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In most if not all cases, you will find applications that are as good as if not better than the PalmOS version.

Ah, but can I get the source? It's not essential, but it's a definite important feature for me.

TomTom - Exists for PalmOS and WM. In my opinion the WM version seems to work MUCH better and is far easier to set up.

I haven't tried this, but I was not aware that the GPS was usable by apps on Treo 650.

TCPMP media player - Exists for both platforms, has somewhat extended codec support compared to PalmOS on a Windows Mobile device

Yeah, I prefer TCPMP over RealPlayer, as TCPMP will play OGGs (which is what I rip to by default).

Web browser - The PalmOS web browser Just Plain Sucks in every way possible. Even Pocket IE is better and it isn't that hot (there are other options for WM)

Yes, which is why I've switched to Opera. I'm not happy that I can't get source to Opera, but I can't get source to any of the others and Opera seems to work better.

Java - The Java environment for PalmOS is utter and total crap and when I tried it on my Treo 650 not a single app I tried would work.

I managed to get ahold of the IMB java kit for PalmOS so I could run Opera. Seems to work pretty well, but then I don't use it for anything besides Opera; I'm not a big fan of Java myself.

GMail's Java app works great on my Tilt.

I run my own mail/web server, which seems to work fine with Opera and the mail client that comes with PalmOS. My only gripe there is that the PalmOS mail client doesn't support aliases.

Google Maps - Don't think there's a PalmOS client that can come anywhere close to Google's Windows Mobile native app

Don't know; haven't use the windows mobile version, but the PalmOS version of Google Maps seems to work fine for me.

Instant Messaging - Half of the PalmOS IM app vendors seem to have gone out of business or stopped supporting the app. I've found FAR more choices for WM.

IM isn't a priority for me (I hardly use it). I'm pretty sure there are open source IM clients for PalmOS however.

You don't exactly provide details of what apps you're using.

Here's a list:

• Little John - Console emulator for playing classic games.
• pFuel - Keeps track of gas mileage.
• FreeCoins - Accounting software.
• Keyring - Keeps track of passwords.
• pssh - SSH client.
• Plucker - EBook reader.
• LispMe - Scheme interpreter.
• Eat Watch - Weight tracking.

The thing is, PalmOS works very well for me, and is entirely compatible with Linux (or any other platform I choose to move to). If I were going to move to a new mobile platform, the last place I would look is to Microsoft (or Apple for that matter). Not only would I need to have the apps I use above (which I have source to, so I could port given a decent development environment that runs on my desktop of choice), but I would prefer to move to something more open, not less. Something more hackable, not something that gets in my way when I try to do something the big corps don't like.

"there is nothing like Photoshop,"

http://www.gimpshop.com/

"no killer video capture and editing software"

i don't know if any of these are 'killer' and some are not editors... but
sourceforge has 300+ linux/bsd apps for avi

my problem with video editing, has been reliability... i hate it when FOSS causes the audio and video to desynchronize! but i haven't tried hard to see if all tools are bad.

These problems go to Windows to its core. How do we change the Registry in text format so that we can guarantee that we do not corrupt it? I'm sure there's a commandline regedit somewhere, but I'd like to edit it as flat files ala /etc.

I'd like to use a Microsoft system that does not require graphical support. Where's a rich commandline for those that need no graphics (samba server, calendar/mail server..)?

I'd like a full update of nearly every program at once.

Windows has file locking. Linux doesnt.

I can save a MP3 in linux and play it at the same time. I can also delete it WHILE playing and nothing bad happens (until I hit the beginning again).

There's tons of things here and there that will lessen the usability of ported BASH and python on Windows.

OK, yeah, there's PalmOS too but I don't count it any more since it's painful and users/developers are leaving it in droves because it and the devices it runs on are obsolete.

(I'm a former Treo 650 owner. My Tilt is such a breath of fresh air after that limited and buggy POS.)

Not that I'm going to switch, but I'll pose the same questions to you that I did to the iphone people: where are the apps that I use everyday on PalmOS? I have source to the vast majority of them, but that would still require I port them; will I have to use a windows desktop to do that? Or can I compile and test them on any platform I choose?

As for lockdown, I know of at least one phone that (unlike android) is not locked down, and it already exists and is available for purchase.

OK, yeah, there's PalmOS too but I don't count it any more since it's painful and users/developers are leaving it in droves because it and the devices it runs on are obsolete.

(I'm a former Treo 650 owner. My Tilt is such a breath of fresh air after that limited and buggy POS.)

Not that I'm going to switch, but I'll pose the same questions to you that I did to the iphone people: where are the apps that I use everyday on PalmOS? I have source to the vast majority of them, but that would still require I port them; will I have to use a windows desktop to do that? Or can I compile and test them on any platform I choose?

As for lockdown, I know of at least one phone that (unlike android) is not locked down, and it already exists and is available for purchase.

A while ago I discovered InfraRecorder thanks to PortableApps.com. It's free as in beer speech.

Mercurial is the solution currently in use at Mozilla, Sun, and quite a few Linux projects. (Though not the main kernel branch. That's GIT. Think something more along the lines of ALSA.)

Mercurial is interesting because it encourages teams to work together, pushing and pulling source code from each other. When the source reaches a stable point, you can push that to a central repository for building and archiving.

The interesting aspect about this design is that it actively encourages branching! Rather than treating branches as a special thing that needs to be done under a certain set of circumstances, it treats every copy of the repository as a branch. So developers can work independently. When they come back together, the tool is able to auto-merge most projects back into a single whole.

Mercurial is able to do this because it tracks the point of divergence. With that information, it can see if any of the changes truly conflict. 95% of the time, there is no conflict and Mercurial is able to merge the files auto-magically. The other 5% of the time, Mercurial will launch a merge tool and make you answer YES/NO to each difference. This process is amazingly smooth.

The key thing to keep in mind with Mercurial is that you won't want to keep all your source in one repository. (Like most companies do with CVS.) Keep a separate repository for each project or module. You can keep the repositories all in the same path, but it's much easier to work with only the code you need rather than copying around a 10GB source tree from developer to developer.

If you do decide to try Mercurial and are given a Windows development machine, I highly recommend TortoiseHG. You'll occasionally have to run 'hg update' from the command line (the tool will prompt you), but it's otherwise a very slick way of working with Mercurial repositories.

Oh, and don't use the CVS->Mercurial conversion tools. It leaves CVS-style droppings all over creation. Just import the latest codebase and keep CVS running in read-only mode for as long as you need historical data.

For a fan of open source the switch of vienna to vista is a sad story.

--- begin complain mode
Given that the 8M euros are 'just' the money of taxpayers and the city of vienna is dominated by one party for at least 90 years (minus the years during WW2) there is no reason to wonder about. Democratic power changes form one party to another do not happen in vienna. A lot of the voters in vienna just vote automatically for the same party all the time, independent of what this party does. Therefore the government of the city of vienna has no motivation to save the taxpayers money. I do not want to start a political discussion. I just think that power changes between partys are essential for democracy.
--- end complain mode

If you want to support an open source project in vienna, support Seed7 (I am living in vienna / austria (no kangaroos here)) :-) .

Greetings Thomas Mertes

Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net/
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.

If I really need visio, I run it inside a vmware session but that is a bit overkill.

It all depends on what you use visio for anyway. Most generic diagramming can be done with something like yEd http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html - it's not open source but it's free and very nice. And it's java so you can also use it on your XP box :)

For UML sequence diagrams, look at SD-edit http://sdedit.sourceforge.net/. Also java, open source and very quick to use. Trust me, you'll never want to use visio again for sequence diagrams.

For generic UML modelling and reverse engineering, maybe you could take a look at BOUML http://bouml.free.fr/

And there's allways Gliffy http://www.gliffy.com/ which is completely server-side. Be careful though, the free version stores your documents for all the world to see. If you don't mind your drawings being stored on somebody else's server, the $5 a month for the paid version (that also does private documents and unlimited number of drawings) seems reasonable.

Openoffice Draw also isn't too bad as a final alternative perhaps.

As for dia, it seems to have a lot of potential but for now text placement for instance is very un-intuitive (try adding some text to an arrow, you have to connect it manually and the positioning of the text is very awkward). These guys really need to step it up, right now it compares to a really old version of Visio and even then it isn't half as easy to use..

http://windows-get.sourceforge.net/

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=572739&cid=23649597

The problem is that nobody knows about it, and it doesn't come with Windows, and since it isn't iTunes or BonziBuddySpywareGetVideoPlayer2000, few will even be interested in it.

I prefer InfraRecorder, as it has a IMNSHO a superior interface, and is actually open source. I always wondered why CDBurnerXP is more popular, or why so many people haven't heard of Infrarecorder.

It's called win-get: http://windows-get.sourceforge.net/ Of course, I know nothing about it, since I use Linux, but, it does exist.

Description

SISCweb is a framework to facilitate writing stateful Scheme web applications in a J2EE environment.

By using continuations, SISCweb does away with the page-centric execution model typical of web programming. Every time the program sends a response to the browser, its state is suspended, to be then resumed from that exact point when the browser submits a request.

One implication of this approach is that local variables in scope when the response is sent will still be in scope when the subsequent request is received, making much of the session-object data shuffling needless. Another consequence is that, much like in console-based applications, the conversational state between client and server is constantly maintained -- hence the term "stateful."

SISCweb is implemented in SISC, a Scheme interpreter for the JVM with support for full continuations.

---

There are other continuation-based web systems, but this one comes to mind.
http://siscweb.sourceforge.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation-passing_style

It may not be the sort of 'state' you were referring to, but it does what you want. And once you spend a couple hours wrapping your mind around the idea of first class continuations, it becomes a breeze to develop interactive sites with (and handily works quite well with existing AJAX-y stuff too, although then you have to explicitly worry about state again).

This is why I love Javascript. It's a beautiful language, with so many nice high-level features like first-class functions and built-in regexps.

The problems only come when you have to make it compatible with multiple browsers. If you just target one, it's a dream to use.

A stateful protocol wouldn't help at all. Who's maintaining that state? Server-side: hello DoS. Client-side: well that's just a stateless protocol.

HTTP is perfectly fine the way it is. Seamless stateful interaction is a problem for server-side languages/frameworks to handle. Don't blame HTTP for a framework deficiency. There are frameworks that don't have this problem.

Yes, the Pidgin devs make some decisions that the users don't like, but if they are really as bad as people claim then anybody who thinks he/she can do better should fork it.

Yeah, maybe someone should look into forking...

If you're using the built-in Palm password feature for your security, you might want to have a look at this:
No Security

Basically, the Palm security program has a tragically weak flaw which this handy little program exploits easily. All you have to do is load No Security into the palm install queue and hotsync. It immediately deletes the password, even if the device is locked, giving you full access to any private data hidden by the Palm security program.

I use a couple of different solutions to this problem: Cryptopad , which is essentially an encrypted replacement for the memopad (and has the added bonus of giving you >4k memos); and using the encryption option of Tejpwriter, which is the best free text editor I've tested for Palm.

And all these programs are free and/or open source and easily obtained with a quick google search.

But I still use the Palm security program to lock the handheld (despite its weakness) as a very basic means to keep casual snoopers from poking around and to prevent accidental button mashings from doing weird things to my data.

Implement vi in javascript? That might just be crazy enough to work!

Doesn't work with links .

$ google what I want to know

You'll get the results directly in a browser of your choice. If you're like me, you have the browser set up as w3m, so that the google results simply appear in the same terminal where you can click on them. Since w3m is a pager like more and less, you can postprocess the google output, eg

$ google hello | grep Cached
www.hello.com/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages
www.hellomagazine.com/ - 32k - Cached - Similar pages
www.hellomagazine.com/royalty/ - 27k - Cached - Similar pages
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello - 39k - Cached - Similar pages
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_world_program - 32k - Cached - Similar pages
www.elite.net/~runner/jennifers/hello.htm - 157k - Cached - Similar pages
www.ipl.org/div/hello/ - 20k - Cached - Similar pages
www.mylalaland.com/hello/ - 6k - Cached - Similar pages
publicaddress.typepad.com/ - 58k - Cached - Similar pages
www.sanrio.com/ - 10k - Cached - Similar pages

Best of all , surfraw is not just limited to google, so you can have a complete shell browsing experience for a lot of different sites.

links is superior.

Anonymous electronic money transfers will not be allowed....Oh, there's no code in the CVS. Government has already been here and cleaned house.

wave's hand Nothing to see here, go about your business.

(Formerly FunPidgin) Forked after the resize box debacle. http://funpidgin.sourceforge.net/

AutoPilot: DIY Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

http://autopilot.sourceforge.net/

From the pictures in AnandTech's teardown:

The controller for the whole board, and USB interface:
  * PIC18F.. - microprocessor (w/ USB transceiver)

The input capture chip for the sensors:
  * PCM1803A - 24-Bit, 96kHz, Stereo, Delta-Sigma Audio ADC

Misc supporting circuitry:
  * ..-2631 - 8-Pin DIP Dual-Channel High Speed 10 MBit/s Logic Gate Output Optocoupler
  * ADUM1300 - Analog Devices Triple-Channel Digital Isolator
  * Several HC595A shift registers
  * A ripple counter
  * Some other simple digital logic

All-in-all this doesn't seem particular complicated. I'm interested in how this compares with OpenEEG designs: http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/

One interesting thing is the choice of the audio analog-to-digital converter as the sensor input capture device. Additionally, the use of the PIC18F as the main chip suggests that there's probably not a whole lot of processing going on in there (or else one would expect a dsPIC, or something else more powerful or better tailored to signal processing work).

>How many game libraries are available in BSD though?

only the best...

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/license.html

Shameless plug to The BananaKernel.

Other than for embedded devices, C is pretty much dead -- and even a lot of that work is in C++ today.

Question for the class: what languages are C++ compilers, Windows and Linux written in? Since we're talking about OOXML and ODF, what language is Microsoft's own ODF to OOXML translator written in? That may be a .cpp file, but the vast majority of that code is C.

You've declued yourself. I'm sorry. Do you want to try again, perhaps on topic this time? You're killing your Karma dude.

It's far from the only TCP measurement tool. Besides, don't you think attacking ICANN's corporate land-grab from within is a better use of someone's time than spinning version numbers on a stable program that talks to a stable API?

I found this little thing: http://dia2code.sourceforge.net/examples.html I thought it was interesting that they actually do code generation of 'virtual' functions in C.

http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/

There are several tools that attempt to directly measure things like forged reset packets, but I am not sure if there is a tools that tries to measure network throttling in general.

Here are some of the ones I found:

http://www.nnsquad.org/agent

http://www.eff.org/testyourisp/pcapdiff/

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=aznetmon

Hmm, maybe the KHTML/Konqueror devs need to learn about this. I find it quite handy.

I have a 3D space sim implemented in Python here: Spacecommander

It isn't the most sophisticated thing you've ever seen, but its definately pretty sciency. Personally I think that the vector math and matrix transformations are pretty cool if you take a minute to stop and think about the amount of data that the program is processing while it runs.

That's why you should help write a GPL J2ME voice encryption client.

Economists measure worth in dollars, but other common uses of the term worthless include "of no use" according to dictionary.com. If FOSS were of no use, it wouldn't power so much of the Internet. Clean air is free, but certainly of great value, just not in dollars.

I author some open-source programs, my favorite being DataDraw. There are good reasons I make this open-source. It's code I need, yet cannot sell, and while I help the world a little bit by making it open-source, the world helps me a little bit by improving it. It's a common example of a program that only makes sense as FOSS.

People get so confused about FOSS, especially most corporate management, who see it as some sort of communist threat. The truth is that most of us FOSS guys are as greedy as the next. If we could sell our software for a profit, we would. That's why FOSS should not threaten programmers or innovative companies. Software tends to go open-source only after no reasonable market for it exists any longer. The reason that Microsoft is specifically threatened by FOSS is simple. They make a lot of their money off their monopoly, rather than innovation. A bunch of hackers can duplicate Microsoft's OS, web browser, and many other tools in their free time. I hear Microsoft's latest Office suite has new innovations, and guess what? It's still selling. It's only when Microsoft stands still that it's threatened. Take Vista for example.

You should check out Octave and Maxima. I just recently completed a course in discreet control engineering used these two programs extensively, they were both extremely useful.

Octave, I think, still needs lots of improvements in the plotting department, but it's amazing how much functionality it has. Maxima's great for inverting symbolic matrices.. :) Python is of course becoming a very popular free replacement for Matlab as well.

At the risk of prodding a hornets' nest here ... I've come across lots of projects that look interesting but haven't been updated or need more work.

Whatever happened to this on? Lots of potential. It's got industry backing and the audience is high end users with plenty of money. Last release in 2001.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hbaprovider/

And excuse me the heresy, but for a noob Python developer it was a major drag to get started with SOAP, mainly because all the projects appeared to be in various states of disarray and abandonment, including promising-but-needing-help (soaplib), bloated-and-convoluted (ZSI) and totally abandoned (Pythonware, SOAP.py).

Obviously all of these have a specific history, such as a superior competing project, but compared with Java it's shameful. As I love Python it was a great disappointment. *shrug*

Anyway, I'm too tired to rack my brain for more examples, but there have been plenty.

At the risk of prodding a hornets' nest here ... I've come across lots of projects that look interesting but haven't been updated or need more work.

Whatever happened to this on? Lots of potential. It's got industry backing and the audience is high end users with plenty of money. Last release in 2001.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hbaprovider/

And excuse me the heresy, but for a noob Python developer it was a major drag to get started with SOAP, mainly because all the projects appeared to be in various states of disarray and abandonment, including promising-but-needing-help (soaplib), bloated-and-convoluted (ZSI) and totally abandoned (Pythonware, SOAP.py).

Obviously all of these have a specific history, such as a superior competing project, but compared with Java it's shameful. As I love Python it was a great disappointment. *shrug*

Anyway, I'm too tired to rack my brain for more examples, but there have been plenty.

At the risk of prodding a hornets' nest here ... I've come across lots of projects that look interesting but haven't been updated or need more work.

Whatever happened to this on? Lots of potential. It's got industry backing and the audience is high end users with plenty of money. Last release in 2001.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hbaprovider/

And excuse me the heresy, but for a noob Python developer it was a major drag to get started with SOAP, mainly because all the projects appeared to be in various states of disarray and abandonment, including promising-but-needing-help (soaplib), bloated-and-convoluted (ZSI) and totally abandoned (Pythonware, SOAP.py).

Obviously all of these have a specific history, such as a superior competing project, but compared with Java it's shameful. As I love Python it was a great disappointment. *shrug*

Anyway, I'm too tired to rack my brain for more examples, but there have been plenty.

Stuff like this:

http://boost-sandbox.sourceforge.net/libs/proto/doc/html/boost_proto/users_guide/examples/lazy_vector.html

Generic Programming in general is impossible in C# because of underpowered generics. Unless stuff like

template
void random(Container &container, Accessor const &accessor)
{
    for (unsigned int i = 0; i (i) = typename Accessor::value_type(std::rand());
}

is possible in C#, this argument holds. (Note that this is an artificial example I came up with; for a good example of real-world usage, check out Adobe GIL).

Another example: http://www.gsse.at/multiprogramming/

C++'s true power lies in its templates. Templates are turing complete, meaning that they for a meta language. Using this meta language, I can adapt code to a specific situation. For example, I can have compile-time polymorphism, which is very useful when there is enough information while compiling to choose the actual type. I can have a list of factory class types, and do a call like create_image (img); which gets compiled to the actual creator function ONLY. No virtual functions, the compiler can even inline without problems. Yes, a JIT could detect that function X has been used with the same parameters for 400 seconds, but this way, I can rationalize unnecessary runtime overhead right from the start. Yet another use was to generate code paths that only differed in pixel format type. I wrote a templated version, and iterated over a list of enums at compile-time. This helped a lot in being cache friendly while not requiring to clone tons of code. Using templates, one can write scientific computing code that rivals even Fortran in terms of performance. See: http://www.oonumerics.org/blitz/

I know C# 3.0 has a functional core, and this is wonderful - many problems can be solved much easier and cleaner with functional style. Generic programming and metaprogramming are the things I sorely miss. I would really like to have a language that has all the strengths of C++, minus its weaknesses (most notably C legacy, hideous template syntax, #include files). So far, D is the closest one, but its not there yet. Also, C++ has an ENORMOUS momentum...

While SRT subtitles are simple, SSA/ASS subtitles can be anything but simple. VLC does quite well with SRT subtitles as long as they do not overlap (i.e. one subtitle line is already displayed when another is to be displayed). However, it ignores the vast majority of the SSA/ASS spec apart from timing (and to some extent, color).

For example, this is a SRT subtitle line:

10
00:02:17,679 --> 00:02:19,237
I'm really sorry.

From this you can determine the line number, the start --> end times, and the dialogue. It's plain text, although every now and then you might see the use of HTML italics (<i>italic text</i>). You can set what font these type of subtitles are displayed in, within VLC's preferences.

However, SSA/ASS subtitles are considerably more complex, and are widely used, especially for anime fansubs. An example ASS line looks like this:

[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:23:47.10,0:23:51.59,Ed - R,,0000,0000,0000,,{\be1\fad(200,200)\org(0,0)\c&H7B70ED&\2c&HB4AFE2&}{\k20}{\k30}na{\k35}mi{\k29}da {\k62}ga {\k64}ko{\k62}bo{\k26}re{\k30}so{\k40}u{\k37}na

The "Format:" line specifies what the information displayed in the "Dialogue:" line is. Comments can be included on "Comment:" lines. The text portion of this particular line is karaoke, and includes parameters to specify blurred edges, fade in/out, the origin point, color and alpha transparency (primary and secondary), and karaoke timing for each syllable. This is not simple, and VLC (up to the current release version) ignores basically all of it other than the timing and (to some extent) the colors. The font declarations are ignored by VLC, it would use whatever subtitle font you specified (or the default one). VLC is also often mocked because it will display the contents of {} if they are not valid SSA/ASS parameters. A number of groups tend to include notes inside braces, usually for editing purposes, because most players (other than VLC) do not display them.

Unlike SRT, the lines in SSA/ASS are not numbered, and do not need to be in the order in which they are displayed.

Here is the style information the line above uses:

[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Ed - R,Cascade Script LT Std,45,&H00856232,&H00AB956E,&H00000000,&H00000000,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,2,0,7,40,20,20,1

Note that the first two characters of each color are for transparency.

Also, the assertion that subtitles are typically an ASCII file is generally untrue; while both of these types of subtitles can be a text file, they're more commonly found muxed into a container that supports multiple tracks, usually either as a .mkv or (less commonly, these days) an .ogm file. (Anime .mkv files are most likely to be x264 video.)

With regards to soft-subs, though, MPlayer is vastly superior to VLC, in that it handles subtitles properly, and you can set it to auto-play specific subtitles and audio (for multiple audio/subtitle track files) by adding the following lines to your ~/.mplayer/config:

ass=yes
embeddedfonts=yes
c

About half a year ago, I discovered SMPlayer while looking for an alternative to VLC. Formatted subtitles render properly and look great. Unformatted subtitles also render quite nicely if you select "Use SSA/ASS library for subtitle rendering" under preferences. Works on Linux as well as Windows, which is nice. I highly recommend giving it a try.

TransactionKit is another lockless highly concurrent data structure, specifically a hash table.

FreeBSD doesn't fit the profile

From the Vuestar website FAQ:

"My site has no images only text?
If your site is only text and has no images, icons or other patent methods then no license required."

Sweeeet! Run the images through aalib. Problem solved :-)