I have been writing a word import filter for quite some time now. Its reasonably good and improving the whole time. It is being used by abiword at the moment, and comes with a word to html sample implementation
Interestingly I have received practically no code from anyone except from some wonderful work by a few in the areas of ole2 stream reading, and some great work by two or three in the area of word decryption
So my angle on this is that Stardivision will probably get next to no useful input into their import filters from the community, the office formats are nasty and arcane and don't hold much interest for most programmers. Either that or my code smells so bad that noone wants to associate themselves with it:-), which is a distinct possibility
Anyhow, if you don't want to wait around for someone else to write a word import filter you can help make wv better, development versions at this location. C.
Im certain that this is the 5th time this has been mentioned. Let me predict the future here, sun is not going to get a host of developers sweeping in and adding all sorts of useful functionality to solaris
There might be some perusal of the source, and maybe a bug fix or two, but it is not going to make any difference at all
Firstly, for them to gain any benefit from the release they have to have a whole support structure in place, they need a developer mailing lists, they need an open development cycle, open knowledge of what they plan, what needs to be fixed, and an idea of who will do what. Sun are not doing any of this, its purely a dump of the source, take it or leave it. What benefit is that to anyone, including sun themselves ?
Secondly, its not really all that open, the community licence twaddle is just "yet another licence", and at this stage for developers licence fatigue has set in. Why code something for solaris, when you can do the same work for linux, and use a licence which is understood. Sun are giving away with one hand, and due to this licence holding on tight with the other
Sure we all want open source, and this is better than nothing, having the source available makes life so much easier for developers to make their drivers work under solaris, advanced system programmers can read through it and see problems for their products, and so forth. But this type of source release basically benefits existing solaris users. There will be no grand influx of users to solaris coz of this, and there will be no flood of developers helping sun, my only fear is that this lack of interest will be pointed out with a "look, open source does not work"
Dunno about that, I have absolutely no concept of fahrenheit (i even had to copy your spelling as i cant even spell it), sometimes I come across the temperature on an american newspaper or tv show and Im always getting caught, "the temperature is 60 outside," and my jaw drops at the concept of such an amazingly high temperature, theres gotta be a national crisis, birds falling out of the air, eggs boiling on rocks, houses spontaneously combusting. And then the penny drops and aha its some wierd archaic measurement system, couse i still dont actually know what temperature Im being told it was.
Yeah, its a little messed up, some of the signs are legacy signs and mention miles quite a bit, but every new sign that goes down is km
The further from civilization you get the more white signs in mph you see, but km is what we are actively supporting
True enough lots of household terms are imperial, x stones (but on the other hand I havnt a clue how many pounds are in a stone, or have any idea of how to convert pounds to anything, so american jokes about someone being x no of pounds are way over my head). I couldn't tell you how big a gallon is either. I might sometimes use inches for rough and ready figures, and because my screensize is measured in it:-)
But for anything else metric is used, for anything even vaguely technical, engineering scientific or craftsman, anything that requires a miniumum of accuracy then you need metric.
So in short we still use miles in everyday usage, but outside of that things get metric damn quick.
Question by the way, did america ever run their monetary system with imperial style units, i.e the ancient pre-decimal system used here until the 70s, something like 212 pennies to a pound, with a multitude of different units inbetween, none of which with a 10 of anything mapping to anything else, complete nightmare, but folk cried having to go decimal, as decimal was "too complicated to understand", insanity!
i haven't done this myself, but I would guess most of the code in the Linux kernel is written in the USA. Remember, Linus is just the coordinator of the project. I'm sure somebody has calculated contributions based on the domain. Perhaps someone could dig up a URL? Hmm, well now. I did a very quick and dirty little look in the CREDITS file, and grepped out all the @ addresses. Firstly linux is a pretty damn international piece of kit, so it doesn't matter a toss what way you want to call it, but nonethess there is 310 email addresses. Some are duplicates, many are.com.org and.net so they could be from anywhere, and some are radio ones
Nomethess doing a grep for.edu which is definitely the states with the.com and.gov and.org.net totaled up gives 143 email addresses, so thats less than half the credits file.
Allowing for a huge degree of error, which i imagine weighs against the concept that all the.coms and.orgs and.net are us, its looks pretty reliable that most of the contributers are not from the states.
Considering the states as the single biggest contributer, might be plausable however, but ultimately unprovable one way of the other, which is probably a good thing, as considering the issue is a pretty irrevelent thing to be doing anyway, a sense of community is what we should be striving for, but for the goal of pointing out that no one nationhood has any ownership of the kernel, it might be worth my while
A quick totaling up of some of the eu endings gives a total of 99 credits for.ie,.de,.uk,.fi,dk,.nl.,.fr,.se,.be,.it. Any how those germans love linux, they come in at a staggering 46 contributers compared to a measly runner up 16 for.uk, though wales did produce alan, so all is forgiven. Fair credit has to be given to the impressive showing for.nl with 13.
some guessword would make me suspect that there is a half to one credits per million inhabitants of a country, ahalf for big ones:-). germany is 80 million, nl is approx 12 (methinks), ie and.be are approx 3 ands o on.
More mad meanderings leaves me to predict that the states might have 100 legit members in the credits list:-)
Re:You've missed the point of X
on
Is X The Future?
·
· Score: 1
What do you reckon about this D11 style of reducing or removing the dichotomy between client and server for the locahost situation, while retaining the networking for the remote situation ?
This D11 idea is a new one to me until i saw it posted here earlier.
Of course we use get the XShm extension correctly, and have suitable fallbacks, but thats because we all rip off your xscreensaver code, Otherwise I'd still be in the dark.
I don't suppose you feel like writing a simple app that uses all of the XShape extention features so that I can figure out how to use that one as well, coz that one has me beat entirely, the man pages and xc documentation on them are scanty to say the least,
One thing to remember here is that linux cannot fail or succeed the same way a company does. If corporate support dissappears, or any other kind of huccup arises and the mainstream success evaporates, what does that actually matter ?
If you are in linux because you enjoy the sort of hackery and fun of playing around with it then all this success / failure in the marketplace is so much foo
Use the system, have fun, play with it, don't get to caught up in its "worth for business", while its impressive that it has worth, and its a ludicrous state of computing that it can easily match and better the commercial organizations, that isn't the only, or even in the top 5 important issues that affect linux
the most important thing for the success of linux, is more code, and far far less talk
On the topic of gun control, it is interesting to note that the republic has the lowest murder rate of the top 20 industrialized nations, the UN stats are discussed in this article, the rest of the stats are hardly complementary unfortunately, in particular in general we are only second to the US in levels of poverty!, still at least we don't tend to go around maiming eachother fatally as a hobby:-)
The latest version was 1.5, maybe there was some problem in the new version that caused this. Hmm, I wonder what the story is with *reading* gif files, maybe the problem was there ?
Right then, does anyone have an alternative to this library ? as I use itself myself in libwmf to convert wmf to gif
I imagine that a useful alternative might be to pull out the gif code and insert png code instead. That would be the most viable alternative, looking at the code, all that would really be required would be to modify/replace gdImageGif which converts gd to gif with something line gdImagePng and re-release the software as lib to create png's instead. I imagine that you'd have to drop support for importing gif's ala gdImageCreateFromGif, but i suppose we can live with that.
The gd library is a simple but truly handy library, I imagine that the author is incredibly annoyed about this, as he only announced the latest version (1.5) a few days ago.
The problems about the gif patent have cropped up again and again since unisys tried to hold the web to ransom on the matter, it really is time for apps that use gif to use png instead. png does appear to be such a nicer format as well.
Interestingly Sweden moved from driving on the right to driving on the left in the 1910-20's at some stage
The government offered special deals for a couple of years previously to tempt people to buy right hand drive cars, and then when the majority of cars were righthand drive they basically made a colossal changeover overnight from one side to the other
Granted this was early in the century when im sure the amount of cars on the road was pitiful in comparison to the modern amount, and the cars would hardly have been zooming around at any great speed. But still a very impressive achievement, I wish we could pull off a trick like this at the current late stage.
Make our cars a bit cheaper i suppose, and we could do away with the lines of messages at the airports saying to drive on the left, and the occasional crushed continental car that shows up everynow and then when someone forgets.
I wouldn't mind finding out if my half overheard and forgotten version of the swedish events were correct. Anyone know ?
If you want to use realplayer as an inline viewer you should be able to knock it together with XSwallow.
XSwallow is a nifty little plugin that can be registered to handle all mimetypes and spawn off a helper app to handle the type, which netscape won't do for embedded mimetypes. The nifty bit is that xswallow can relocate the spawned off X program into the space that netscape provides in its window, so you get a nicely faked plugin especially for vrml and animations.
With xswallow you have two choices, when netscape finds an embedded realvideo type do you want the realplayer app to appear embedded in the webpage, or whether you want it to appear external to the webpage, which might be a better option as the actual app has menubars etc that wouldn't exist in a real plugin.
I used it quite happily for the previous rvplayer with a xswallow config line of audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin; rpm; rvplayer %s;;Real Player
And yet for some strange reason that noone can fathom, a vastly greater amount of americans die from shooting relating deaths than europeans.
It appears that the only reason you have to have a gun is to protect yourself from all the other people with guns.
I remember a norwegian in a usenet thread similiar to this who said that all norwegians in the north of norway have guns, to protect against polar bears:-).
I suppose its just too late for the states, once the cycle is as ingrained as it is, its very hard to get out of it.
What kind of madness suggests that having a gun creates a polite society !, i would assume that this post is a parody, but i have a sinking feeling that it isnt.
This is pretty much of a world news event, and it's interesting to piece together information from the various news articles.
The irish times was one of the few papers on this side that actually has bothered to put in any quotes that it actually attributes to named students in the school. Which goes something along the lines of
"They were quiet kids, clever..."
There was another quote from a teacher along the lines of
"it was ironic that most of killings took place in the library, as they liked reading there"
or something like that, the point being that by the only comments that have been attributed to named sources, these were reasonaly normal people, that were pissed on long enough to get pretty mad at everyone.
In any other country that would have been the end of it, they would have grown out if it. Possibly been able to tell themselves that they were now earning twice as much as everyone else in their school, done the whole growing up thing and die in their beds 80 years later. Of course in the states you have the "right to bear arms", and put a stop to that pretty sharpish. Nothing like being able to put your hands on an arsenel of weapons to give you an inflated sense of power.
This is not a story of geekdom, this is a story of a country that is set up so that its easy to blow the fuck out of people at the drop of a hat:-)
C. (whos doesn't own a gun, doesn't know anyone who owns a gun, knows noone who has ever been shot, knows noone who knows someone whos been shot, and does not feel any trauma that he is denied the right to shoot people)
"There is no connection between having a gun and shooting someone, and not having a gun and not shooting someone, any you'd be a fool and a communist to think so", by someone or other whos name i forgot, died last year i think.
In general the april fool's thingy is supposed to be a joke. Funny, amusing, maybe a pointed deflation of something or other. But dammit where is the humour in this ongoing "shutdown humour sites" hoax. This one has lasted too long, short sharp jokes are funny, long running sagas like this one are soap opera, and ultimately a failure.
Now the mouse powered laptop, that was genius, plausible for a few moments, and genuinely funny. That wins my best april 1st article.
But the number of these articles has killed the whole joke, and ploughed the fun into the ground, very very heavy handed. Don't try so hard.
This is getting a bit tiring, one little april story would be ok. But this unending stream of them is unfunny. Maybe if you've just gotten out of bed it might be amusing, but on this side of the world we're drawing to the end of the day and we're all aprilled out, so maybe my boredom is symptomatic of that.
So enough already, now this userfriedly thing is a bit stinky isn't it? Lacks the punch to make it a good hoax, just messy. C.
The file formats for the latest ms word and other office formats are available
Ole decoding tools for linux are available, information of getting the formats, and the ole tools, and a work in progress converter for converting msword 8 format documents into html can all be found at my mswordview page, or its mirror on gnu.org
I agree, Purify is the only reason i even go near solaris, as its available there. It's one of the few things i think id throw some money at if it was available. I have to say i really like it.
I actually saw the video of doug giving that demo. Great fun to watch, doug gets a big gasp from the audience when he shows them that his keyboard is actually "not built into the computer", he can "pick it up and put it on his lap, and move around", and the audience was gobsmacked:-)
Doug showed them his mouse, and then showed them his other invention, which was the chord keyboard, supposedly he was always a bit upset that it wasn't as much of a success as the mouse
He does this video link up as well, which wowed the audience, and showed them two users, himself and his research assistent who teleoperates a mouse pointer of his own at the same time on the shared screen, one of the first proper Computer Supported Cooperative Work demos as well. All very heavy stuff, the mouse cursor looks very funny, its basically an ink blob moving about the place, Doug also demoed a form of hypertexted document as well, just while he was at everything else:-), the bitmapped display he was using (dont know how new bitmapped displays would have been to his audience) is a bit wierd as well, the font he was using looks really like something he threw together for an afternoon. I dont know the cost of the demo, but it was reportedly incredibly high, what im still interested in knowing, is how much of the demo was semi-faked:-), and how careful was doug to avoid functionality that would have crashed the whole thing, he must have been sweating heavily with so many new and cutting edge pieces of software and hardware functioning at the same time.
Anyhow if you get a chance to see the video, do so, i found the audience reactions hilarious.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly I have received practically no code from anyone except from some wonderful work by a few in the areas of ole2 stream reading, and some great work by two or three in the area of word decryption
So my angle on this is that Stardivision will probably get next to no useful input into their import filters from the community, the office formats are nasty and arcane and don't hold much interest for most programmers. Either that or my code smells so bad that noone wants to associate themselves with it :-), which is a distinct possibility
Anyhow, if you don't want to wait around for someone else to write a word import filter you can help make wv better, development versions at this location. C.
C.
There might be some perusal of the source, and maybe a bug fix or two, but it is not going to make any difference at all
Firstly, for them to gain any benefit from the release they have to have a whole support structure in place, they need a developer mailing lists, they need an open development cycle, open knowledge of what they plan, what needs to be fixed, and an idea of who will do what. Sun are not doing any of this, its purely a dump of the source, take it or leave it. What benefit is that to anyone, including sun themselves ?
Secondly, its not really all that open, the community licence twaddle is just "yet another licence", and at this stage for developers licence fatigue has set in. Why code something for solaris, when you can do the same work for linux, and use a licence which is understood. Sun are giving away with one hand, and due to this licence holding on tight with the other
Sure we all want open source, and this is better than nothing, having the source available makes life so much easier for developers to make their drivers work under solaris, advanced system programmers can read through it and see problems for their products, and so forth. But this type of source release basically benefits existing solaris users. There will be no grand influx of users to solaris coz of this, and there will be no flood of developers helping sun, my only fear is that this lack of interest will be pointed out with a "look, open source does not work"
C.
C.
The further from civilization you get the more white signs in mph you see, but km is what we are actively supporting
True enough lots of household terms are imperial, x stones (but on the other hand I havnt a clue how many pounds are in a stone, or have any idea of how to convert pounds to anything, so american jokes about someone being x no of pounds are way over my head). I couldn't tell you how big a gallon is either. I might sometimes use inches for rough and ready figures, and because my screensize is measured in it :-)
But for anything else metric is used, for anything even vaguely technical, engineering scientific or craftsman, anything that requires a miniumum of accuracy then you need metric.
So in short we still use miles in everyday usage, but outside of that things get metric damn quick.
Question by the way, did america ever run their monetary system with imperial style units, i.e the ancient pre-decimal system used here until the 70s, something like 212 pennies to a pound, with a multitude of different units inbetween, none of which with a 10 of anything mapping to anything else, complete nightmare, but folk cried having to go decimal, as decimal was "too complicated to understand", insanity!
C.
C.
Nomethess doing a grep for .edu which is definitely the states with the .com and .gov and .org .net totaled up gives 143 email addresses, so thats less than half the credits file.
Allowing for a huge degree of error, which i imagine weighs against the concept that all the .coms and .orgs and .net are us, its looks pretty reliable that most of the contributers are not from the states.
Considering the states as the single biggest contributer, might be plausable however, but ultimately unprovable one way of the other, which is probably a good thing, as considering the issue is a pretty irrevelent thing to be doing anyway, a sense of community is what we should be striving for, but for the goal of pointing out that no one nationhood has any ownership of the kernel, it might be worth my while
A quick totaling up of some of the eu endings gives a total of 99 credits for .ie,.de,.uk,.fi,dk,.nl.,.fr,.se,.be,.it. Any how those germans love linux, they come in at a staggering 46 contributers compared to a measly runner up 16 for .uk, though wales did produce alan, so all is forgiven. Fair credit has to be given to the impressive showing for .nl with 13.
some guessword would make me suspect that there is a half to one credits per million inhabitants of a country, ahalf for big ones :-). germany is 80 million, nl is approx 12 (methinks), ie and .be are approx 3 ands o on.
More mad meanderings leaves me to predict that the states might have 100 legit members in the credits list :-)
This D11 idea is a new one to me until i saw it posted here earlier.
C.
I don't suppose you feel like writing a simple app that uses all of the XShape extention features so that I can figure out how to use that one as well, coz that one has me beat entirely, the man pages and xc documentation on them are scanty to say the least,
C.
If you are in linux because you enjoy the sort of hackery and fun of playing around with it then all this success / failure in the marketplace is so much foo
Use the system, have fun, play with it, don't get to caught up in its "worth for business", while its impressive that it has worth, and its a ludicrous state of computing that it can easily match and better the commercial organizations, that isn't the only, or even in the top 5 important issues that affect linux
the most important thing for the success of linux, is more code, and far far less talk
C.
C.
C.
I imagine that a useful alternative might be to pull out the gif code and insert png code instead. That would be the most viable alternative, looking at the code, all that would really be required would be to modify/replace gdImageGif which converts gd to gif with something line gdImagePng and re-release the software as lib to create png's instead. I imagine that you'd have to drop support for importing gif's ala gdImageCreateFromGif, but i suppose we can live with that.
The gd library is a simple but truly handy library, I imagine that the author is incredibly annoyed about this, as he only announced the latest version (1.5) a few days ago.
The problems about the gif patent have cropped up again and again since unisys tried to hold the web to ransom on the matter, it really is time for apps that use gif to use png instead. png does appear to be such a nicer format as well.
C.
The government offered special deals for a couple of years previously to tempt people to buy right hand drive cars, and then when the majority of cars were righthand drive they basically made a colossal changeover overnight from one side to the other
Granted this was early in the century when im sure the amount of cars on the road was pitiful in comparison to the modern amount, and the cars would hardly have been zooming around at any great speed. But still a very impressive achievement, I wish we could pull off a trick like this at the current late stage.
Make our cars a bit cheaper i suppose, and we could do away with the lines of messages at the airports saying to drive on the left, and the occasional crushed continental car that shows up everynow and then when someone forgets.
I wouldn't mind finding out if my half overheard and forgotten version of the swedish events were correct. Anyone know ?
C.
C.
C.
XSwallow is a nifty little plugin that can be registered to handle all mimetypes and spawn off a helper app to handle the type, which netscape won't do for embedded mimetypes. The nifty bit is that xswallow can relocate the spawned off X program into the space that netscape provides in its window, so you get a nicely faked plugin especially for vrml and animations.
With xswallow you have two choices, when netscape finds an embedded realvideo type do you want the realplayer app to appear embedded in the webpage, or whether you want it to appear external to the webpage, which might be a better option as the actual app has menubars etc that wouldn't exist in a real plugin.
I used it quite happily for the previous rvplayer with a xswallow config line of ;Real Player
audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin; rpm; rvplayer %s;
C.
It appears that the only reason you have to have a gun is to protect yourself from all the other people with guns.
I remember a norwegian in a usenet thread similiar to this who said that all norwegians in the north of norway have guns, to protect against polar bears :-).
I suppose its just too late for the states, once the cycle is as ingrained as it is, its very hard to get out of it.
What kind of madness suggests that having a gun creates a polite society !, i would assume that this post is a parody, but i have a sinking feeling that it isnt.
C.
The irish times was one of the few papers on this side that actually has bothered to put in any quotes that it actually attributes to named students in the school. Which goes something along the lines of
"They were quiet kids, clever..."
There was another quote from a teacher along the lines of
"it was ironic that most of killings took place in the library, as they liked reading there"
or something like that, the point being that by the only comments that have been attributed to named sources, these were reasonaly normal people, that were pissed on long enough to get pretty mad at everyone.
In any other country that would have been the end of it, they would have grown out if it. Possibly been able to tell themselves that they were now earning twice as much as everyone else in their school, done the whole growing up thing and die in their beds 80 years later. Of course in the states you have the "right to bear arms", and put a stop to that pretty sharpish. Nothing like being able to put your hands on an arsenel of weapons to give you an inflated sense of power.
This is not a story of geekdom, this is a story of a country that is set up so that its easy to blow the fuck out of people at the drop of a hat :-)
C. (whos doesn't own a gun, doesn't know anyone who owns a gun, knows noone who has ever been shot, knows noone who knows someone whos been shot, and does not feel any trauma that he is denied the right to shoot people)
"There is no connection between having a gun and shooting someone, and not having a gun and not shooting someone, any you'd be a fool and a communist to think so", by someone or other whos name i forgot, died last year i think.
Well whatever you say about kipling, they delivered on their promise.
C.
Now the mouse powered laptop, that was genius, plausible for a few moments, and genuinely funny. That wins my best april 1st article.
But the number of these articles has killed the whole joke, and ploughed the fun into the ground, very very heavy handed. Don't try so hard.
C.
So enough already, now this userfriedly thing is a bit stinky isn't it? Lacks the punch to make it a good hoax, just messy. C.
Ole decoding tools for linux are available, information of getting the formats, and the ole tools, and a work in progress converter for converting msword 8 format documents into html can all be found at my mswordview page, or its mirror on gnu.org
Lend a hand, less talk more code
C.
I agree, Purify is the only reason i even go near solaris, as its available there. It's one of the few things i think id throw some money at if it was available. I have to say i really like it.
C.
Great fun to watch, doug gets a big gasp from the audience when he shows them that his keyboard is actually "not built into the computer", he can "pick it up and put it on his lap, and move around", and the audience was gobsmacked
Doug showed them his mouse, and then showed them his other invention, which was the chord keyboard, supposedly he was always a bit upset that it wasn't as much of a success as the mouse
He does this video link up as well, which wowed the audience, and showed them two users, himself and his research assistent who teleoperates a mouse pointer of his own at the same time on the shared screen, one of the first proper Computer Supported Cooperative Work demos as well. All very heavy stuff, the mouse cursor looks very funny, its basically an ink blob moving about the place, Doug also demoed a form of hypertexted document as well, just while he was at everything else :-), the bitmapped display he was using (dont know how new bitmapped displays would have been to his audience) is a bit wierd as well, the font he was using looks really like something he threw together for an afternoon. I dont know the cost of the demo, but it was reportedly incredibly high, what im still interested in knowing, is how much of the demo was semi-faked :-), and how careful was doug to avoid functionality that would have crashed the whole thing, he must have been sweating heavily with so many new and cutting edge pieces of software and hardware functioning at the same time.
Anyhow if you get a chance to see the video, do so, i found the audience reactions hilarious.
C.