval() on it from a JavaScript script. You can do synchronous (blocking) or asynchronous (non-blocking) calls to your web server, and either be notified of completion by a callback for non-blocking calls, or just treat it like a function call for blocking calls. It's quite handy, and we have a project at work that makes extensive use of this technique. We have a "thick" or "rich" client application that runs in the web browser. Our client looks like a native application--it has table widgets, with clickable headers that resort the columns, it has a tree widget that looks like the tree in Windows Explorer, it supports drag-and-drop and custom context-menus, and if you open our application in a chrome-free browser window, it's almost possible to forget it's not native (the speed is usually what gives it away, the GUI is a little sluggish...). It works equally well in Mozilla, Firefox, IE 5.5+, and Netscape 7.1+ on Windows 9x, 2000, XP, and many flavours of GNU/Linux (tested on Gentoo and Redhat 7.3, and 8.0 using GNOME, KDE, and some kind of *Box wm). Well, "equally well" is a bit of a stretch. IE's implementation of the DOM is dog slow, so some things run a bit faster in the Gecko-based browsers, but all functionality is equally available in all the configurations listed above. We've managed to stay standards-compliant for the most part, and have abstracted away the quirks in IE, so as soon as Konqueror, Opera and $YOUR_FAVOURITE_BROWSER fully support JavaScript 1.5, DOM 2.0, and CSS 2.0, our app will work in your browser, too. (I don't know which parts these browsers are missing, so maybe our app already works there.)

The only remaining hurdle is to convince management that it should be open-sourced so that other people can use it, too. If you can't wait, you might want to check out SourceForge. There are some other widget kits available for building browser-based apps. We chose not to go with them because, at the time, they were too Alpha-ish, and we disagreed with some design decisions. Our decision not to use those projects has not been revisited for a while though, now that we are rather comitted to our in-house implementation, so things may have improved significantly since the last time I had a look.

Also, if you're going to actually build any significant JavaScript apps (we have more than 40k loc that turns out to be more than 1 meg of JavaScript to download), I highly recommend JSDoc. The main developer, Gabriel, has been very responsive and helpful, and the documentation that his scripts produce is excellent. Especially considering he builds JSDoc in his spare time, I can't compliment his work enough. Now that our codebase is too large for me to keep it all in my head, the API has saved a lot of my time.

Ian

I disagree entirely. I used to use Outlook, with SpamBayes as my spam filter. The Thunderbird spam filter is far, far less effective. I have a suspicion it doesn't read email headers or something. All I can say for sure is that after training SpamBayes for two weeks I used to get maybe one email a week in my "suspected spam" folder. Then I moved to TB's built-in spam filter, and since then I get more like three spams a day delivered straight to my inbox. Not good. If this new version doesn't fix that I'm just going to go back to SpamBayes, even though I'll have to run it as a separate process.

To replace your HotSync software, take a look at the jSyncManager. It's an Open Source, pure Java, and will run on all your different operating systems. It features an Object-Oriented "jConduit" plug-in system to allow different applications to use it for their synchronization services.

The two downsides currently with running the jSyncManager on the desktop are:

• The jSyncManager relies upon external libraries to communicate with the hardware. For serial docks/cables it requires either the Java Communications API, or the Open Sourced jSerial API. For USB ports it requires jUSB. jUSB is currently only readily available on Linux, with a partial implementation available on Windows. TCP/IP sync support is available on all platforms.
• There aren't a whole lot of jConduit plug-ins available yet. The bundles ones provide generic functionality such as CSV and XML downloading of common PalmOS record types, the ability to upload PRC and PDB databases, the ability to export Zire 71 photos as JPG files, etc. However, if you're a Java-coder and want to write your own jConduit plug-in for your favorite PIM, documentation is available online, and support is readily available through the jSyncManager development community.

Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.

You missed a WWW in the Ecco Pro address. There is also the open-source Progect, a nice little outliner with has a (sadly paid) windows client.

Try Java Web Start. Example.

Unfortunately, your WG121 is not among those, but the Linux Prism GT driver project at least mentions it (although with a pretty disturbing "unknown status" and a "success rate" close to 90%, which seems kinda oxymoronous), so maybe it's worth a try. Atheros chipsets are supported by the MadWifi project, too...

Unfortunately, your WG121 is not among those, but the Linux Prism GT driver project at least mentions it (although with a pretty disturbing "unknown status" and a "success rate" close to 90%, which seems kinda oxymoronous), so maybe it's worth a try. Atheros chipsets are supported by the MadWifi project, too...

Everyone else has pretty much covered it already, but here's a brief summary anyway.

RAID 1 with 2 drives or RAID 5 with 3 drives is the best way to go for your typical desktop depending on your storage needs.

What's important (as others have also mentioned) is that you also backup the data regularly. There's a great Open Source project called BackupPC which will let you backup just about any type of machine with network access (Unix and Windows machines) automatically. You can configure it to make as many incrementals as you want/need and it also uses compression and hard-links to save storage space. All you need is a Unix server to run BackupPC on with a decent amount of storage space. Restoring files with BackupPC is also a piece of cake, there's an easy to use web interface, or you can use the command line as well.

Since there is a Linux upgrade kit ($99) for the PSX, will the EPSX also be Linux capable?

This would make a great all-in-one platform for Freevo or MythTV.

On a similar subject, we've also had real bad luck with linux data integrity in general when handling large files (>500MB). I've seen this problem on both low-end IDE drives as well as high end (5 year warranty) hot-swap SCSI drives. I've mailed the IDE driver author on this (when I thought it was an IDE-only problem), but received no comment. I suppose I should post it to the kernel list.

In any case, for anyone interested, I submitted a test program "writetest" to the Linux Test Project for anyone interested. Just give it a really large block size (a 1GB file is generally large enough) and repeat about 10 times. I wouldn't mind hearing from people on what they see on various mb/chipset combos. Some controllers/motherboards have problems, others don't.

restrictive networks that don't allow outbound connections on anything other than web, ftp, pop3, telnet, and maybe ssh

Wow, I can't believe you are complaining! I have ONLY an HTTP(S) proxy at work. Well, I had :-) Got a real IP for my home machine, tuned OpenVPN, and voila :-)

I have a Belkin card and wanted to get Linux working with wireless on my IBM Thinkpad which currently runs Windows 2000 quite well. I loaded up Mepis Linux and then set about getting the WiFi card working. My Belkin F5D6020 uses the Atmel AT76C5 chipset which as luck would have it has a set of open source drivers over on sourceforge. I thought I was golden until I started reading the directions...step 1 of about a dozen steps was: recompile kernel. Being a noob, I quickly decided this just wasn't going to happen. So I have pretty much given up on it till now. I'll give driverload a try. Otherwise it's just wait for a distro with full support or maybe by a new card that is known to work.

Ben Collins, the maintainer of the sbp2 driver, is the ieee1394 project administrator and, I'd hope, is subscribed to the list. I also posted a bug to the projects bug tracker on sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=deta il&aid=933965&group_id=2252&atid=20225 2
which has gone unanswered and even unassigned.

Not particularly uncouraging, huh?

Dinivin

I just thought I would post a brief message about supermount. If anyone wants to upgrade to 2.6.7 and still use supermount, I don't think vanilla kernels have it in there (yet, I'm sure it'll get in there sooner or later). I'm pretty sure the Mandrake and Gentoo kernels have support for it (gentoo-dev-sources do, anyway), but I just looked at gentoo-dev-sources and it is at version 2.6.5, dunno about Mandrake, but I'm sure it will take a few days for all the distros to catch up.

If you want to upgrade for security reasons, but you also want supermount in your kernel (as I do), this guy seems to have a patch for 2.6.7, which might come in handy if you don't want to wait for your distro to catch up. I am going to use this patch myself, but I cannot guarantee that it won't bone your system so to speak. The patch is not just supermount, it looks like it has some other stuff in it too, so decide for yourself!

Seeing as how I'm posting this, I may as well give a little background for those not "in the know". Supermount is a sort of filesystem, you mount your CD-ROM and floppy drives (or even USB sticks) with it, and it will automatically mount and unmount the media when you insert or remove it, kind of like on Windows. Personally, I think it is great, and it is hard to live without it now I have it.

You can learn more about it at the project website. Jeez, if it turns out the vanilla kernel does have supermount after all, I am going to look a right idiot... *presses Submit*

7-zip is actually pretty impressive, it can't quite stuff 2 pidgeons down a hole (for that try lzip) but it is still pretty good.

The biggest problem is that there is only one (linux) editor that can properly handle RAW files, and it's not the GIMP (it's cinepaint, which is a fork of GIMP).

The issue is that, to take full advantage of RAW, you need an editor that can handle at least 16 bits per color (48bpp), and the GIMP can only handle 8 bits (and, when asked about >8-bit support, I think the GIMP developers said something like, "2006, maybe"). Having the extra resolution is very nice when trying to pull out shadow details. (OK, Canon RAW has only 12 bits, but 12 bits is still more than GIMP can handle.)

(For the unwashed in the peanut gallery: yes, most people don't need more than 8 bits per color when printing, but I'm not talking about printing. Think about it.)

You can't really chroot the kernel (at least as far as I know). The kernel is the only thing that stays consistent across a chroot. (If you are interested in using chroot to hold a different installation you could start by looking at the debian manual.)

I guess you could install something like bochs and run a kernel inside a kernel, but that is a lot of effort just to improve your uptime.

Packet filtering bridges allow a much higher level of flexability in allowing mulitple boxes to offer internet services. However, until very recently, this option wasn't "stable".

However, history shows that I haven't needed it yet. So, this is something that's on my list to test.

have you tried the software suspend patches from swsusp.sourceforge.net?

If you use LiveJournal, there is a command-line based client called Charm and one of its features is the ability to archive old posts.

If you're worried about losing all your old posts, go ahead and back them up yourself. You never know..

Seems there's lots of software being written even though it's not monetarily profitable, and this is just a smidgen of it.

I WIN

If you know Perl and want to assist with this, please contact me via the website.

Salsaman.

FLAC is worth it for ripping. It's a well-supported lossless compression format that is free (as in speech), and encouraged by Xiph.org. With a 250GB hard drive for $180 at reputable stores, most people can rip their entire CD collection ~750CDs into a lossless format that will last. With FLAC, you only need to rip once.

You mean like JNode?

Azureus is a good example of the only Java application that I use regularly (aside from Eclipse). And it is also based on SWT. I don't care what the acronym is supposed to stand for, I say SWT is short for 'sweeeeet'.

Unfortunately, SWT is a pig these days. Like I said, it's terrible to code for and since Swing is actually faster than GTK+ now, there isn't much reason to use SWT.

Show me a developer who use both SWT and Swing who still prefers to use SWT. If they exist, they are very rare.

Oh, and of you really want to use the GTK+ widgets in Java, there's a much better project, the JavaGNOME project.

Your wish just came true. Check out the JNode project.

But until it is bundled by default with the JVM and JDKs, it will still be hassle to get SWT working for normal users. If Sun replaced the swing toolkit with SwingWT and linked it to SWT, I would think there would be a great improvement in performance of most Java GUI apps (and most of them really do suck - the only good one I have seen is MoneyDance).

If the textbook companies keep their monopoly we can make software for students to sell their books to each other for far less than the bookstores charge.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bookexchange/

I used the basic code to build www.westernbookexchange.com for my school and am now updating it even more at www.westernbookexchange.com/test/books. It works. My little page cost me about $30 for space and the domain name and then I saved more then $100 on my books (and everone else who used it saved money as well).

Also check out SkinLF from L2FProd - it's a library that makes it very easy to use GTK themes, KDE themes or even both together to make a very nice native-looking interface. I use it with ConsultComm and have had very nice results.

You might be interested in this link http://openvidia.sourceforge.net/screenshots.shtml a machine with many graphics cards on the PCI.

I personally use Popfile Once you get it trained, its damn near 100% accurate