Slashdot Mirror

Great for browsing someone elses sloppy code:
http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/

I got interested in Graphviz when I did a Tech Writing contract that required me to use Doxygen. One useful feature of Doxygen is that it can feed inheritance and dependency information to graphviz to create cool diagrams for your API manuals. Alas, Graphviz only knows how to connect nodes with simple arcs. That means you can't follow standard conventions for creating things like org charts. And even if you're not that picky, you need more contro over placement and line drawing if you're going to readable charts with more than a very few nodes.

Just browse their version control for prior art.

Doxygen http://www.doxygen.org tags can be used to do lists on TODO since 1997. A nice example can is http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/lists.html

Doxygen has had this since release 1.1.4. Here is the changelog (grep down for 1.1.4). I'm not sure when v1.1.14 was released, but v1.0 was started in 1997 I think. This should be prior art...

Granted, the documentation is a bit poor, but once you get the hang of it, it's very nice to use. It's worth checking this out.

"Nice anonymous coward rant. You apparently lack the guts and conviction to say it with your name attached."

Fortunately for me (not you), your "I've been denied the opportunity to go "La La La I can't hear you" fallacy has been shown to be load of bull. But you do get points for sticking with the basics.

"I'm running on a 1 GHZ Pentium 3 laptop with 256 MB of RAM. Sure you can run them all but OpenOffice in particular is a complete and utter slug to start. You should try doing a head comparison with Windows starting IE, Outlook and Office. It dusts Linux on startup time versus Mozilla, Evolution and OpenOffice. There is an inevitability in it. Windows is sharing one set of DLL's. Linux is loading pretty much 3 completely different set of libraries."

You apparently mised the news on Slashdot, that MS preloads behind the scenes. Actual time hasn't changed, effective time however has you snowed.

"OSX and Windows may not me completely consistent but Linux isn't even in the same ball park. If people are adopting Linux on the desktop its in spite of the terrible application consistency and more likely because of the price, and the fact security is better mostly just because no one is targeting Linux because its desktop share is so low."

Oh we're in the ballpark. Look over in the bleachers. And I see your goodie bag of "fallacy" is full. Apache is just one of many that proves the "If only I were popular, the script kiddies will go out with me" to be false.

"Just keep telling yourself Linux is going to win the desktop without fixing the screwed up UI and usability problems."

Results speak louder than predictions.

"I love Linux, I pray for its success on the desktop, I've been running it on my laptops for years."

That would be the P3, right?

"Its just a simple fact of life that UI and application consistency is its Achilles heel, mostly because geeks like you would rather rant, justify the situation, fight religious wars, pretend its a plus instead of a problem and generally stick your head in the sand."

As opposed to your overblowing the situation, AND insulting every "average person" between here and the gold coast. "Why I'm sorry ma'am. I hope my moving the trash icon over to the right didn't confuse you?" I can just see them rushing to your defense.

"Thats not going to solve the problem."

As opposed to your overstating the situation, overuse of logical fallacies, deemphasising the deficiencies of your choice of platform in an attempt to make Linux look worse.

"It appears Linux is just going to fracture in to people only using KDE apps, and others using only Gnome apps, and geeks using a bunch of quirky splinters."

And let's pretend to ignore the reality, ON ALL PLATFORMS. People use a mix of software NOT ALL OF IT CONSISTENT. PEOPLE SURVIVE, oh no, wait. They don't [checks the obit. page]

"As long as I stick to just KDE apps the consistency and interoperability is pretty good. Maybe I could just stick to GNOME apps though the consistency there is not as good. Its just unfortunate you have to ignore two thirds of Linux applications if you don't want to cope with a hopeless hodge podge."
"

And you could ignore a lot of apps on Windows and Macs if you're going to be that "religious" about your UI.

RTF (which is, by the way, an older standard than Word), it would have looked fine in either word processor.

Have you ever actually LOOKED at a RTF file? It never, ever looks fine.

Also, from the doxygen manual.:

"Note that the RTF output probably only looks nice with Microsoft's Word 97. If you have success with other programs, please let me know."

RTF is clearly not completely standard, and in my experience most often looks like hell (our co-op office used to make us submit resumes in it).

Go check here:

Farout Remailer stats/links

anon.efga.org

Freedom Project

And for more nym information: Nym creation for mere mortals

For those of us who use our desktops as a PVR instead of dedicating a machine to it, I highly recommend a TvTime and vcr combination under Linux. MythTV is a overkill for my needs. TvTime is hands down the best tv viewing program, IMO, and there are web frontends for vcr to make scheduling recordings as snap. There are some features lacking in this setup that a normal PVR system would have, such as live rewind and such, but I think there's alot of people going through way more trouble than they need to because they don't know there's any other way..

Well, if you're going to go Linux, ALSA supports multiple sound cards pretty nicely, just tell XMMS (or whatever media player it will be) to use the different /dev/ devices (use devfsd). My first though was an implementation in Windows, Winamp also offers you the choice which soundcard you want to use, although one has to wonder about the IRQ hell of 6 of them in the same computer!

VNC wouldn't be such a good idea, because AFAIK it grabs the pointer so you'll probably end up with a situation where 2 or more people in different rooms wrestle for control of the pointer. A thin X display that connects to the server would work ok, although that would mean 6 computers in 6 different rooms, and when you already have that, it'd probably be wiser to have a "1 MP3-fileserver and 6 clients that draw MP3s across the ethernet" setup. Or you can just use SSH (or even telnet) to connect to the server and let them use mp3blaster, a text-based interface. Yeah, ugly, you can put it to the bottom of your list. But if the 6 clients need 6 "real" computers, it'll be so much waste - with SSH you can connect from a Palm Pilot, but then you'll need 802.11b for significant distances, and you can only get that from high end Palms..

But oh, depending on how long the VGA cable must be, you can always have 2 computers, each with 1xAGP, 2xPCI graphic cards and 3xPCI sound cards, and one of them as an NFS server for the other.. or even use the on-board sound. That should be easier to set-up, IMO.

Anyway, have a lot of fun, IMO you should document the process with lots of pics and put it up on a server, you can then wear the proud tag of "I've been slashdotted".

Key features of the Network Audio System include:

• Device-independent audio over the network
• Lots of audio file and data formats
• Can store sounds in server for rapid replay
• Extensive mixing, separating, and manipulation of audio data
• Simultaneous use of audio devices by multiple applications
• Use by a growing number of ISVs
• Small size
• Free! No obnoxious licensing terms

• Festival - The Festival Speech Synthesis System.
• mpg123 - a command line MP3 player
• GAIM - a free AOL IM client
• OpenOffice (StarOffice) - the (now opensourced) StarOffice Suite has built-in NAS support for the Solaris and Linux Platforms.
• The Qt Library - from Trolltech supports NAS natively. You will need to pass the '-system-nas-sound' to './configure' before building.
• libSDL - SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer library, now has native NAS support thanks to Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8}
• XAnim - the X Animation viewer
• XBoing - a blockout type X game
• XPilot - a multiplayer client/server space warfare game
• Xemacs - the best cross-plaform, cross-language IDE
• Alsaplayer - A NAS Output plugin written by Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8} is now supplied with the Alsaplayer distribution.
• X MultiMedia System (XMMS). A NAS Output plugin written by Willem Monsuwe is available at ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/
• Wine. A NAS plugin written by Nicolas Escuder is now available with the WINE distrubution.

Key features of the Network Audio System include:

• Device-independent audio over the network
• Lots of audio file and data formats
• Can store sounds in server for rapid replay
• Extensive mixing, separating, and manipulation of audio data
• Simultaneous use of audio devices by multiple applications
• Use by a growing number of ISVs
• Small size
• Free! No obnoxious licensing terms

• Festival - The Festival Speech Synthesis System.
• mpg123 - a command line MP3 player
• GAIM - a free AOL IM client
• OpenOffice (StarOffice) - the (now opensourced) StarOffice Suite has built-in NAS support for the Solaris and Linux Platforms.
• The Qt Library - from Trolltech supports NAS natively. You will need to pass the '-system-nas-sound' to './configure' before building.
• libSDL - SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer library, now has native NAS support thanks to Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8}
• XAnim - the X Animation viewer
• XBoing - a blockout type X game
• XPilot - a multiplayer client/server space warfare game
• Xemacs - the best cross-plaform, cross-language IDE
• Alsaplayer - A NAS Output plugin written by Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8} is now supplied with the Alsaplayer distribution.
• X MultiMedia System (XMMS). A NAS Output plugin written by Willem Monsuwe is available at ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/
• Wine. A NAS plugin written by Nicolas Escuder is now available with the WINE distrubution.

Technically, Baen already broke the ground. Hey, they've given away an entire CD-ROM of books, under the same terms. Granted, they didn't use a specific license, but it says right there on the disk that you're allowed to copy and share but not sell its contents.

It sure is nice to see Doctorow jumping on the bandwagon, though.

Baen has experienced a mysterious 50% increase in gross dollar sales in the previous year. Also, our "sellthrough" (percentage of books placed in the market that sell to end-point customers) has improved from the rather startling 63% to the truly stunning 74%. I'm tentatively blamiing this on my wacko e-net proclivities. (Insert a Crazy Eddie ad pastiche here)

This is from a somewhat outdated article on breaking PGP encryption, but the improvements in factoring technology since then have been incremental.

It should take about 3*10^20 MIPS-years to factor a 2048-bit RSA key with the General Number Field Sieve, the fastest known algorithm. This means that on a top-of-the-line Athlon, it should take some 10^17 years, or a bit less due to multiple instructions per second. Even if they had a million of these, they couldn't break it in 100 billion years. And on top of that, the GNFS algorithm doesn't parallelize well, so they probably couldn't use it.

In other words, I'd bet a lot of money they won't crack it. They'd have a better chance bribing an insider.

It'd be nice if there were similar indicators for new mail, or alarms from iCal, connection state, short messages, etc.

The Fujitsu Lifebook has these. Look for the "The LifeBook Application Panel" on this page. This page has Driver information for Linux.

Use vcr
Here are my settings: (works very well)

[defaults]
quality = 100
keyframes = 15
audiobitrate = 128
framerate = 29.97
audiomode = stereo
resolution = 384x288
codec = DivX 4.0
norm = NTSC
source = Television
grabdevice = /dev/video
freqtab = us-cable

I call it my "tuxvo"
If you combine cron with vcr you can achieve good quality recordings using divx4/5 pretty much off the shelf.
Add an nVidia GeForce 2 MX w/TV-out and nVidia's kernel module you can save yourself the money for the scan converter.
That is, if you don't mind black bars at the edge of the screen. Otherwise go with the scan converter.
But IMHO nothing beats MPlayer for playback. YMMV

Oh and In Soviet Russia tuxvo records you.

All new postings and users since november 21 have been lost, but the Ur-Quan Masters Forum is online again. To prevent repetition, we've moved it to here , and we should have daily backups now.

Serge van den Boom
from the Ur-Quan Masters core team

You saw it here

What do others use for recording?

I went through using various tools and had best results with:
vcr
and
nvrec

Apparently mencoder (part of the kickass mplayer package) will also do the job.

Using nvrec you can start recording a program and then start playing it back via mplayer a short time later as it's still recording with few problems.

I recently bought a ReplayTV
though, and since these babies have ethernet, I should be able to stream my video directly from it using Xine/mplayer over my LAN. I'm moving on Monday and haven't bothered to wire ethernet to it yet so this is untested. To grab/stream video from a ReplayTV under Linux or another Java enabled OS use dvarchive
I've been thinking of setting up a cron job to suck the video off my ReplayTV, use transcode to convert it to mpeg1 and burn it to a VCD to archive shows to CD automatically..

BTW, I've had problems many times with mplayer and A/V sync, while xine will play the same video flawlessly. I hate the xine UI though, and much prefer mplayers sparten interface..

FWIW, C++ and other languages have long has this ability thanks to Doxygen and similar tools. It's cool stuff. Doxygen doesn't use XML, but the syntax is pretty straightforward.

I'm surprised that anyone would attempt to argue the merits of using any computer language as the appropriate mechanism for communicating the intent of an algorithm/function/method. The code is for the machine, not for humans! It's more precise, but only because it's so much more constrained. If you want to quickly port it, or have any hopes of releasing your work as an API for somebody else to code to (or test against), you've simply got to have good documentation.

In your scenario, the problem was not simply that the documentation was out of date. If you're operating in a shop where a change can be made in a core component without triggering regression testing, or core components can have their functionality change without revving the API, you need to fix your process.

It is bad to have out of date documentation, but this typically occurs because it's too far away from implementation. Making documentation coincident with implementation, either by convention (embedding comments), or by language design (Literate Programming languages) is an improvment.

In general, I prefer less high-level documentation and more at the class and library level. I know I'd much rather have a well documented class header and methods (with code fragment examples) and a good unit test than having to dive into an implementation and reverse engineer somebody else's code.

For that matter, for C++ I prefer incorporating documentation into the code itself, and use packages like Doxygen or Cocoon to extract it (there are many more, I'm sure).

BTW, now in danger of getting on topic, Leo does look pretty interesting... esp. for web work.

I didn't really think there was any need for anything better than 128 bit encryption. It would take a lot of factoring that is practically impossible by human standards to figure out the key for a 32 bit encrypted code, and this site seems to tell me that 128 bit encryption is nearly impossible to break by any standards.

On that same site, they are saying that most encryption cracking comes in the form of key snooping, trojan horses, and packet sniffing, so simply increaing the cipher strength probably won't do much.

here

I think corporatism is a huge threat to Linux enthusianados everywhere, not to mention Europeans.

We have to fight against the status quo, even if it means being jailed like Dmitry.

You'll note that even when Tux is trudging through the pounding rain he doesn't wear a suit or a helmet.

Tools like javadoc, or maybe better in your case doxygen can really help when it comes to commenting code... the idea is pretty much that you place a documentation comment before each function, or class, and so on, which usually makes the entire thing much easier. Having done that, I've found that only a few more non-obvious parts have to be commented within the actual functions.

well, two basic parts: hardware and software
first of the hardware is pretty independant of the os, just pick the highest quality capture card you can afford that is supported in linux, add a reasonable camera, sound card, and a nice modern machine of any kind. I use a bttv card, which works well for me, but of course it depends on your exact needs, and the camera that you hook up to it. As to software:
SDL, mostly used for game programming, but has some of the capabilites needed for capturing, sound recording, etc.
v4l the basic component of all video type stuff under linux-you can see the list of crap it supports there, but it doesn't really have facilities for actually capturing to something like mpeg.
avifile everything you want in a capture API, will let you output to all kinds of formats.
mplayer I have heard that they support capturing now, but haven't used them for that, but is what you will be using for playing back the files you capture.

My recommendation would be to use the VCR project, and one of these for audio. VCR uses avifile to record the video in your chosen format, and will record the audio also, but if you want seperate files for audio and video, it is simplest just to use the mic in with another program.

Let me know if you have problems--it's remarakably similar to what is already done to record television programming, with higher quality requirements, so you should be able to take advantage of all the PVR projects out there.
Or you can let me do it-send me the requirements, 1500$, and I'll send the box back a week later
;-}

Doesn't seem like there's much done yet... I'd say your better off using vcr and a crontab, or writing something based on it..

In fact this doxygen was only part of the solution, our research projects had other documentation which required addition, however we simply had the developers get into using LyX and had the doxygen script merge in the static docs with the code documentation. Made for a nice doc tree which was easy to update (and if you really want to get fancy every once in a while, import into LyX and whip up a tasty DocBook). Of course the developers has to conform to the commenting style required, however if this is a problem for your development team, then the whole 'team' concept isn't going so well.

If you don't use CVS and/or doxygen, and those tools don't fit into your workplace (although CVS should be used, IMHO). You could easily whip up a php or perl script to merge TODO and Changelog files, this is of course assuming that all the developers use these files to track their work, which they should do anyhow (at least in some form). It would be trivial to whip up a parser in perl and merge those files into some sort of report. Thus the whole Practical Extraction and Reporting Lanuage thing...

If you're looking to document your source take a look at doxygen. Its really nice, and give you several output options; including indexed HTML & PDF documents. It also has provisions for including a sort of notes sections with your source.

is generally what I use. Now days it is Abi or StarOffice. Sorry to say though that if your doing a massive amount of it, probably have to go with the Word.

If you need to write any techinial docs on the implementation, I strongly recommend you checking out Doxygen , works like a champ, not to mention you can do your documentation in your vi/emacs editor.

It depends on your specific needs. Are you documenting the source or documenting program usage? For the former, doxygen may be useful to you. Generates HTML and LaTeX, amongs other formats.

dan.

This document contains a rough reckoner for calculating whether a passphrase is strong or weak. It makes the point that for a passphrase to be as strong as the encryption in PGP, it needs to be 30+ characters long. ! Remembering one or two paintings might not quite cut it.

For most systems, you can safely use shorter passphrases if you are only permitted a limited number of attempts or have no access to the machine (like at a bank) or the passphrase is changed frequently, or if the phrase is truly random.

Regardless, the strength of the passphrase is almost always the weakest link in any security system.

"Let's compare:

for (i = 0; i array_size; i++)
free(array[i]);
free(array);

and now let's look at:

// get rid of the array
for (i = 0; i array_size; i++)
free(array[i]);
free(array);

Has your life *really* been so harmed?"

---

What's wrong with:

freeArray(array, array_size);

and an appropriate function definition? (Sorry, don't know enough C to get the typing straight on the function or overloaded functions.)

If the for loop cited above is so idiomatic in C that it shouldn't need a function with a clear name around it, it also shouldn't need a comment. But virtually every piece of atomic logic that's complicated enough to be non-obvious probably deserves its own function with a good name. Not only does it make the code more readable, it follows the "once and only once" rule (no matter how many times you use it, define it once) and enables potential reuse of that code in the future (without compromising maintainability now).

I generally take comments as a sign that the code they comment needs simplification, and then refactor it until the comments are redundant. The exception is comments that detail external forces acting on the function, like "This array can't have more than 255 characters, because that's the datatype in the database." That's a good candidate for inclusion in the unit test, though, if you code test-first.

Of course, encapsulating a bit of logic in a well-named function is documentation, of a different sort. I find it provides more use than the slightly "deader" comment block.

If you have to satisfy more than the programmer, you may have to rattle off a bit more than that; comments in the code are an excellent place to put that extra documentation, if you're using something like javadoc or doxygen.

phil

what's the most commonly used Win9x compatable pacakge I can grab?

Grab GnuPG.

If you want nice, easy, email integration, get Eudora and EudoraGPG.

You can send me a test message if you want. My public key is on my slashdot user page. Use the email address in the key.

Sure the interface is nice for Johnny Couchpotato, but with a homebrew device, the tradeoff is that you are not trapped in the PVR's interface.

Personally, I love being able to ssh into my linux machine at home and/or edit my crontab to encode a show to divx. (using Bram Avontuur's vcr program or Justin Schoeman's NVrec ). AFAIK this is not something you can do with a Tivo.

There's even a web interface for doing it, if want to get fancy.

The ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon has pretty damn great TV capture, although I don't know if there are any Linux drivers for it (I can't afford one, so I daren't look :)), and could quite concievably be used to roll-your-own PVR.

Of course, if I had a capture card with DVI input, and a digital TV service, one could pipe it straight into that and get amazing quality...

Or, were you looking for the ability to mix/create video or record video in one of many ways.

or did you just want to play those MPEG-1 (there are several others) or MPEG-2 or or

Basically the point I'm trying to make is that the multimedia stuff is there already. just use it.

The one piece I know of thats missing is Sorenson (sp?) codec quicktime player. anyone doing this, or know of a project that is?

Take a look at the Passphrase FAQ. Although it is meant for PGP it has some interesting information that is generally applicable to passwords, among others an estimation formula for the strength of different password types (section 4) and also an interesting scheme how to write down a password ("key splitting", section 6).

Sure, there's even an HowTO about setting up such a beast: VCR-HOWTO

The VCR program is currently quite unstable, since it frequently freezes my 2.4.4 kernel, but even that doesn't stop me from having a bit of fun with scheduled realtime DivX video capturing ;-)

--
"Tell the world that we're going to be the grim reaper of innocent orphaned children." - /linux/init/main.c

This is the kind of produt that Hauppauge are offering with their WinTV PVR. It's really nothing special - just a standard TV card and software that captures and compresses the video and writes it to hard drive. I have been doing this for many years with an old WinTV PCI card and the excellent vcr program for Linux. All Sony are doing is riding the PVR hype with this one, and it seems that they're succeeding.

The best place I've found for information on the current state of this "Borg PC" is the AVSForum HTPC board. Some of the forum members have customized their PCs to a degree that comes pretty close. They aren't an every user, dumb down PC, but some come pretty close at being user friendly... The problem remains being the cost. The Gateway Destination came pretty close to bringing it all togheter, but it was underpowered, and very few people would pay for it (so it was discontinued)...

Some manufacturers are starting to come around and to provide automation features, that enable some customization (like ATI, which now has an API for remotes). Girder seems to be a great hub for programmability features, where several Open Source projects converge in controlling the HTPC.

A few general comments: * 560 GB of storage is almost affordable for personal use. Just use 8 80 GB HD with a RAID 5 controller (like the 3Ware 6800). It'd cost ~$2300, which isn't cheap, but you'd have plenty of storage, and you even get some redundancy...

* UltimateTV and the XBox are going this way. The XBox will be HDTV compatible, and future generations might include a HDTV tuner. And then using USB you might get additional funcitonality. A merging of UTB and XBox might also be possible. Probably the biggest objection would be that this is a MS solution...

* There at at least 3 HDTV PC Tuner cards available (Telemann HiPix, Hauppage WinTV-HD, and AccessDTV). All the manufacturers are working into building digital PVR functions into their products, which will make HDTV tuners a Tivo alternative (at least for OTA broadcasts).

* SnapStream is working to provide PVR features on your PC (there was another, but I don't have a name handy), and the company is very open to user feedback and open source development (as the IRTuner Project shows).

* Don't forget PDA's and mobile multimedia devices. As more multimedia is available, the box will make it accesible on the go, so you can take movies with you when you commute, or access music from anywhere in your house (using 802.11b) w/o requiring a PC or a full blown device, just your PDA. SnapStream recognizes the potential of PDAs, and is offering PocketPVS so you can transcode video and play it back on your PPC.

HDTV might be the catalyst that pushes the HTPC out of obscurity, and that creates the borg box. With every US household having to replace their TV in the next few years, more will start to consider cheap HDTV PC Tuners, using existing big screen displays and/or large screen Monitors (and VGA compatible TVs).

No, but it's as simple as adding a BT8[47]8/etc card to the box and using something like VCR or mp1e for Linux. I've had quite good results with mp1e and V4L2 recording ST: Voyager episodes at 768x576 @ 25fps on my other box. Broadcast 2000 had a little trouble with the resulting mpeg but the latest version should work fine. You will have to handedit the stream to get rid of the commercials. Bottom line: since it's a whitebox PC you can add functionality as you like, given enough funds / spare time :)

-adnans

Mp1e is the only program that does high quality high resolution real time compression, but it does not produce MPEG2 right now, only MPEG1. That is not a problem for the quality, though: for this application there is not much difference between those two. There is currently no release version of mp1e, you have to get it from the CVS of Zapping and it works only with V4L2. There is also the old version 1.7.1 of mp1e, which has a much lower quality but may be easier to install.

Sampeg can do real time MPEG1 and MPEG2, takes advantage of multiprocessing and is optimized for both Intel and Sun SIMD operations. It is very well written in C++, but also rather slow and there has been no update in a long time. The author is now working on an MPEG-4 encoder that should be available in the near future.

ffmpeg is reasonably fast, is usable and under current development and supports most formats, most notably MPEG1, MPEG4 (OpenDivx compatible), DivX ;-), and Realvideo. Some more may be added soon.

VCR may also be an alternative, but I have not tried that yet.

--
Arnd Bergmann <arnd at itreff dot de>, no /. login

I realize that this is not what you asked for, but maybe check out vcr. It'll do real-time divx encoding, as well as mpeg-4..it works great for me...I record 320x240@30fps and it looks great (on a dual 400 celeron with 256MB RAM..it only uses one processor though) I then use aviplay to watch the movie, and it scales up very cleanly to 1280x1024, very clear picture, and only uses about 10% CPU during playback.

It doesn't do mpg2, but it may be close enough for you..

(file sizes aren't too bad...for 30 minutes of TV, the file is about 380MB)

You're kidding, right? Xerces-C is the best third-party C/C++ library I've ever seen! It has a neat Java-like design, but with the speed and flexibility of C++. (I just wish they used std::wstring instead of XMLString, but the conversion is trivial) What I love about it is that it uses Java-like autodoc comments, so I can produce unified documentation for my code as well as xerces-c using an external tool called DOXYGEN which also generates class-hierarchy and dependency graphs. Very cool.

The link to vcr: http://www.stack.nl/~brama/vcr/
</shameless plug>

Celeron 533Mhz (basically the best I could fit on my existing PII mobo)

128MB RAM

40GB ATA/100 (running at 33 :( ) HDD, 7200RPM

ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder

Logitech AST Remote - to control mouse/applications

Software to control mouse is Girder. (It's awesome)

Black desktop ATX case

Black wireless keyboard/trackball (Compaq)

Running Win98 (Radeon can't output digital audio thru SPDIF in 2000 yet)

Creative Labs MP3+ 5.1

Cheapo black DVD-ROM drive

100Mbps ethernet

It generally performs very well. I use it for DVD (only in a secondary capacity, my regular DVD player is superior and I laugh at anyone who claims their PC's DVD player does a better job than a decent component DVD player), MP3 (primarily the reason I built it), watching MPG1/2/DivX movies and VCDs. It can also act as a WebTV in a pinch, though it's running at 800x600 and the text can get hard to read, even when set at largest font.

I do have some issues with the Radeon card (besides the exorbitant price) - it does straight-to-MPEG2 capture, which is nice, but it doesn't enforce a/v synching, which isn't usually an issue until I decide to compress to DivX. Then you usually need to fire up something like AVI Info to correct the problem. I bought the Radeon because it comes with some TV-Guide type software to control listings and recording, but in my experience, it's not really worth it. From what I hear, the ATI AIW 32 is a better card for straight PVR uses.

Just my $0.02.