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I actually really like PalmFiction. Free, featureful, works great with text, RTF, and HTML, and generally just does the job. 'course, it's focused mainly on fiction reading, and so lacks more extensive search functionality, etc.

It looks to me like the big accomplishment here is that he parses processing language code and API calls and converts it to JavaScript that uses a canvas. It's pretty cool that it's possible to do that (similar to the Java -> JavaScript converter or the Ruby VM in JavaScript mentioned a few days ago), but the end product doesn't seem that useful to me, as the processing language isn't significantly better than JavaScript for this kind of thing, anyway. I'd be more interested if this guy had found a way to make processing perform better (translated to JS or otherwise), or if he came up with an entirely new language that made certain graphics really simple to express (certain fractal generators come to mind). Though it feels likely that proofs-of-concept such as this will inspire something really great in the near future.

No Frets on Fire? Seriously? http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/

My PSP *is* my eBook reader and I swear by it. Of course, I had to go off the reservation and mod the firmware, but with bookr installed (search google for bookr-0.7.1-fw15.zip if you have a slim), the unit is perfect as a PDF and TXT book reader. Combine this with being a gaming rig and being able to watch (converted) movies and listen to MP3's - the PSP is the ultimate train commuters tool. Shame it didn't come out of the box like that though!

There seem to be several Amstrad emulators already. And if for some reason you don't like any of them, you could reuse an existing open source Z80 emulation core. Ours, for example. :)

You just typed out about 50 words using what you "don't need"...

Because I was responding to a poster in English with just English words. However, most of the writing I do online requires the use of multiple languages, many requiring letters present in Unicode Latin Extended A and B and the upper ranges of the Cyrillic block. I'd rather see more people using e.g. the DejaVu fonts, which look just as good as the Bitstream Vera the Free Software community already took to its heart, but which at least has that Unicode coverage there if you should ever need it.

ddrescue is an open source disk recovery tool based on dd. It can make a disk image from any kind of disk, regardless of format and it is designed to be very robust reading through bad blocks as you're likely to have on disks that old. You just need to have a floppy drive to connect to. ddrescue will compile and run on Linux, OS X and maybe Cygwin.

Once you have a disk image, Foremost can extract files from it. It is also open source and can be compiled and run on many different platforms and doesn't care about the filesystem on the disk image (or original disk). It searches for files based on header information. If need be, you can edit what header information it looks for. Since your BASIC source code is, presumably, ASCII text files, it shouldn't be a problem.

Wow, you actually found documentation? I tried writing an OO.o macro once. I have almost gotten back my sanity now. =)

Start at the API project homepage, and dig down from there. But it's still rather hideously organized, all apparently put together not to be useful for coders, but rather from a software architect perspective, with modules, services, and interfaces all separately documented so that it's nearly impossible to figure out what you can do once you have an object of type X -- basic questions are left unanswered, such as what are its properties or methods. I find it a rather glaring shortcoming that after so many years, the best tool for figuring out the OOo API is still a third-party macro (the X-Ray tool by Bernard Marcelly).

But anyway, there's one part where OO.o differs from Word: Documents are not coupled to the application. You don't have to use OO.o to process OpenDocument.

< ... snip ... />

I've written a word count tool for my own use for LaTeX text myself in 15 minutes... and there's a bunch of libraries for parsing OO.o. How hard can it be? =)

I may look into that, thanks. I'm a sole-prop and thus have precious little free time, but I am *very* interested in getting myself completely free of the MS tax. The lack of any sane counting functionality in OOo has been one major stumbling block, so it'd be quite nice indeed to remove that particular obstacle. :)

Cheers,

• Microsoft Expands Document Interoperability
  • "Expanding on its customer-focused commitment to interoperability, Microsoft Corp. today announced the creation of the Open XML Translator project. The project, developed with partners, will create tools to build a technical bridge between the Microsoft® Office Open XML Formats and the OpenDocument Format (ODF)."

• Microsoft (Funding, Architectural & Technical Guidance and Project co-coordination)

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

There is an initial port of gtk+ to Mac OS X (and an older, less complete port: gtk+osx). The Java toolkits run on OS X. Tk supports OS X natively (according to this -- I can't say I've ever come across a Tcl/Tk script on a Mac). There might be others.

wxWindows is just a wrapper around the Mac APIs, so it shoudn't be ugly.

As far as non-native toolkits go, I think qt actually looks pretty good under OS X. Here's a good link: Qt/Mac is Mac OS X Native

Can anyone tell me why you would possibly want to plug CoreAVC into MPlayer and Xine or GStreamer based applications when these already have native H.264 playback?

For decoding, ffmpeg (Which has a code base used throughout a tonne of the Free Software world) already has a decent decoder, and for encoding we have x264 (Developed by the folks behind VLC)...

I know that CoreAVC claims to be super optimised, but is it really that much better? I have always assumed that they were just milking those Windows users that didn't know of ffdshow.

Here's a tip. You don't really need an MSDN license to do good Windows development anymore. The .NET SDK provides everything that you need to develop and build great .NET applications and it is free (as in beer).

What's that you say? No VS.NET with the .NET SDK? That's true. Your favorite text editor can do the job with the writing and NAnt can do the job with building it. True, you won't get your precious statement completion that you get in VS.NET unless you use the OSS IDE SharpDevelop.

VS.NET can be more of a crutch than a tool since there is no first class, built in support for modern IoC/DI style MVC frameworks such as Unity or Spring.

My home servers are in screaming need of ZFS (A NetApp Filer for home use). I want ZFS implemented in Linux, like everyone else. Moving to a OpenSolaris based distribution just feels awkward and wrong, especially when ZFS has made it into FreeBSD 7.0 as an experimental feature.

I'm eyeballing the FreeNAS project daily. Sooner or later we will have a ZFS appliance, free as in beer at least. Sun have to work harder to win me over but things look promising. (Ubuntu on Sun hardware [+], trying to release Java under an Open Source license [+], closing some MySQL features [-])

The Lego NXT is very open. Accessable scematics, and firmware as well as an independent open source firmware (see http://lejos.sourceforge.net/ ). In true OSS fashion, the Lejos firmware has also served as a springboard for other alternative firmware too.

You're stupid, and you're anonymous, so I shouldn't reply to you, but someone easily led might believe you, so: http://linux-abi.sourceforge.net/

Please try to be correct next time.

I think there will always be a place for beginner/simple languages, for two reasons:

* Not everyone wants to be a programmer-- some people just want to get stuff done. I trained a (very hesitant) group of people how to use SQL today; by the end of the session, they were surprised with the expressiveness and simplicity of the language. But it's not a "real" language. It's domain-specific, and that's fine. Same with regexps-- great at one thing; other things would totally suck. But do I really want to build my own pattern-matching (and more) state machine in C++? No f'ing way!

* You have to start somewhere. My first language was TI Extended BASIC, followed by QuickBASIC. I learned C when I was in middle school, but the jump was difficult. I don't think I truly understood modern languages until I was in college, after I learned about set theory, programming paradigms, and compiler design-- actually, I'm still learning every day. You can't ask a beginner to grasp all of that at once. You want to give them something simple, straightforward, expressive, but most importantly FUN. I had a ton of fun as a kid with BASIC, LOGO, and my all-time favorite as a kid, RoboWar. A sneaky way to teach a kid trig, I'll tell ya!

Anyhow, those goofy little languages were what kept me focused on honing my skills all those years. We definitely need them.

funpidin has some other features:

* a send button -- here I agree with them, and find the original Pidgin developers especially assholic for insisting that users don't need it...

* an ability to resize the buddy icon on the chat window to bigger than 32x32 pixels -- also a good idea, why the hell did the original devs decide to move that 96x96pixel buddy icon from next to the chat input box to the 32pixel space top left corner. Oh, because they wanted to reduce the chat input box into 2 (or whatever it is) lines. Setting the buddy icon to 96 pixel causes another problem though: your window consists of menu, 96 pixel high name of your chat partner, with his/her pic to the right, then below that the conversation, and then the input box, both of these being about 96px high as well...

* other things that I'm not interested in: http://funpidgin.sourceforge.net/content/features (apparently one of them is master passwords, so your passwords arent stored in plaintext in the accounts.xml file. And this is supposed to be an official Pidgin Summer of Code project?

BASIC is still alive and well these days, from Microsoft's VB.net to cross-platform variants like REALbasic.

...Or, for those interested in FOSS versions (and more cross-platform to boot), you could try SmallBasic.

I first used it because I couldn't find any other decent interpreters for an ancient Palm, then discovered it supported just about every platform I regularly use (oddly enough, however, no official Mac build exists, though I'd imagine you could get the Linux version to build on OS X).

And now, I even keep a copy installed on any Windows machines I use... VB.Net may have a lot more power, but (at the risk of sounding elitist), who the hell wants to code in Basic if you need to go through all the trouble of creating a project and compiling? Basic excels at one task - Near-instant testing of small blocks of code, up to "toy" one-off programs. And for that, it works perfectly.

MLBViewer: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mlbviewer/

I've been messing around with Actionscript 3 development since Adobe released the compilers for free and the only completely free way to import vector assets is via SVG. There are also a couple run-time SVG engines for AS3: uSprite and AS3SVGlib

I don't think SVG+SMILE is going to be the animation tool that some people were hoping for, but it has become THE format for exchanging vector art and will continue to become more important on the web.

if you are using ubuntu or debian you just have to type this on a terminal:

sudo apt-get install php-mode

or download it here

Yeah - but those stats are for Linux. I should have noted that the copy-and-paste I did was from Source Forge's download stats on the Pidgin project. Now - there's Linux and source code in there too. But I would suspect that a lot of those are people grabbing Windows installs.

You don't need to, it ships with HPLIP. I have it right here in v2.7.10:

$ ls -l /usr/share/ppd/HP/HP_Color_LaserJet_CP3505.ppd.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17568 Mar 4 23:54 /usr/share/ppd/HP/HP_Color_LaserJet_CP3505.ppd.gz

Why would you post a story like this and not even provide a link to the fork?

This is not just about the text window resizing; there have been several heavy-handed UI changes since GAIM that were opposed by the user base, such as the change in layout of the IM input window which wastes a lot of empty space on nothing but grey background because of the new placement of tabs and icons.
The send button and other buttons provided by plugins also seem to be placed arbitrarily with each new version. The user icon has been reduced in size to the point of being unrecognizable and there is no option to move it or change the size. The GAIM input window was a lot more compact and the space it took up was used a lot more efficiently.

After long and quite frankly frustrating debates about the continued degradation of UI features and user options with every new version of Pidgin, the suggestions to KEEP the useful UI features and make them optional at the very least have repeatedly been met with "won't fix" or just been plain ignored by the developers.
Being presented with a modified UI with every new version of an application and no way of reversing the changes is extremely frustrating for a user.

To be clear, there is no technical reason for changing things around. As can plainly be seen in the fork, Funpidgin provides the old functionality with option boxes on an extra settings tab, and an external plugin is included that lets you resize the input window as before.

As the Funpidgin website states "FunPidgin is a Pidgin fork readding some functionality that was removed from Pidgin's main branch, with the stated goal of being user-driven."

From an outsider perspective, it seems like it would be trivial for the pidgin developers to make all their bad UI changes since GAIM simply an option instead of a forced 'feature'. Or maybe they could provide the options as a plugin if they don't want to clutter the settings tabs with more options.

Probably a good time to suggest Funpidgin a forked Pidgin that aims to keep the removed features as options.

here

I'm not sure where you are looking. This works, and here is another mirror, and here's one more just for kicks.
Still need more?

For anyone interested, the fork is called "Funpidgin" and can be found here.

The summary makes light of it, but the Funpidgin page explains that their intention is to respond more directly to the requests of the user community. In addition to the feature mentioned in the summary, Funpidgin has implemented some others, and will presumably continue adding user-requested features (while still integrating upgrades from the pidgin codebase, presumably).

Forks are both good and bad; this one is no exception. On the one hand it "wastes effort" and can duplicate work. On the other hand, it can give the user community (which isn't homogeneous) the product(s) they want. It can encourage useful competition. Often the end result will be better than if no fork had occurred. Another example is the Compiz/Beryl fork, which created some duplication for awhile, but ultimately turned out for the best since the merged Compiz Fusion includes the best features from both (a stable core and all the whiz-bang features users wanted, in the form of plugins).

If both the Pidgin and Funpidgin developers work to provide something that their respective users find worthwhile, then what's the problem?

For anyone interested, the fork is called "Funpidgin" and can be found here.

The summary makes light of it, but the Funpidgin page explains that their intention is to respond more directly to the requests of the user community. In addition to the feature mentioned in the summary, Funpidgin has implemented some others, and will presumably continue adding user-requested features (while still integrating upgrades from the pidgin codebase, presumably).

Forks are both good and bad; this one is no exception. On the one hand it "wastes effort" and can duplicate work. On the other hand, it can give the user community (which isn't homogeneous) the product(s) they want. It can encourage useful competition. Often the end result will be better than if no fork had occurred. Another example is the Compiz/Beryl fork, which created some duplication for awhile, but ultimately turned out for the best since the merged Compiz Fusion includes the best features from both (a stable core and all the whiz-bang features users wanted, in the form of plugins).

If both the Pidgin and Funpidgin developers work to provide something that their respective users find worthwhile, then what's the problem?

Considering my general hatred of the Pidgin UI, no, I don't find this ridiculous.

Let's start with Pidgin's UI Sucks, which details some of the weird UI decisions made back around version 2.1. Fortunately they've fixed almost all the issues listed in that post.

More Pidgin Bashing is just a bug, so let's skip ahead to Pidgin's Crappy Formatting Icons which they have not fixed.

If I ever had the time to, I'd like to write a new UI for libpurple, Pidgin's backend. I have some ideas - but not enough time to actually learn how to use libpurple.

Maybe I can help with this fork, called... uh. Hm. The summary doesn't appear to mention it.

Ah, here we go: funpidgin.

You're almost there. Just get rid of the representatives altogether: let people vote on whatever interests them. Their level of interest determines their participation, meaning people will specialize in areas of government they care about. (This is basically an extension of open source mentality.)

Now that we have sophisticated computer networks and the idea of open content, all we need is some good software and we can have real direct democracy without anything like mob rule.

And that software is being developed right now as part of the metagovernment open content project, already mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

Say what? I have always had very good experience with HP printers. HP has had excellent support for Linux a very long time. You must be either very new to Linux or trolling. If you are new to the game see the links below.

http://hplip.sourceforge.net/
http://www.linuxprinting.org/printer_list.cgi?make=HP

What year are you living in? My HP Deskjet 6540 has been working flawlessly in Linux using HP's drivers for a good 3 or 4 years now...

That's not even including the Deskjet (870cxi or something like that, I forget now) I had before that, which was also in the same situation.

Perhaps you've overlooked HPLIP?

Actually it's easier than you think: http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/

Here's a tip for narrow band users or any users who just want the content without all the eye candy. Seek out the mobile pages for a web site. Internet enabled cell phones and PDAs are growing in popularity and web sites are developing mobile pages for those users. A well designed page for mobile devices shouldn't use javascript or any plugins and will go light on the graphics which is just what you are looking for.

These mobile friendly pages are sometimes hard to find because the content providers want the full featured desktop users to use the full featured web pages. Why? Because most web trend analytics tracking technologies depend on javascript which isn't available for mobile devices. Also, they have to cut out most of the advertising which also doesn't fit the ad revenue business model too well.

That is why it isn't easy to find links to the mobile edition. One way to find the mobile page for a web site is to load the main page using a mobile device. Most of the time, you will get a client side redirect to the mobile page. Then email that page's URL to yourself and use that URL from your desktop. For example, /.'s mobile page is http://slashdot.org/palm/ and Yahoo's mobile page is http://us.m.yahoo.com/

Not only is the gain in mobile device popularity driving content providers to add support for mobile devices, it is also compelling CMS vendors to add mobile device support for their products too. I have recently added a mobile page to my open source news portal application.

Here's a tip for narrow band users or any users who just want the content without all the eye candy. Seek out the mobile pages for a web site. Internet enabled cell phones and PDAs are growing in popularity and web sites are developing mobile pages for those users. A well designed page for mobile devices shouldn't use javascript or any plugins and will go light on the graphics which is just what you are looking for.

These mobile friendly pages are sometimes hard to find because the content providers want the full featured desktop users to use the full featured web pages. Why? Because most web trend analytics tracking technologies depend on javascript which isn't available for mobile devices. Also, they have to cut out most of the advertising which also doesn't fit the ad revenue business model too well.

That is why it isn't easy to find links to the mobile edition. One way to find the mobile page for a web site is to load the main page using a mobile device. Most of the time, you will get a client side redirect to the mobile page. Then email that page's URL to yourself and use that URL from your desktop. For example, /.'s mobile page is http://slashdot.org/palm/ and Yahoo's mobile page is http://us.m.yahoo.com/

Not only is the gain in mobile device popularity driving content providers to add support for mobile devices, it is also compelling CMS vendors to add mobile device support for their products too. I have recently added a mobile page to my open source news portal application.

"at least vpinmame will save pinball."

Too bad their community (vpforums) sucks.

Would this help at all? I don't really know anything about it, but I've been wanting to give it a whir for a few months now; it's got an open source API, and built in LDAP server and authenticates to gmail... it's at least centralized.
GCALDaemon

If you compare Mac and non-Mac hardware solutions to almost any realistic set of requirements, the Mac solution is at least 40% more than the comparable Windows solution.

I did compare cost before switching from Windows. A Dell with similar specs to my MacBook Pro cost $200 more while an HP cost about the same.

What makes Macs competitive is the software. The hardware is still super-expensive.

No it isn't, however like you said before, when you compare prices you have to start with the Mac.

I'm still waiting for Apple to fix some bugs from 2004.

I've only had my MBP 8 months but it that tyme I've only had 3 problems with it. The first, and only Mac specific, is it doesn't always wakeup after I've closed the lip. The second is that I wasn't about the get Fink Commander to work properly, however I'm not a Linux guru. The third was that Firefox used to occasionally crash though it hasn't happened in a few months.

We all do, but it never really took off commercially. At a certain point it wasn't worth the man-hours to keep it working. 20 guys using it write kludgy web service dashboards (and the occasional Cyberduck) weren't enough to keep that fire burning.

It IS slow as hell, but you're changing the subject.

I am sorta waiting to see if someone uses the scripting bridge (by which we're talking about the SB* classes now) and makes a Java bridge with it; the tech is not Ruby-Python only; there's a perl implementation as well as new languages like Nu or F-Script that use it.

My understanding of Deprecated in this context means "not to be used in new code," "end-of-lifed," "we plan that one day these symbols won't link on the platform." They've made no such declaration; by your definition, if an OS vendor ships libX 1.0 and libY 1.0 (an object-oriented version of libX 1.0) in their distribution, libX 1.0 is deprecated. Apple ships CoreAnimation alongside OpenGL; CA has a higher-level interface than OpenGL, so is OpenGL 'deprecated' (the underlying implementation of CA being hidden and thus irrelevant)? Windows uses Unicode strings, does that make WinANSI strings "deprecated?" They're all over the place, embedded in RIFF-container files, conf files, and more getting made every day. W3C has stopped developing XML 1.0 and will not be adding new features, does that mean when XML 2.0 comes out that XML 1.0 will be "deprecated"? That's not how it works, just ask the people that have 15 year old programs still running on Win32. Just because a vendor creates a new library doesn't mean automatically that the old one is no-go.

Thank you for conceding the fact, but you can keep the modal verb phrase containing your guess.

But you're only too happy to insinuate them every time you are confronted with the actual record of the matter :^]

Massive game of old school table top BattleTech.
Or a Networked game of BattleTech