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Speaking of game related education, a 2008 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a particular memory task, called Dual N-Back, may actually improve working memory (short term memory) and fluid intelligence (gF). This is an important finding because fluid intelligence was previously thought to be unchangeable. The game involves remembering a sequence of spoken letters and a sequence of positions of a square at the same time.

Read the original experimental study here.

There's a free open source version of the Dual N-Back task called Brain Workshop. Start practicing!

The bugs are fixed in the windows driver, not in the bios where everyone can benefit.

You can download a new data table from here: http://acpi.sourceforge.net/dsdt/view.php And have your initrd bang it into place, or just fix the bugs yourself - they are usually obvious.

who said you can't?

It took me all of 10 seconds to find this one http://bandwidthd.sourceforge.net/
Just install it on an old PC and plug a net cable into it from your "router" or "modem" or whatever your ISP gave you.
I believe it will just run on your PC as a standalone also.
Works with Windows too!

If you go with a web based app.... use a WURFL library + DB to discover phone capabilities. It's a really easy library/class you can get for PHP, JAVA and .Net

WURFL on Sourceforge

Basically it runs a User Agent detection routine on the phone and does a look-up in a DB table which contains all known capabilities (dimensions, video codec support, html support, image support, etc.) and returns an object that you can use to turn on or off features in the web app.

Or Links. Far better than Lynx.

+1 for links if your just surfing to read.

Or Links. Far better than Lynx.

Download Opera Mini and the Microemulator

http://www.operamini.com/download/pc/generic/generic_advanced_midp_2/

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=30014&package_id=21993&release_id=587061

You could also try uninstalling Flash is generally pretty easy. Zipping all your attachments etc

Oh and stop reading pages like Slashdot. Its all just nonsense anyways. ;-)

It is *possible* to cache YouTube videos and the like, but you'd need some technical skill to pull it off. Basically, you'd write a Squid pre-filter that replaces embedded YouTube videos with an embedded call to a local cgi-script. On the first invocation, the cgi-script would download and cache the video while streaming it to the client. Subsequent calls would skip the download process.

Of course, this only saves bandwidth when you re-watch the same video over-and-over.

Even in the pre-YouTube days of the internet, Squid didn't help with bandwidth all that much. I once set up a Squid cache in transparent-proxy mode at an ISP with around 400 dial-up customers. I gave it 4 GB of cache space, which doesn't sound like much now, but our biggest drives were 500mb full-height SCSI bricks. I tuned every configurable option and pulled every trick in the book to maximize the caching. The experiment lasted around a month, during which time Squid saved us around 30% on our inbound bandwidth, according to log analysis. We finally had to shut it down because customers started to notice that they weren't seeing real-time data (like stock quotes) and some of them threatened to sue.

Bottom line: If you want low-bandwidth internet, use one of the these:

Lynx

Links

ELinks

w3m

http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/ has a so called "privacy" bar where you enable and disable images, javascript with one click.
Opera has such buttons too but for me they won't work right (the images one).

Most of the web looks good without images and javascript is mostly useless. Plus by disabling javascript you also disable Flash.

Obvious solution: http://links.sourceforge.net/

If you have access to a remote server which do not have bandwidth limitations (perhaps a friendly sysadmin in an university?) you may try a compressing proxy such as Ziproxy which recompresses pictures to lower quality and does some extra black magic aswell.

It seems that RabbIT does that too, but I've never used that software myself.

From the sound of it and from looking at spectrograms of the sounds it question I can safely claim that a few things are misleading about these sounds. I have every reason to think that these sounds have been generated by spectrogram synthesis, that is they analysed the original astro-seismic signal into a spectrogram (an image which is a plot of the frequency components and their amplitude over time) and resynthesised it into a sound so that we could hear it but also so that it wouldn't be too long and boring or too short.

However here's the thing, they used a very poor spectrogram synthesis technique (disclaimer : I consider myself a specialist in spectrogram analysis and synthesis and have made a spectrogram analyser and synthesiser called the ARSS), which consists in modulating the horizontal bands of the spectrogram with sine waves of different frequency. What's worse, they used a linear frequency scale, which means that all these sine waves are separated from each other by a fixed frequency (in our case about 10 Hz), which creates a huge envelope beat at that frequency. What it means is that this "regular repeating pattern" you hear isn't "the entire star is pulsating" as the journalist claims, but rather an artifact of the synthesis technique.

Fortunately this technique, even if it produces an awful sound, conveys the original image in the sound's time-frequency plan almost intact (just as in this example, note the similarity with the sounds in the article), and therefore I can reconstruct the original images they used and resynthesise them using a better technique to obtain a more natural sound. Which I'll post as a reply to this comment.

Picking a logic analyzer is a harder problem. A logic analyzer is a device for collecting and reducing many channels of parallel digital data coming in from a device under test. The data reduction part is a hard problem. There's a vast amount of data coming in, and you need to find the interesting/important/wrong stuff. It's really a form of log analysis.

Some logic analyzers are just input devices to PCs. There's an open source logic analyzer program for use with such capture devices. Take a look at this for some USB-based interface hardware. They also offer some units that can emulate a scope in hardware. For a real entry-level product, see this low end unit. There's a demo video.

Cost goes up with data rate and channels captured. If you need to look at 10GHz signals, it's going to cost you. 10 MHz, quite cheap.

What do you want a logic analyzer for, anyway?

http://cobolforgcc.sourceforge.net/

It was also the only MS program that came with the source. ;)

Would mentioning WiX kill the joke?

I'm a developer and was wondering what kind of testing is done to verify the code.

Short answer: all kinds of testing.

• Ingo Molnar (among others) have access to huge build farms that compile- and boot-test the kernel.
• linux-next merges and builds proposed trees, and generates daily reports.
• Thousands of developers test development kernels before the stable kernel is released, each focusing on their area of interest.
• The kernel oops project tracks which kernel bugs occur most frequently.

Do they use unit testing? Regression testing?

Yes. See the Linux Test Project.

Being a practical type, I must confess that the learning curve with Dojo has been rather steep; having said that, once you get over the first major hump - it's literally all downhill from there. But, I'm not defending Dojo. Instead, I'm complimenting the book.

This book appears to solve the learning curve problem by starting with a practical tutorial and then going into guts.

IMO, the biggest problem with Dojo's userbase growth has been that Dojo seems to be both large and small at the same exact time, making it difficult to get oriented. One thing that developers should keep in mind is that Dojo is very scalable; performing a custom build will whittle it down from its 37+ MB source distribution (yes, graphics included) to however low you need it (in my case, couple of hundred kilobytes - smaller than some logo images out there).

In my case, I've completely embraced Dojo as a reliable way to quickly produce backend systems with it - and - more recently - front ends.

But that's just work. As for fun - without Dojo, I don't think that I would have put my open source project together or released it to the public. There are so many hours in a day and I don't have time to reinvent the wheel; Dojo was there for me.

For some amusing interaction between Dojo and PHP (not using the Zend framework..), see the videos / screenshots from http://eval2.sourceforge.net/

there is at least the linux test project http://ltp.sourceforge.net/ I see a lot of unit, regression testing and stress tests.

Back in college between 1994-1998 my MUD of choice was Kingdoms http://www.kingdoms.se/. But, what really held my interest was programming TinyFugue http://tinyfugue.sourceforge.net/. I had macros and autoresponders for everything. No one could touch me without some good autoretribution. I even created some remote controllable semi-AI bots such as Locutus of Borg who went around trying to assimilate people and one linked to an outside lisa/eliza type program that just went around chatting with people just to watch the hilarious conversations :-)

You wield the Annihilator.
Annihilator says: Let's kick some butt!

I am curious about integrating with git. I know that there is plenty of support to integrate with Subversion. What does git provide in terms of integration? I am not talking about IDE integration, I am talking about continuous integration. Does Cruise Control work with git?

http://tortoisehg.sourceforge.net/
http://swik.net/tortoisegit

Haven't used either, can't attest to stability or usability.

After using distributed version control for a very short time, I decided I will never go back to something centralized like Subversion. Only with a DVCS do I can:

- Get work done, with complete repository access, anywhere. On a train. In the rain. In a box. With a fox. Anywhere, any time, even when the network goes down or while I'm thirty thousand feet above an ocean.

- Create as many experimental branches/clones as I like, without making them visible to anyone else or cluttering up any shared namespace. (This is especially nice for capturing checkpoints when I have a lot of large, interdependent changes to make and the project won't work until they're all finished.)

- Get perfect, complete, automatic repository backups as a side-effect of working on a project. It's as hassle-free as I could ask for, and restoring is equally easy.

After quite a bit of reading, I ended up choosing Mercurial. After a year or so of using it regularly, and occasionally checking in on the other DVCS systems, I have always been glad of my choice.

Git was a contender, but is notoriously non-intuitive and awkward to use, and has never been a good fit on Windows. (I try to avoid Windows, but some of my colleagues still use it, and some of our projects are necessarily cross-platform.) Mercurial is similar to git in design, features, and speed, and is also very easy to use and works well on every major platform. Linus even called it out in his version control rant.

Bazaar was a contender, and I like their sponsor (Canonical), but didn't seem focused on performance enough for my liking.

More points for Mercurial:
- The folks on the email list are very knowledgeable, friendly, and helpful.
- It is very easy to extend.
- It has the blessing of some very large, high-profile projects. (e.g. Mozilla, OpenSolaris, Java's OpenJDK)

To the git users who use the gitk GUI for browsing revisions, Mercurial has a clone:
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/HgkExtension

To the user who posted about the Tortoise GUI for Subversion, here's a link for Mercurial's equivalent:
http://tortoisehg.sourceforge.net/

To the user who posted about Trac integration, Mercurial will work too:
http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracMercurial

Also of note, Version Control Blog occasionally links to some interesting articles:
http://www.versioncontrolblog.com/

The other dvcs Mercurial: Tortoise, Eclipse, Netbeans
I don't see, why the workflow has to become more complicated for server-side things like Jira and Confluence: you simply create a automatic server-side conversion from your central dvcs repository to a svn repository for those tools are done with it.

For Linux, KDirStat: http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/

Basically the same as WinDirStat, except actually perhaps older and not quite as pretty. I am a tremendous fan of both programs.

Trust me to forget to explain why. Before I get modded offtopic I should point out this is all for the Danmere Backer.

No, it wouldn't. A microkernel loads modules into the kernel space. You're talking about running in user space. So when an application makes a system call, the kernel has to translate it to the FUSE layer into user space. So there's an extra layer consuming time. On top of that, kernel space isn't generally swapped out, but user space can be. Obviously it should never happen, but wouldn't it suck if your disk driver was swapped out?

See the diagram at the bottom of this page: http://fuse.sourceforge.net/

Also, ZFS (like ReiserFS) handles its metadata differently from ext3, so you have to translate the differences between the virtual file system and ZFS. This is why writes are significantly slower. Reads are not so bad. The NFS penalty would be huge. See http://www.linux.com/feature/138452

wayback, copyfs, and ext3cow are all fairly stable versioning filesystems for linux. I'm not sure if they let you stop non-root users from getting old versions, but I don't see why you'd want people to have to ask an admin to get old versions of their files?

Here are my top-5-ways-to-live-in-closed-source.
1. I can't imagine quitting a company merely because they have scratchy toilet paper. I think you are mad for some other reason.
2. Regarding open source, What I do is just get the job done. Don't tell them.
3. From my experience, you will be happy doing this, but you won't last long at that company, so be prepared to move into consulting, the only place open source really will make you a living.
4. Don't ever post their name anywhere.
5. Read your employment agreement and if it doesn't say OPEN-SOURCE in there, then you are ok.
Rgds,
http://sourceforge.net/projects/singletomulti-c/

http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/

If the tags annoy you just turn them off.

Oh wait, that doesn't work any more.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2146380&group_id=4421&atid=104421

To be fair, fluxbox workspaces are the equivalent of E's multiple desktops; I don't think it has anything matching E's virtual desktops. (And yes, I do miss those sometimes.) There is therefore no edge flipping, although moving a window past the edge will move to the next workspace.

As for pagers, there is at least one out there (fbpager), but I found I didn't need a pager as much as I did with E. With a middle-click, I can pull a list of all workspaces, and all windows in any of them (similar to E, if I recall). Most importantly, the "Send To" command makes it easy to send a window to another workspace. Also, you could have the (optional) taskbar display all windows, instead of only those in the current workspace.

* It's fast. Very fast.
* It feels clean and simple.
* Looks very good.
* Very customisable.
* Keyboard shortcuts for just about anything!
* Just about everything can be controlled or configured from the command prompt.

Apart from that last point, the same could be said about fluxbox.

I myself migrated from E to fluxbox a few months ago, and found it to have that same no-frills attitude. (Or rather, just-the-frills-you-want-and-nothing-else.) From what I gather, Blackbox and its offspring appear to have filled the void left by E16 rotting away and E17 never releasing.

So ngrep, in other words? It's not as though this is particularly new or exciting technology.

He did a lot of work on imlib2, which languished for years until better software replaced it (where "better" might mean "less buggy" or "released more frequently" or "appears maintained").

To which software are you referring? (Honest question, not rhetorical.)

I've never thought that he had much interest in releasing stable versions of his code with any frequency or rhythm. That's not the sole criterion for positive notoriety, but releasing software that people can actually use is important.

The release cycle is painfully slow, or possibly even non-existent. One of the lowest layers in the E17 actually has a release version. And I just now noticed that there is a release snapshot for E17 and EFL. I haven't taken the time to look at the actual bug lists for the whole E17 project, but I am one of the many people saying "E17 has been quite stable for me and I use it every day". So there's some positive hearsay for whatever that's worth. :)

(One caveat is that I stopped using Enlightenment a decade ago, around E14, because the new versions weren't stable or releasable.)

In all fairness, E14 was a looooong time ago. When development for E17 got started, E16 got handed off. It's been a supported, "release quality" product for quite a while now (not as glamorous, obviously). I lurk on the enlightenment-users mailing list, and see a fair number of people asking questions about E16, bugs getting fixed, etc, relative to the general E17 traffic.

Anyway, I've got high hopes for an actual, true-to-life E17 release version... it was actually asked about recently on the e-users mailing list. Raster said they are working towards a release. The snapshot news linked above supports they notion that he is following through with this.

But not *that* active.

Looking at the mess of keyboards and mice, could he use Synergy http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ or does it not work with WoW? -armus

Something tells me that an email system that only depends on your hard drive with no net connection wouldn't be very useful.

FWIW I don't seem to be having any problems getting gmail through my gmail-lite install.

I, a self-proclaimed reverse engineer, will make an updated bnet daemon when D3 comes out. I will base it off of http://bnetd.sourceforge.net/ (the existing daemon), then I will release it anonymously on a server in another country that blizzard has no jurisdiction over. Do not fear a lack of lan play!

I love Blizzard. They make fun games. I hate companies who put ridiculous requirements to play fun games.

I am really looking forward to Diablo III gameplay, but I refuse to spend money on it until a system for LAN play is released. I really look forward to the reverse engineering, just don't forget to set up a donation link. :D

I used siege to run load tests on a server with the MVCbench PHP test framework.

I, a self-proclaimed reverse engineer, will make an updated bnet daemon when D3 comes out. I will base it off of http://bnetd.sourceforge.net/ (the existing daemon), then I will release it anonymously on a server in another country that blizzard has no jurisdiction over. Do not fear a lack of lan play!

My concerns though are the 35,000 computers being used to spam.

I've been wondering for some time now: does anyone have a botnet map? Surely, I should be able to make a decent botnet map just from my server logs alone. Something along the lines of denyhosts. They can't all be on dial-up and I assume forging IP's could be dealt with with a large enough dataset.

I want the botnet IP list to block at the SMTP level, or perhaps just dump them all in /etc/hosts.deny. Or, of someone is a good Samaritan, find a way to contact these people and get their computers cleaned.

Since the Samaritan cause is probably a lot of thankless work, one should probably set up a system like denyhosts, where the botnet IP's would be blocked by participating server administrators, and those IP's redirected to a botnet list indicating the problem to them, and how to get their IP removed from the botnet list. (Just like spam blacklists work now)

Slashdot's equally shitty in all browsers. I've found tons of bugs in the most current Firefox, so it really makes you wonder what browser they could be *possibly* testing on. (I mean, I assume they wouldn't test on IE, but not on Firefox? Of course the other possibility, more likely, is that there's no testing done at all.) After a brief altercation with one of the Slashdot devs, I now diligently report every bug I find-- none have been fixed.

For example, I'm looking directly at this bug right now as I reply: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2159787&group_id=4421&atid=104421

Best case: A company sees the project and wants to sponser it, making your project your full time development job

Worst case: You spend some time working on a project that goes no where, but you now have some real experience that you can tout on your resume and in the interview

Added Bonus: You get to talk in the interview about the open source community, your participation in it, and maybe on how that experience can also benefit your perspective employer.

Plus you'll be able to brag about your software to friends and co-workers.

-Runz

The problem with teaching PHP to beginners is that you also need to teach them HTML.

No, actually, you don't!

For your enlightenment:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-command-line-1/
http://gtk.php.net/
http://www.php-qt.org/
http://php-tk.sourceforge.net/documentation.html
http://www.bluem.net/downloads/pashua_en/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpopengl/

The problem with teaching PHP to beginners is that you also need to teach them HTML.

No, actually, you don't!

For your enlightenment:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-command-line-1/
http://gtk.php.net/
http://www.php-qt.org/
http://php-tk.sourceforge.net/documentation.html
http://www.bluem.net/downloads/pashua_en/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpopengl/

He's moved to sourceforge svn, but (still) hasn't updated the website.

More info in the forums.

I have used Howie (best one so far) and Seeborg (very dumb and random). Both are old though. Are there any better ones for IRC that runs in Linux?

It sounds like you should have tried Oxygenoffice instead of Openoffice,as it comes with a lot more with regards to templates and such out of the box. Of course it takes them a little while after the latest Open Office release,so why not bookmark tham and check it out in a month or so when version 3 comes out?

That said I don't really think OO.o is really for the "power users" of MSO,because they get more use out of the little features that a good 85% of the public probably doesn't even know is there. Where I have had luck switching folks is the basic home users,where they are just writing docs,working up some basic spreadsheets,and maybe cooking up a contact list database. They,along with my older users who can't stand the stupid ribbon seem to have no problem making the switch to OO.o.

I have personally always been a believer in the right tool for the job. Since I have a copy of MSOffice 2K I picked up several years ago for cheap at the shop I worked at that is what I primarily use. But for my home users it would simply be stupid to spend even $100 on the student/home edition of MSOffice when OO.o does everything they'd use an office suite for for free. I also like how I can whip out a copy of OO.o 1.5 for those folks around here that are still using older machines and give them an office suite that doesn't slow their machine to a crawl. Both MSOffice and Open Office seem to be getting a lot more bloated IMHO. But if only MSOffice gets the job done for you please stick with it and enjoy. But even as a MSOffice user I'm sure you'd agree having choice in the matter is a good thing.

MS appears to basically doing optical flow & color tracking. the above libs can do those, and more, and are great for programmers and nonprogrammers alike. tho if you really hate code, you may rather use max/msp/jitter or gem/pd.