Slashdot Mirror

1. Proxomitron - awesome web filter.
2. mSys+mSysDTK+MinGW (extremely useful *nix tools that don't require a Cygwin shell)
3. Winroll -Next best thing to a useful Windows desktop manager
4. Sysinternals utilities
5. Vim!!

Of course others, but they've been mentioned above.

nobody asked, but that won't stop me from answering :)

For AIM: Adium
For a tweaked OS: Cocktail and TinkerTool
For a better OS: my collection of haxies for Unsanity's Application Enhancer (ClearDock, FruitMenu, Metallifizer, Mighty Mouse, ShapeShifter, SharedMenus, Silk, WindowShade X)
For privacy/security: NetBarrier, PeerVanguard (not because I trade P2P, but because I wear a tinfoil hat), Little Snitch
Helpful apps: Butler, QuickSilver, DragThing
For everything else: VLC, SBook5, Transmit, Path Finder, Apple Dev Tools

it's more than 10, but those are all put almost instantly on every fresh OS X install I touch.

joe of course. A person can not live without joe.

Some people are working on programmatic ways to express database queries. Have a look at HaskellDB for example.

I haven't tried SmartFTP (so I can't compare the two) but if you haven't already tried it, take look at filezilla, which is pretty good.

After I install the OS (Windows XP) and security updates:

1. Office 2003
2. Visual Studio .NET
3. SQL Server 2000 Desktop Edition
4. FileZilla
5. MSN Messenger
6. RSS Bandit
7. Photoshop 7
8. ActiveSync
9. Adobe Acrobat 6
10.BitTornado

Programs that come convienently bundled with XP
1. Internet Explorer
2. Windows Media Player
3. Folder Compression Zip Utility

After I install the OS (Windows XP) and security updates:

1. Office 2003
2. Visual Studio .NET
3. SQL Server 2000 Desktop Edition
4. FileZilla
5. MSN Messenger
6. RSS Bandit
7. Photoshop 7
8. ActiveSync
9. Adobe Acrobat 6
10.BitTornado

Programs that come convienently bundled with XP
1. Internet Explorer
2. Windows Media Player
3. Folder Compression Zip Utility

OpenOffice
Crimson Editor (programmer's editor; free, not open source)
Audacity (WAV editor)
CDex (ripper)
Firefox
Thunderbird
Navicat (MySQL admin tool)
MySQL Snap (MySQL backup tool)
Top Style (CSS Editor)
Photoshop (Gimp ain't ready for primetime yet. Sorry.)

That's 10. Next up: WinAmp, WS-FTP, AdAware, and 17 million IE/Win patches.

Besides what was stated in the news story, and what is grabbed on Windows Update...

Miranda
Lightweight ICQ/IM app with plugin support for IRC/Jabber/etc..

FilZip
Free zip, rar, etc... util

PuTTY
Best SSH client for windows, and it's free

WinSCP
SFTP/SCP Client, free

Crimson Editor
Text Editor / IDE, supports color-coding source code and such. Very handy.

Mozilla
FireFox is nice, but I need a decent mail app and I like Moz for that.

Media Player Classic
Best. App. Ever. As long as you've got the codec installed, this handy thing will play the media files for you. This includes QuickTime, RealPlayer, and even Flash movies.

Nimo Codec Pack
A compilation of video and audio codecs as well as stream switchers, extra directshow filters, and nifty bits. Rather than hunting down individual codecs for XviD, 3vix, OGG, etc... this pack does it all in one operation.

Besides what was stated in the news story, and what is grabbed on Windows Update...

Miranda
Lightweight ICQ/IM app with plugin support for IRC/Jabber/etc..

FilZip
Free zip, rar, etc... util

PuTTY
Best SSH client for windows, and it's free

WinSCP
SFTP/SCP Client, free

Crimson Editor
Text Editor / IDE, supports color-coding source code and such. Very handy.

Mozilla
FireFox is nice, but I need a decent mail app and I like Moz for that.

Media Player Classic
Best. App. Ever. As long as you've got the codec installed, this handy thing will play the media files for you. This includes QuickTime, RealPlayer, and even Flash movies.

Nimo Codec Pack
A compilation of video and audio codecs as well as stream switchers, extra directshow filters, and nifty bits. Rather than hunting down individual codecs for XviD, 3vix, OGG, etc... this pack does it all in one operation.

SmartFTP - Great free for personal use FTP client, not found a better one yet!

I haven't tried SmartFTP, so maybe it's better, but I really like FileZilla. It does sftp too - great for crypto xfers.

I think you missed Windows security fixes, Adobe Acrobat and WinSCP.

Being a musician in my own right, I've been considering the idea of using a P2P client for distribution of my music. Since *I* would be the copyright holder, it would be completely legitimate and get my music heard. In the effort to destroy the RIAA's stranglehold over the music business, I would encourage any of you with a creative bent to distribute your works via P2P. After all, fame is worth a lot more than money because fame can get you places that money can't. I have been experimenting with P2P clients like MUTE and the interesting new file sharing pardigm Konspire. Konspire has the interesting side effect of turning P2P around into something like what Usenet used to be, only it's a LOT cooler.

My suggestions:
-Try out MUTE
-Try out Konspire
-If you are creative, focus on getting your name known via P2P
-Once you have an established reputation, you can keep your fans happy with some free tracks/videos/writing and some exclusive stuff that they would happily pay for. It's the best of both worlds.

Being a musician in my own right, I've been considering the idea of using a P2P client for distribution of my music. Since *I* would be the copyright holder, it would be completely legitimate and get my music heard. In the effort to destroy the RIAA's stranglehold over the music business, I would encourage any of you with a creative bent to distribute your works via P2P. After all, fame is worth a lot more than money because fame can get you places that money can't. I have been experimenting with P2P clients like MUTE and the interesting new file sharing pardigm Konspire. Konspire has the interesting side effect of turning P2P around into something like what Usenet used to be, only it's a LOT cooler.

My suggestions:
-Try out MUTE
-Try out Konspire
-If you are creative, focus on getting your name known via P2P
-Once you have an established reputation, you can keep your fans happy with some free tracks/videos/writing and some exclusive stuff that they would happily pay for. It's the best of both worlds.

FTE also has menus. But the project seems dead...

I used to try being as anonymous as possible, because, like the poster, I did not want to face the wrath of the spam monster. However, when my work address, which was on published aliases, started getting hunted in earnest by the spam monster, I was finally forced to look into Baysian filters (I chose spamprobe, but there are plenty of other good ones as well). The pleasant surprise was that they work extremely well. So well, in fact, that I've really just stopped worrying about how many spammers get my email address. It's not that the monster is gone, but it is trapped in soundproof box in another room that I never go into. Silly monster.

The two best solutions I know of (if you don't own the server) are Spamarrest and POPFile.

Both get rid of spam very differently but I've gotten about 99.8% acuracy with both (for different people)

SpamArrest uses "Challenge/Response" which is annoying if you have lots of new people email you but if it's mainly old email addresses it's great.

If you don't want to pay anything then POPFile is for you. It uses Bayesian filtering which basically means it learns what you think spam is. That means it might take a couple of weeks to train it but then it's great. As spam changes so does it (retraining). The only things it's gets wrong for me are things like newsletters (or good spam for lack of a better name).

Anyway good luck.

Vi(m) can be used on Windows - I use it all the time.

Vim can be used as the editor in Visual Studio.

Uh, it doesn't claim to have full Unicode support. What it claims to have is UTF-8 encoding support. Check your sources.
Release announcement on SourceForge

I prefer fte.

I use PDF Creator. It is GPL-ed, the program pretends to be an installed printer driver and you can use it from any program.

eenk

Who needs Clippy - real men use VIgor :)

You're right, describe doesn't work. I'm too used to Oracle. (I could have sworn I typed it into psql before I posted it, but alas, I'm wrong). \d table_name does work as well. It's also possible to get the information by querying the system catalog tables, though in the last 10 minutes, I've proven to myself that your complaint is valid. This is all less than obvious to a newcomer, and finding it in the documentation is less than trivial.

If you've got access to a web server that has PHP, it's well worth it to install phpPgAdmin, which makes all this incredibly simple. PgAccess also works well, and there's a windows version as well as a linux version, and it doesn't require a webserver or PHP.

The thing that makes PostgreSQL great is every time you define a view, you never have to write it again in code! Just query the view. And every time you define a function that returns a value, you can use it in any subsequent query. And every trigger you define is there whenever you insert or update or delete a record, not just when you remember to do it correctly in your code. MySQL is great to use when you're slapping out the code to get the job done. PostgreSQL is great when you've forgotten exactly how everything works (for me, that's a couple of weeks at most) and you've got to make a change or add some functionality. Keep trying, it's not easy to learn, but it's worth the trouble!

And finally, your point about "update" is well taken. I use that feature in ADODB all the time, and it saves writing a lot of code.

Could you share your impressions about the sound quality of the various formats?

Personally I only listen to FLAC, since I'm here with the terabytes of audio and gigabit ethernet. :-)

If you want to check it out, the creator wrote a free (GPL) implementation named "Basser" Lout (after his university IIRC), which comes with loads of documentation and runs on Linux (Debian offers a package, dunno about other distros), other unices, and Windows.

Oh, and like TeX, you can do maths stuff with it, but the equations are expressed in a format based on eqn instead. Luckily that has a whole chapter dedicated to it in the docs. There's some sort of extra package that offers "TeX style" maths, but it seems that's just in terms of fonts; that too is described in the docs.

The Lout sourceforge page was started fairly recently as a repository for Lout info, in case you have a tough time finding much.

Nice post, but a little out of date, as I see no mention of Poisoned which is a front end to giFT. giFT supports FastTrack (Kazaa), Gnutella, and OpenFT (a hot little network). Personally I'd rather run Poisoned than Kazaa any day.

Furthermore, the BitTorrent community is alive and well on OS X. Azureus works really well, and there's a hot little native client that is better than the standard one.

I've been using the Overnet command line client, which sucks but gets the job done better than the various front-ends floating around.

And then there's Hotline, Carracho, and the new open-source client-server model "Wired".

Enjoy.

The central debate here is about how to best use F/OSS development resources (people and code). The assumption seems to be that everyone who cares about F/OSS should come together on a single strategy for dealing with Microsoft. But a monoculture within the F/OSS community is exactly what we're fighting against in Microsoft! Must we become the enemy to defeat the enemy?

Most F/OSS developers want to see GNU/Linux succeed in the sense of becoming a widespread desktop alternative. Those who bother thinking about why they want this are most likely to come up with a fundamental reason: choice.

Survival for GNU/Linux is a question of the niches it is able to successfully occupy. For the moment these niches include the desktops of F/OSS developers and Internet server farms. The problem with the general user desktop niche is first that it's not really a niche per se, but more importantly, it's completely dominated by Microsoft. GNU/Linux is like a small mammal running around near the end of the age of dinosaurs. What it has going for it is adaptibility. Rather than give up adaptibility and become just another dinosaur, GNU/Linux needs to find another way to occupy the general desktop niche.

What I'd like to suggest is that the desktop niche really needs to be bifurcated in such a way that GNU/Linux can survive there as a small mammal, without needing to become a dinosaur. That is, it needs a place on the desktop where it can run without necessarily displacing Windows. One way this could be done is though a Windows port of User Mode Linux, but that's not really going far enough in my opinion.

What is really needed is an OSS virtual machine monitor (VMM) for PCs, under control of which both Windows and GNU/Linux (and any other OS!) could run separately and equally. Vmware shows what this might look like, but with Vmware the host operating system runs along side the VMM rather than on top of it. It sort of achieves "separate" but not "equal".

The problem with current approaches to PC VMMs is that they suffer from certain architectural limitations in virtualizing the CPU. These limitations probably could have been eliminated several hardware generations ago, were it not for the unholy alliance of Microsoft and Intel. But there is some hope that that alliance could be broken, if AMD would implement virtualizability in its CPUs and/or IBM would apply carrots and sticks to Intel on behalf of GNU/Linux.

The ultimate goal is freedom to innovate from the lowest levels of software on up. This can only be truely achieved by a complete OSS platform, as access to the source is what enables the kind of innovation that does not require reinventing the wheel when something at a lower level doesn't work the way you want it to. On the other hand, some F/OSS developers may be perfectly happy developing on top of Windows or some OS-independent application platform. Indeed, there's no reason to believe that .NET isn't "good enough" for some of them.

http://sourceforge.net/people/

Check it out, find a project. Show your skills, make a name for yourself.

Excuse me? I participated in some of the threads leading up to Marco's split, and actually read the parting message. I suppose "duplicated" was the wrong word as the "features" were already present in Galeon 1 and Galeon 2, but they were duplicated and seperate from the settings in the GNOME desktop. By "Mouse Settings" I mean "Mouse Wheel" settings (Edit->Preferences->Advanced... In mozilla). If you want a 10,000 overview of the split read Galeon : A History. Or read the Epiphany FAQ/Manifesto.

The Galeon developers liked having MIME configuration options, proxy options, etc. while Epiphany, in order to 1) Be more simplified for the non-technical user and 2) Be more integrated with GNOME, chose to remove them from the browser and use the GNOME-wide settings. Those three preferences were just specific examples of the overall difference of opinion between the two groups.

*Rant*
I hate BibTeX. I'm a life scientist and BibTeX is the main reason I don't use LaTeX.

First BibTeX is an undocumented nightmare. I speak as someone who learned Forth as their second programming language.

2) Bibliographic tools used in my discipline don't play well with BibTeX. I still don't know of any BibTeX style to produce Vancouver formatted references, which completely dominate medical journals. (I could probably write one, but life is too short, see 1)

3) BibTeX documentation usually assumes that you already know everything about how it works. Lamport's book has a good short introduction, but it's not really enough. (There's a useful MSc. thesis from LS Abd Rahmin. This is worth looking at as it has a nice introduction to the whole area, and a careful examination of some of the existing tools.)

4)Integrating BibTex into a document processing workflow, for example for meta-analysis or annotation, seems to be basically impossible.

5) BibTex is great if you write statistical or mathematical papers, otherwise, forget it. It is far harder to use than other reference handling systems. It does work on Linux, which EndNote reallly doesn't, but thats about it.
*End Rant*

In fairness to BibTeX it set out to solve a very specific problem, and solves it very well, however the problem space has moved on rather sharply since.

There is a dire need for an Open source competitor to EndNote/Reference Manager. A combination of RefDb and OpenOffice could do it, but BibTex won't.

Anthony Staines

Answer to third question: If you're in psql interpreter, and connected to the database, type \dt and voila, a list of the tables. There are various ways to get the same list by querying the system tables, but I never learned them (I admit to using phpPgAdmin which is superb for administering PostgreSQL databases, and which makes those kinds of things easy).

Answer to fourth question: in psql type describe your_tablename and it will show you the structure. Many of the commands in psql are the same as in SQL*Plus in Oracle, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to get a nutshell guide to that for this kind of problem.

I agree, views are great, but wait until the first time you create an inline function... Mmmmm... true database goodness.

And I don't know where you get the idea that replace is any better than update... set... where... functionality. I guess I just don't think in "replace" anymore (FoxPro has it, and I used to use it all the time).

I really wish the parent didn't use buzzwordy phrases like "enabling rapid development methodologies," because the aforementioned tools really do kick some serious ass (once combined with a proper templating system.

I have been using LaTex since forever .. written my Physics thesis in it and still use it for writing letters and stuff. It is just simpler since I have all my templates set up and dont need to worry about layouting at all anymore.

I have found that it is essential to have a good IDE (powerful editor). The ones I can recommend are either Vim or Emacs with the respective addons if you are already familiar with either of those editor or otherwise make sure you check out Kile (http://kile.sourceforge.net/)if you run KDE (or anyhting else Linux that allows you to run KDE apps .. or even Cygwin) or under windows you have to check out WinEDT (http://www.winedt.com/ ).

And then of course the best resource for anything TeX is the CTAN network (CTAN: the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network http://www.ctan.org/). Lots of very useful stuff there.

While the idea of a 3 year old book on web development appeals to the poetry in my soul, I think it is misleading. In the last few years the Perl dev community has been making really significant progress in enabling rapid development methodologies, in particularly using tools like Class::DBI

A book which claims to detail how to do web development with Perl and MySQL and doesn't address the following issues is painfully out of date:

* Class::DBI
* SPOPS
* Kake's How to avoid writing code

With the Perl Foundation funded work on Maypole being the most recent efforts in this direction.

I've just gone through the same process of learning LaTeX. However, I'm an OS X user and I found Mac-Tex at Penn State to be a very good resource. I chose TexShop for my front end iInstaller to install the LaTeX backend. You can also use Fink to install your backend but I didn't feel like comand line install this time as suggested previously.

Other than getting the software installed, I simply used Google for tutorials on LaTeX and BibTex.

Nice. I'm planning on learning how to tie scripting (have decided on Perl yet but it's a contender) and databases this summer anyway. This book might make the decision as to what to use for me.

However, for those just picking up Perl for the first time I recommend the free ebook Picking Up Perl, and the ActiveState Perl Interpreter for Windows (this was a while ago-- if you are using Linux it probably aleraday has Perl installed). And then as it was Windows I was learning Perl on I used OpenPerl IDE. For Linux I recommend using Kate and Konsole.

Not trying to be off-topic here but I figure someone reading this may want to try out what this Perl thing is.

Disclaimer: Not a Perl fan at all, I actually perfer Python, but to each their own and as any Perl hacker can appreciate TIMTOWTDI! ;)

The Galeon website contains a short history of Galeon . This page tells more or less the same story, but it emphasizes disagreement on the HIG rather than the duplication of MIME/proxy/mouse settings.

Sure, they can both be built on top of Java, but they need to be built, hence the `Come up with our own competitive stack'.

No, unlike Longhorn/Mono, they do not need to be built, they already have been. There are a number of companies with XAML like technology here and now. I work for one that has been around for 4 years already, and there are many more including some Open Source projects (notably XWT and Luxor). I can't comment on "advanced graphics and rendering", because it is as vague a claim as you'd expect to come out of Microsoft's marketing for a product that is still 2 1/2 years away and slipping.

I pressume that you are using Free software

That sounds like a really slow emulator. It's probably an interpreting one, which means you can expect it to be something like a 100-1000 times slower than the emulated system clock-for-clock. A good example is Bochs, which is pretty damn slow, but the interpreted approach allows it to run on many systems with little porting.

What you really need for a fast emulator is dynamic translation - rewrite snippets of emulated instructions into native ones, and run that instead. You can get close to a 1:1 ratio of native:emulated clocks, which means in your case you'd have a 472MHz XScale emulating as if it were a 472MHZ SNES.

There's plenty of examples of dynamic translators about. Transmeta's processors all run a dynamic translator from x86 to some freaky native instruction set (they call it "code morphing"). Java's JIT (just-in-time) is an example of a very similar thing - it translates byte code to native instructions on the fly, but doesn't have to worry about maintaining the virtual system's state, because Java doesn't have the concept of one.

So yes, it should be possible.

You mean like EasyCalc?

Really, why bother, the dedicated calculator is dead. Just install EasyCalc and EasyStat which can do some pretty neat stuff for your Palm and you're all set. My Tungsten T3 has a 144Mhz ARM CPU, which is loads faster than anything dedicated calculators can offer and has a beautiful 320x480 16bit tft.

Plus there are loads of software for Palms that can do statistics, etc..

Too bad HP can't see it. Or maybe they can and they want to rip you off? After all, if you buy a Palm, all you have to do it upgrade your software to get new features. With this, you need to buy a new calc.

Talk about a rip-off if I ever saw one.

So, use that on a flyer to inform the kids about it, and use this for professional correspondence.

ayttm has had video support (in msn and yahoo) for a very long time now. Voice support for yahoo has been available in pyVoice Chat.

The main stumbling block in implementing these things has not been technical. It's been the patents that cover the voice and video formats used.

ayttm has had video support (in msn and yahoo) for a very long time now. Voice support for yahoo has been available in pyVoice Chat.

The main stumbling block in implementing these things has not been technical. It's been the patents that cover the voice and video formats used.

Cool, I get to plug my new project and be on-topic.

k12wincd is a CD image that includes open office as well as others. Similar to gnuwinCD.
I should be burning 250-300 of these this summer to be handed out in the fall.

It's called hugin, and is available here. It even outputs layered files which capitalize on capabilities recently added to the Gimp 2.0!

Take a look! You might also like to see the worlds first gigapixel image created using the techniques hugin employs here.

"Last time I checked, it seems the only rights you have in the U.S. are to privacy and to not be offended.
Neither of these are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution."

Then it is time to make it apart of the constitution. Enough with this penis-vagina anti gay people amendment no one needs, lets get a useful privacy amendment started.

This is what I really didn't like from the summary:

"...pass laws to force users to provide their encryption keys and the plain text of their encrypted files"

That is insane. If someone has documents in which they would be embarrased to have shared (yes, I'm looking at your direction the pro-animal necrophilia crowd) then what business is it of government's that they have them.

One interesting solution to having to hand over your pass keys is provided by the Phonebook Encryption Project. This program encrypts a file to have TWO keys which will decrypt into TWO different files. One key decrypts the file to reveal the beastiality porno, one key decrypts the file for pictures of barney the dinosaur :).

Also those that say Freenet wouldn't be necessary in North America, I thought the same for the Phonebook project just yesterday. Now I am very glad both Freenet and Phonebook are here.

Ratpoison.

Or you could just buy a cat.

Let's host this program on Freenet, it is a project that make's the best use for what Freenet was made for.