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Heh... note the email address Annalee Newitz is using here... she evidentally creates a new mail alias for every column: sugarpill@techsploitation.com

Ah, slash ids pushing a billion and whining about what a sewer it's become...

But, since Swing ALREADY has the GTK theme, I have to disagree that writing all the peers is any easier than calling a single line of code to switch themes.

This is misleading for two reasons. First, what Swing has already is NOT what I want. Since it is necessarily written in pure Java, the best it can do is emulate the look and feel of GTK. Perhaps it can do a reasonably good job, but it seems unlikely to be perfectly correct in all cases and even a small visual inconsistency can be distracting. Swing is less likely still to quickly adjust to GTK theme improvements over time. Of course, having a Swing theme that emulates the *default* GTK theme and one that emulates the *current* GTK theme whatever it may be are different things. I very much doubt that Swing does or will ever do the latter. (I notice that gtkswing clearly states that only the default theme is supported. Is that the theme you are referring to?) Remember that new GTK themes are created all the time, just as Swing themes are. How could Swing possibly have support for all of them, and why would the developers even bother trying? Using AWT peers will give complete and correct support for the current -- not just the default -- GTK theme no matter when it was created or where it came from, for no additional effort.

Second, much of the work needed to write such peers has already been done. Perhaps the GCJ team is reusing work done for java-gtk in which case the heavy lifting is already finished. Either way, from my perspective it's just a matter of waiting. Meanwhile my AWT applications, while terrifically ugly, are quite functional and will get better looking with no code changes when the GTK peers appear.

Starting a new process for every incoming request is insane regardless of language. Otherwise, Thread Pools wouldn't exist.

Not so. Starting a new process for every incomming request is perfectly sensible if performance requirements are within a certain range (this depends on the hardware in use and what other applications need to run on the same machine). Clearly a persistent approach such as mod_python or servlets will give better performance, but this is not always needed and is always more complex. That means more time consuming to create and debug. Consider a company that needs a prototype of a web application, for instance. A few simplistic Python scripts can be put together easily and will likely be more than fast enough to get the point across. Doing the same thing with Java is not likely to be a good idea, because the syntax is more complex, because there is a separate compile step (Python compiles to byte-code as it runs) and because performance is sure to be dire.

I think it more likely that the Apache mod is the problem, rather than the Java VM. Pure java apps from the command-line seem to run very fast on both Windows and BSD. It is only from Apache that they seem slow.

I think it is impossible for Apache to be the problem, because it has no idea what language a CGI script is written in and therefore would have to deliberately introduce delays to slow down Java. In my experience the overhead required to bring up a Java virtual machine is considerable, and this makes command-line performance unacceptable for many purposes where Python does fine. This point of view is seconded by engineers at Sun Microsystems in the internal memo I linked to last time.

Personally, I have installed a few different applications that installed their own JRE, and I submitted bug reports to those companies because A) They were installing JDK 1.2 when I already had 1.4.2 on my system; B) They were ILLEGALLY installing the JRE (which gets back to your original point).

Point A is quite deliberate and I expect your bug reports don't get far before being stamped WILL-NOT-FIX. These vendors want a JRE that they can depend on to behave pre

But don't blame Mr. Cone or Creative Commons, blame Xiph for not getting Ogg Theora finished yet.

They play without a hitch in Media Player Classic.

-- paper

Here: http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=52647

The HVAC community is definitely different from Open Source community, and whenever they get close, it gets quite hot

Doesn't seem that hot - fun reading I'd say! The idea is great though (not new, but great) - As open source branches in to more and more area, the people involved with open source software are more likely to adapt OSS principles to non-software aspects of their work.

"An open-source future is one in which we realize that reality itself is open source" to quote an unknown guy on the internet. Hope it happens this year!

DIY Zoning is just one in a family of projects.

Don't forget about Haywire, Jukebox, and ServoMaster, all of which are hosted at SourceForge and directly tie-in to the temperature zoning system featured in this Slashdot posting.

[Oh, and FWIW, Professor Tkachenko's son is a cutie (an old college friend of mine knew him)!]

DIY Zoning is just one in a family of projects.

Don't forget about Haywire, Jukebox, and ServoMaster, all of which are hosted at SourceForge and directly tie-in to the temperature zoning system featured in this Slashdot posting.

[Oh, and FWIW, Professor Tkachenko's son is a cutie (an old college friend of mine knew him)!]

DIY Zoning is just one in a family of projects.

Don't forget about Haywire, Jukebox, and ServoMaster, all of which are hosted at SourceForge and directly tie-in to the temperature zoning system featured in this Slashdot posting.

[Oh, and FWIW, Professor Tkachenko's son is a cutie (an old college friend of mine knew him)!]

Using lynx, links or dillo will give you a similar browsing experience on your main PC.

Using mozilla with images blocked from images.slashdot.org will probably have the same effect aswell.

The problem I've had with most of the RSS browsers is that they don't distinguish between what you've read, and what you haven't. They either create a web page (which is sort of tedious to browse), or they ticker-tape the N most recent events. If you're off-line for a while, and N+1 events come through, you miss that first one, and in any case, you have to constantly scan the ticker for new events.

eventwatcher queues messages, and alerts you when any of your feeds has a new event. When you read events, you can trash them, or save them. If you save them, they go into a different queue which you can browse later; if you trash them, they're marked as "read", and don't show up in your queue.

eventwatcher is a KDE app, and it sits in the system tray, alerting you via a tooltip when a new event comes in (and telling you how many events you have in the queue). For an early release of the app, it is amazingly useful; I only have a couple of feature requests, and I highly recommend it.

I'm not affiliated with the project and have had no contact with the author yet.

F-Prot antivirus is available for free for home users, and runs on Linux, Windows, BSD, DOS and Solaris. For the Unix-based systems, there is a nice GUI front end called xfprot.

Smoothwall is a "best-of-breed Internet firewall/router, designed to run on commodity hardware, and to give an easy-to-use administration interface to those using it. Built using open source and Free software, it's distributed under the GNU Public License".

Here's the quality
Here is the site to get it from.
Here is the client you need.
It's really f'n fast 50 kb/s ++ For the dummies: Install this
Then click this: torrent and then save it to your c:\ and remember Jesus DIED FOR YOUR PIRACY SINS!!@$

Amphetadesk is pretty popular.
If you want to embed RSS in your own home page(or any HTML page) like I have done on http://bhavesh.freeshell.org/news.html then you can use http://zvonnews.sourceforge.net/zfeeder.php

Check out FeedReader

I've been hooking up my game consoles to my monitor through my PC for years, and I've NEVER seen any kind of lag like you're describing. I'm not using anything fancy either - just an old PCI WinTV card and xawtv and now the awesome tvtime.

I really want a decent means for connecting things like games consoles to my PC monitor. All the VGA boxes out there just give horrid blurry pictures because they double the scanlines of the picture.

With an inexpensive BT8xxx card and a decent linux box, you can use tvtime to watch beautifully scaled and deinterlaced video in realtime. I use it with my gamecube and it's absolutely fantastic!

Try Panda 3D (Sourceforge Page)- it's an open source game engine originally written at Disney's VR studio for DisneyQuest and Toontown Online. We're now co-developing it with the Disney team at the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU, and use it for a lot of internal projects.

The core is written in C++, but game programming is done in Python, which initializes the engine. Exporters exist for Max & Maya. Since your stuff runs in Python, it's simple to add extra functionality. Last semester we used it for the Building Virtual Worlds Class, and were able to add things like networking, computer vision, MIDI IO, and simple show control pretty trivially. One group now is using it to do realtime interactive stuff on a dome with 5 cameras stitched together in realtime.

This semester, the project is adding in-engine video playback using Helix and integrating with the Eclipse IDE. It serves our needs pretty well.

This is closer to reality than you might think. You have OGRE for graphics. OpenDE for physics. Once there is middleware that makes it a little bit easier for the two to interoperate, we'll see more titles using them. I'm currently working on an open source driving simulator that makes use of both. These open source engines are cross platform so they have been used in commercial titles as well as for open source projects.

An interesting discussion is whether or not the middleware should be BSD, LGPL, GPL licensed or something else. The article brings up an interesting point though. In our case we could sure use a few more good C++ gurus. There is no shortage of good ideas. Check out our site and forums here if you have some time to kill and you like tough problems.

Also, don't forget that Guido got a DARPA acceptance and funding for Computer Programming for Everyone. Kids may be learning Python in elementary school soon.

Admittedly not as pretty as the MS-Windows software, but you could use it with a frontend like acidrip, kmencoder or Gmencoder. They're all fairly portable (AcidRip is even written in PERL), so you could use them on Windows with a great deal less effort than using Nero on Linux.

Well, Windows Media Player would be an awesome operating system, if someone wrote a good app for viewing videos.

Webcalendar's features include:

# Export events to iCal, vCal or Palm

# Import from vCal or Palm

# Optional general access (no login required) to allow calendar to be viewed by people without a login (useful for event calendars)

# Users can make their calendar available publicly to anyone with an iCal-compliant calendar program (such as Apple's iCal or Mozilla Calendar)

Your comment gives the mistaken impression that OSS is somehow destined to always be behind proprietary software, as far as innovation and technical superiority is concerned. Microsoft and SCO love that notion, but unfortunately for them, it's not true. OSS is overtaking proprietary software in many areas, and it's reasonable to expect this trend to continue.

Here are just some of many examples of innovative, open-source software:

Anyone tried this with MultiSync? It seems to provide the Palm to SyncML translation (and it will do Evolution). That would be a really cool solution if it'd work (I may have to try it now) -- but if anyone has experience that'd be great.

For me personally the best Pocket PC emulator is Pocket Nester. It runs nintendo games at full speed with perfect sound on my toshiba e350. Nintendo games are optimal because they are easy to find on kazaa (and I don't feel bad downloading them because back in the day I used to own almost everyone that came out) and they don't take up much space. Nothing like playing Dragon Warrior 4 in class.

Morphix is modular, and can be adapted with less effort

The base, the Knoppix part contains the kernel, kernel modules, hardware detection, etc. This base is left untouched. You can either a change a mainmod or add lots of minimodules.

The are four basic images to start off with. So making you own LiveCD is much easier.

It even possible to save you files, configuration and setting to the Morphix CD you using, ready for next boot up.

Did I mention the GUI installer ...

Brendan Mentioned before and here

Not to feed trolls but there is always phpiCalander which would take the place of a .mac account.

Now, I'm the kind of person who still plays NES games from time to time, and can replay some games nearly endlessly, so I don't lack for games to play so much as lack for variety of gameplay (like being in the middle of five RPGs at once...). It makes sense to go for whatever genre I'm craving more of at the moment (and purchases of other consoles can come at a later date).

Now that the rush on this article has passed I don't feel too bad announcing it; don't care to hype it especially as it's not released yet. I'm working on an outliner called Iron Lute, written in Python/Tk.

For an outliner moving a paragraph up is a very basic operation. I prefer writing essays in outliners, but there isn't a useful one for Linux, except maybe JOE.

I think the current keyboard shortcut is actually "CTRL-Up" ;-)

Also, there are ahead of time compilers, nowadays. I'm not sure that ahead of time compiled code is clearly superior, but if you want to try it out, gcj (part of gcc) can do it for you. You can even build programs that use SWT with gcj. There is even a sourceforge project dedicated to distributing a native buildable version of SWT.

It is called "libswt." You can check it out if you want.

Actually, this is VERY IMPORTANT! I think the big advantage(s) of "open sourcing" java will be seen when things such as the mess with the logging API's and the use of the assert keyword are avoided.

It is still a mystery to me why Sun developed their own logging API's when LOG4J was widely used and accepted.

Hopefully a more open approach to Java would help projects that are housed at Jakarta and SourceForge actually make it into the JDK instead of sticking us with inferior rewrites.

The logging API is just one example. Imagine if the JUNIT implementation of assert was used, and if SWT could be combined with Swing/AWT to create better/superior user interfaces. I think Java could grow in leaps and bounds with an open approach.

Another good example of this would be the JDOM project. How long has it sat in the JCP? While in the meantime Sun implemented their own INFERIOR XML libraries.

The JCP is too political, and needs to modified/done away with. Let the people decide the direction of JAVA!

Just my .02

--Ryan

iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering system for music. You rate the tracks it downloads and the server uses your ratings and other people's to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music.

here is a fine guide to build a Fairly-Secure Anti-SPAM Gateway Using OpenBSD, Postfix, Amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, Razor and DCC.

You can follow the steps and build it with Linux too. This entire procedure has been developed with security as a primary focus. These are the main tools it shows:

• Amavisd-new (www.ijs.si/software/amavisd) is the main filter which processes email from postfix and ensures that we don't lose any mail. Amavisd-new is an huge improvement over the original amavis which was a simple virus scanner, and I think it is the best way of implementing SpamAssassin (www.spamassassin.org). SpamAssassin is the main anti-spam component which works by comparing messages to a ruleset and by using a statistical analysis that is custom built based on your email. In addition to the SpamAssassin spam detection software, we will be using 2 online SPAM databases: DCC (www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc) and Vipul's Razor (razor.sourceforge.net).

KDE's Kommander lets you construct simple scripts and dialog-based applications to run shell commands and control other KDE applications through DCOP.

1. A network-based sales system, comprising:
at least one buyer computer for operation by a user desiring to buy a product;
at least one merchant computer; and at least one payment computer;


How could they possibly know that Amazon has exactly this setup?

2. A network-based sales system in accordance with claim 1, wherein said payment message and said access message each comprises a universal resource locator.

This sounds exactly like one-click to me.

Amazon's one-click patent was filed September 12, 1997; whereas this was filed October 24, 1994. How could the one-click patent be filed if it was alreay there? ...and don't say "you must be new here" :)

4. A network-based sales system in accordance with claim 1, wherein said access message comprises a buyer network address.
5. A network-based sales system in accordance with claim 4, wherein:
said product can be transmitted from one computer to another; and
said merchant computer causes said product to be sent to said user by transmitting said product to said buyer network address only.

What?!? Said product is transferred to the buyer network address only? I never shipped any of those books I bought from Amazon to an IP address!

15. A network-based sales system in accordance with claim 14, wherein:
said payment message comprises a payment amount; and
said payment computer is programmed to ensure that said user account has sufficient funds or credit to cover said payment amount.

Surely this already existed. I doubt every time someone swiped an American Express card before October 24, 1994, a human being was called to look up an account balance in a paper ledger.

39. A method of operating a shopping cart computer in a computer network comprising at least one buyer computer for operation by a user desiring to buy products, at least one shopping cart computer, and a shopping cart database connected to said shopping cart computer

Funny, I figured you just needed a program to do a shopping cart, instead of a whole computer! Here we have a buyer computer, merchant computer, payment computer, and a shopping cart computer. Wow.

I'd look at the other patents, but I'm getting dizzy....

The following programs make the console accessible for blind people worth downloading. One of the administradors of the FreeNode is legally blind and use the first one:

SpeakUp
EmacSpeak

I grab copies of my favorite radio shows, or just grab a few hours of music off any one station. Streamripper's ability to separate title tracks falls apart slightly at the beginning of the song, but it'll numerically order them.

Thus, any show, just about any format, can be sucked off a stream and stored for your listening convenience. And I'll stuff them onto a flash or hard disk player and haul them home. I'd guess someone else can figure out how to timeshift an mp3, I'm sure it's in here somewhere.

Swing would be hard work, and pointless. There's a reason that eclipse doesn't use Swing... IBM isn't interested in it - it sucks.

Ah, but one of my open source projects is a completely free implementation of AWT and Swing that uses SWT as a renderer - so it has all the delicious APIness of Swing, the platform looks of SWT and IBM could throw it in a free Java implementation tomorrow :-)

I do the same thing with Audacity. I've got it recording the Jim Rome show right now. OUT! (I'm a closet clone)

Well, it's really called GnuPG, but you're right, it is the standard that basically states: "the sender's signing key validates against the original key you trusted by signing it with your own key." I've started signing all of my emails in Thunderbird using the help of the Enigmail plugin and encrypting any files I attach in my emails with the help of WinPT. I know this post looks like a giant plug for these "products," but since they're all free, open source software which I have no affiliation with, it's simply me trying to get the word out that there IS a manner in which to get your emails to your friends in a trusted, reliable manner, and hopefully convert a few of your friends and family to using the same method in the future. We wouldn't have to worry about address spoofing if email gpg signing was a defacto standard of every email client! Plus it would be a lot safer and difficult to circumvent (ultimately) than Yet Another Format for email.

TMDA has been nearly 100% effective for me (3 spams have gotten through since I installed it 6 months ago.) It requires you to process the message, but in combination with something like SPF you should be able to reduce network load of forged messages. Of course, if SPF or Microsoft's solution are used, more spammers will go go zombie machines which will cause the network load to go up again...

I guess I'm asking if there is a "clean" way to build and configure the latest GIMP-2.0 and gimp-print w/o having a GIMP-1.2 installed.

There isn't yet. The Print plugin needs to be ported to the GIMP 2.0. Anyone want to volunteer?

I guess I'm asking if there is a "clean" way to build and configure the latest GIMP-2.0 and gimp-print w/o having a GIMP-1.2 installed.

There isn't yet. The Print plugin needs to be ported to the GIMP 2.0. Anyone want to volunteer?

Would knowing anything about their actual project, I'd wager that they're using something like NumPy for the actual calculations, and just using Python as "glue" between high-level operations.

For example the BBC has not embraced Open Source, even for their own in house products, even under a non-commercial-use-only license.

Not embraced per se, but:

• WebTodo
• BETSIE

For example the BBC has not embraced Open Source, even for their own in house products, even under a non-commercial-use-only license.

Not embraced per se, but:

• WebTodo
• BETSIE

They aren't competitors. Notes is a collaboration/groupware suite.

And we aren't collaborating in a group right now? People don't use Intranets and Internet email for what they would have bought Notes for in the mid-90s? I knwo for a fact that that's what happens at non-Microsoft shops. w.g. Oracle doesn't use Notes internally. It uses Internet email, web-based solutions and some collaborative addons of their own.

They aren't competitors. XML is just one of many protocols that can be used to implement CORBA. Corba is an Architecture, XML is a data transmission format.

I was talking about XML in the large: XML+SOAP+WSDL, etc. Obviously these are both pitched as enterprise integration technologies and XML-based ones have a lot more traction in business today (think .NET and Axis) than CORBA does.

You don't (if you are sane) use a scripting language to write enterprise-level apps like finance or CRM software, or secure distributed systems, or high-performance numerical software.

GNU Enterprise is finance software written in Python. Secure distribute systems in Python? How about mojo nation or ZEO, or the MEMS Exchange or BitTorrent. High performance numerical software? You'd better tell someone down at Lawrence Livermore National Labs that they are insane because they show up at every Python conference and by now have spent millions on Python code. I don't see Java or C# mentioned on their list of key languages. Java in particular is a horrible language for that sort of thing. Do a Google for "Java Floating Point".

Look: you can understimate Python just as the Unix vendors understimated Linux. In the long run it doesn't really hurt anyone, even you. It is always more comfortable to presume that things will stay in the mental boxes we've built for them in our minds.

How about 3D Desktop. It certainly does seem to zoom, rotate and animate your desktops. Granted, it won't let you interact with the windows on the desktops until you zoom in on one desktop, but the animation is there. Look for yourself....

How about 3D Desktop. It certainly does seem to zoom, rotate and animate your desktops. Granted, it won't let you interact with the windows on the desktops until you zoom in on one desktop, but the animation is there. Look for yourself....