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Here's an OK GUI for Octave that is still maintained: Octave UPM where UPM = Technical University of Madrid. Don't worry, the website is in Spanish but the program has an English version.

But about all these slapped-on GUIs, the Octave FAQ says

None of the GUIs for Octave that have been developed thus far are part of Octave and there is a reason for it. All of them fail at a very important point, integration with Octave. They treat Octave as a foreign black box using pipes for communication, an approach that is bound to eventually fail. This includes QtOctave (now abandoned and incompatible with newer versions of Octave) [...] it will never be stable

So I'm really looking forward to an integrated solution.

I never did get my masters, my graduate grades where poor (did half of a masters and got excellent grades there though). I have never had problems landing jobs, 28 years old and earning over $100k.

Having a diploma shows you know how to read, it shows you know how to learn - these are important aspects of a company. Having experience working is also great, but fact is, every time you switch job you are in for a period of relearning - everything they do will be different from whatever you have done earlier.

First problem anyone needs to get past is being sorted out before interviews, writing resumes is a science, but it isn't that hard, there are excellent resources on how to do this, but in my experience, have a generic CV you attach to a personalized e-mail. In the e-mail write why you think you are good for them, but also very important, why you should work for them in terms of what you expect. Keep the CV short and to the point, I've been through hiring people and christ some people attach a lot of meaningless shit.

When you have landed the interview, be prepared! There are a lot of standard questions you will be asked:
http://datsi.fi.upm.es/~frosal/docs/25mdq.html
those 25 suggestions have served me well through my short career. Never lie during the interview, if you have shortcommings, mention them, tell them how you are aware of them and work on them. Show them you are aware of how business works.

Oh, and make sure you look clean. I know a lot of nerds thinks suits are evil, you don't necessarily have to wear a suit, check up on the dresscode at the company - but looking clean is important, if in doubt a nice shirt worn casually with jeans should be nice and neutral.

Also, Office Space while being exaggerated, does have a few points. Hiding in a cubicle will get you fired, showing you have balls and a meaning will often get you promoted - provided you use them at the right time.

You could print the lines interleved and use an overlay consisting of alternating white and clear horizontal lines. Not very practical though.

This reminds me of R.D. Laing's interesting book Knots , where he uses indention to clarify structure.

This is the minimum of what's needed in an office suite

Spreadsheets

graphs

presentations

a single-file container format so exchange is easy. OpenDocument has it. HTML and LaTeX fails it;

* a user interface that regular users can migrate to. OpenDocument has it. HTML has it. LaTeX fails it;

* macro language (admitedly not standardised in OpenDocument). OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails it;

* integration with other office formats such as OleDB datasources. OpenDocument has it. LaTeX fails.

Pah! What is this? We aren't just some "other people"--we're the smartest, most creative, fashionable, and beautiful people on the planet. Certainly we make butt-scratching troglodytes out of the average Win/IE user. In my humble estimation, then, we Mac users are more entitled than anyone to copyright protection. The Copyright Office should be ashamed.

This makes no sense. Don't those boneheads realize that Win/IE users aren't likely to create anything of value? In my experience, the creative ones tend to be Mac users. And everyone knows that no self-respecting Mac user would touch IE with a fifty-foot feather.

Bah. The whole thing makes me sick.

...does not make you a chicken. And installing OS X on your PC does not make you a Mac user. We real Mac users still won't let you into our parties. But don't worry--you'll always have your old friends to hang out with.

It's no secret that Microsoft, and its customers, don't have quite the same refined aesthetic sensibilities as other operating systems, and their customers.

Apple's demographic is real people with real lives, as opposed to dweebs like you.

Don't kid yourself, PC boy. We Mac users aren't dweebs like you.

Here's a rather low-level one: Ciao Make.

Spain's CLIP Laboratories at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid have extensive experience (perhaps the best in the world) in those fields and have produced an elegant and extensible FOSS logic programming system, Ciao Prolog, that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux/UNIX/BSD. It includes emacs extensions, extensive WWW and XML libraries, a documentation system, and much, much more. It's incredible to see what skilled people can achieve when they focus their efforts over many years.

Microsoft has realized the significance of these technologies and is also quietly beginning to use them in their research laboratories.

Spain's CLIP Laboratories at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid have extensive experience (perhaps the best in the world) in those fields and have produced an elegant and extensible FOSS logic programming system, Ciao Prolog, that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux/UNIX/BSD. It includes emacs extensions, extensive WWW and XML libraries, a documentation system, and much, much more. It's incredible to see what skilled people can achieve when they focus their efforts over many years.

Microsoft has realized the significance of these technologies and is also quietly beginning to use them in their research laboratories.

Common baby, run Linspire!

Please, please, there must be a sane way to query data from a highly normalized database.

I was about to say SQL is like COBOL, but SQL seems to be even more persistent so perhaps it's not as flawed.

Summer blend of gasoline?? What is this? Never heard of seasonal blends for gas....

Here's an explanation.The difference seems tobe the number of hydrogen-carbon bonds. By increasing these by a third for winter and reducing these for summer, the fuel compensates for the difference in operating temperatures.

Of course, this does lead me to ask: Do you really need such different fuels in places like California/Florida/Texas?

% by weight; gasoline is a distilled mixture with M=0.10..0.12 kg/mol, Tb=300..440 K (10% and 90% boiled), pv(38 C)=60 kPa for the summer blend and pv(40 C)=90 kPa for the winter blend, 90..100 motor octane number, and sulphur content

Having been involved with space work a bit the software aspect of the Beagle lander is quite interesting - the reason I know about it is we used the same compiler on the Galileo signal generator project.

ADA is still very popular amongst the European space companies and agencies (for a good reason I think) and particularly the ADA95 Ravenscar profile which gives a miniscule runtime the actual runtime is only about 4-5k which is pretty good considering that contains everything you need to execute the ADA code including tasking.

There is another opensource attempt at a ravenscar compiler called openravenscar funded by ESA here - for Sparc and Intel platforms . Ravenscar is basically a profile that removes the more complex features of the ADA languages to give a mathetmatically provable scheduling - so you can always cater for your worst case scenario. Such small executives are neccessary due to the prohibitive cost of rad hard EEPROMs as most missions have some sort of inflight reprogramming requirements. I think they are using the ERC32 processor which again, is an open source processor, along with its replacement LEON, you can even download the vhdl for the Sparc based leon here

Heres hoping Beagle makes it through the Martian atmosphere and takes some pictures of little green men.

The ZDNet article on the protest says that "More than 600 Web sites are to take part" in the website blackout.

Another of their articles mentions "hundreds of websites"

Is it just my imagination, or is "more than 600" a slightly crap phrase to describe 2953 websites?

The list of websites that've shut down is here (two and a half thousand sites so far)

My site is shut-down.
Others include KDE, Gimp, gnu-darwin, GNU-savannah, and most of the French and German linux sites.

List of participating site can be found here.

Join in, and contact your MEPs if you are a citizen of an EU member country.

There's already a full operative open-source voting system: JFreeVote
Spanish-only web page, sorry.

GNOME FTP Sites This site is mirrored at:

• United States and Canada

  ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Gnome
  ftp://ftp.rpmfind.net/linux/gnome.org/
  ftp://ftp.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome/
  ftp://ftp.twoguys.org/GNOME
  ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/mirrors/site/ftp.gnome.org / ub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp3.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome
  ftp://archive.progeny.com/GNOME/

• Australia

  ftp://planetmirror.com/pub/gnome

• Europe

  ftp://ftp.easynet.nl/mirror/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.unina.it/pub/linux/GNOME
  ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/gnome.org
  ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME
  ftp://ftp.codefactory.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.dataplus.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.dit.upm.es/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.no.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/X11/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.tr.gnome.org/pub/GNOME

• South America

  ftp://linux.cem.itesm.mx/pub/mirrors/gnome.org

GNOME FTP Sites This site is mirrored at:

• United States and Canada

  ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Gnome
  ftp://ftp.rpmfind.net/linux/gnome.org/
  ftp://ftp.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome/
  ftp://ftp.twoguys.org/GNOME
  ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/mirrors/site/ftp.gnome.org / ub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp3.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome
  ftp://archive.progeny.com/GNOME/

• Australia

  ftp://planetmirror.com/pub/gnome

• Europe

  ftp://ftp.easynet.nl/mirror/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.unina.it/pub/linux/GNOME
  ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/gnome.org
  ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME
  ftp://ftp.codefactory.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.dataplus.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.dit.upm.es/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.no.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/X11/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.tr.gnome.org/pub/GNOME

• South America

  ftp://linux.cem.itesm.mx/pub/mirrors/gnome.org

Last updated Wed Jun 26 03:18:01 2002 from our mirror database (webmaster@gnome.org).

Karma whore alert! Please mod down, and mod this anonymous post up!

archive.progeny.com (US or Canada)
ftp.twoguys.org (US or Canada)
ftp3.sourceforge.net (US or Canada)
ftp.rpmfind.net (US or Canada)
ftp.sourceforge.net (US or Canada)
ftp.cse.buffalo.edu (US or Canada)
ftp.yggdrasil.com (US or Canada)
planetmirror.com (Australia)
ftp.sunet.se (Europe)
ftp.dataplus.se (Europe)
ftp.easynet.nl (Europe)
ftp.unina.it (Europe)
ftp.belnet.be (Europe)
ftp.codefactory.se (Europe)
ftp.tr.gnome.org (Europe)
fr.rpmfind.net (Europe)
ftp.acc.umu.se (Europe)
ftp.no.gnome.org (Europe)
ftp.dit.upm.es (Europe)
fr2.rpmfind.net (Europe)
linux.cem.itesm.mx (South America)

archive.progeny.com (US or Canada)
ftp.twoguys.org (US or Canada)
ftp3.sourceforge.net (US or Canada)
ftp.rpmfind.net (US or Canada)
ftp.sourceforge.net (US or Canada)
ftp.cse.buffalo.edu (US or Canada)
ftp.yggdrasil.com (US or Canada)
planetmirror.com (Australia)
ftp.sunet.se (Europe)
ftp.dataplus.se (Europe)
ftp.easynet.nl (Europe)
ftp.unina.it (Europe)
ftp.belnet.be (Europe)
ftp.codefactory.se (Europe)
ftp.tr.gnome.org (Europe)
fr.rpmfind.net (Europe)
ftp.acc.umu.se (Europe)
ftp.no.gnome.org (Europe)
ftp.dit.upm.es (Europe)
fr2.rpmfind.net (Europe)
linux.cem.itesm.mx (South America)

Without DGPS or WAAS you will not get readings with an accuracy of less than 5 meters more than about 60% of the time. (You could spend 5 years researching and understanding the statistics related to GPS units). Most units are specified to be within 15 meters 95% of the time. They do NOT accuratly tell you when they are NOT within that tolerance. They may give a confidence level of one type or another, but those again, are based on statistics and are not 100% accurate.
With DGPS you can have accuracies within the range you want if your in an area that can receive DGPS signals. A DGPS receiver will cost you a few hundred dollars, and the GPS you use has to be able to use DGPS information. (A DGPS capable GPS receiver will NOT pickup the DGPS signals, rather it needs an external receiver to get the signal, but it will process the data.) (You may find an exception to this, I expect it will be outside your price range by a wide margin).
WAAS might work for you, but then again, it might not. If you on the East, or West coast you will have a higher probability, but even then it has been rather spotty for many people and is really intended for aircraft (significantly above ground) usage. The satelites are too close to the horizon for most people and are blocked by ground clutter. Optimally WAAS should get you within 3 meters, but it might only increase the accuracy of the estimated error.
Note: Getting readings that indicate within a couple meters of each other for a period of days might get you an average location with a low margin of error, but again, it might still be WRONG. Some methods of determining location are known for being inaccurate but consistant. I understand ( but do not know the specifics) that Loran is known for this. In a specific location you can expect a VERY similar reading for the same spot in the future, even if the reading is off by a wide margin from reality it will be consistantly off at that location. GPS doesn't do this significantly. With the satelites moving at a high rate of speed and various objects reflecting the signal depending on the current location of the satelites the error will not necessarily be consistant from day to day, or hour to hour.
(On the other hand, the orbits do repeat and shift slightly over a period of 24hrs so a reading at 4 o'clock today will have similar satelite coverage tomorrow at 3:55, or 4:05 (not sure which off hand).
If you want more stable results try to aquire your data at night. A significant margin of error is introduced by the ionisphere and this is reduced at night.

All of the above is generic GPS information....

Now, the reason I suggested GARMIN, GARMIN GPS units support a mode which allows you to extract data required for RINEX processing. The programs which extract this data are using undocumented functions but they do work. (see: This website) RINEX data can be post-processed and combined with external data (freely available after a delay of a few days generally) which can be used to get very accurate results. I believe the estimated accuracy for a GARMIN unit with RINEX based post processing is about 1/2 meter.

The program to collect the RINEX processable data can be run on a laptop or PocketPC connected to almost any Garmin GPS (from the older GPS12, to the newer etrex)

It seems we are witnessing the first complete implementation of the Electric Monk

All Software Engineers should have a look at Correctness by Construction: Better can also be Cheaper from Crosstalk the Journal of Defence Software Engineering. It contrasts the usual C approach with one using a really tight but powerful subset (SPARK) of an already pretty tight language, Ada

* SPARK code was found to have only 10 percent of the residual errors of full Ada; Ada was found to have only 10 percent of the residual errors of code written in C. This is an interesting counter to those who maintain that choice of programming language does not matter, and that critical code can be written correctly in any language : The claim may be true in principle but clearly is not commonly achieved in practice.

This isn't just an anecdote: there are documented facts. The results (for the problem domain of aircraft avionics and large systems) may not be applicable to the normal b2b and gamezware - but then again, they might. Have a look at the stuff in bold later in this post.

It's not a magic bullet : from the same article:

In December 1999 CrossTalk, David Cook provided a well-reasoned historical analysis of programming language development and considered the role languages play in the software development process. The article was valuable because it showed that programming language developments are not sufficient to ensure success; however, it would be dangerous to conclude from this that they are not necessary for success. Cook rightly identifies other issues such as requirements capture, specifications, and verification and validation (V&V) that need to be addressed.

But the real kicker, one that should cause everyone to sit up and take notice, is this:

• Code quality improved by a factor of 10 over industry norms for DO-178B Level A software.
• Productivity improved by a factor of four over previous comparable programs.
• Development costs were half that typical for non safety-critical code
• With re-use and process maturity, there was a further productivity improvement of four on the C27J airlifter program.

One more thing: the SPARK and similar RAVENSCAR ( pdf, HTML version here) subsets of Ada-95 are just that : (proper)subsets that just omit certain language constructs. Write to the profile, and the code is compileable by any Ada-95 compiler, like the downloadable Free GNU version GNAT 3.14p (though commercial users might want the latest-and-greatest non-free version 3.15a. And the ORK (Open Ravenscar Kernel) is, as the name implies, an Open Source Kernel for reliable real-time embedded systems.

Better, Cheaper, Faster, Open-Source with Free-as-in-Beer downloadable compilers. IMHO worth at least investigating, even if you decide Microsoft's latest language-du-jour is more appropriate for your situation. YMMV, and COBOL, C++, Assembler, C#, Java or even VB might be better in your case. But worth a look.

'Index of Documentation for People Interested in Writing and/or Understanding the Linux Kernel'

http://jungla.dit.upm.es/~jmseyas/linux/kernel/hac kers-docs.html

This should keep you going for a few day's :)

Index of Documentation for People Interested in Writing and/or Understanding the Linux Kernel >>
http://jungla.dit.upm.es/~jmseyas/linux/kernel/hac kers-docs.html

The info was compiled by Juan-Mariano de Goyeneche after folks on the kernel list asked the same questions time & time again.

When was the last time you read about a buffer exploit in Lasso or the TCP/IP stack resulting in an serious compromise in Mac OS 9?

Oh, right about the time of this message to bugtraq...

The FBI's job is to enforce the law...Just keep in mind, the folks who made the law are to blame, not the folks mandated to enforce it.

Sorry, but "I was only following orders" didn't cut it at the Nazi war crimes trials and doesn't cut it now.

Separation of powers has a purpose; legislatures can (in theory) prevent bad laws from passive, executives can (in theory) prevent bad laws from being enforced, and judiciaries can (in theory) prevent anyone from being convicted under bad laws.

None of them gets to use the "look what you made me do" excuse.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

free of charge

widely used (since July 1993)

yeah!, works under Linux (recommended RH 7) and there are versions for Solaris & IRIX

Not only Teleconferencing (Video + Audio), also Shared WhiteBoard, Slides, Chat, ...

Several distinguishing features over standard videoconferencing

ISABEL was also mentioned here a long time ago: Ask Slashdot: Can Linux do Video Conferencing?

It was developed at the school where I studied (Telecomm. Engineering School, Madrid: etsit.upm.es) and some people I admire contributed at it.
Isn't it a project to be proud of?
Hope you like it

--
ACid

That is what is so good about free and open source software, why rebuild something from scratch and pay 2.8 million when you can take something that is already built and make the changes you want? This does require you to be able to program of course because you have to be able to read and understand what the open source author is doing in his source code, or you could find some really great documention. For Linux there are quite a few documents that explain how it works other OSS projects may be harder to learn...

http://jungla.dit. upm.es/~jmseyas/linux/kernel/hackers-docs.html

The concept of Open Source is to reduce the cost of developement by having many people helping you build it. The chicken and the egg problem comes in (again) when you have to get developer interested in helping your project, you have to have something already coded to get them interested, and to help speed up developement you have to have more people helping you. ;)

You make a very, very good point. Isn't there a way the Linux and *BSD kernel could be patched to disallow execution from a stack? I know there's plenty of memory protection and such in there, so can't we put in one more layer of protection?

So, let's just change chips. :-) Of course, that's hardly enough. Can't we clear up a lot of these exploits by fixing the stack? The answer is yes, we could clear up a lot of them. But that sadly, it's not going to cure the class of problem completely.

Why should stack and data pages be executable? Why are any pages that are executable also writable? Well, there are a couple reasons for that. Certainly it hasn't always been that way. But the signal trampoline code from gcc(1) makes this very attractive, and it's a bit annoying to change. You still have to deal with issues of mmap(2), which can ask for pages with any access bits it cares for.

And let's not pretend please that C is the issue here. It's not. You're diddling the instruction set. I don't care if you used a Pascal compiler. You could still diddle it. Then again, there's something to be said for having a cleaner library. See the end of this missive for a simple, elegant, and effective approach to one class of these problems in C by someone famously inclined toward the simple and elegant.

What I strongly suggest that anyone interested in this do is read existing literature on this. Yes, it's work, but it's really, really good for you. Start with the paper StackGuard: Automatic Adaptive Detection and Prevention of Buffer-Overflow Attacks. And yes, the buffer overrun in the version of Perl referenced by this paper has long since been fixed. But then read about how to defeat this. You can also check out disabling an executable stack on Solaris, and why this isn't a cure-all.

Even with a non-executable stack, you can still be bitten. Several such exploits have appeared on bugtrak. Here's one. The short explanation for why this isn't a panacea is that if I push a pointer to "/bin/sh" and a (char *)0 on the stack in a place right before an system(3) (well, or or execl(3) or execve(2) or whatever) then it'll still suck to be you. Notice I haven't executed any code that I put on the stack. I just managed to change some of the arguments to existing calls.

Let me put up a copy of some mail from Ted T'so, who said it well:

Well with a non-executable stack most security conscious system administrators will sleep better :) I can guarantee that. (Not too much better as holes always exist but quite a lot).

The advantage of the patch is that it will stop the current set of attacks that take the form of "find buffer overrun in a program", followed by "apply standard toolkit to exploit buffer overrun by putting executable code on the stack".

The disadvantage of the patch is that after we apply, within a few months we will see a new toolkit of the form "corrupt the stack to point the return address into someplace entertaining in libc --- like right before an an execl call in the implementation of popen()."

The danger is people thinking that with this patch, they don't need to worry about finding and fixing buffer overrun bugs in their code....

Here's the promised gem of insight from Dennis:

> ..... If most implementers will ship gets() anyway,
> there's little practical effect to eliminating it from the Standard.

On the other hand, we removed it from our library about a week after the Internet worm. Of course, some couldn't afford to do that.

Dennis