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http://www.pers-place.uklinux.net/tommyogtigern/flamethrower.gif

I realise that YMMV, but I find it staggering that you can honestly think that the most commonly eaten apples are so much more worth eating. The flavour of a Braeburn is incomparably inferior to an Egremont Russett, which I doubt it commonly sold in most supermarkets, but is a reasonably large commercial brand all the same. And there are much finer and rarer apple varieties available, such as Ashmead's Kernel. http://www.orchard-group.uklinux.net/glos/apples/Ashmead's+Kernel.html

This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...

Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.

Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...

Many people complain about the interface, how it's difficult to learn. Unfortunately, many of these people are trying to 'learn 3D' over the weekend - and I'm sorry, that won't happen, regardless of the package. To become truly proficient in any 3D software package takes a long time.

Amen, People see 'making of' documentries on their pixar DVDs and think its a breeze to do CG, it took me awhile to learn blenders 'one hand on the keyboard, one hand on the mouse' interface but it would have taken longer for me to earn the money to buy Maya,Max3ds,softimage etc..

If you do not pay money for Blender or improve the codebase you are left at the whim of the contributors who are happy with the UI (and as long as it has mouseover help labels so am I)so they improve other areas *cough*image texture file selection*cough*.

Also there are plenty of free resources on the net for blender, models,materials,tutorials, since blenderheads are more likely to be hobbyists they're more willing to share their work freely wheras max,maya owners are probably paid professionals and unwilling to spend time on work they just give away.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but my current set of bookmarks is limited to this:
http://www.redferni.uklinux.net/visio/
and:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/vsdump/
And I'm sure there was a third one, one that went even further, but I've lost him.

££££'s Maya or £££'s 3DMax will not give you motivation.

let the piss-taking commence

Letter frequency research seems a slightly bizzare topic in the 21st century - Bring back the Linotype keyboards !! As regards other languages - http://www.bckelk.uklinux.net/words/etaoin.html is a good starting list of letter frequencies.

I don't know if you'd prefer it, but I found a solution for this, and for another problem - storage in a small space. I've got a Palm Tungsten E, which has 32 MB of memory built-in. I've had as many as 20 books on it at once - some of which were over half a meg compressed - and never been able to break the 2MB barrier in terms of book size. Before I used compressed ones, this was a bit of a problem.

The answer is that you can convert from all of those formats to HTML. In fact, HTML can look like any of those. So what you really want is something that can display HTML in from a perspective of an e-book reader. Just convert to HTML and tell your e-book reader what the root file of your book is (or do like I do and make a nice presentation front page from which you can select whichever book you want).

I use plucker for my actual reader, and convert most every format using Open Office. Open Office can read RTF, DOC, HTML (if you get very nonstandard HTML from somewhere, as is usually the case) and convert them into compliant HTML. The one exception to this is PDF.

Since PDF is an exact layout format, it's very difficult to remove text from it programmatically. You can do it with ghostscript, but it doesn't look good. I mostly use Acroread for palm for those - which still doesn't look very good.

Lit files actually involve an unpacking step which unfortunately breaks DRM. Your other alternative is to pay for a crappy e-book reader, though. Lit files are actually compressed, encrypted collections of HTML files, so you generally lose almost nothing in the conversion in terms of display.

Can you please provide a link to the open, published specification? I'd like to see it so that I know that anyone can implement that spec under whatever license they feel most comfortable with.

An example of a truly open standard is:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/ 12572/OpenDocument-v1.0-os.pdf
Or also, the PostgreSQL wire protocol:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/protocol .html

The MySQL wire protocol is proprietary. You would have to reverse engineer the product to create code under a different license. They did that on purpose.

Note, there are documents in existence, such as:
http://www.redferni.uklinux.net/mysql/MySQL-Protoc ol.html

That is someone who read the source files and produced a spec for a hypothetical re-implementation. The problem with that is that MySQL has made no promises to adhere to that spec, so it's quite possible that MySQL could manipulate the protocol to break 3rd party implementations without breaking their own. And nobody would have a standard document that they could use to file a bug report against. That's the definition of a proprietary protocol.

Alexander Watkins and Ruby Watkins both say Bwargg! to comics.

Alexander Watkins and Ruby Watkins both say Bwargg! to comics.

Quoth the wise man in his treatise Monadology (1714):
"There is also no way of explaining how a monad can be altered or changed in its inner being by any other created thing, since there is no possibility of transposition within it, nor can we conceive of any internal movement which can be produced, directed, increased or diminished within it, such as can take place in the case of compounds where a change can occur among the parts. The monads have no windows through which anything may come in or go out. The Attributes cannot detach themselves or go forth from the substances, as could sensible species of the Schoolmen. In the same way neither substance nor attribute can enter from without into a monad."

And they they've managed to attack them??? Oh, the humanity...

I have the pictures on one of my web sites:

Project Gutenberg Photos and Maps of Trinity [Atomic Test] Site

One thing's for sure... It doesn't have Wolf Linux!

I frequently IM myself as a low-budget cut-and-paste between my computers.

You might find cpop useful. It doesn't seem to be under any sort of active development, but the stable version works fine.

Compuserve did not "hold the patent", Sperry (by then Unisys) did. Compuserve merely licensed the patent. See, for example, amongst many other web resources, http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/giflzw.php and http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/Gif/Gif.html Just being pedantic, but the idea of Compuserve ever coming up with something patentable was mind-boggling...

What's the connection between this and UKLinux.net? I seem to remember Jason Clifford was involved in that as well, but some kind of disagreement over the related distribution (which was Mandrake + crypto, IIRC) made things go a bit pear-shaped. I remember UKLinux was once giving money to a Free Software charity too.

The new keyboard looks like it will have a short learning curve. That may drive sales. Certainly, a person who knows only the alphabet can hunt and peck at this thing more effectively than on either querty or dvorak.

But how good is the new one once you've learned it? Will it provide actual benefits over querty for the experienced typist as dvorak promises?

In English, the top letters by frequency are etaoi nsrhl dcumf. In this keyboard, the left hand covers the first half of the alphabet (including eaihldcmf), the right hand covers the second half (including tonsru). So, the new layout gives a relatively even load to each hand. Now, what about fingers?

Actually, that principle doesn't apply here, because the encrypted hard drive is part of the search warrent that is issued. Therefore by not giving up the key, you are refusing to comply with the warrent, which leaves you in contempt.

You can't ignore a search warrent of your house because you have things in there that would incriminate, and unfortunately the same rule applies here.

Check out this link (at the bottom) for the relevant UK laws, it functions the same way in North America as well.

http://www.kuznetsov.uklinux.net/gallery-4-linux-g o.php

The image of tux shooting down a windows icon can be found here.

For others who share my tastes, here's a link to the wallpaper image.

if you're pretty enough...

Now, I guess IBM is unlikely to sue

Especially given that the prior Unisys patent is prior art that would probably invalidate the claims of IBM's patent as they relate to implementations of LZW. (Other claims in that patent are said to relate to other compression structures.)

Without John Levon, there is no (present day) Qt GUI for LyX - The Document Processor. And I, along with many others found the earlier XForms GUI for LyX to be unusable. Thanks John for making LyX usable.

It was internal only, but hackers at securityoffice.net leaked it. I have a mirror here, please mirror it yourselves and don't slashdot my server!

• CAB History
• 
  
  In 1977, Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv devised and published a paper on their new compression method, LZ77. In 1982, James Storer and Thomas Szymarski released their LZSS variant. In the early 1980s, Microsoft required some form of data compression for their installation media to cut down on the number of disks needed to install MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows, so they took Haruhiko Okumura's implementation of LZSS. Their compressed files had a SZDD signature.
  
  In 1989, Phil Katz put the deflate method in the public domain. Microsoft started using the algorithm to compress their installation media. The signature changed to KWAJ.
  
  In the early 1990s, various people invented new forms of disk formatting for the IBM PC, increasing the amount of space on a disk despite the PC's inflexible floppy disk controller. Once again, Microsoft products were getting bigger and bigger, so Microsoft took one of these disk formats and called it DMF, or Windows formatted disks.
  
  For most of the early 1990s, Jonathan Forbes had been writing fast versions of LZH archivers on the Amiga. In 1995, he and Tomi Poutanen devised an LZH adaption known as LZX. Its main benefits beyond deflate were a compact way of encoding large match offsets, and ramping up the size of the LZ sliding window. Furthermore, their Amiga implementation included file merging (known as solid archiving in RAR), where file data was grouped into large blocks, instead of files being individually compressed. This file merging technique also appeared in other new archivers around that time. By coincidence, Microsoft devised a new installation media which used file merging! This time, they were cabinet files or CABs. They included two compression methods - MSZIP (aka deflate) and Quantum, a large-window LZ compressor using arithmetic coding, licensed from its author David Stafford.
  
  In 1997, Jonathan Forbes went to work for Microsoft. Soon enough, cabinet files started supporting a modified form of LZX. But finally, Microsoft published an official specification for cabinet files, MSZIP and LZX. They did not detail Quantum, and their LZX specification contained errors to such extent that it was not possible to create a working compressor or decompressor from the specification.
  
  In 2000, Stuart Caie embarked on writing a CAB unpacker for Dirk Stöcker's XAD system. He discovers all of the above, including the LZX specification errors, but eventually comes up with a working LZX extractor. Being a generous devil, and wanting help with the remaining Quantum extractor, he converts his XAD client into a command-line CAB decompressor. In 2002, Matthew Russotto kindly researches and writes the Quantum extractor.
  
  In 2003, Stuart Caie launches a new library designed to support all major Microsoft compression formats, called libmspack.

Then, install these apps:

• OpieReader (aka QTReader). Reads Palm DOC files, zTXT, Plucker, HTML, plain text (normal or gzipped), and ppms text (I don't know what that is). It's very configurable for your Zaurus's hardware buttons, and Zaurus units have native screen rotation abilities already.
• qpdf2. This is a full PDF viewer that will let you open standard, untranslated PDFs. There is no need for any sort of desktop "conversion" program like you see on some other platforms. It's an awesome program and handles embedded fonts and graphics just like you'd want it to.

The device itself runs on Linux with Trolltech's QT/Embedded, and ships that way from the factory. Although there are not yet any Linux tools to sync with the newest ROM versions (MacOS X tools may exist), there are these workarounds available:

1. You can install a VNC server on the PDA to help you with data entry, and use rsync to back it up. (This is my preferred method.)
2. You can re-flash the unit with any of the numerous custom ROMs out there. Check out OpenZaurus, which is a Free Software fork of the QTopia environment that comes with it. TrollTech's free QTopia Desktop is available for Linux and can sync with that, as can several other tools like KitchenSync. Or, you can check out PDAXROM (formerly Cacko) for a true X11-based environment.

The one requirement of yours that it will fail is price. Depending on the unit, expect to pay at least $600 (some of the higher-end ones go for that much on ebay). But this unit is much more capable than $600 units from Palm, Sony, or HP/whatever. It really does behave similarly to a laptop, given that it runs a *real* OS. A quick scan of the Zaurus Software Index will reveal all sorts of programs, and you can easily compile others (yes, you can run gcc on the Zaurus itself, too). If you look at it in that light, it's good deal.

Over the last 5 years, I've used a Palm IIIxe, a low-res b/w Clie s360, and most recently, a Zaurus 5600. Of all of them, I'd pick the s360 as the best device for ebook reading.

The palm was fine on battery life, and replaceale batteries meant you could grab a set anywhere, with NiMH AAA's doing the bulk of the work for me. The s360's battery life was still good, but not as good as the palm. Zaurus battery life, on the 5600, (which has a larger battery than the 5500), is probably 5-6 hours straight with the backlight on a low setting, and several days worth if you only use it a few hours a day.

Pros

• Palm - great battery life, easy to replace, several good readers, like cspotrun.
• Clie - good battery life, good backlight, and most importantly, has the Jog Wheel for scrolling with one hand. This is the nicest feature, IMO. Same software as PalmIII series. The memory stick is great for carrying around more titles
• Zaurus - Nice color screen, very good resolution, decent battery life, WiFi for grabbing new titles from Project Gutenberg, 2 expansion card options (SD & CF), and several good readers, such as QTReader, which supports many formats, and Gutenbrowser, which allows searching, downloading, and reading gutenberg ebooks in one nice little program. Overall, my favorite PDA so far.
  

• All - No support for MS Reader .lit format.
  To deal with .lit files on other platforms, there's always open c-lit which works quite well.
• Palm - low-res screen doesn't show as much text at a time, only a few font sizes available
• Clie - same as above, plus, if batteries die, you can't pick up a fresh pair at a convenience store
• Zaurus - Battery life only ok, spare batteries are available, but costly. No scroll wheel, or it would get my vote for the best.

Over the last 5 years, I've used a Palm IIIxe, a low-res b/w Clie s360, and most recently, a Zaurus 5600. Of all of them, I'd pick the s360 as the best device for ebook reading.

The palm was fine on battery life, and replaceale batteries meant you could grab a set anywhere, with NiMH AAA's doing the bulk of the work for me. The s360's battery life was still good, but not as good as the palm. Zaurus battery life, on the 5600, (which has a larger battery than the 5500), is probably 5-6 hours straight with the backlight on a low setting, and several days worth if you only use it a few hours a day.

Pros

• Palm - great battery life, easy to replace, several good readers, like cspotrun.
• Clie - good battery life, good backlight, and most importantly, has the Jog Wheel for scrolling with one hand. This is the nicest feature, IMO. Same software as PalmIII series. The memory stick is great for carrying around more titles
• Zaurus - Nice color screen, very good resolution, decent battery life, WiFi for grabbing new titles from Project Gutenberg, 2 expansion card options (SD & CF), and several good readers, such as QTReader, which supports many formats, and Gutenbrowser, which allows searching, downloading, and reading gutenberg ebooks in one nice little program. Overall, my favorite PDA so far.
  

• All - No support for MS Reader .lit format.
  To deal with .lit files on other platforms, there's always open c-lit which works quite well.
• Palm - low-res screen doesn't show as much text at a time, only a few font sizes available
• Clie - same as above, plus, if batteries die, you can't pick up a fresh pair at a convenience store
• Zaurus - Battery life only ok, spare batteries are available, but costly. No scroll wheel, or it would get my vote for the best.

Weasel is awesome, I don't understand why one would use anything else.

Any non-picture book can be represented as a textfile. Copy and paste from a PDF or a web page, or use Clit to remove Microsoft's drm if you are so unlucky. Of course Project Gutenberg is king of books.

Just run the txt file through makeztxt and off you go.

After email, my web browser, and vim, Weasel is probably the program I spend the most time with - and it is reading so what good times they are...

Happy reading!

Any Zaurus from the following: SL-C700, SL-C750, SL-C760, SL-C860, SL-6000

Beside that marvellous-looking new Sony thing with ePaper screen, there's really no contest.

Opie-reader reads AportisDoc, Weasel (ztxt), Plucker, gzipped text, ppms text. It will also give html a go, but the built-in NetFront browser works well, and Opera is available for it.

The 640x480 screen on the Zaurus means the auto-scroll is super-smooth, and makes other PDAs look like they have lego screens. The screen is incredible quality. It really is like nothing else. Super-clear and bright; it has to be seen to be believed.

The PDF readers read full PDFs, none of this Palm cut-down stuff.

It runs Linux on-board, has got USB, has a removable rechargable battery (rechargable in-place via the AC adaptor).

As to "pay very much", well if you buy an import, you'll pay a fair whack. If you get one direct from (in?) Japan you can get it much cheaper. I got my C750 for 60000 yen about two weeks after it was released in Japan. It's a lot cheaper over there now.

My Zaurus has seriously changed the way (and the amount) that I read. So much so, that dead tree books are starting to really annoy me because they take up so much physical space.

It's definitely one of the best things I have ever bought

There are other reasons to stop prepending things to the OS name, by the way...

My take on this : Stallman (who recently did a speech in my area, and didn't forget to tell us that ``GNU is the operating system and Linux is its kernel'' amongst other questionable things, like Open Source is not about freedom. He must have overlooked the Open Source Definition...) has seen the Linux OS gain lots of attention, and he's disgruntled people talk less about the GNU project. Still, he's wrong in thinking this causes problems for GNU or the FSF : quite to the contrary, the number of people that have started writing (or even hearing about) free software because of Linux has greatly helped the GNU project approach the goal of having a computing environment made only of free software. He should be grateful of this. Instead, he's obsessed with safeguarding a message he thinks is ``suppressed'' and churns out non-free licenses (like the GFDL) for this purpose (I'd be insterested in seeing only one occurrence of a distributor removing philosophical texts from the GNU documentations. I don't think this ever happened). That's sad, and not very positive, IMHO.

Bzzzt. Wrong.

The (academic) definition of "operating system" is "interface to the hardware".

"kernel" in unix terms is synonymous with "operating system".

"distro" is "operating environment".

If you *really* want a complete rant on this, I have written one, sad individual that I am.

In future, please refer to a recognised textbook (suggestions in the link above) before jumping in.

My Zaurus SL-C750 has completely changed the way I read. I'm starting to get really annoyed by the physicality of real books now, in the same way that my jukebox MP3 player has made me get annoyed with CDs. There is an excellent reader program which reads all sorts of formats (including Plucker and AportisDoc), and the smooth text scrolling is supremely smooth because of the 640x480 display. And of course, I can use it in portrait or landscape mode (when the screen is rotated, the display auto-rotates).

It's so much better having a small, compact auto-scrolling backlit display to read from. Holding a book and turning pages is annoying.

Hey Look - I know I am an Anonymous Coward and whatnot, but you have to mod this up so people can see if this really checks out as Prior Art.

http://www.uklinux.net

This ISP has been doing this whole "giving subdomain and email address" since I have been using it (2000) and it may have been before this patent was applied for.

Amongst other goodies, this Linux based ISP offers its customers:

• Unlimited email addresses in the form anything@username.uklinux.net as well as username@uklinux.net
• 20MB of PHP and Perl enabled web space www.username.uklinux.net

Doesn't this sound like exactly the same system?

Now the site News section says:

December 31st, 1999
uklinux.net is officially launched.

Which is a month or so past the date the Patent was filed for - but maybe uklinux.net could prove they had the system in place (ie. while developing etc.) before this time.

Opie-reader

Most of the books I have been reading were from Baen Books. BTW, if you haven't already, you should really give a try.

last post!
Baby Ruby says "bwarghhhhh!"

last post!
Baby Ruby says "bwarghhhhh!"

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Baby Ruby says "bwarghhhhh!"

last post!
Baby Ruby says "bwarghhhhh!"

The "humanised" yeast should lead to greater availability of treatments relying on, for example, antibodies and human growth hormone, as well as new treatments.

--
www.mutley.uklinux.net
Baby Ruby says "bwarghhhhh!"

The "humanised" yeast should lead to greater availability of treatments relying on, for example, antibodies and human growth hormone, as well as new treatments.

--
www.mutley.uklinux.net
Baby Ruby says "bwarghhhhh!"

According to this program, the password from
root:6X7liA1zmJhyA:12255:0:10000::::
is "Cracking".

For those who are interested, myself and a friend took some photos whilst in Brussels. We were lobbying MEPs in the European Parliament.

http://www.tomchance.uklinux.net/swpat-brussels.sh tml

No problem : The LZW algorithm has fallen in the Public domain 2 months and a week ago.

You must be new here.
Welcome.

--
www.mutley.uklinux.net
Baby Ruby says "bwarghhhhh!"

You must be new here.
Welcome.

--
www.mutley.uklinux.net
Baby Ruby says "bwarghhhhh!"