In my case, for what I want to do (anime fansubbing), the existing tools are barely inadequate, and I have patched them up to be adequate.
Ah! I'm not an anime fansubber, but I sometimes wish to subtitle weird Finnish TV programs so that foreigners can make sense of them. =)
So far, I've been perfectly happy with SubStationAlpha wav timing, and VirtualDub's subtitler plugin, OggMux, and one Perl script I wrote to convert.ssa to.srt for OggMux (no idea how well.ogm subtitles actually work, WMP seems to not care and Xine crashes...)
Are there really any tolerable programs for Linux that'd do wav-based subtitling? I know BakaSub, but that didn't work at all last time I tried it and the development seemed to have stopped...
If no one's acting, perhaps I really do get annoyed enough to write my own wav subtitler =)
But I still use linux for manipulating videos. Why? Because freedom is priceless.
But freedom to do anything is nothing without tools to actually do something. =) Linux is nice for a lot of things, but video tools Just Aren't There Yet!
Personally, I use VirtualDub in Windows 98 to capture and edit crap. Not the fanciest program, but perfect for the job and also GPLed. I just wish I had a proper NLE...
Same goes for most of the apps: I value more the fact that I get things actually done than the freedom. Free apps are nice when they actually work (Mozilla, XEmacs, GIMP, GnuCash,...), but, for instance, before Blender was GPLed I still used Blender because the open-source 3D apps just weren't as nice.
...and both quotes are conviniently irrelevant in this case. =)
(And don't know if they are even relevant these days. The ICCCM may or may not be garbage, but at least that is the headache of toolkit developers these days, not the app developers. The second quote is about compiling extensions to the X server; Don't know what's so difficult about it from the user point of view, at least XF86 4.x supports dynamic loading of modules that provide extensions...)
Of course it doesn't. SQL isn't a format. It's a "Structured Query Language". I don't even know what you're trying to do.
Probably something like pg_dump -d which produces a text file with a huge load of CREATE TABLEs and INSERTs and other weird capitalized imperative forms of verbs. I'm fairly certain this kind of feature exists in one form or another for the commercial DBs too, or otherwise they wouldn't be that profitable...
But i was sure EMacs has its own built in movie player:P
Haven't seen a movie player yet, but seeing how TiMidity (software synth MIDI player) got its Emacs interface a year or two after the program was released, I expect the same to happen to XINE, sooner... or... later...
(The timidity-el interface is awesome, by the way. It makes most vi fanatics screeaaaaammm.)
Actually, I found XMMS user interface pretty... odd. The UI itself mimics Winamp in both good and bad - with a clean theme, it's usable. The default skin is horribly dark, though, they should have kept the old one or at least made the "GTK+" theme default.
Yeah, I'd prefer full native user interface more, because the custom GUIs have the tendency to infuriate. I found Rhythmbox, which looks pretty neat on GNOME2 and doesn't do its own theming (And behavior mimics iTunes rather than Winamp), but as it depends on gstreamer it's still somewhat buggy (No app that uses gstreamer can open files that have spaces in the pathname? What the hell? It is year 2003, folks...)
Point 1: Themeing does suck. A while ago I was looking for a music player that would not have any of these idiotic theme things. I couldn't. Finally I found Rhythmbox, but that depends on gstreamer and is thus a little bit unstable. Finally, I settled on keeping XMMS but minimizing the freakin' window and using the "NeXTAMP" theme that doesn't suck as much as most other skins.
Another thing: XINE is excellent, but the GUI does, indeed, suck - thank God both Xine and mplayer have excellent keypress interfaces and Xine's support for LIRC is nice too. Hoping Sinek will improve, it has a better-working GUI with Xine internals, and uses bare GTK+ 2.
And this compares only players! How about the total and utter lack of video editing software? (No, cinelerra is still inadequeate for... um, anything. Either it doesn't work, or isn't documented, says whatever I'm doing is not Supported, or crashes.)
I have extremely high hopes for gstreamer but it's still at 0.5...
Unless Overseer or whatever found a reverse algorithm for MD5,
Actually, there has to be a "reverse algorithm" - the whole idea of MD5 is to give a *short* 128-bit checksum for an arbitrarily long file. Since any checksum algorithm has limited number of possibilities (admittedly there's ~ 3.4*10^38 possibilities with 128 bits...) it's theoretically possible to find two files that have precisely same checksums, but it's unlikely.
I heard there was some hash collision attack found for MD5, and people recommended SHA1 instead when security is at stake (probably MD5 is still more than adequate for casual file integrity checks). Anyone got details? However, I find it unlikely that this company is using that kind of attacks - too much effort for something that's ultimately Complicated.
Well, at least Bungie had the sense to give the Myth franchise to Take2. Otherwise, it'd been Highly Odd that I'd have had a copy of Bungie-Microsoft's Myth II for Linux. I mean, I got my copy wayyy after Bungie was assimilated and LokiGames fell... =)
Hrrm, have to start playing Myth II and III again. Warcraft III sort of pales compared to them.
Erm... Times New Roman, Arial and Courier New already have high-quality equivalents in OSS world: Times, Helvetica and Courier. There versions that come with XFree86 are crap, but there are high-quality Type1 versions of them available, made by URW. You can get them from the GIMP web page.
Okay, I'm not a typographer (just play one on Slashdot), so I think those just look good enough. =)
A mod. And now it's the most popular FPS game in the world.
So? How is this relevant?
Console games are just playable. PC games can usually be played and modded.
Okay, so I've gone a far way since I got Breath of Fire for GBA. Nice story, nice characters, and, um, actual roleplaying value of near zero and very linear plot. But on PC, I have Neverwinter Nights, finished the official campaign and several fan-created ones and discovered the Toolkit Is Indeed A Fun Addition. Yes, I'm still enthusiastic.
And the only "mod" thing I've recently seen on console was the map editor of Advance Wars. Boohoo. No scenario editor, just "kill everything that moves" maps. That's so 1995. =) (Okay, I never expected to see an enjoyable strategy game on a console, much less GBA. But still.)
The SNES? Lavender and Beige? I mean, Lavender and Beige? How did this get past test marketing?
Back in the day, the local Nintendo magazine showed pictures of this upcoming "Super Famicom" thing. Looked pretty nice to me.
Then, shortly before the release, they showed the American model of SNES. I screamed. I panicked. No, please don't give us this.
And then the Euroversion of SNES came out, looking more or less same as Super Famicom. Americans had to suffer from an ugly box, Europeans got the nicely designed and far better looking box =)
Tell me why the company can't paint a nice little white bar coded serial number on the side of the tire?
(Disclaimer: I don't know a damn.)
Such barcodes would not be aesthetically pleasing. Also, the tires have the tendency to get dirty, and barcodes are read optically. So, to read the big ugly barcode, you'd need to bring a water hose, but RFIDs can be read through the muck. Also, the RFID tag can be embedded in the material, but the barcode needs to be *painted* on the surface, meaning it can (theoretically) be worn off.
Yes, barcodes might work, but RFIDs would be theoretically more hadly messed and would probably be a little bit more convinient to use.
All it takes is the right call - X takes care of the rest.
Running fullscreen without a window manager is trivial. Some bugs in window managers may create problems in fullscreen mode (eg. Enlightenment proir to 0.14), so that is something to watch out for.
Oh, yeah. Most of the problems I had seen were in some programs like VICE, not sure if they're fixed now. (Oh, and right now Quake3 crashes but at least the resolution can be restored with alt+plusminus...)
The only real X11 fullscreen pain in the rear is DGA. ("Make your app setuid root, crash your X server and kernel, and not see app go fullscreen even when it says it does that.") I hear XF86 4.0 has fixed this, but all programs that count use SDL's method of changing the resolution and stuff...
Re:Ashamed to admit my cluelessness...
on
F'd Companies
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Wapit was making Mobile Phone Service Stuff. You know, stuff for this "WAP" thing that was such a major success that almost three people bought a cell phone that supported it and one actually tried the services once... one prominent figure employed by them was Lars Wirzenius, friend of Linus Torvalds, a Debian guy and, um, appeared in the newsgroups or something.
Some stuff from Wapit is still alive due to this "open source" idea thingy. People say Kannel beats Nokia's WAP/SMS gateway software easily =)
My guess is that they're using SDL (or something similar, but probably SDL since it has that Professional Quality[tm] and has just about the only 99% working fullscreen mode I've seen on X11). Just the game in window or fullscreen, and it doesn't depend on any specific WM or desktop environment.
The KDE is probably because that was the developer's weird idea of a good desktop environment =)
Has this been done using a "payload" that runs Windows? Or is this just another excuse to say that linux is going to rule the world someday?
Um, not sure about Windows, but I know people who have shot stuff to the air have used DOS. The on-board computers seem to have pretty slow processors by today's standards. The processor in this case was a 100MHz 486, not exactly too hot for running Windows. (Windows XP Embedded seems to need 500 MHz minimum.)
The operating system, in my opinion, was not that important in this case. What was cooler was that they assembled the balloon payload themselves and gave valuable insight in what it takes to build such things. And the article wasn't even too praising of Linux at times (particularly regarding the state of Video4Linux and finding some imaging device that actually works...)
The date on that link doesn't make it very believable..
Which was, of course, not the reason why NASA decided to launch April 4 instead of April 1. Of course, this also prevented some jokers leaving an applecore to a critical circuit panel (/obscurereference) and causing a disaster of Challengerian proportions.
Then came the slips, the rewrites, the bloat, and the delusions of grandeur.
Bloat? *cough* Galeon works just fine on my mother's Pentium 166! And at times it feels faster than Netscape 4 on the same machine. I couldn't believe my freaking eyes!
Agreed, Mozilla in itself is pretty huge, but as Galeon (and Phoenix, I've been told) show, there's a nice little rendering engine in Mozilla screaming to get out.
And you can't blame Mozilla for "delusions of grandeur" if it really is a good browser. Misunderstood, perhaps. =)
However, I did install gtk-gnutella in order to download the hiliarious fan fiction Star Trek episode "Savage Empire", because the web site distributing the files had been slashdoted.
And quite often, people download MP3s from my computer through the giFT network - and these MP3s were got from remix.overclocked.org or remix.kwed.org. I know, these people may or may not appreciate (but probably may!) the fact that the files are there to download - but they offer the MP3s for free, I put *identical* copies up there for people to download, and thus if people are using giFT, they can download the files from there and save the bandwidth.
This all in hopes of lowering the bandwidth bills of the sites in question. I'm sure remix.kwed.org didn't have "5 downloads per hour per IP" limitation out of sheer meanness...
Port Eliza to it, and it'll listen to your problems as well.
I was thinking more of Alicebot, because it could be made more bartender-like. And the obligatory "You want some more?" would be fairly easy in AIML...
We wanted to do this for a couple of reasons, but the two main ones were archival and convenience.
Convinience! Just what the doctor ordered.
Yesterday I tried running some DOS demos in Win98. *boom*. They usually work fine, but many still work with pure luck.
Then, I got this crazy idea. I got Bochs, made it run DR-DOS 7.03, and painstakingly transferred the files through floppies to a 100meg hard drive image (Dosemu doesn't work for the demos, and Bochs can't mount host machine directory tree reliably. Argh.) Typed "second", and *boom!!!* virtual machine panics. The technology isn't perfect...
Now, if only I had any money left, I'd get this DVD right away =)
Not really. Support for the format maybe, but not the player itself. I already use Xine to play.avi and MPEG, and I like it a lot. (Works right out of Nautilus. Well, the default GUI sucks and there's only one halfway decent skin that doesn't make my eyes bleed, but the keyboard controls are pretty damn good, it works just fine fullscreen, and the LIRC support is a big bonus!) And, I already also use XMMS for my net radio purposes.
This is perharps the only reason I don't like Realvideo that much: It requires a separate player program, and RP8 as a player application is inferior compared to Xine. (No support for full screen, when maximized it uses a lot of processor (ever heard of this thing called Xv?) and misbehaves the window, playlist needs manual advance, and oh, I could go on...)
I'm fine with sites insisting using some certain format as long as I'm able to play it, but I really dislike the fact that doing so needs me to use an app that doesn't work as nicely as my Player Of Choice.
And please don't ask me to compare Windows Media Player 7 and Xine... (*cough* did you hear that? that was thousands of Windows users hard disks merrily rattling as they find out there's an executable called 'mplayer2.exe' somewhere...)
In this case, information like the client IP address can be md5 hashed before being logged.
Err... if I were doing that, I would rather md5 the reverse DNS name rather than IP. I know, takes one additional step, but is probably safer if you're really concerned of protecting the identity of the users.
I mean, if you have a hash of a message, and you know the message is in form "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx", all you need is a little bit of time and processor speed to go through all of them (for a smarter algorithm, leave out the reserved/special IPs too). Certainly easier to crack than the XBox key... However, if you hash a DNS name, it's a lot more harder to figure out.
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Ah! I'm not an anime fansubber, but I sometimes wish to subtitle weird Finnish TV programs so that foreigners can make sense of them. =)
So far, I've been perfectly happy with SubStationAlpha wav timing, and VirtualDub's subtitler plugin, OggMux, and one Perl script I wrote to convert .ssa to .srt for OggMux (no idea how well .ogm subtitles actually work, WMP seems to not care and Xine crashes...)
Are there really any tolerable programs for Linux that'd do wav-based subtitling? I know BakaSub, but that didn't work at all last time I tried it and the development seemed to have stopped...
If no one's acting, perhaps I really do get annoyed enough to write my own wav subtitler =)
But freedom to do anything is nothing without tools to actually do something. =) Linux is nice for a lot of things, but video tools Just Aren't There Yet!
Personally, I use VirtualDub in Windows 98 to capture and edit crap. Not the fanciest program, but perfect for the job and also GPLed. I just wish I had a proper NLE...
Same goes for most of the apps: I value more the fact that I get things actually done than the freedom. Free apps are nice when they actually work (Mozilla, XEmacs, GIMP, GnuCash, ...), but, for instance, before Blender was GPLed I still used Blender because the open-source 3D apps just weren't as nice.
...and both quotes are conviniently irrelevant in this case. =) (And don't know if they are even relevant these days. The ICCCM may or may not be garbage, but at least that is the headache of toolkit developers these days, not the app developers. The second quote is about compiling extensions to the X server; Don't know what's so difficult about it from the user point of view, at least XF86 4.x supports dynamic loading of modules that provide extensions...)
Probably something like pg_dump -d which produces a text file with a huge load of CREATE TABLEs and INSERTs and other weird capitalized imperative forms of verbs. I'm fairly certain this kind of feature exists in one form or another for the commercial DBs too, or otherwise they wouldn't be that profitable...
Haven't seen a movie player yet, but seeing how TiMidity (software synth MIDI player) got its Emacs interface a year or two after the program was released, I expect the same to happen to XINE, sooner... or... later...
(The timidity-el interface is awesome, by the way. It makes most vi fanatics screeaaaaammm.)
Actually, I found XMMS user interface pretty... odd. The UI itself mimics Winamp in both good and bad - with a clean theme, it's usable. The default skin is horribly dark, though, they should have kept the old one or at least made the "GTK+" theme default.
Yeah, I'd prefer full native user interface more, because the custom GUIs have the tendency to infuriate. I found Rhythmbox, which looks pretty neat on GNOME2 and doesn't do its own theming (And behavior mimics iTunes rather than Winamp), but as it depends on gstreamer it's still somewhat buggy (No app that uses gstreamer can open files that have spaces in the pathname? What the hell? It is year 2003, folks...)
Point 1: Themeing does suck. A while ago I was looking for a music player that would not have any of these idiotic theme things. I couldn't. Finally I found Rhythmbox, but that depends on gstreamer and is thus a little bit unstable. Finally, I settled on keeping XMMS but minimizing the freakin' window and using the "NeXTAMP" theme that doesn't suck as much as most other skins.
Another thing: XINE is excellent, but the GUI does, indeed, suck - thank God both Xine and mplayer have excellent keypress interfaces and Xine's support for LIRC is nice too. Hoping Sinek will improve, it has a better-working GUI with Xine internals, and uses bare GTK+ 2.
And this compares only players! How about the total and utter lack of video editing software? (No, cinelerra is still inadequeate for... um, anything. Either it doesn't work, or isn't documented, says whatever I'm doing is not Supported, or crashes.)
I have extremely high hopes for gstreamer but it's still at 0.5...
Actually, there has to be a "reverse algorithm" - the whole idea of MD5 is to give a *short* 128-bit checksum for an arbitrarily long file. Since any checksum algorithm has limited number of possibilities (admittedly there's ~ 3.4*10^38 possibilities with 128 bits...) it's theoretically possible to find two files that have precisely same checksums, but it's unlikely.
I heard there was some hash collision attack found for MD5, and people recommended SHA1 instead when security is at stake (probably MD5 is still more than adequate for casual file integrity checks). Anyone got details? However, I find it unlikely that this company is using that kind of attacks - too much effort for something that's ultimately Complicated.
Well, at least Bungie had the sense to give the Myth franchise to Take2. Otherwise, it'd been Highly Odd that I'd have had a copy of Bungie-Microsoft's Myth II for Linux. I mean, I got my copy wayyy after Bungie was assimilated and LokiGames fell... =)
Hrrm, have to start playing Myth II and III again. Warcraft III sort of pales compared to them.
Erm... Times New Roman, Arial and Courier New already have high-quality equivalents in OSS world: Times, Helvetica and Courier. There versions that come with XFree86 are crap, but there are high-quality Type1 versions of them available, made by URW. You can get them from the GIMP web page.
Okay, I'm not a typographer (just play one on Slashdot), so I think those just look good enough. =)
Console games are just playable. PC games can usually be played and modded.
Okay, so I've gone a far way since I got Breath of Fire for GBA. Nice story, nice characters, and, um, actual roleplaying value of near zero and very linear plot. But on PC, I have Neverwinter Nights, finished the official campaign and several fan-created ones and discovered the Toolkit Is Indeed A Fun Addition. Yes, I'm still enthusiastic.
And the only "mod" thing I've recently seen on console was the map editor of Advance Wars. Boohoo. No scenario editor, just "kill everything that moves" maps. That's so 1995. =) (Okay, I never expected to see an enjoyable strategy game on a console, much less GBA. But still.)
Back in the day, the local Nintendo magazine showed pictures of this upcoming "Super Famicom" thing. Looked pretty nice to me.
Then, shortly before the release, they showed the American model of SNES. I screamed. I panicked. No, please don't give us this.
And then the Euroversion of SNES came out, looking more or less same as Super Famicom. Americans had to suffer from an ugly box, Europeans got the nicely designed and far better looking box =)
(Disclaimer: I don't know a damn.)
Such barcodes would not be aesthetically pleasing. Also, the tires have the tendency to get dirty, and barcodes are read optically. So, to read the big ugly barcode, you'd need to bring a water hose, but RFIDs can be read through the muck. Also, the RFID tag can be embedded in the material, but the barcode needs to be *painted* on the surface, meaning it can (theoretically) be worn off.
Yes, barcodes might work, but RFIDs would be theoretically more hadly messed and would probably be a little bit more convinient to use.
Oh, yeah. Most of the problems I had seen were in some programs like VICE, not sure if they're fixed now. (Oh, and right now Quake3 crashes but at least the resolution can be restored with alt+plusminus...)
The only real X11 fullscreen pain in the rear is DGA. ("Make your app setuid root, crash your X server and kernel, and not see app go fullscreen even when it says it does that.") I hear XF86 4.0 has fixed this, but all programs that count use SDL's method of changing the resolution and stuff...
Wapit was making Mobile Phone Service Stuff. You know, stuff for this "WAP" thing that was such a major success that almost three people bought a cell phone that supported it and one actually tried the services once... one prominent figure employed by them was Lars Wirzenius, friend of Linus Torvalds, a Debian guy and, um, appeared in the newsgroups or something.
Some stuff from Wapit is still alive due to this "open source" idea thingy. People say Kannel beats Nokia's WAP/SMS gateway software easily =)
My guess is that they're using SDL (or something similar, but probably SDL since it has that Professional Quality[tm] and has just about the only 99% working fullscreen mode I've seen on X11). Just the game in window or fullscreen, and it doesn't depend on any specific WM or desktop environment.
The KDE is probably because that was the developer's weird idea of a good desktop environment =)
Um, not sure about Windows, but I know people who have shot stuff to the air have used DOS. The on-board computers seem to have pretty slow processors by today's standards. The processor in this case was a 100MHz 486, not exactly too hot for running Windows. (Windows XP Embedded seems to need 500 MHz minimum.)
The operating system, in my opinion, was not that important in this case. What was cooler was that they assembled the balloon payload themselves and gave valuable insight in what it takes to build such things. And the article wasn't even too praising of Linux at times (particularly regarding the state of Video4Linux and finding some imaging device that actually works...)
Which was, of course, not the reason why NASA decided to launch April 4 instead of April 1. Of course, this also prevented some jokers leaving an applecore to a critical circuit panel (/obscurereference) and causing a disaster of Challengerian proportions.
Bloat? *cough* Galeon works just fine on my mother's Pentium 166! And at times it feels faster than Netscape 4 on the same machine. I couldn't believe my freaking eyes!
Agreed, Mozilla in itself is pretty huge, but as Galeon (and Phoenix, I've been told) show, there's a nice little rendering engine in Mozilla screaming to get out.
And you can't blame Mozilla for "delusions of grandeur" if it really is a good browser. Misunderstood, perhaps. =)
And quite often, people download MP3s from my computer through the giFT network - and these MP3s were got from remix.overclocked.org or remix.kwed.org. I know, these people may or may not appreciate (but probably may!) the fact that the files are there to download - but they offer the MP3s for free, I put *identical* copies up there for people to download, and thus if people are using giFT, they can download the files from there and save the bandwidth.
This all in hopes of lowering the bandwidth bills of the sites in question. I'm sure remix.kwed.org didn't have "5 downloads per hour per IP" limitation out of sheer meanness...
I was thinking more of Alicebot, because it could be made more bartender-like. And the obligatory "You want some more?" would be fairly easy in AIML...
Convinience! Just what the doctor ordered.
Yesterday I tried running some DOS demos in Win98. *boom*. They usually work fine, but many still work with pure luck.
Then, I got this crazy idea. I got Bochs, made it run DR-DOS 7.03, and painstakingly transferred the files through floppies to a 100meg hard drive image (Dosemu doesn't work for the demos, and Bochs can't mount host machine directory tree reliably. Argh.) Typed "second", and *boom!!!* virtual machine panics. The technology isn't perfect...
Now, if only I had any money left, I'd get this DVD right away =)
Yes.
Never ever underestimate the power of coffee. =) *sigh*
Not really. Support for the format maybe, but not the player itself. I already use Xine to play .avi and MPEG, and I like it a lot. (Works right out of Nautilus. Well, the default GUI sucks and there's only one halfway decent skin that doesn't make my eyes bleed, but the keyboard controls are pretty damn good, it works just fine fullscreen, and the LIRC support is a big bonus!) And, I already also use XMMS for my net radio purposes.
This is perharps the only reason I don't like Realvideo that much: It requires a separate player program, and RP8 as a player application is inferior compared to Xine. (No support for full screen, when maximized it uses a lot of processor (ever heard of this thing called Xv?) and misbehaves the window, playlist needs manual advance, and oh, I could go on...)
I'm fine with sites insisting using some certain format as long as I'm able to play it, but I really dislike the fact that doing so needs me to use an app that doesn't work as nicely as my Player Of Choice.
And please don't ask me to compare Windows Media Player 7 and Xine... (*cough* did you hear that? that was thousands of Windows users hard disks merrily rattling as they find out there's an executable called 'mplayer2.exe' somewhere...)
Err... if I were doing that, I would rather md5 the reverse DNS name rather than IP. I know, takes one additional step, but is probably safer if you're really concerned of protecting the identity of the users.
I mean, if you have a hash of a message, and you know the message is in form "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx", all you need is a little bit of time and processor speed to go through all of them (for a smarter algorithm, leave out the reserved/special IPs too). Certainly easier to crack than the XBox key... However, if you hash a DNS name, it's a lot more harder to figure out.