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Do yourself a favor and do not mix business and presentation...

Somewhere down the line you are going to have a person working on design that doesn't understand PHP and breaks something. Then you can either spend who knows how long to figure out what is broken or throw out their work and just roll back to what's under revision control (you use revision control, right?). Either way you wasted time. Or worst case, nobody notices the logic is broken and it makes it to production.

Go find a template engine that you like and use it. You'll be happy in the long run.

Here's a couple to get you started.

PHPLib
Smarty

linux runs on a ipod!!!
so why????

Not everyone can afford a Mac you yuppie fuck.You don't have apt for OS X, now do you?

You have to go through all the trouble of dragging and dropping packages. Whereas, us Debian users use one command for the WHOLE system.

Um... yes we do... In fact, it even uses a little command line program called "apt-get".

So why don't you do some reseach you "anonymous coward fuck?"

Using Linux I've been able to:
* literally use my home desktop at work using VNC
* log into a choice of window managers depending on my whim (kde, gnome, xfce)
* customise the behaviour of my window manager in a couple of clicks (eg I like to have the close window icon on the left so I won't accidentally close when I want to minimise)
* switch between multiple virtual desktops (and that Powertools copy M$ provide is not an equivalent, it's so slow its unusable)
* use the Filer I want to (currently ROX) and still be able to consistently drag and drop between applications

There are plenty more innovations but those are the first of the top of my head. Just because they aren't high-profile doesn't mean they aren't there. For example I'm thinking of doing some Home Automation and am looking at owfs. With it I can type "cat */temperature" and it will make all the temperatures sensors on a 1-wire twisted pair connected to a serial port measure and print their data. Since these devices look to the OS like normal files, I can use them easily from any language from bash to C to Python.

If a group of people want to make available some of their favourite software that exists on other platforms then I think that's also innovative and an interesting intellectual challenge. It's not "Linux trying to play catchup", it's "I'd like to be able to do this so why don't we create it".

Phillip.

I've been using this from CVS for about a month, and it only reads from the ipod. Write support is planned for the future.

In the meantime, you may consider GTKPod, a very nice GNOME interface to read/write songs to your iPod. It even supports AAC formats. I have 20GB iPod, and I've been very happy with GTKPod.

Web site: http://gtkpod.sourceforge.net/

Example: http://www.freedos.org/jhall/ipod/

gtkpod does sync entire library and playlists.

It's about time gnome had a good ipod solution.
gtkpod

does the job for me just perfectly.

I think I'd probably go with a Nebula if I had to do it again - they appear to get better reviews than the Hauppauge.

I've been using a box with just Movix installed, and it's worked with the crappy 16mb ATI card with S-Video and it plays DivX's, XVids, MPEGs **really** well.

So I've been experimenting with my system so I can record from digiTV using the Hauppauge on MythTV then play thru my movix box.

KnoppMyth sounded like a good idea - but I had a few unexpected hitches - (HD has to be hda, altering time-zone doesn't appear to always work, upgrading using apt-get seems to often 404). And mplayer doesn't seem to be working. So I've decided reinstall using a standard Debian dist - then install MythTV on top manually.

Drop me an email at my website (listed above) if you want to know anymore?

TV-CARDS.COM is great for digi card reviews.

No, seriously, try playing a partially complete BT download of an AVI with a player that doesn't look for the index (mplayer, DivX, etc.). The file is missing random chunks, not the end.

The Azureus bittorrent client will let you see exactly which pieces you have.

Whats a better client?

Azureus

I convert the plain text files to ztxt and put them on my palm pilot, and read them using weasel reader. I would HATE if they changed thier standard file format, but if they, or someone else wants to have an additional format available, go ahead.

Two projects come to mind. Etext Reader is a cross-platform open-source reader which looks like it hasn't been updated for a while, but the source is available for you to improve on. PyGE is another cross-platform reader which even includes some support for text-to-speech output.

Frankly, Linux has a looooooooooooooong way to come in terms of games.

Here is one open source project for displaying and reading PG e-texts on a computer. It doesn't do everything you asked for, but does quite a bit.

Get a BT client that pre-allocates the whole file(s). Oh, Azureus is one.

Windows Privacy Tray and GnuPG Made Easy libraries. Works for me, except for a bug when I try to sign and encrypt at the same time ... the clipboard tools work for that.

does BitTorrent even work under Linux?

Uh, yes...

I hadn't heard of Markdown before, thanks for the tip. reStructuredText, as used in the python docutils module is my own favourite. It will produce many other markups besides HTML (LaTeX for example).

However, the Gutenberg volunteers would have to have followed some text formatting conventions for either of these to work.

Isn't this just Konspire2b? Konspire2b was designed specifically for this purpose:

Konspire2b

Essentially you subscribe to channels which push content instead of pulling.

Compared to Bittorrent

This is an exhaustive analysis (with pretty charts) why under the above scenario (pushing content, as opposed to pulling), Konspire2b is much more efficient.

Isn't this just Konspire2b? Konspire2b was designed specifically for this purpose:

Konspire2b

Essentially you subscribe to channels which push content instead of pulling.

Compared to Bittorrent

This is an exhaustive analysis (with pretty charts) why under the above scenario (pushing content, as opposed to pulling), Konspire2b is much more efficient.

Invasion of privacy anyone?

Use Freenet.

With the false positives, and the delays in identifying new viri, the virus writers have a gap in time and a gap in confidence that the detector is both timely and accurate.

For example McAfee Virus Scan reports a false positve for a development file SetCVSShellCommands.exe from NSIS (the installation program used by WinAmp and other programs). McAfee has been unresponsive on adapting Virus Scan so that it does not trigger a false positve. All they are interested in is actual viruses or -- in this misidentification -- spy ware.

I doubt that SetCVSShellCommands.exe -- basically NSIS itself with a custom script -- will be handled properly anytime soon.

This is not a new problem, though. One program I worked on about 10+ years ago was identified as a virus because it had a jump to a BIOS location and the string 123 in it (software reboot). At the time, the false positive was handled promptly and was not an issue when the virus detection software was updated.

With the false positives, and the delays in identifying new viri, the virus writers have a gap in time and a gap in confidence that the detector is both timely and accurate.

For example McAfee Virus Scan reports a false positve for a development file SetCVSShellCommands.exe from NSIS (the installation program used by WinAmp and other programs). McAfee has been unresponsive on adapting Virus Scan so that it does not trigger a false positve. All they are interested in is actual viruses or -- in this misidentification -- spy ware.

I doubt that SetCVSShellCommands.exe -- basically NSIS itself with a custom script -- will be handled properly anytime soon.

This is not a new problem, though. One program I worked on about 10+ years ago was identified as a virus because it had a jump to a BIOS location and the string 123 in it (software reboot). At the time, the false positive was handled promptly and was not an issue when the virus detection software was updated.

Blizzard did not shut down freecraft but only forced it to change its name.

Why not just use Qt if you like C++ so much?

gtkmm developers tend to prefer gtkmm to Qt because gtkmm does things in a more C++ way. Qt originates from a time when C++ and the standard library were not standardised or well supported by compilers. It therefore duplicates a lot of stuff that is now in the standard library, such as containers and type information. Most significantly, they modified the C++ language to provide signals, so that Qt classes can not be used easily with non-Qt classes. gtkmm was able to use standard C++ to provide signals without changing the C++ language.

Why not just use Qt if you like C++ so much?

gtkmm developers tend to prefer gtkmm to Qt because gtkmm does things in a more C++ way. Qt originates from a time when C++ and the standard library were not standardised or well supported by compilers. It therefore duplicates a lot of stuff that is now in the standard library, such as containers and type information. Most significantly, they modified the C++ language to provide signals, so that Qt classes can not be used easily with non-Qt classes. gtkmm was able to use standard C++ to provide signals without changing the C++ language.

Except that BitTornado doesn't exactly have the best throttling capabilities. The ABC Yet Another Bittorrent Client has a global upload throttle - regardless of how many torrents are running you can change the setting at any time and the client simply divides up the specified bandwidth equally among the running torrents.

As a bonus it doesn't launch a separate BT client for each torrent running, which can eat up a LOT of memory, meaning that for any given number of torrents it'll use about half the RAM of Tornado.

And, it looks nicer! IMO, of course.

I use ABC which is pretty idiot proof; Azureus is also pretty good. Still, as it stands the regular ABC client doesn't really need "setting up" per se; just install it and it should associate itself with .torrent files, and that's that.

I use ABC which is pretty idiot proof; Azureus is also pretty good. Still, as it stands the regular ABC client doesn't really need "setting up" per se; just install it and it should associate itself with .torrent files, and that's that.

A large number of the popular BitTorrent downloads have around 2000 total peers (summing up seeders and leechers) during peak time. For files distributed by corporations, the sky is the limit (400,000 is possible for the WoW beta). The current generation of trackers do NOT prioritize IPs by location, and thus if I connect to this tracker and there are 10 other people on campus downloading it, the chances of any of us even finding each other is very slim, since the average client gets around 30 random ips from the tracker in one shot.

It would be nice if you could specify to the tracker a range of IPs to always give, but I doubt many tracker operators would want to suck up the extra bandwidth to recieve those requests.

Libtorrent (a c++ implementation of a BT client, currently in pre-beta stages) supports trying to connect to an IP directly, but you'd still have to know about someone else on campus downloading the torrent.

The only solutions I can think of put even more strain on the trackers, which go down more often than most porn stars.

Just my two cents.

Azureus can prewrite the whole file with zeros, then fill blocks into that file. As compared to the more usual approach of continuously appending, then sorting them into order on completion. This should help prevent fragmentation.

I'm not sure how long it's been around but there is an excellent FTP package called Filezilla which is completely unrelated to the Mozilla Foundation.

Um... you need to try Shareaza. It's currently the king of P2P clients (but Windows only):

* Swarming - Yes.
* Privacy/anonymity - No (you're going to make performance sacrifices if you do that).
* Good searching - Yes.
* Open-source - No.
* No ads/spyware - Yes. No adds, no spyware.
* Decentralized/self-organizing networks - Yes.
* Browser/web server hooks - Yes. They're 'magnet:' links.

So close.

Anyway, there's a list of the bleeding-edge P2P applications over on Bitzi. My favorite (besides Shareaza) would have to be Mutella simply because it's open source, cross platform - and has an absolutely badass logo. The UI being command-line based also means I can easily search and download files via a SSH shell (and the screen utility) when I'm not at home. But it doesn't have swarming or support 'magnet:' links, so it's kind of limited at the moment.

That Weasel Reader thing looks great -- *if* you're using a PDA.

There are no good open source projects that I know of to let you read ASCII ebooks on a computer screen.

Constraints I would put on such a project:

* Must support antialiased text. If I'm going to be reading masses of text, I'd rather not see jaggies.

* Must support keyboard and mousewheel navigation.

* Must support some form of good resizing to run in fullscreen mode.

* Must support display with a proportional font. This is harder than it sounds, since proportional display is usually done without a hard-wrapped source, and the PG texts are all hard-wrapped.

* The ability to bookmark locations in the text, and zip back to these saved locations.

* The ability to read gzip- or zip-compressed files. ASCII compresses well, and there's no reason to leave ebooks around uncompressed.

* A find feature. It would be nice if this had glark-style features, so you can do context searches and the like. (actually, it might make a lot of sense to just be a frontend to glark).

* (Optional but nice) the ability to feed output into festival or a similar speech synthesis sytem for listening. Open Source speech synth isn't quite to the point where I'd want to use it for ordinary usage (as opposed to use by the disabled), but it's not awful and some folks may like it.

* (Optional but nice) the ability to remember where you stopped reading.

I've looked at a *lot* of approaches to getting a nice, readable book. This hack takes in a text file and seems to spit out a pretty good pdf viewable in full-scree-mode in xpdf:


#!/bin/bash
# Converts a text file into a nice, computer-readable PDF
# Usage bookize
cat "$@"|tr -d "\r"|enscript -B -f Palatino-Roman24 -M Compscreen --word-wrap -p
"$@".ps
ps2pdf "$@".ps && rm "$@".ps


And the required ~/.enscriptrc:


# Media definitions:
# name width height llx lly urx ury
Media: Compscreen 858 644 0 0 858 644


It is, unfortunately, still not perfect. I've tried writing scripts to feed things in to LaTeX (to enjoy the superior kerning of LaTeX), but I've never been that happy with the results. It's easy to have something that's a metasequence in LaTeX isn't escaped.

I have never understood the PDF format. I hate it. Adobe Acrobat Reader defines bloatware - it takes ages to launch, and provides very little added value as far as I am concerned.

If you are reading an ebook on a desktop or laptop, read it as html or plain text. If you are reading it on PDA (as I have read many gutenberg texts) use zTxt with the Weasel Reader. The reader is great and the compressed text is tiny.

I have never understood the PDF format. I hate it. Adobe Acrobat Reader defines bloatware - it takes ages to launch, and provides very little added value as far as I am concerned.

If you are reading an ebook on a desktop or laptop, read it as html or plain text. If you are reading it on PDA (as I have read many gutenberg texts) use zTxt with the Weasel Reader. The reader is great and the compressed text is tiny.

But now that some pieces have been done, putting them back together might make sense.

Yup and the Azureus bittorrent client has this option disabled by default to prevent massive fragmentation. Allocating only for what has been downloaded is only and advantage when you only want a few files from a multi-file torrent.

>>> Horrible pixellation is no longer fashionable

>> Then why are so many people trying to pirate and emulate the latest SNK fighting games?

> SNK games are not open source.

I recognized that SNK Playmore follows a proprietary software business model. I was giving an example of "horrible pixellation", running in a similar video mode to Quake 1, that is in fact fashionable. If 320-pixel-wide video modes are no longer fashionable, then what explains the success in both commercial and pirate circles of SNK titles that use such modes?

> and the kde games are not on the level that even Age of Empires was years ago.

Level of what? Do you seriously think more people play AoE style games than play solitaire? How would you suggest that one design and implement, say, a solitaire sim on a higher "level" as you put it than Kpatience? And it's true that 2D RTS games such as Stratagus are not as graphically sophisticated as the more recent 3D RTS games, but as the success of SNK games shows, since when are graphics everything? If graphics were everything, a version of Photoshop Elements specialized for turn-based image editing contests would be the hottest selling video game.

The FA makes some valid points about the cost of porting games to linux. However, there are commercial-quality game engines out there that do run under linux. One of them, Nebula if even open source (even though Nebula2 is still lacking graphics support for linux, but that's in the works). Nebula1 is perfectly useable and has all kinds of goodies, including input handling, sound, and a slick architecture.

I believe the major problem at the moment is definitely the difference in availability/quality of hardware accelerated graphics drivers. One ATI get their shit together, the story might be different...

Amiga bites the dust again eh? I hope Hyperion had something in the contract about this one.

Hey, you might have noticed the shot to aros.sourceforge.net.
It's actually pretty nice! Actually reminds me of booting up Workbench!

-- I downloaded a recent snapshot ISO and burned it. It booted great on my PC, and I was able to play a bit. It looks like it would make an awesome development platform for anybody! -- they've created something called 'ZUNE' that it a lot like MUI...

For those of you who hate programming for GUI's, amiga was the only system I programmed for that I didn't feel like I was muddling through to make GUI calls work.

It's 15 megs, download it and give it a try!

Click here if you're lazy

Amiga bites the dust again eh? I hope Hyperion had something in the contract about this one.

Hey, you might have noticed the shot to aros.sourceforge.net.
It's actually pretty nice! Actually reminds me of booting up Workbench!

-- I downloaded a recent snapshot ISO and burned it. It booted great on my PC, and I was able to play a bit. It looks like it would make an awesome development platform for anybody! -- they've created something called 'ZUNE' that it a lot like MUI...

For those of you who hate programming for GUI's, amiga was the only system I programmed for that I didn't feel like I was muddling through to make GUI calls work.

It's 15 megs, download it and give it a try!

Click here if you're lazy

You might want to have a look at HaskellDB which is a Haskell library for writing statically checked queries using a relational algebra-like syntax. It lets you write things like:

r <- table time_reports
u <- table users
restrict (r!userid .==. u!uid)
project (last_name << u!last_name # activity << r!activity)

We're all going to be surfing the net with a government approved "conduct officer" standing behind us.

But they do support most of their printers. Their PCL and PostScript clone ones work perfectly with well documented PDLs.

See linuxprinting.org and their offically supported HP Linux Inkjet Driver Project. Unfortunately cost-cutting and outsourcing of some product development and resulting patent issues has made this less than perfect; but they are trying.

Lawyers and government types just don't get it. The technological Pandora's Box has been opened, and legislation isn't going to help. Anonymity on the Internet? Try looking into the FreeNet project. It's so anonymous that lawmakers practically don't know it exists. And if they did, they still couldn't do anything about it.

MorphOS is the OS that comes bundled with the Pegasus PowerPC machines.

It uses parts of AROS and looks really sweet.

Yup. Gotta agree there. I say get Media Player Classic instead.

Since 2004-01-01 there is a pre-alpha proyect to develop a clean, GPL compliant port of the Linux kernel and tools to Realtek's RTL8181 "802.11b wireless gateway controller" system-on-chip, used in a variety of wireless access point and gateway appliances. You can join the proyect: rtl8181.sourceforge.net/

Microsoft made a $51 million investment in Groove. See: Groove's FAQ and Microsoft's press release

Until this "strategic partnership" I was following groove, hoping they would take a multiplatform aproach.

I don't know how succesful they are, but being Microsoft only and having close ties to US "Homeland security" is not a very good way to expand their worldwide marketshare.

Anyway, there's still waste (I just noticed it has resurfaced)