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DocBook or DITA are two XML vocabularies designed to write technical documentation and procedures. Coupled with a CMS like Calenco (shameless plug), you can write procedures independently, and then gather them inside whole documents, in a modular and versatile way. Additionally, you can in the same procedure, tag chunks of information as being, for example, basic or expert information. Depending on your audience, you can then output documents in various formats (PDF, html, etc.) with the information directly relevant for your target.

You can use plain text or formatted HTML to create pages (attachments are easy to add) and it's easy to organize pages into an outline or (surprise!) a course format. Moodle also lets you set up forums, wiki's and so on.

Wiki's are good, but it takes some work to organize the pages. I like to create an "index page" for ease of navigation. You can do this with wiki trails in PmWiki http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/WikiTrails

In MoinMoin http://moinmo.in/ you can use Categories to group pages.

With Moodle and wiki's, authorized users can edit the pages, including data in tables. which can be handy.

For personal notes,you might try:Tuxcards http://www.tuxcards.de/, KeepNote http://rasm.ods.org/keepnote/(it easily handles screenshots or other images),Jreepad http://jreepad.sourceforge.net/ a plain-text-only outliner, or BasketNotePads http://basket.kde.org/. Like Tuxcards, Basket can export its contents to an HTML tree, which can be posted for others.

If you are adventurous, use a mindmap, such as FreeMind http://freemind.sourceforge.net/.

You can use plain text or formatted HTML to create pages (attachments are easy to add) and it's easy to organize pages into an outline or (surprise!) a course format. Moodle also lets you set up forums, wiki's and so on.

Wiki's are good, but it takes some work to organize the pages. I like to create an "index page" for ease of navigation. You can do this with wiki trails in PmWiki http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/WikiTrails

In MoinMoin http://moinmo.in/ you can use Categories to group pages.

With Moodle and wiki's, authorized users can edit the pages, including data in tables. which can be handy.

For personal notes,you might try:Tuxcards http://www.tuxcards.de/, KeepNote http://rasm.ods.org/keepnote/(it easily handles screenshots or other images),Jreepad http://jreepad.sourceforge.net/ a plain-text-only outliner, or BasketNotePads http://basket.kde.org/. Like Tuxcards, Basket can export its contents to an HTML tree, which can be posted for others.

If you are adventurous, use a mindmap, such as FreeMind http://freemind.sourceforge.net/.

No problem!

No problem!

I'm quite convinced someone sufficiently motivated could replicate the Eclipse IDE in ASCII format and functionality in emacs.

Anyone?

I don't know about similar projects for Emacs, but there is a plugin for Vim that runs Eclipse windowless as a backend, and exposes the services it provides (code completion, refactoring, on-the-fly error checking etc) in Vim. Of course it's all drawn in text mode; the screenshots mostly speak for themselves.

I'm quite convinced someone sufficiently motivated could replicate the Eclipse IDE in ASCII format and functionality in emacs.

Anyone?

I don't know about similar projects for Emacs, but there is a plugin for Vim that runs Eclipse windowless as a backend, and exposes the services it provides (code completion, refactoring, on-the-fly error checking etc) in Vim. Of course it's all drawn in text mode; the screenshots mostly speak for themselves.

While vi and a Web Browser is good enough for some, I'd take just the Web Browser. Rapid development needs to break out of the constant theoretical-writing-uploading/saving-previewing cycle and that's why I put together my "eval2" project for PHP.

This video tells it better:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfxrt2pc3pg

While the example is ultra-simplistic, I use this every day for altering regex or otherwise previewing REAL data as I protoype code. Anyhow, the typical horse and buggy mentality backlash against this approach has been "well, I can just do php -a".

For the interested, see http://eval2.sourceforge.net/

I use my laptop and Synergy to achieve just that.

Mind mapping software is brilliant for that kind of stuff.

FreeMind is a good start. Start with the overview nodes, then add sub-nodes for a bit more detail, then you can add sub nodes to them again, until you're into step by step commands to run.

It is free (GPL), runs on most platforms (Java), can export to html, and is really easy to work with. Saved files are in xml format, and there's even flash / java widgets to read and display the files directly in the web browser.

Here is an example java viewer, showcasing some of the functions of freemind (and being documentation for the java applet)

Mind mapping software is brilliant for that kind of stuff.

FreeMind is a good start. Start with the overview nodes, then add sub-nodes for a bit more detail, then you can add sub nodes to them again, until you're into step by step commands to run.

It is free (GPL), runs on most platforms (Java), can export to html, and is really easy to work with. Saved files are in xml format, and there's even flash / java widgets to read and display the files directly in the web browser.

Here is an example java viewer, showcasing some of the functions of freemind (and being documentation for the java applet)

Semi-related sf proyect:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/codepress

Wow, Appleseed seems interesting. With some luck, the mere fact that it's "distributed" might buy SOME privacy improvements. After all, Google standing astride their ocean of data is where the trouble comes in. Re-read, substituting "Facebook" for "Google" and it's still true.

By the way, Project Appleseed stalled over a year ago, though perhaps a little slashdotting might help? See http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/theory/future.php for his manifesto.

He could always try to get them going as Rendering-Farm; or Compiler-Farm for OSS-projects/small distros.

extremetech.com gives some insight on the renderfarm idea.

sourceforge about how to join the sourceforge distributed rendering network

It may be time to help out The Unichrome Project, which produces a driver that works with the older Unichrome and Chrome9 chipsets.

VIA doesn't have much of a history of helping the open source community with specs or source for its S3 graphics cards.

What you call a "hash table database" others might call an "indexed cursor".

Others would be wrong ;)

An indexed cursor only contains a reference to the original data. Memcached contains a duplicate of the original data, so I'd argue it was a database in its own right.

However, even if Memcached doesn't meet the criteria of a database, DBM-based databases certain do. They operate on a similar principle; a unique key points to a specific piece of data. Unlike Memcached, they are persistent, but like Memcached they are very fast and easily scalable.

I was asking for an example of a data storage technique that scales better than RDB.

Well, consider a modern DBM-based database like Tokyo Cabinet. Let's say we want to distribute it evenly across 16 machines, labelled 1 to F. When a request for data comes in, we MD5 the key and use the first 4 bits to determine the machine to use. This gives us an even and consistent spread of data between machines.

Relational databases can't easily use the same trick, because table joins are very costly to perform if the table data is distributed across several machines. In a nutshell, the flexibility of relational databases reduces their speed and scalability compared to databases with a more limited scope.

Me and a work mate have a battle every couple of months with Robocode. Winner gets bragging rights.

It is as difficult or as easy as you want to make it. There are also world wide comps with 256 byte codes. Makes you also brush up on your high school trig. Awesome fun.

• GNUmed
• Polyxmass
• AMIDE
• SOFA

Just in case you never heard about them, have a look at Tokyo Products http://tokyocabinet.sourceforge.net/index.html by the wonderful guy who already wrote QDBM, Hyper Estraier, etc.

The presentation tells you the basics, but Tokyo Products are quickly improving, and there's already a bunch of useful new features since the presentation, as seen in the Mixi's Blog : http://alpha.mixi.co.jp/blog/

Tokyo Products + Flare ( http://labs.gree.jp/Top/OpenSource/Flare-en.html ) makes SQL relational databases totally useless for almost every web app, except for beginners or conservative people.

Also, with the raise of products like Terracotta (for Java) and Maglev (Ruby VM), getting back to SQL really seems retardated.

http://documentation.wikia.com/wiki/METRo

http://metpx.sourceforge.net/

http://iti-iit.cnrc-nrc.gc.ca/colloq/0708/07-10-25-print_e.html

usage: http://openconcept.ca/blog/mgifford/what_people_arent_saying_about_nrcan_wiki_and_gcpedia

I am hesitant to download free stuff to me mobile that hasn't been checked for malware.

How about free as in freedom?

The XML databases and tools are just now becoming mature enough to compete on the same level as relational databases. I would say they won't completely replace them but they have the potential to augment them in some interesting verticals. Anywhere the problem can be thought of as document centric (or hierarchical) an XML DB has the potential to out preform a relational data-store.

For some examples of XML DBs you can refer to:
http://exist.sourceforge.net/
http://www.modis.ispras.ru/sedna/
http://www.marklogic.com/
http://www.x-hive.com/

Also take a look at http://www.saxonica.com/ (Michael Kay's company) for some insight on how XML DB's can be used.
Remember that it takes years for major process cycles to change. XML DB's may not be in the limelight yet but their time is approaching.

oops, I thought the poster I replied to was looking for a compiler which is compiled (bootstrapped) using PGO technology.

I think using PGO with GCC would require working on the build scripts (as in the GCC example above), not the compiler itself, although a compiler (or an extension) designed specially for the convenient of PGO would be very desirable. In other words, I think PGO is not "internal" of a compiler.

If you are interested, you can take a look at the build procedures of the ATLAS library (http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/). It's similar to PGO, but more like "benchmark-guided" than "profile-guided".

have you tried Galeon?

http://galeon.sourceforge.net/

i've been using it under Debian and now Ubuntu for a few years.

I just found an m500, the model that replaced the Palm V, and I have to agree. It's simple yet great. I never needed all the bells and whistles of modern devices like you mentioned. Besides the clock and memo-/notepad, the only apps I frequently use are EasyCalc for more-than-elementary-arithmetic calculations, Phoinix to play Game Boy games, and a cracked version of OmniRemote to turn off annoying televisions.

I just found an m500, the model that replaced the Palm V, and I have to agree. It's simple yet great. I never needed all the bells and whistles of modern devices like you mentioned. Besides the clock and memo-/notepad, the only apps I frequently use are EasyCalc for more-than-elementary-arithmetic calculations, Phoinix to play Game Boy games, and a cracked version of OmniRemote to turn off annoying televisions.

This synergy is actually fairly useful...

Racer (driving sim)
Paintball2

http://xreal.sourceforge.net/xrealwiki

Vegastrike.

I'm not really interested in making an incrementally better game using current techniques; more into the indie-gaming, art-gaming, and experimental scene in general. Stuff like what these folks are are putting out.

Also I'm not sure what you mean by "only $995". SIGGRAPH is super-expensive as far as conferences go, and it costs $345 for grad students, or $800 for non-students. Most conferences are about $200 for students, $400-$500 for non-students. But then most conferences are also run by non-profit organizations, not for-profit companies trying to ream you.

but AROS doesn't. AROS brings the Classic AmigaDOS/Workbench and AmigaOS experience to X86 and PPC platforms.

At least AmigaOS applications are still being developed, hardly anyone develops for BeOS anymore. AROS can at least run AmigaOS 3.1 and under applications and 68K Amiga applications via AmigaBridge.

I like vim, however, I've been using great editor for windows.

Notepad++
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

It supports everything you mentioned.

Buy and old xbox. It's not going to do HD content, but Boxee is a fork of XBMC. Using XBMC+rtorrent+pytvshotws I have what can be assumed to be a near identical setup. The 'server' is in a different room and it has 2TB of space.

He said MySQL, so no stored procedures unless he's running > v5. I don't know what the penetration is for MySQL 5 in the hosting market.

With PHP and most PHP-based Web sites stored procedures are overkill. Use ADOdb or PDO and you'll get similar protection with less hassle.

I think pwgen is better yet.

May as well give a link

Why not allow reliale software such as those listed bellow to generate and manage your password? Passwords suck as security, but they aren't going away. These even let you setup rules for generating the password.

http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/
http://keepass.info/download.html

"f you've got a legacy of MS documents that you can't easily move, you're kind of stuck with MS."

There's a lot of truth in this, but just the same, for the vast majority of organizations it's the content of those documents which is really important, not the exact layout (think about how quickly in real terms most large organizations managed to transform all those business-essential forms and documents from paper to electronic form - less than a decade for most - and that was a much more costly transition in terms of the human hours involved than merely reformatting some .doc-formatted files).

My suspicion is in years to come there's going to be a lot of demand for tools like the (open source) Australian government-funded Xena, an "XML Normalizing tool" for converting almost any digital document format you care to name to an open XML format for archiving and re-use.

There used to be a Gaim plugin for Blizzard's Battle.net that I used several years ago. I could talk to people on Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Diablo, and even World of Warcraft (I think).

However, I somehow appeared strangely in the chat lists because people were always IMing me, out of nowhere, thinking I was some kind of official Blizzard tech support. Sometimes I had fun messing with them by telling them go through futile exercises: "Ok, try unplugging your monitor for 30 seconds. No? Ok now try ..."

Unfortunately, Blizzard shut down the protocol this used, so it's a dead project.

We can host SourceForge ourselves.

> Mono has bindings for QT4 as well, active and well maintained (Qyoto).

Wtf? I have searched for that thing, and all that could be found were lots of no longer registered domains, like qyoto.org, qyoto-project.com and a dead sourceforge mailing list:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=qtcsharp-list
I'd consider anyone using this a fool, because even if it still lives somewhere it does not have enough support for even google to find its new place.

http://directxwine.sourceforge.net/

This or that application doesn't work on Linux or there isn't a comparable one (my favorite to mention is Sibelius's music notation software, aptly named Sibelius [or Coda Music's Finale, but I hate Finale]), it's not as easy to use, hardware, etc.

Some music notation software on linux (not complete list, just a quick search):

• Lilypond ( http://www.lilypond.org/ )
• Denemo ( http://denemo.sourceforge.net/index.html )
• Rosegarden ( http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ )
• NoteEdit ( http://noteedit.berlios.de/ )
• Brahms ( http://brahms.sourceforge.net/ )

This or that application doesn't work on Linux or there isn't a comparable one (my favorite to mention is Sibelius's music notation software, aptly named Sibelius [or Coda Music's Finale, but I hate Finale]), it's not as easy to use, hardware, etc.

Some music notation software on linux (not complete list, just a quick search):

• Lilypond ( http://www.lilypond.org/ )
• Denemo ( http://denemo.sourceforge.net/index.html )
• Rosegarden ( http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ )
• NoteEdit ( http://noteedit.berlios.de/ )
• Brahms ( http://brahms.sourceforge.net/ )

Running as non-admin is easy, runas (which is only a right-click away)is very easy to use and works well 99% of the time. The annoying thing is remembering to right-click the msi/exe to use runas :) Do you need AV? IE is how BHO's like vundo get in to your pc, active-x is also a nightmare... I've been saying this for years! I have 5000+ users that we no longer install AV directly on their PC's, and we pass our PCI/DSS and SOX audits every year. There is no excuse for M$ to put users into Admin by default. Windows 7 however it does... the local admin account is disabled... but so what! It's idiotic, lock the administrator, but place a new user into admin group by default. -rich ClearSite

> Can I have all your code for free, then?

Sure!

Most of it is floating around without my name attached. A couple tools are in the Bugtraq archives somewhere, though not under this name. There may also be some here and somewhere in here, though I can't keep track of where everything is any more.

Open source is like that, you know. I don't even know who all is using what any more. Especially because I prefer NOT to have my work attributed to me and do most things anonymously or pseudonymously.

I read a lot of pdf's on my MacBook, and I never really quite liked Preview.app.

Luckily there's also Skim.app, which I enjoy using daily.

I think we need multiple distros. (In fact, I once wrote an article to that effect.) However, I also think that we need more focus inside those distros. Rather than being good at being a desktop or being good at being a server, Linux distros tend to try and be all things to all people. Which makes them a jack of all trades, master of none.

What's needed are fundamental operating system components that support the desktop and/or support the server and/or support the supercomputer and/or support the embedded device, etc. It should all be a matter of how the OS is built.

Unfortunately, we seem to end up with all the disadvantages of choice in distros and none of the advantages. Why do GNOME and KDE both have their own hardware config tools that conflict with the underlying tools? Shouldn't there be OS-level services available that these desktop environments plug into?

Why is sound such a mess? That was a solved problem 15 years ago!

Why do X-Servers have the graphics drivers rather than the kernel or HAL? The X-Server should only be a consumer of graphics services!

So on and so forth. Make the individual distros more cohesive and things will get a lot better. Stop focusing on retreading the same ground that GNOME and KDE have tread a billion times before, and start working on a few standard, low-level APIs that can be compiled in to the OS to give the GUI Windows or Mac level control over the underlying system. THEN things will get better.

Oh, and stop with the packaging for crying out loud! A desktop system is antithetical to a centralized software repository. Desktop systems should have a standard method of software distribution that accepts any software from anywhere, commercial or OSS. Take Indie Gaming or Shareware developers as an example. Why should they submit their software to 30 different package repositories rather than providing a single, simple download on their website? (Worst case, two or three to support competing standards.)

And no, I'm not talking about installers. Unix systems and installers don't usually get along. (I remember back when the shortcut spec was changing every other week. And yet distros were deploying a different standard in each minor revision. GAHHH!!!) Rather, I'd prefer to see App Bundle distributions similar to OS X. Such a concept is simple to download, install, and run without the fuss of messing with shortcuts, restarting your desktop, installing packages, or the gazillion other minor barriers Linux desktop systems have put in the way over the years.

(I did create a Proof of Concept on Solaris a while back, but lacked time to follow up on it. This problem is solvable if distro makers are willing to dedicate the resources.)

I will give Ubuntu some credit here. Shuttleworth has been trying very hard to push the community in the right direction. But in order to "arrive" we need to actually embrace the ideals of OSS rather than hanging on to this idea that packaging repositories == Linux == OSS freedom.

I'm not a fanboi or anything, and would be interested in a Mac PDF reader that's better than either of the above options.

Have you looked at Skim? I find it to be extremely fast and light; it's certainly great for my needs.

Sounds like you would want to have a look at Skim then.

Sure beats the crap out of every other reader I've tried.