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any mention of the open source project TexPerfect, a Project on Sourceforge whose homepage gives a lot more information on this topic: http://texperfect.sourceforge.net/en/texperfect.html

Anyone using PCs in the mid-80s to early 90s may remember WordPerfect fondly for ability to handle the most complex of documents with ease. It's easy to use equation editor even used Tex as it's typesetting engine!

I have yet to see any other piece of software handle complex documents that include lots of equations and graphs as well as WordPerfect did. I wrote two graduate theses in WordPerfect; having used Word for the last 10 years, I can't imagine doing the same with Word or with OOo.

Unfortunatley the Linux/Unix version of WordPerfect never got beyond a crude prototype of WP 5.1. Another, more recent downside: Microsoft paid Corel $150 million in the late 90's in exchange for Corel rewriting WP in VBA instead of Ansi C. I had purchased every version after 5.1, but never tried the VBA based versions. I heard the initial VBA version didn't work as well as previous versions. Two more versions of Corel WordPerfect have come out since then, but I don't know anyone that has used them enough to comment on how they compare to the older, excellent versions of WorPerfect.

The TexPerfect project seems quite interesting, if any developers wish to take on the challenge!

What you really want is a text-editor with built-in templates, push-button PDF compiling, and other TeX-specific features

I recommend Kile.

Still no inline spell-check and lacking a few other nice features, but it's on its way there.

Here is some info from the FAQ:

Lout is similar in function to LaTeX and troff. Indeed, it borrows ideas, techniques and conventions from these typesetting systems. For example, Lout uses Knuth's (the author of TeX, on which LaTeX is based) optimal line breaking algorithm, and has extended it to paragraph breaking across pages. For simple documents, Lout, LaTeX and troff offer much the same functionality, with different syntax (see the "Simple Examples" section). Lout is much more "programmer friendly" than TeX's macros (and a fortiori than incomprehensible troff macros). See the "Advanced Examples" section.

Lout makes it easy to mix text and graphics. You can draw lines, arrows and boxes, scale and rotate objects, use color commands. While many of these things are possible in LaTeX by including Postscript files generated by utility programs such as xfig, you have to specify the size of each included figure, losing a lot of Lout's flexibility.

Here is some info from the FAQ:

Lout is similar in function to LaTeX and troff. Indeed, it borrows ideas, techniques and conventions from these typesetting systems. For example, Lout uses Knuth's (the author of TeX, on which LaTeX is based) optimal line breaking algorithm, and has extended it to paragraph breaking across pages. For simple documents, Lout, LaTeX and troff offer much the same functionality, with different syntax (see the "Simple Examples" section). Lout is much more "programmer friendly" than TeX's macros (and a fortiori than incomprehensible troff macros). See the "Advanced Examples" section.

Lout makes it easy to mix text and graphics. You can draw lines, arrows and boxes, scale and rotate objects, use color commands. While many of these things are possible in LaTeX by including Postscript files generated by utility programs such as xfig, you have to specify the size of each included figure, losing a lot of Lout's flexibility.

I've also used Framemaker to write technical publications for standards bodies (draft specs, RFP responses...) and it is very good. We used it at my company to author most of the help documentation for our products. We're moving to our own document system using the DITA Open Toolkit. I doubt it will help with math, though, and it isn't an editor, it's a publishing system.

Have you tried lout (http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/)? I've not, but it looks interesting.

Fixed link

Here, fixed it for you: Kile.

What's wrong with UNIX file semantics?

It's not that there is anything wrong with it, it's just that it's so ridiculously primitive. I mean, rwxrwxrwx is such a incredibly limiting mindset... if you've never developed a large complex system on a more advanced filesystem (like VMS or Novell's Netware file system) you probably aren't aware of what you are missing.

Limiting files to only one group membership, and only five possible file manipulation properties (rwxts) is really lame, it's a 30 year old paradigm that several other OSes surpassed 20 years ago. Novell even used to have "rename inhibit" as a filesystem attribute!

Stacking ACLs on top of other architectures has always been a way to create system maintenance nightmares, ACLs enable as many problems as they solve in unskilled hands (at least you can back them up with the files they apply to these days, though, that's a recent improvement in the *nix world).

These days, good version of unix have filesystems with versioning, such as: http://wayback.sourceforge.net/. In this case, the versioning is implemented using a very general machanism, instead of being built in. This allows, as a result, many more things than just versioning filesystems. You should look in to FUSE.

Thanks for the link; I'm already familiar with FUSE. Wayback looks nice, especially for anyone who doesn't already have something based on Mike Rubel's paper set up, but it's not solving the same problem as a file system that cleanly implements version numbering.

There's nothing wrong with a sharp rock. But I'd rather have a nice steel axe when I need to chop down trees. Once you've used a better toolset it's hard to go back to the stone age.

This is hardly the first 2-player homebrew game on the PS3.

I released my Puzzle Bobble clone pubble almost a year ago. That actually supports 2-5 players.

What's more, it's open-source and written in Python using my PS3 2D sprite library, python-ps3 which has a good library of SPU-accelerated sprite and alpha-blending routines, wireless sixaxis support and rumble support on a dualshock 3. I'm currently working on 3D rasterisation too, although that will be some months off yet...

There is, in MP3 at least. It's used by mp3gain:

http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/faq.php

However, not all audio players support it. I'm pretty sure the iPod doesn't, nor does iTunes. (For some reason iTunes does have a "normalise levels on all selected tunes" option but that works by decoding/re-encoding the audio, which is a lot slower because in addition to the audio analysis you have to re-encode the file and is likely to introduce further interference to the stream).

Having said that, I've only got a fourth gen ipod. For all I know, more recent models do make use of this tag and furthermore, for all I know if iTunes knows that it's being synced with an ipod which does support the tag then that's what it uses to adjust the gain.

Even with the released documentation, we also need a good leader like Harald Welte to bring together the OpenChrome and UniChrome developers to work on the same codebase. Right now the split effort is really wasteful.

Do I, as a customer who, according to the acceptable use policy, owns my data, have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the data which I own, despite it being hosted on a third-party's server?

IMO everyone should expect privacy, however, even with strict privacy policies and expectations in place there should be no surprise that any data which you make accessible is accessed.

Far to many web application developers are lax on security when developing their applications and storing data. End users running these applications should be pushing developers and hosting providers to implement some level of security against unauthorized access to data using least privilege and encryption of stored data.

And now for the plug. :) PHPgirder is an example of implementing both least privilege and encryption to protect from unauthorized access and encryption of data in the event unauthorized access does occur.

Basically the idea is to use the user level access control built into the database engine to limit access to tables and encrypt all sensitive data that is stored in those tables. This requires the use of multiple database users and while the username and password for the user with the least privilege is stored in plain text like any other web application the usernames and passwords for higher access levels in the database are stored in encrypted records in the database and require user authentication before they can be decrypted and thus provide higher levels of access to the application and the data in the database.

The same encryption and ACL technique that is used to control an application based on PHPgirder can also be applied to any pages and data that are implemented in an application using the classes by using the same database ACLs required to run PHPgirder or by adding additional ACLs upon the base PHPgirder ACLs (translation: more database usernames and passwords with restricted database access).

Now this will not stop someone who has root access to the server from intercepting user session information and stealing user's usernames and passwords to gain access to the encrypted data but it will surely stop someone from doing a casual dump of your database to peruse your data and tell you what your doing wrong.

burnin

There are some 3D games that run on Linux.

I'm going to mention one that I play myself, Urban Terror (a semi-realistic shooter based on Quake 3).

Sure, it's a few years old. I don't care, it's still just as fun. Occasionally I'll even play some good old "regular" Quake 3.

To be perfectly honest, I don't run UrT or Q3 on Linux myself, I run Mac OS X. The point is, if I ever decided to switch away from Mac OS X to Ubuntu, almost all the games I have on my computer right now would run on Linux as well. Actually, let me go through my Applications folder right now:

• Bridge Construction Set -- yes, it runs on Linux
• DEFCON -- yup. That too.
• Kill Monty -- unfortunately, no. :-( (Then again, that doesn't run on Windows either.)
• Frets On Fire -- yup. It runs on Linux. And way better than on OS X too.
• OpenTTD -- yep. It runs on Linux too.
• IOQuake3 -- sure.
• SNES9x (and by extention, a collection of Super Nintendo games), sure, works on Linux
• Tetrinet Aqua does not run on Linux, but other (and better) Tetrinet clients do.
• The Ur-Quan Masters runs on Linux.
• Uplink runs on Linux.
• And finally, as discussed before, Urban Terror runs on Linux.

So, all the games I actually have on my hard drive and play would run on Linux if I decided to migrate. Except for Kill Monty. (But then again, that doesn't run on Windows either.)

The lack of games are not what's keeping me on Mac OS X on my machine.

Oh, and in response to your issue about not being able to flash because you'd need either Windows or DOS -- I give you FreeDOS.

There are some 3D games that run on Linux.

I'm going to mention one that I play myself, Urban Terror (a semi-realistic shooter based on Quake 3).

Sure, it's a few years old. I don't care, it's still just as fun. Occasionally I'll even play some good old "regular" Quake 3.

To be perfectly honest, I don't run UrT or Q3 on Linux myself, I run Mac OS X. The point is, if I ever decided to switch away from Mac OS X to Ubuntu, almost all the games I have on my computer right now would run on Linux as well. Actually, let me go through my Applications folder right now:

• Bridge Construction Set -- yes, it runs on Linux
• DEFCON -- yup. That too.
• Kill Monty -- unfortunately, no. :-( (Then again, that doesn't run on Windows either.)
• Frets On Fire -- yup. It runs on Linux. And way better than on OS X too.
• OpenTTD -- yep. It runs on Linux too.
• IOQuake3 -- sure.
• SNES9x (and by extention, a collection of Super Nintendo games), sure, works on Linux
• Tetrinet Aqua does not run on Linux, but other (and better) Tetrinet clients do.
• The Ur-Quan Masters runs on Linux.
• Uplink runs on Linux.
• And finally, as discussed before, Urban Terror runs on Linux.

So, all the games I actually have on my hard drive and play would run on Linux if I decided to migrate. Except for Kill Monty. (But then again, that doesn't run on Windows either.)

The lack of games are not what's keeping me on Mac OS X on my machine.

Oh, and in response to your issue about not being able to flash because you'd need either Windows or DOS -- I give you FreeDOS.

For OS X:
http://xmeeting.sourceforge.net/pages/xmeeting.php

Use an open protocol such as SIP, for instance you could use Asterisk and Ekiga.

KIAX + Asterisk would be another solution.

http://www.asterisk.org/
http://ekiga.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kiax

Microsoft gives all kinds of stuff away (examples include this and this).

I don't use Skype (or VoIP for that matter) but I would be curious if anyone knows of any alternatives that is completely open.

For Linux there's a decent program called I Hear You (IHU), very simple program, GPL-licensed etc., you can find it at http://ihu.sourceforge.net/

You could use Gparted, as another poster said. Also, since you're already running KDE/Qt, you could just as well save memory and run qtparted (same backend as Gparted)

http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/

Works pretty well.

Many of the clients I support are constantly asking me "Is there a program that does this? or Can you find me a program to do this" etc etc.

I used to be able to just use google to help me get started but these days the top level searches are all those bloody link farms peddling "free" software

Have you tried SourceForge? That's what it's there for, you know.

Automatic file versioning built right into the file system! Problem solved! Next!

Beat me to the punch. VMS was running on 64-bit processors with full version control built into the OS in 1992.

IRIX was 64 bit by 1994. I don't know of any earlier ones, but there may be. I also don't know when workstations of the size that NUIX supported started supporting > 2G RAM. According to the wikipedia, the R10000 memory controller only supported 1G. Not much real need for 64 bit, then.

The ISO-9660 standard used on most CD-ROMs has VMS-style version numbering built in, but more primitive OSes can't really do anything with it.

*ix file system semantics are such a huge step backwards. As somebody once said (jwz perhaps?) "If you'd told me 20 years ago that unix was the great hope for the future, I'd have cut my own throat". Sadly, licensing and corporate greed have trumped technical issues, and now we just try to buy an OS that won't go unsupported if the vendor cashes out or decides to ram an upgrade down our collective throats.

What's wrong with UNIX file semantics? These days, good version of unix have filesystems with versioning, such as: http://wayback.sourceforge.net/. In this case, the versioning is implemented using a very general machanism, instead of being built in. This allows, as a result, many more things than just versioning filesystems. You should look in to FUSE.

I'll add my voice to everyone suggesting that you use a revision control system.

Meld is a useful tool that lets you view diffs visually http://meld.sourceforge.net/. You can either ask it to diff two files or directories, or use the built-in subversion support. It shows the two versions of files side-by-side and highlights where stuff was added/deleted/modified.

One place I worked, the lead developer was paranoid and liked to review and understand every change I made to the code before "committing" it to his own tree. (Yeah they didn't use source control much either. Very stupid...) So we got really good at using WinMerge. It has good keyboard shortcuts that let you step through the diffs between two files, one at a time, and merge them from one to the other.

On Linux, meld is comparable (except the keyboard shortcuts are inferior, IMO, but you can probably change them).

One place I worked, the lead developer was paranoid and liked to review and understand every change I made to the code before "committing" it to his own tree. (Yeah they didn't use source control much either. Very stupid...) So we got really good at using WinMerge. It has good keyboard shortcuts that let you step through the diffs between two files, one at a time, and merge them from one to the other.

On Linux, meld is comparable (except the keyboard shortcuts are inferior, IMO, but you can probably change them).

SCiTE

I've also used Scite for AutoIt and it does work very well, but in general Scite is a royal PITA to configure. If you want to change text styles or colors you have to wade through several mountains of configuration files, hunting for just the right line to change, restart the editor and hope you picked the right place to edit.

For Windows users, Notepad++ is a much better solution. It uses the Scintilla editor engine so it has the same capabilities as Scite, but the configuration is all done through a GUI editor. This makes configuring syntax highlighting and styles much easier and less time consuming.

ACPI Compliance = ACPI Compliance

There's no runner-up prize. It shouldn't matter what software you use.

The poster on the Ubuntu forums seems to think that this is a case of deliberate sabotage.

Poorly designed, or incomplete bios implementations are not the exception. They are in fact a fairly common occurrence. The DSDT table being missing, incomplete, or just wrong is so common in fact, that a number of solutions exist.

See here: http://acpi.sourceforge.net/dsdt/index.php

And at this stage in the past interested public parties have filed class action suits, won HUGE damages which put "most abusive player x" under, and the rest shaped up really, really fast.

Urge the FSF to file class-action lawsuits for false advertising, anti-trust (a mobo that's supposed to be OS neutral under the standard evidently passing "special" tables to each os), and anything else in the book you can.

Given the BIOS should be on its way out, being replaced by the more modern EFI, are there any generally avaialble EFI based mother boards? Also, does EFI solve some of the issues with regards to ACPI mentioned here? Linux supports EFI as far as I am aware (well there is ELILO).

http://acpi.sourceforge.net/dsdt/index.php

Poorly designed, or incomplete bios implementations are not the exception. They are in fact a fairly common occurrence. The DSDT table being missing, incomplete, or just wrong is so common in fact, that a number of solutions exist.

See here: http://acpi.sourceforge.net/dsdt/index.php

You underestimate the awesomeness of ASCII pr0n, especially in combination with aalib and all its tools.

nothing good has never come out of sharing development ideas: http://sourceforge.net/

You don't say if you're running on Windows or Linux or something else. If you are running on Windows, the latest versions of VirtualDub have made big improvements to SMT/SMP encoding.

VirtualDub home
VirtualDub 1.8.1 announcement
VirtualDub downloads

Make sure you grab 1.8.3 - 1.8.1 was pretty good, but had a few teething problems. 1.8.2 has a major regression which is fixed in 1.8.3. The comments in the 1.8.1 announcement contain a few important tips for using the new features (some of which I posted BTW).

The two major new features that would be of interest to you are:

1. You can run all VirtualDub processing in one thread, and the codec in another. This works very well in conjunction with a multi-threaded codec - this one change improved my CPU utilitisation from approx 75% to 95% on my dual-core machines - with an equivalent increase in encoding performance.

2. VD now has simple support for distributed encoding. You can use a shared queue across either multiple instances of VD on a single machine, or across multiple machines (must use UNC paths for multiple machines). Each instance of VD will pick the next job in the queue when it finishes its current job. Instances can be started in slave mode (in which case they will automatically start processing the queue).

I use 3 machines for encoding (all dual-core). With VD 1.8.x I start VD on two of the machines in slave mode, and one in master mode. I add jobs to the queue on the master instance, and the other two instances immediately pick up the new jobs and start encoding. When I've added all the jobs, I then start the master instance working on the job queue.

To achieve a similar effect on your quad-code, start two instances of VD on the same machine - one slave, the other master.

It's not perfect (if you've only got one job, you won't use your maximum capacity) but it has greatly simplified my transcoding tasks, and reduced the time to transcode large numbers of files.

The Google App Engine already has the Django libraries available.

Have a little care, there. The GAE caused quite a stir in the Django community, because it is only a partial implementation of the database interface that Django normally uses. It is backed by BigTable, which is blazing fast, but not a full blown relational database. If that works for you, go for it - it looks like a sweet platform for certain kinds of projects.

As for your question about Java->Python, I'm a former C++ convert myself, but I can help a little here. For some 'compile time' checking, look at PyLint It may check too much for you, but you can turn off the stuff you don't want.

As for unit testing, PyUnit is a pretty straight port of JUnit, so that should look familiar. However, I actually find nose to be a little better. It has many of the same capabilities, but with less boilerplate needed, and it integrates well with any existing PyUnit or DocTest tests.

there are tools like pychecker, they help quite a bit. junit is right there in the standard library of python, see docs for the unittest module; there's also the doctest module for simple cases.

Here is software that will convert between ODF and UOF, written by the Open Standard Lab of Peking University. In the process of writing this software, they have been participating in the UOF standardization process and talking with ODF folks to make sure the two formats can be converted well.

The UOF is a written standard approved by the Chinese national standardization bodies - not just "whatever ElOffice does". I don't know if there is an english translation - I have been able to find one with google.

Except is this software "company" is nationalized, or "works closely with the government" - then in that case, it is "whatever EIOffice does".

We all know the Chinese govt is repressive, above and beyond....and controlling. Imagine the backdoors in any "format" they approve.

I read two books about GWT and I like it a lot and plan on using GWT for my future projects at work. Although GWT is very promising, it comes with a steep learning curve. You need to know quite a bit to be productive. For quick prototyping I still prefer Hamlets (http://hamlets.sourceforge.net/). My $0.02
Rene

JSP or Velocity or (shameless plug Jolene. Also wicket, echo, tiles, etc. etc. etc.......

See if he's interested in robocode http://testwiki.roborumble.org/w/index.php?title=Robocode http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

You start with a combat robot written in Java. You subclass the robot and change the code to see if you can get your robot to be better than the other robots. The base robot class the battlefield, etc are all provided, so you don't have to do much to have a full featured game, but the better your programming the better your results.

If he gets into it he will have a lot of fun and learn of lot of Java while he's doing it.

Here is software that will convert between ODF and UOF, written by the Open Standard Lab of Peking University. In the process of writing this software, they have been participating in the UOF standardization process and talking with ODF folks to make sure the two formats can be converted well.

The UOF is a written standard approved by the Chinese national standardization bodies - not just "whatever ElOffice does". I don't know if there is an english translation - I have been able to find one with google.

You are joking, right?

I created a small project that uses Ruby Tk. Is not Quake Arena, but you get the point.

http://winlearnseries.sourceforge.net/

I don't agree with the idea of dumb-down development.

Programming is about rules, lots of rules.

Programming is like comedy, either you dig it or you don't.

My litmus test is the rubik cube. Give a teenager a rubik cube.

If she/he toys w/ it for a while and then tosses it. Don't waste your time.

If she/he tries for a while and then asks for directions. Good news, she/he is ready to learn programming.

If she/he tries, fails and then returns tomorrow with the cube solved, you have in your hands a kernel developer.

If she/he already knows how to solve it and you have not bought her/him a laptop yet you are wasting precious time.

If you don't know how to solve the Rubik cube, you clicked the wrong link, this is Slashdot, not Digg.

Whilst this is an advantage of open source, I'm not sure how practical forking it is just to fix a bug or add a feature you like, as you now how a separate fork to maintain everytime the main version is updated.

Yes, but there have been examples of it. For example, think of Debian's rebranding of various Mozilla browsers, and also Fun Pidgin which was origionally a fork of Pidgin to add in the resizing of the text box. (see http://funpidgin.sourceforge.net/content/features). And I'm not saying it is practical, but rather that you could do it.

here is the information about it http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-robocode/

Logo combines simple programming with rewarding Turtle graphics. Programming gets much more interesting when you can make something nice appear on the screen.

After that, I suggest Robowar a game where you program robots to fight against each other. It combines programming with tactics and graphical animation of combats.

IBM created a framework to encourage kids to learn programming, but apparently it's so engaging that big kids who really ought to be working spend their time obsessed with it too. You create a bot class, overriding it's methods that respond to events in the game, and then have your bot compete in battle with other bots. As a side effect you learn fundamentals of Java.

Robocode is at http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ While googling I also found http://robocoderepository.com/ which is a Robocode enthusiast site.

My thoughts exactly-- make it fun! This is what got me into programming when I was a kid. HTML, being purely declarative, is a nice introduction to the idea of putting together a structured document, and the results are immediate. You can have him work with the W3C validator open, and it will help him find his mistakes. Then, when he's comfortable, add a real programming language. I recommend something like PHP, which is simple and relatively uncomplicated. Javascript is rather unforgiving when it comes to things like infinite loops, and (no offense to hardcore Javascript people out there) the language is pretty weird (my curse-to-code ratio is pretty high here).

When I was a kid, I learned BASIC and then moved on to C, but it was a HUGE leap to doing GUI programming for me, and I didn't really grasp that part until after college. Web technologies are, for the most part, quite simple, and people who know them well are in high demand. So unlike learning a minilanguage like the kind that comes with RoboWar, which is fun, but not very useful, web languages are a lifelong skill.

The cool part is that you're a programmer, so if he has questions, he can ask an expert. I did not have access to this resource as a kid-- it made learning the stuff much harder. As a physicist, my father had some exposure to APL and Fortran, but he wasn't very good at translating that experience to C.

Also-- I don't know if he's had exposure to algebra and geometry yet, but make sure he learns these-- they are essential to understanding the operation of modern applications. I haven't come across any higher math yet that hasn't benefitted my programming skills in some way (set theory probably being the #1 most useful subject to study).

Most importantly, make sure you are excited. If he sees how cool you think it is, he'll be extra motivated to push through the hard parts, in part because he'll want to please you, but also, because he'll want to see what all the fuss is about. Programming is one of the more fulfilling aspects of my life, so obviously, conjuring up the enthusiasm for me is very easy.

WTF? My team uses Fortify to analyze our Java webapps (compiled on the Sun JDK and running on their JRE), which is then deployed to Linux servers running RHEL 5. HTTP connectivity for the apps is provided by Jetty; the apps themselves connect to Oracle databases (using C3P0 for connection pooling).

With Fortify 4.0, I griped that it provided no value that we didn't already get with FindBugs (for free). The 5.0 release (along with the workbench, which provides better information than the HTML report), however, did catch a few bugs which weren't caught by FindBugs. We now run both tools in our automated Hudson builds.

Where, exactly, are the Microsoft products in the above list?

I had one like that too, where the developer replied with a useless work-around that doesn't address the bug: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1865630&group_id=95717&atid=612382

It's the year 2008, what excuse is there for not knowing how menus are supposed to work? Seriously, they've only been perfected since, what, 1985.