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You are afflicted by a task of supporting morons. Your position is thus understandable; 'nuff said.

For non-morons, however, a desktop switcher is neat, and I also miss it in modern versions of Windows. Back in Windows 3.0 days, there was a BigDesk application which I used with BackMenu to make the interface a bit similar to that on X desktops. The 1991 version of those combined utilities can be downloaded as backdesk, if you've still got a windows 3.x box around...

Incidentally, for a real trip down memory lane (and assuming you have something running Windows 386, which pre-dated Windows 3.0), install Aporia on it. In 1990 you could have an interface like Windows 95 or OS/2 WPS on a 640kB machine!

You are afflicted by a task of supporting morons. Your position is thus understandable; 'nuff said.

For non-morons, however, a desktop switcher is neat, and I also miss it in modern versions of Windows. Back in Windows 3.0 days, there was a BigDesk application which I used with BackMenu to make the interface a bit similar to that on X desktops. The 1991 version of those combined utilities can be downloaded as backdesk, if you've still got a windows 3.x box around...

Incidentally, for a real trip down memory lane (and assuming you have something running Windows 386, which pre-dated Windows 3.0), install Aporia on it. In 1990 you could have an interface like Windows 95 or OS/2 WPS on a 640kB machine!

I used to use PB for install scripts back in the mid-90s - a sort of extension of DOS batch language that produced executable code. A bit like VB for DOS, come to think of it - you might have a look at that as well: Powerbatch: ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/batchutil/pwrbt14j.zip VB for DOS: http://www.qbcafe.net/cgi-bin/downloads/download.pl?dlid=capuqWZASbvLM&compiler/qb_compiler=vbdos.zip

Beautiful fractal landscape made from voxels. It was made by Tim Clarke. Yeah, that demo was so great, and so smooth on these old machines. You can get it here : http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=4662 (with a screenshot). Or directly : ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/show/mars10.zip

I used to know procmail like the back of my hand.

My procmailrc (which I stopped using FWIW) is almost 400 lines at its last incantation. Sure, after all those hours learning the syntax, and after adapting Timo's http://lipas.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/proctips.html (great page BTW) procmail testing scripts to work on my computer I could indeed do pretty much anything with my email. Procmail is also pretty much bug free (I heard that *every* single C library call has its return values checked for all possible error code values).

But the point is: procmail is a "email scripting language", whose syntax is a disgrace by any standard, and simply too cumbersome get started with it. Too many small gotchas to learn.

Everybody does email, the market is huge. Can't we just have good mail programs that can be configured to do what we want? Why do I need to write a program to do it?

And if I am going to write programs to do it, why learn a specialised dedicated (IMHO) disgracefully ugly syntax? Doing that through a python or ruby library would be the proper way to go. A bastard child of sendmail and awk is not the way to go.

Take a look at this nice video conversion table. You will see that while 720x480 is a workable approximation of ntsc resolution, it is not exactly the same.

For most practical purposes, ntsc is approx 711x486. Video captured at 720x480 is indeed having some black pixels on the sides, and is missing a total of 6 lines from top and/or bottom.

This all depends on what sampling frequency you are using for digitizing video of course, slightly different sampling frequency results in the often used 640x480 resolution.

Schoolbell has a calendar component (schoolbell is a subset of the code for Schooltool, a school administration server being developed with $$ from Mark Shuttleworth). It could be the free-server end of what you want (you said you didn't want a server that cost anything; I assume a free one is okay).

SchoolBell allows users to manage their personal calendars, group calendars and calendars for resources, e.g., rooms, projectors, etc, via a web interface, or using an iCalendar compliant client such as Mozilla calendar or iCal.

You can:

1. create users, groups and resources through web forms or bulk import (in CSV format);
2. view and edit calendars for each user, group or resource using an ICal client;
3. use the web interface to manage user and group calendars;

Once you've got your calendars in ICal format, there are a number of other tools that can help you manage them, such as evolution for users, or pcal to output calendars as postscript.

The linked article doesn't mention it, but the SVCD (Super Video CD) format was created in 1998 for the same reasons. Here is a good overview of why and how SVCD was created (some excerpts follow...)

Super Video CD (aka SVCD, Super VCD or Chaoji VCD) is an enhancement to Video CD that was developed by a Chinese government-backed committee of manufacturers and researchers, partly to sidestep DVD technology royalties and partly to create pressure for lower DVD player and disc prices in China. The final SVCD spec, set by the China National Committee of Recording Standards, was announced in September 1998, winning out over C-Cube's China Video Disc (CVD) and HQ-VCD (from the developers of the original Video CD).

As always, the background story is a bit more complicated than how it appears in brief summaries like the above. First of all, why was there such a big interest in creating a new CD-based video disc format for China, at the time when the rest of the world was already preparing to accept DVD as the "next generation" digital video delivery format?

It all comes down to the following three reasons:

• The prevailing success of the original (White Book) Video CD format...
• The political objectives of the Chinese government...
• The "luxury" status of DVD...

FYI, spamd is installed by default on pair.com accounts; you can call spamc from procmail. I spent most of yesterday afternoon setting it up, along with Spam Assassin and a nifty server side IMAP filtering... It's nothing revolutionary, but it's satisfying to have it setup ;)

Spam Assassin has bayes, but I've been getting 99% so far without it; expert rules work amazingly well, no need for learning. Methodology is the best way to foil spam. Have at least two/three email addresses: one public address (minimizing public exposure), one email as default reply-to (except for mailing lists) and optionally one address for close friends only. You can keep a low spam threshold then without much to worry about...

The idea of sorting the spam folder by score by injecting the rating into the subject (from this article on Reverse Spam Filtering) works wonders and it's easy to setup with procmail. If things get worse, I'll most likely be setting up temporary addresses that expire within weeks (for website contact & feedback), or a password system with password and explanation posted with contact details on my homepage)... it's almost as good as GPG/PGP for this purpose without the inconveniences for the other party.

I actually look forward to getting spam now!! hehe

>I am looking for the new RAH/Piers Anthony/Roger Zelazny/Weis & Hickman etc..., of the world. I have read just about everything I could find on King Aurthur, all of the Dragon Lance stuff and all or most of the 'old school' hardcore. I don't know, I have maybe 4000 books at home, most of them Scifi/SF.

Personally, I dislike the Weis & Hickman novels, especially the DragonLance series. They read like a script of a D&D campaign, they put too much emphasis on "special effects" while neglecting the basics (like character development, internal consistency, etc.)

Piers Anthony had some very interesting ideas but I felt that the series that I read quickly became repetetive or degenerated into punfests. Maybe it was intentional but I found it tiresome.

Zelazly is a different matter. I read most of his books and liked most of what I read. I especially enjoyed "Eye of Cat".

>I am looking for some new stuff. I haven't bought any kind of book other than techie for more than 2 years. I just keep reading the ones that I have over and over and over. What are you guys reading? If it is a series, please list ALL of the books in it!

It is hard to give a recommendation, as our tastes differ, but I'll tell you what works for me.

Start with the familiar then expand and branch out.

You've mentioned Zelazny. Have you read his non-Amber books as well? Some of them are as good or even better.

Most readers are familiar with the hard SF of Larry Niven. However, he also wrote some interesting fantasy stories (try "The Time of the Warlock", etc.) Being a hard SF writer, he does not cut corners in making his universes internally consistent.

You've probably read Asimov. Why don't you try his popular science books? Even though they contain only the "science" part (without the "fiction"), they are still a most enjoyable reading material. And if you happen to learn something from them, consider it an added bonus. There's a list here

Also, there are several good authors that wrote some SF/fantasy but it is not their only (or even main) focus.
Read some of the SF writings of Ray Bradbury (start with "The Martian Chronicles") and if you like his style read his other fiction.
Try the same approach with Kurt Vonnegut's work.

Here's how challenge-response works:

1. If the sender is on the whitelist, accept the email. (Spammers can forge their addresses, but they then have to figure out who to forge as... and anti-fraud measures make this dangerous).
2. If the subject line includes a "password" set by the receiver, accept the message.
3. Otherwise, reply back to the sender a message that's configurable by the receiver-to-be, saying that they need to include the password in the subject line & here's how to figure it out. Spammers won't get the message, or won't read the responses. Real users will include the password.
4. Include various measures to prevent email loops: detect null senders, vacation messages, and remember who you sent replies to (and after a few tries, start dropping them).

This has already been suggested as a Mozilla mail enchancement, as Mozilla bug 187044. If you like the idea, by all means vote for it at Mozilla and/or encourage other email programs to add it.

The danger with filters is that even if they're based on good statistics or heuristics, they're just that - statistics and hueristics - and they can sometimes mistakenly throw away valuable email. A password email system, however, is deterministic - in particular, it always lets in email from those you trust and those able to respond to your challenge. I think challenge-response email passwords, combined with filters (which wouldn't have to be as selective), could go a long way to controlling spam.

> but NTSC pixels are not square. They are 1:1.33 rectangles

Yeah, Jukka Aho's A Quick Guide to Digital Video Resolution and Aspect Ratio Conversions page goes into this.

And then there is this gem, which shows what anamorphic really looks like.

Cheers

From the SVCD faq

• The political objectives of the Chinese government. It
  was decided that DVD - while undoubtedly a good technical specification as
  such - is all too tightly controlled by DVD Consortium, a closed body of
  foreign companies. The Chinese government did not quite like the idea that the
  domestic home electronics industry would have to pay royalties to foreign
  companies in order to manufacture next generation video disc products for
  Chinese people. It was calculated that creating a royalty-free, full-fledged
  video disc format on their own would be a major long-term win for the domestic
  industry. Moreover, this was also considered an issue of national pride; an
  opportunity to flex some technical muscle, and to send a clear signal to the
  outside world that China has enough critical mass to be able to ignore foreign
  entertainment standards it does not want to conform to. (Chinese politicians
  and researchers are now keen to celebrate SVCD as the first international
  high-tech standard that has been developed in China.) Finally, it was also
  thought that a Chinese video disc standard would help in pressuring the DVD
  Consortium to keep the licensing fees down, at least for the Chinese market.

This is a copy and paste of a response made to a comment I made a while back, it really opened my eyes as to *why* chinese are so into open source. I believe that Chinese frugalness (as explained by the below re-post) is to blame for the rampant piracy of The Two Towers.

Before I get to the repost i'd like to add in my own link and two cents from the SVCD Faq I read.

• The political objectives of the Chinese government. It was decided that DVD - while undoubtedly a good technical specification as such - is all too tightly controlled by DVD Consortium, a closed body of foreign companies. The Chinese government did not quite like the idea that the domestic home electronics industry would have to pay royalties to foreign companies in order to manufacture next generation video disc products for Chinese people. It was calculated that creating a royalty-free, full-fledged video disc format on their own would be a major long-term win for the domestic industry. Moreover, this was also considered an issue of national pride; an opportunity to flex some technical muscle, and to send a clear signal to the outside world that China has enough critical mass to be able to ignore foreign entertainment standards it does not want to conform to. (Chinese politicians and researchers are now keen to celebrate SVCD as the first international high-tech standard that has been developed in China.) Finally, it was also thought that a Chinese video disc standard would help in pressuring the DVD Consortium to keep the licensing fees down, at least for the Chinese market.

Cool huh? It's a part of their culture folks. How can Hollywood fight an entire culture of 4 billion people?

The only thing that strikes us Americans as odd is the communist goverment that is in power there. As geeks we are appalled that they would dare install a firewall to protect their people, which in our eyes is a violation of their free speech, but this is what their society just does. How do you convince this culture of 4 billion people that what they are doing is not being frugal but stealing

It would begin at a goverment level, and the police would have to crack down on the street vendors that bootleg it. Will it happen? I doubt it, from the above snippet of the SVCD faq I bet the goverment is celebrating yet another victory.

There's a huge amount of open-source NLP resources and software for many languages on the web.

• Thought Treasure - a bilingual database of 25000 concepts including 55000 English and French words and phrases. Compiles under Linux and Windows

• Leeds University NLP Research Group (mail webmaster re broken links to software)

• Japan's ICOT/5th Generation Computer Project archive of free software

• Linguistics Toolset at Vaasa University

Last but not least:

• A well-annotated collection of NLP links including NLP, NLU, Speech*, MLT, Fuzzy*, MLPs, SVMs, etc

Will.

And because of this, the Chinese government sponsored the development of a competing royalty-free standard (SVCD) which, along with the existing video-CD (VCD) format, are now de-facto standards for video distribution in Asia.

So far the other open standard produced by China has been pretty good SVCD I've used it for music videos and DVD rips. The quality is pretty good considering the low bit rate, but the lower resolution helps there. The only thing that sucks about it is the DVD players that support will only support 2/3 of the standard. It'll have the video and 2 audio tracks, but no subtitles or vice versa.

There was a second format called CVD for china video disc didn't take off outside of China and still isn't that big there AFIAK.

Sheesh! I hope that was posted to alt.warlord. That would be a pretty long signature.

epenguin.org - Believe It!

• it jeopardy quoted by default, and there was no way to override this setting
• it posted as HTML by default, and the only thing you could configure was which font you want to use, not "whether or not there is a defined font in the first place"

Etc. I tried to fight this by cutting & pasting my messages so that they'd be top-quoted -- The Way The Good Lord Intended -- but it was much too much of a pain in the ass, and being the only one in the company doing it just made me look funny. Likewise my selection of a monospace font -- it was like tilting at windmills.

Yes, it's sad that not everyone has been brought into the culture in such a way that old netiquette would be honored, but that's just how it works when a subculture gets promoted to the mainstream. Yes, Microsoft could have made it easier to configure Outlook -- and to be fair, Outlook Express *is* a nice email client on the Mac (I just wasn't allowed to use it), and newer versions than this one ('98?) might be more flexible) -- and there's really no defence for their wholesale scuttling of all but their way of quoting messages. But what's done is done: as long as I can keep using Pine or Mutt, and read most of the mail coming to me, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. Times have moved on...

There are several things you can look for when filtering spam.

Personally, I use procmail - which will work with whatever mail reader you use, so long as your ISP lets you use it...

This site is a good starting point on learning to use procmail for spam filtering.

As they say, "Procmail is your friend."

Why deal with this whole issue?

Setup a password-protected inbox, and you will have just a few spams in a whole year. Simple filtering will never be able to provide this level of protection.

http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/spamfoil.html

It works *really* well!

This solution only works if you have a unix computer delivering to your mailbox. However, if you do, it virtually eliminates spam.

The solution is to put a password system on your mailbox.

You set up filters on your email so that for the people you know and mailing lists, they can email you as before. The rest of the world will get a canned response saying that they have to send the email again with the password of 'xxxxx' in the subject.

Since spammers almost never send a valid email address, they never see this email, and so the spam disappears back into the ether, and I didn't have to use potentially expensive modem time to download the spam to check to see if I wanted it. (And I didn't have to participate in a global spam checking service that doesn't really work 100% anyway).

Once in a while (2 times in the last 6 months) you'll get a spammer stupid enough to actually resend the spam but with the password. However, since they are sending it by hand the return headers are valid! *yay* Instant retribution!

Here's the link:
http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/spamfoil.html

My spam rate was 10-20 spams a day. After putting this into place, I get maybe 1 a month sneaking through on top of some other filter match.


I can't recommend this enough!

-Fred

I was getting around 20+ spams a day. (Oh! If only I could have found time to use all that Porn or viagra or money.) I'd had enough. Regular mail filters didn't work, and complaining through spamcop was useless. After implementing this password, I've seen 3 spams in 5 months on the same account. The rest were trashed.

I stumbled across Dr. Salvi's page here: http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/proctips.html.

Basically, the way it works is that when I receive email that I haven't explicitly approved, the procmail filter sees that the password is not in the subject, and sends it back to its sender with the password stuffed into the subject. They are asked to resend the email. This time, the filter accepts the email for me to read. Since most spam comes from faked email addresses the spammers never see this. Of those that do, only 1 was stupid enough to actually modify the subject by hand and forward it on to me. funnily enough, I then had *her* email address, which I promptly submitted to any email list I could find for a day or two...*evil grin*

For people I *want* to communicate with, I add them to my email filter. I've got around 60 exemptions or so including mailing lists.

It won't work for everyone as it's fairly tricky to set up, and if you get it wrong you will annoy the hell out of any mailing list you post to, but if you can I strongly recommend you do use this approach.

I'm afraid I don't know any of the details, but I think you might have much more success (that is, "do what you're looking for") by recording the data as Super Video CD (which I think is also known as Chaoji VCD) ... a company called Amoisonic makes a SuperVCD recorder for about $1200 / $1300 ... And I think you can encode them on your PC legally. Potentially useful links:

http://www.licensing.philips.com/partner/data/sl00 811.pdf
http://www.uwasa.fi/~f76998/video/svcd/overview/
http://www.amoisonic.com/vdr/VDR2000.html
http://www.twocom.net/dvdvcdmp3/vdr2000.html

The essence of it is that there are people that have vigorously strong positions on some peculiar issues and that there is little point to trying to debate the issues even if you think you have a rational position and can debate rationally.

There are enough people who have strongly irrational positions, whether due to mental instability (suggested in the essay, and likely, in my view, for "crackpot" theories) or (I would add) due to having strong emotional feelings surrounding the issue, and likely to be true for situations such as the Abortion debate, matters in the Middle East, and anything relating to Nazi Germany.

In effect, this provides a corollary to Godwin's Law that topics involving large numbers of deaths and/or outright wars evoke such strong emotion that many find it hard to detach themselves from the issue so as to discuss the issue rationally.

And if the matter is "insane" to begin with (e.g. - as with most "conspiracy theories"), there is no "rational" side to start with...

If they haven't included Super Video CD recording on CDR media in the unit then they've missed out on a golden opportunity.

This format is huge in the far east, effectively being a sort of "poor man's recordable DVD", and companies like Shinco, Mico and Amoisonic are gearing up to market SVCD player/recorders over here (they all play MP3 as well). If the ZapStation doesn't handle SVCD, it'll soon lose market share to those that do.

These chips have a multitude of bugs (quote from /usr/src/linux/drivers/block/cmd640.c - "these chips are basically f*cked by design") all of which could cause serious data loss. I even complained to my motherboard manufacturer who asked what video card I had (S3 864) and dismissed my complaint saying that all PC hardware around including that specific chip has serious bugs...

Then there's the UltraSparc bug that causes problems if you run it in 64-bit mode...

I can't say I've stopped worrying, but I don't see there's much that can be done to fix the situation... :(

If you want to help, then PLEASE check out the Linux Documentation Project. There is a lot of documentation already being written, and some of it is excellent. The last thing we need is to have a lot of people spending time on duplicated effort.