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Wicd is the way to go

Connection manager can be pathetic at times. http://wicd.sourceforge.net/ is the way to go.

setting static IP has been broken in ubuntu for a couple of releases now, i don't see why nobody has fixed it yet. each time, i end up installing wicd to manage my network connections http://wicd.sourceforge.net/

You don't even have to go that far. Just install the free unix tools for windows. I carry these around on a usb thumbdrive. I even set up a custom zsh environment that allows me to write she-bang scripts, including activestate perl (also running from the usb drive).

http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

What do you use for a decent console app?!

http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

and while were at it:

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/

What do you use for a decent console app?!

http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

and while were at it:

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/

I find Cygwin a little too heavy; mostly I just need grep, sed, awk, etc. That's why I prefer using UnxUtils ( http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ).

Mintty is what I currently use.
http://code.google.com/p/mintty/

If you must have tabs console works pretty well too
http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

And to have a nice, beautiful terminal window, instead of running bash in the default WinXP's terminal window, install RXVT (available in Cygwin's installer) and run bash in it.

Support fast mouse cut'n'paste, nice window resizing, acceptable scroll back buffer, etc.

If you're forced to endure windows, Cygwin's bash+rxvt help soothing part of the pain.

You could also use UnxUtils or GNU win32, which can just be unzipped and put in the path. Cygwin is overkill, I feel.

You could also use UnxUtils or GNU win32, which can just be unzipped and put in the path. Cygwin is overkill, I feel.

pork
naim

Pork hasn't been updated in 4 years, but I've used it constantly since I found it ~5 years ago and it does everything I need to.

If I really want video chat I'll fire up iChat.

But with gnokii you can send more than 160 characters.. https://sourceforge.net/projects/binnizawebsms/

Nothing in the license, other than the fact that I failed to think of any way to recover the $600 cost of said license.

"It's about freedom, not about price", right?

Of course, if it's actually about price, too, then you can always try CeGCC.

The context is that someone recommended Windows Mobile, which has "only" the Java trap, compared to the iPhone that has both the lockout chip and the Java trap. Sure, I get your point that a Java trap alone is preferable to a lockout chip, but both get in the way of porting free software to a platform.

If your goal is running a platform exclusively (or even just mostly) with free software, then, apart from OpenMoko, I don't really know any options. All others are proprietary, and closed-source to lesser or greater extent. I don't see a big difference between, say, Symbian, WinMo, and Android in that respect. At least you can actually write your own apps, and run them freely, without "jailbreaking" on all of them - which is about as good as it gets presently.

And, of course, we all know what OpenMoko turned out to be...

Microsoft calls their version an add-in, not a plugin. It is here

Interesting, but is it open source? F/OSS OSF plugin for Office

Clever Age's stuff is released under a BSD-like licence.

Synergy will allow you to share keyboard and mouse over an ethernet connection, but not a monitor.And it is free. http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergy2/

I've been working toward a Java version of a Social Semantic Desktop. The code is here:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
"The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop is an RDF-like triple store implemented on the Java/JVM platform, as well as related social semantic desktop applications inspired in part by NEPOMUK and Halo Semantic MediaWiki."

http://www.tightvnc.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipcop/

Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but my experience is the opposite. Our university department also had our lab machines upgraded to Office 2007 due to pressure from our IT personnel. It was promptly rejected by all the students and all the staff as frustrating and incompatible. Nobody liked it.

It was frustrating because commonly-used options were hidden away (no "Office classic" mode? What were they thinking?), and incompatible because there were enough changes in Excel (for example) to break tools that were set up in previous versions. Then there's the default .XML format which students and staff had to learn wouldn't work on their older versions at home without saving as 97-2003 format first (and sometimes *that* didn't work properly either).

The final straw was spending an hour trying to find and then figure out how to properly paginate a document divided into sections with different page number styles (e.g., a thesis document). I knew how to do it in prior versions, and it was fairly easy. Not only had the menu options been rearranged and relabeled, but the help sucked, and the behavior seemed to be different even when we did find it the right menu.

After 2 weeks of this sort of thing we insisted that IT restore the 2003 version, and when the call went out for software to be installed on the new lab hardware coming later this summer, the number one request was Office 2003. Whether IT will support that, I don't know. But if they don't, then I'm insisting OpenOffice be installed too.

PDF as a "native" option? Big deal. We already had PDFCreator installed anyway, it works for more than just Office, and it's free.

Office 2007 is an expensive and unnecessary "upgrade" that may make sense to IT departments already paying for Microsoft licenses, but that's because they only have to deploy it. They expect everyone else to work through the retraining, and for what benefit, exactly? What was wrong with Office 2003 or OpenOffice if those already worked fine?

The problem is NOT seeing ads on the Noscript website. Like many of the others here that didn't faze me one bit. The problem is he is hijacking OTHER software to shovel his ads. Now THAT is a problem.

It says on the Noscript website it is software under the GPL, that means the source code is available, yes? Can we get a fork please? I mean we seem to have a bazillion OO.o forks now, and there wasn't anything wrong with OO.o that I could see to begin with(that said I prefer to give out oxygen office as it has all the clip art and slideshow presets to make it useful like MS Office) and here we do have something seriously wrong.

Until we get whichever group is responsible for JavaScript to actually fix the security in it, or get websites to dump it like they did ActiveX, we are going to need a way to filter it selectively. Unfortunately just like ActiveX in the 90s you can't just kill JavaScript dead because there are too many websites like banks(WTF?) that need to have JavaScript to be useful. I don't mind making money, and if the guy would have asked nicely I would have been happy to add his little whitelist so he could keep making the tool I use, seems fair to me. But pulling this backdoor install BS just don't cut it. But frankly I haven't seen any other tool that does the job so this jerk kinda has us over a barrel. Proxies and fiddling all day with HOSTS files is frankly a royal PITA.

So does anybody know of ANY software that can give us roughly the same functionality as Noscript without being a PITA? Because those of us that have to use Windows really need the extra protection.

Were adblock and flashblock available for Safari or Chrome (and I believe this is in development for Chrome), and were Chrome available as a Mac version, I would stop using Firefox overnight.

Adblock has been available for Safari for years now. You can get it here:

http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/

A Flash block addon for Safari is also available:

http://hetima.com/safari/stand-e.html

While Safari doesn't have the same ease of plug-in support as Firefox, there's enough for most people who want to make the switch.

So I took a look at that Foxit Reader just now on the VM. Yuck. At least it allows you to opt out of the crap it trys to add in.

I will stick with Okular and PDF Edit. Much better, I can read AND edit pdfs.

You're probably looking for something like Pootle. This is used by a number of projects doing localisation including: Creative Commons, OpenOffice.org and others

It allows online translation and management of translation projects. It translates Gettext PO (for software localisation) and XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format), by using standard localisation formats it makes it easy to manage both online and offline translations. The Translate Toolkit can be used to convert various formats into PO or XLIFF for online translation.

I'm not sure exactly what you need to do in the audio, do you want to overdub or use subtitles? If you want subtitles you can use sub2po from the Translate Toolkit to convert subtitle files to Gettext PO. You'd still need to subtitle the files, then you could put those on Pootle to allow anyone to translate them into their language.

If you have documents in OpenDocument Format (ODF) then you can use the Toolkits odf2xliff converter to allow those to be translated on Pootle.

Pootle allows people to translate online or offline and they can commit their work directly to a version control system from within Pootle. This allows you to automate most of the process for you and your users.

You're probably looking for something like Pootle. This is used by a number of projects doing localisation including: Creative Commons, OpenOffice.org and others

It allows online translation and management of translation projects. It translates Gettext PO (for software localisation) and XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format), by using standard localisation formats it makes it easy to manage both online and offline translations. The Translate Toolkit can be used to convert various formats into PO or XLIFF for online translation.

I'm not sure exactly what you need to do in the audio, do you want to overdub or use subtitles? If you want subtitles you can use sub2po from the Translate Toolkit to convert subtitle files to Gettext PO. You'd still need to subtitle the files, then you could put those on Pootle to allow anyone to translate them into their language.

If you have documents in OpenDocument Format (ODF) then you can use the Toolkits odf2xliff converter to allow those to be translated on Pootle.

Pootle allows people to translate online or offline and they can commit their work directly to a version control system from within Pootle. This allows you to automate most of the process for you and your users.

You're probably looking for something like Pootle. This is used by a number of projects doing localisation including: Creative Commons, OpenOffice.org and others

It allows online translation and management of translation projects. It translates Gettext PO (for software localisation) and XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format), by using standard localisation formats it makes it easy to manage both online and offline translations. The Translate Toolkit can be used to convert various formats into PO or XLIFF for online translation.

I'm not sure exactly what you need to do in the audio, do you want to overdub or use subtitles? If you want subtitles you can use sub2po from the Translate Toolkit to convert subtitle files to Gettext PO. You'd still need to subtitle the files, then you could put those on Pootle to allow anyone to translate them into their language.

If you have documents in OpenDocument Format (ODF) then you can use the Toolkits odf2xliff converter to allow those to be translated on Pootle.

Pootle allows people to translate online or offline and they can commit their work directly to a version control system from within Pootle. This allows you to automate most of the process for you and your users.

You're probably looking for something like Pootle. This is used by a number of projects doing localisation including: Creative Commons, OpenOffice.org and others

It allows online translation and management of translation projects. It translates Gettext PO (for software localisation) and XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format), by using standard localisation formats it makes it easy to manage both online and offline translations. The Translate Toolkit can be used to convert various formats into PO or XLIFF for online translation.

I'm not sure exactly what you need to do in the audio, do you want to overdub or use subtitles? If you want subtitles you can use sub2po from the Translate Toolkit to convert subtitle files to Gettext PO. You'd still need to subtitle the files, then you could put those on Pootle to allow anyone to translate them into their language.

If you have documents in OpenDocument Format (ODF) then you can use the Toolkits odf2xliff converter to allow those to be translated on Pootle.

Pootle allows people to translate online or offline and they can commit their work directly to a version control system from within Pootle. This allows you to automate most of the process for you and your users.

You're probably looking for something like Pootle. This is used by a number of projects doing localisation including: Creative Commons, OpenOffice.org and others

It allows online translation and management of translation projects. It translates Gettext PO (for software localisation) and XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format), by using standard localisation formats it makes it easy to manage both online and offline translations. The Translate Toolkit can be used to convert various formats into PO or XLIFF for online translation.

I'm not sure exactly what you need to do in the audio, do you want to overdub or use subtitles? If you want subtitles you can use sub2po from the Translate Toolkit to convert subtitle files to Gettext PO. You'd still need to subtitle the files, then you could put those on Pootle to allow anyone to translate them into their language.

If you have documents in OpenDocument Format (ODF) then you can use the Toolkits odf2xliff converter to allow those to be translated on Pootle.

Pootle allows people to translate online or offline and they can commit their work directly to a version control system from within Pootle. This allows you to automate most of the process for you and your users.

You're probably looking for something like Pootle. This is used by a number of projects doing localisation including: Creative Commons, OpenOffice.org and others

It allows online translation and management of translation projects. It translates Gettext PO (for software localisation) and XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format), by using standard localisation formats it makes it easy to manage both online and offline translations. The Translate Toolkit can be used to convert various formats into PO or XLIFF for online translation.

I'm not sure exactly what you need to do in the audio, do you want to overdub or use subtitles? If you want subtitles you can use sub2po from the Translate Toolkit to convert subtitle files to Gettext PO. You'd still need to subtitle the files, then you could put those on Pootle to allow anyone to translate them into their language.

If you have documents in OpenDocument Format (ODF) then you can use the Toolkits odf2xliff converter to allow those to be translated on Pootle.

Pootle allows people to translate online or offline and they can commit their work directly to a version control system from within Pootle. This allows you to automate most of the process for you and your users.

As someone who has a lot of customers that have older hardware (and I myself keep a 9 year old 1.1GHz Win2K box around as a low power netbox) I have found Kmeleon CCF ME to be a great replacement on older hardware. Not only does it use less resources than FF3, but it has built in Adblock Plus and by following this guide here and downloading a couple of free files it will run on anything from Win95 up.

So please, be kind to yourself as well as the Internet and stop using IE6 if you are on older hardware. Both Kmeleon and Kmeleon CCF ME will run on as little as a 233MHZ with 64MB of RAM ( they say 32MB but lets be real here) so there really isn't a reason to keep running that virus laden pile of.....eewww that is IE6. It really wasn't nice to begin with and now it is just nasty.

As someone who has a lot of customers that have older hardware (and I myself keep a 9 year old 1.1GHz Win2K box around as a low power netbox) I have found Kmeleon CCF ME to be a great replacement on older hardware. Not only does it use less resources than FF3, but it has built in Adblock Plus and by following this guide here and downloading a couple of free files it will run on anything from Win95 up.

So please, be kind to yourself as well as the Internet and stop using IE6 if you are on older hardware. Both Kmeleon and Kmeleon CCF ME will run on as little as a 233MHZ with 64MB of RAM ( they say 32MB but lets be real here) so there really isn't a reason to keep running that virus laden pile of.....eewww that is IE6. It really wasn't nice to begin with and now it is just nasty.

You make a good point, except for one thing: ODF is available in MS Office as well. It's a open-source plugin (sponsored by Microsoft, hosted on Sourceforge) and integrates pretty nicely. I've been using it all the way back to when "Office 12" (as it was then called) was in beta, and I've yet to find a file it couldn't open correctly, or one that it saved which opened incorrectly on another office suite.

http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/

Office 2007 (and apparently 2003 and XP, although I haven't tried on them) has had an optional plugin for 2+ years that enabled ODF support (for all the od* formats that I'm aware of, at least). It's an open-source project sponsored by Microsoft and listed on Sourceforge: http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/

I use it to open/convert, edit, and save/export ODF files, and it works fine. Mind, if you prefer OO.o over Office 2007 (I don't, even ignoring the risk of OO.o getting the MSOffice formats wring - something which has never happened using the odf-converter plugin, BTW) then this isn't for you. I'm sure there are other people who would find this useful, though.

A while back I worked on a program to find duplicated code - CPD (copy/paste detector). It discards comments and whitespace and (optionally) normalizes variable names... but probably wouldn't deal well with tokens being moved around. There's a chapter on it in my PMD book, too.

What was interesting were some of the performance optimizations that folks came up with. My first version used JavaSpaces to distribute the computation - but subsequent versions (thanks to Brian Ewins and Steve Hawkins) were fast enough to run on one just machine. Good times.

The key is not to look for "ubuntu and centos solutions" (which sounds more like something typically asked a consultant), but to apply your supposedly broad system administration skills and adapt the already existing administration tools to your environment.

Typically done with small snippets of shell script building on your environments build- and packaging tools, and so on, but more mature things do exist. I mention two:

arusha (ark) http://ark.sourceforge.net/
puppet http://reductivelabs.com/products/puppet/

For those of you who wish to keep track of how much bandwidth you're using, FreeMeter's an open source meter for XP that lets you both monitor your speed, chart that shit out and you can set it to alert you when you hit whatever limit you set it to. A must if you're in Texas, are a TW customer anywhere else or like to tether. Sourceforge, yo, it's legit.

Download!

A bit off topic, but extremely easy to do on any Mac.

First things first. Install ReFit to make the OS boot selection easier. Very nice boot manager for OS X.

Next, you install your Bootcamp, which will partition your OS X HD into two OS partitions (Refit first, OS X, and then Bootcamp partition last). Once completed, go into Disk Utility and shrink your OS X partition by whatever number of GB you want your Linux partition to be (Bootcamp should always have the last partition on your HD. If it isn't last, it doesn't work with the built in tools.

Install whatever flavor of Linux you like and ensure you install your boot loader on the actual Linux partition and not on any of your other partitions (usually in the 'advanced' setup during the partitioning process in distros I've set up. Check the documentation)

Rinse and repeat as needed for any number of OS's.

That's it in a nutshell. VERY easy to do...

2003 dude, all the way. Switch to windows classic (start menu, taskbar, window decoration, folder views) and disable the 'themes' service which seems to intercept graphics calls and the result is snappier than 2000, esp with boot/shutdown times taken into consideration (with concurrent service start/stopping that came in 2001's XP).

Throw a couple of UI enhancements on (launchy, freelaunchbar) and you're away. Nothin beats it. One of my problems with 7ista is that you can't create a second bar on the screen (eg, add quicklaunch toolbar, and try drag it to the top or side of the screen. You now have a new bar, great for adding an address toolbar, a freelaunchbar, website bookmarks etc). I don't understand the mentality behind removing functionality.

If anyone is interested in helping out, there is the talklock project. I started it a little over a year ago to do voice encryption for Blackberries, and as many mobile Java devices as possible.

Most of the pieces are there now, but it is not complete. There are screenshots available and it is GPL.

It can record audio and play audio, and send and receive audio from a web server. I even hacked together a shell script on my Mac to listen to the audio so I could test the code with only one phone :)

I agree, this technology is too important to wait for, we should develop it ourselves! Then it can't be taken away from us.

If anyone is interested in helping out, there is the talklock project. I started it a little over a year ago to do voice encryption for Blackberries, and as many mobile Java devices as possible.

Most of the pieces are there now, but it is not complete. There are screenshots available and it is GPL.

It can record audio and play audio, and send and receive audio from a web server. I even hacked together a shell script on my Mac to listen to the audio so I could test the code with only one phone :)

I agree, this technology is too important to wait for, we should develop it ourselves! Then it can't be taken away from us.

CDisplayEx and ComicRack are two:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdisplayex/
http://comicrack.cyolito.com/

CDisplayEx appears to be inactive but is about what it says, ComicRack wants to help you manage your files, so I don't use it (when I checked it out, I didn't really look to see if there was a way to use it only as a viewer).

http://cygnome.sourceforge.net/ ?

I highly recommend wicd. It works, it doesn't auto-connect to wired networks (I sometimes wish that were a checkbox option though)

Such a check box is on the front page, right on top when you unfold the properties of a particular network.

Actually, there is a project on Sourceforge that appears to build on the old GPLed ICS code:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/chessd/

In general, it seems that forks only happen if the original group of developers really does a bad job. Because otherwise, it is simply easier to download the work that someone else does for you.
In the case of XFree86, it took dissatisfaction among developers and a license change that was seen as unacceptable by many Linux distributors. But once those happened, X.org was founded. By now it has mostly supplanted XFree.

I highly recommend wicd. It works, it doesn't auto-connect to wired networks (I sometimes wish that were a checkbox option though), it lets you use external programs (WPA drivers, DHCP Clients, Wired Link Detection, Route Table Flushing) and best of all, it allows you to set up scripts to run on connect, disconnect, and/or pre-connect (absolutely fantastic for laptops+cifs/pppoe/etcetera). The only downsides are that it's not in the default repos, it's got a very lazy security implementation (it runs the script manager as root when strictly speaking it doesn't need to), and it's basically just a glorified python script. But it's still miles ahead of NetworkManager/KNetworkManager.

FICS has been replaced by chessd: http://chessd.sourceforge.net/index-en.html

I once found a keylogger written in Python. I don't think I have the code for it anymore, but from what I remember, all it did was ask politely for X to give it all the inputed keys, as well as the name of the window and some other information.

This program did not need to be run as root; however, it would only pick up keys from the X session it was running in (duh) which was usually only the user it was running under. If that user was in the admin group, though, and typed in their password to run something as root, it would catch the password. I think that I started writing a program that tried to root the system through keylogging, but I think that through a combination of boredom with the project and thinking that this was a bit too dangerous a program to exist on my own computer, I purged it. Either way, I can't find any trace of it anymore on my own computer.

If anyone is interested, the program is here.

Personally, I take security on my own computer semi-seriously. I am as guilty as anybody else of running programs as root without doing a full background check on them. I plan to change this at some point, but at the moment I don't have the time to do a full redesign of my computer usage. Perhaps this summer I will... I do, at least, have a non-obvious username, and a root that has no valid password. Oh, and don't forget that blocking program that calls sleep in a loop from /etc/rcS.d that requires someone to press ctrl-alt-del during the boot process in order to finish booting the computer.

Yes. There's also Skim for OS X, which is far and away my favorite PDF reader for any platform. It's actually designed by and for people who really want to read, quickly search, and annotate PDFs.

Here are two of Skim's great features that I'd love to to see in other PDF readers:

1. Fast search with great presentation. Skim's PDF text search is blazing fast, provides a concise one-hit per line view, as well as thumbnails of the page around the search target on mouse hover. The thumbs are great for quickly winnowing down to the correct hit; you often don't need to even read the text, just the "look" is enough to know you've got the right thing.
2. The ability to easily spin off small windows frozen to a part of a page -- great for popping open a diagram or other material referenced across multiple pages of a text.

I do believe that Skim relies heavily on various OS X frameworks (e.g. for PDF rendering, Spotlight support for search, etc.). That definitely goes to show the value of providing functionality via general, well-conceived and well-implemented frameworks instead of being wrapped up inside of monolithic applications.

Check out the GPL, VST-compatible headers provided by dssi-vst: aeffectx.h. Maybe you can build against this to work around Steinberg's restrictions.