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XMMS Compress is much better for the very reasons explained on the website:
http://trikuare.cx/code/AudioCompress.html

I know very little about compression (or sound editing in general) but even I could notice a clear improvement over volnorm.

What you want is a compander. (compressor/expander). It is so called because it compresses or expands the dynamic range of the input audio. Sox includes one, if you like command lines.

For winamp, I've found Rocksteady is beautiful, and does separate compression for several frequency bands (i can't begin to express how good this is for pop/rock).

For XMMS, AudioCompress does a sufficient job, although the windowing is somewhat stupid (not predictive == you'll get pops if things suddenly get loud) and it doesn't separate into multiple frequency bands, so it won't sound so good if you're playing something where the bass is really pushed (like Fiona Apple) next to something where it's not (classical).

Neither allow you specify complex transfer functions (of input volume to output volume).

For your purposes, sox is really the right thing, although it may feel a bit like "ack! drowning in sea of unexplained options!". You could start off trying:

$ sox infile.wav outfile.wav compand .1,.1 -60,-10 0 0 .1

will give you VERY hard compression. Change the .1s to specify how fast it changes the volume; change the -60,-10 (always negative) to more similar values to make the compression less severe.

$ man sox
will tell you something more.

'Real' colour management or 'Professional' publishing can mean a lot of things. It depends if you publish a colour newspaper (I help maintain PCs at the editorial office of one such) or the National Geographic.

Where I work, once the monitor is calibrated and the scanned image looks good enough for the person operating Photoshop & InDesign that's all there is to it. There are no specialized bits of hardware involved, just using a monitor calibration helper site like this one.

Incidentally, they have a nice quote regarding Epson colour profiles you mention:

In my experience, Epson really cares about color-matching. Their printer ink actually has a larger gamut than standardized CMYK, and their drivers come with very well-calibrated color profiles (and are ColorSync-compatible on the Mac. Similarly, their scanners are very well-calibrated, and at least the Perfection 2450 Photo's colorspace rivals even human vision in many areas.

And the goatse.cx site was suspended. It's not there anymore.

So I guess we'll have to raise the money to replace it, eh?

That won't be necessary. Apparently the site was suspended without warning on January 14, 2004, but not without protest. Some thought the ".cx" top-level domain name was recieving a bad reputation. However this hasn't stopped the site reappearing under different domain names- for example, one excluding the "se" and another substituting the ".ca" TLD for ".cx". So it is still there, to the horror of unnwitting first-time viewers everywhere. It has also spawned a whole series of parodies and tributes. There is a Wikipedia article about it, with more information than you ever wanted to know on the topic.

Well, iTunes has OGG icons, so perhaps it's planned.

One word...NANITES!!!

This song is, according to its information page, made up of samples created from converting non-sample data (I don't know if it's using the same technique as Baudio or not) such as command.com from MSDOS 6.22. Does that count as a DMCA violation? Do they need to pay royalties to Microsoft for the use of a sample? I doubt you could extract command.com from the music, but it's something to think about anyway...

This song is, according to its information page, made up of samples created from converting non-sample data (I don't know if it's using the same technique as Baudio or not) such as command.com from MSDOS 6.22. Does that count as a DMCA violation? Do they need to pay royalties to Microsoft for the use of a sample? I doubt you could extract command.com from the music, but it's something to think about anyway...

Hey, wow, that's pretty damned cool... I'm going to have to start running it. (If you've ever seen my desktop you know I'm into odd color schemes which I find pleasing to the eye and have the nice side-effect of making it difficult for others to look over my shoulder without getting a headache :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Look, playing with GIMP and making their own tiles isn't exactly difficult. I whipped up the imagery on my fvwm2 setup without much effort. Why do we need to hype up and drool over a collection of images done by basically combining random plugins? How does it show creativity to use someone else's stuff for this purpose?
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Oh, and the original picture is hidden in my website (yes, that's the diplomat photo for the porcupine race I added to Civ:CTP during LokiHack).
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Great that his karma is in good shape, because his self-esteem is totally fucked...