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/offtopic:

What exactly does that code in your sig do? I can tell it's an infinite loop, but of what? My computer doesn't seem to like it very much ;)

A Linux system call table might help.

Do you have any idea how long it took me to figure out what your current sig means?
"echo -e 'global _start \n _start: \n mov eax, 2 \n int 80h \n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a; a

Here's some help for others who are wondering:
This explains what assembly language is: http://www.int80h.org/
This explains what INT 80h does: http://www.f13-labs.net/virus/linuxAsmWindows.htm
This explains what AX=2 does: http://docs.cs.up.ac.za/programming/asm/derick_tut/syscalls.html
And this explains what NASM is: http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/g/nasm.htm

For the love of God, we're geeks and this made me loose about 10 minutes of work (translation: "reading Slashdot") today; now I'll have to do overtime and there's been an article regarding OT issues on Slashdot today which made me realize I should stop reading other people's sigs and I shouldn't use sigs that seem to mean something when they really don't.


--
Help, I'm addicted to /. sigs!

How to Write Unmaintainable Code. Enough said. Read it.

Try ftp://ftp.up.ac.za/pub/linux/ssh/pub/sentinel/

Don't forget ATP synthase inside the mitochondria... it spins and spins and spins....until you die. Seems to qualify as a "continuously spinning thing" to me, esp something that's as common to all life as the mitochondria.

A nice research paper probing the rotary mechanism of ATP synthase

Isn't it a marvel how complex life is sometimes?

The saddest thing about Shuttleworth's Go-Opensource is that is makes no effort to indicate (or show respect for) any Free Software or Open Source foundation, or to acknowledge any of the (many) other South African initiatives that have been promoting OSS over the years.

Although the FAQ provides links to the Free Software Philosophy and the Open Source definition, there are no links to the home pages of gnu.org or opensource.org. In short, this "promotional campaign" doesn't even indicate where you can find authoratative information on what they are promoting.

For a person new to the concept of FLOSS, SourceForge and Freshmeat (the only suggestions for finding Open Source software given in the FAQ) are really bad places to start. They are riddled with poor quality software, and can give a really bad impression. Links to TheOpenCD or another site that lists specific, mature and useful software would be far more valuable.

The are various organisations in South Africa that support Open Source (to varying degrees). Bridges.org has offices in the country, and supports the use of free (as in beer) software of various types, including FLOSS. There are many LUGs around the country, and a wealth of information is available from TLUG in particular.

Ultimately go-opensource provides some pretty layout, but no meat, or even directions to a butchery.

Its about time something cool happened here!
By the way open source has in fact been here for a while,I dont have all the links on hand but ,heres one,google can probably turn up others
Contrary to what you may think cape town and SA in general has a thriving PC population and even frequent LAN games(100+ games in CT every month or so) despite fairly poor hardware support (I dont even know where to buy apple macs around here (no big loss)) ,a weak currency(which has has improved massively lately though) and least I forget really shocking ISP services.
Our local monopoly offers the following : outrageous installation (about R4000 or about $615) including modem and monthly fees (R1200 or about $185) and a ridiculous cap of 3 gigs per month ,but I'll try not to go off into a rant about that...
However most PC users arent even aware that there are alternatives to windows and I have yet to meet anyone who runs Linux at home!

there's a web page showing the complete table of contents here and the main site in support of the book including examples and all the exercises here.

just make sure if you buy it you are buying the 3rd printing. the 2nd and first are out of date at this point.

there's a web page showing the complete table of contents here and the main site in support of the book including examples and all the exercises here.

just make sure if you buy it you are buying the 3rd printing. the 2nd and first are out of date at this point.

Hmm, kinda. The parts are there, but no-one has put them together in a neat package yet. That's probably since Linux video software has really taken off in just the last 6 months.

There's mplayer which is a great player for any video-format out there. It can even play DVD's, although it doesn't have menu support like Ogle. It can also rip DVD:s to MPEG-4 (a.k.a DivX) using a couple of different encoders. Xvid is my favorite open-source MPEG-4 encoder, it's also got good reviews on Doom9 (good place for DivX info!).

For the TV-in recording part you can use a $50 WinTV card and the Video4Linux drivers. On top of that you need an audio-video capture application that can use encoders such as Xvid and Lame to encode to MPEG-4 (video) and MP3 (audio). I use NVrec. If you try the NVrec suite, use the DIVX4rec app (with the Xvid library instead of divx4linux which isn't maintained anymore). On my P-III 500MHz I can compress 29.97 Hz (NTSC) 320x240 in real-time to 800 kbit/s (video) + 80 kbit/s (audio). It takes about 5 hours to make a one-pass encoding of a DVD, so with a faster CPU it's probably possible to do real-time de-interlacing and encoding of 640x480 video.

A drawback is that NVrec is a command-line app for recording, I'm working on a patch for real-time preview on Matrox G400 TV-out. Or if you have a fast enough computer you might be able to run mplayer on the file as it is being recorded. This would allow for Tivo-like pause and resume. It might be a problem with AVI files from NVrec though since I don't think they're streamable.

Now, to put all of this together you need some kind of control application. That's not really that hard to write compared to all the other pieces (mplayer, xvid, nvrec). I've been working on one for the last couple of months, and have an alpha version that is usuable. It only supports the Matrox G400 for TV-out, and is a little crude, but it works good enough that I have it hooked up to my TV for everyday use. It's controllable by a remote control (see Lirc), using a very simple text-menu system to view tv, play avi/mpeg/mp3/dvd, record tv-in and rip DVD's. I'm getting ready to put it up on Sourceforge as Freevo within the next couple of weeks.

The application is written in Python which is great for stuff like this. Once the basic stuff is done, it might be cool to make a plugin architecture where you could interface to other stuff. For instance, with OSD (on screen display), it is easy to add things like new mail notification while you're watching TV. Or new Slashdot headlines, ICQ chat notif, phone caller ID interface, www control, etc. And, of course, an interface to some kind of tv-guide.

I haven't really found any other complete applications like this. Not that I've looked that hard, I'm always looking for an excuse to write software. mplayer might end up with all these feaures eventually, it is improving at an incredible rate at the moment.

>> For some reason, I always drop WAY too many frames with every Linux video capture program I use.

I think it isn't bttv problem. For a very long time there simply wasn't any good capture program for Linux, now there is. You can try NVrec or ffmpeg . It is possible to capture 320x240 25 fps movie on K6-2 333 (with NVrec). Good luck!

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 article claims that a program "claiming to be a Gameboy emulator for PalmOS" is really a virus. This isn't true. The program (Liberty) in question is quite real, although shareware. The "virus" (really just a trojan) is a different program which claims to convert the shareware version to the registered version. Read about it here

I stumbled upon this client/server implementation recently. Haven't tested it out, but judging from the page it should do very well over ethernet..

http://www.ee.up.ac.za/~justin/bttv/