The one program that impressed me the most was VMWare 2.0 for Linux running flawlessly under FreeBSD. It requires a kernel module but somebody ported that to FreeBSD and it works like a charm. One of the many, many reasons I switched to FreeBSD permanently after running Linux for 7 years.
Great Bridge, a Norfolk, Va., subsidiary of Landmark Communications, will close, and 38 of its 41
employees will be laid off, said Frank Batten, chairman of parent company Landmark and Great
Bridge's founder.
Will they just sit around and keep getting paid due to some accounting glitch, or what?
(although, I'm guessing they'll work for the parent company...)
I can attest to this. I went completely without caffeine for about 13 months somewhere in '98-'99. I wasn't nearly as addicted as a lot of people here are, I'm sure, so it was really no big deal as far as missing it. But I noticed the same thing - I just felt better all around, despite the fact that I wasn't really living any healthier in other respects (exercise, diet, sleep, etc).
Unfortunately, even for someone like me who doesn't have to have it every day, it's all too easy to get back into it. I broke the streak not because I really wanted a caffeinated beverage, but because I felt like 13 months was long enough. I still don't drink much caffeine in general, but no longer going for the streak meant that the door was wide open for the occasional binge when not getting enough sleep. The last two weeks are a prime example - a busy time at work plus moving to a new apartment mean not much sleep. I'm on my 4th Mountain Dew of the day as I type this and I don't feel that great. My brain may not be nodding off to sleep, but my body, and especially my heart, feels like crap.
A day or two without caffeine and I'll be feeling much better...
This interview pretty much answers both of your questions:
Q: Have you heard from Dean [Stockwell] since you got the role?
SB: No. He called me on Father's Day,but we missed. I have not talked to him. But wouldn't that be great if we could get him on [as a guest on Enterprise]? It has to be; we've got to do it. But put him in a big mask so he can be miserable for once! [Laughs]
Q: Are they telling you to avoid anything? Like, don't say, "Oh boy."
SB: They haven't written it on the page, and I won't be ad-libbing it! [Laughs] No, I'm not avoiding anything. Certainly, if we got to a place where Dean was a part of a show, that would be walking a very thin line if he was a guest. But no, there's no directive about, "Scott don't do this" and I'm not really watching myself. Look, a lot of Sam Beckett was a part of me, and a lot of this captain is a part of me -- I haven't split off personalities between then and now. There will be similarities. I'm just older.
I saw the word Aircraft in the submission text and thought it was going to be a little 4" R/C plane/helicopter that could be flown around the office for fun and mayhem. Now, that would have been cool. Ah well, the rover is still kinda neat, especially with the camera option.
Heh, I was thinking the same thing (except for the part about not being much of a Van Halen fan, obviously)...;-) I had thought about striping my computer case like I did one of my guitars but never had the time. Doing it to one of these IBM cases would certainly be an added bonus!
For just a split second, I was hopeful that it was talking about BYOND, a fabulous game development environment. (in their language, the standard "player" object is called a mob) Oh well. Interesting read, though.
Hmm, I'll have to give it a try myself and see how it does. After the recent discussion on Ogg vs. MP3, I was all set to encode my CDs to Ogg. I'm on my third time re-encoding my CDs (first time was crappy with bladeenc at 128kbs, second time with VBR LAME, third time with the latest LAME beta, creating a high quality version for listening at home and a lower quality for the MP3-CD player in the car for each track). I was only about 10% through my 300 CDs and figured it would be easy to scrap that and start again. I was going to make the high quality files Ogg and keep the lower quality MP3 for the car player.
One problem I've had with MP3 is that I have yet to find any player that will play consecutive MP3 files with absolutely no break in the audio stream between files. It seems that every one of them has to close the old file, open the new file, read some information, then finally start decoding. In the meantime, there's been a split second break in audio output. Not good for live CDs or any time two tracks continuously merge together. I looked at the API for decoding Ogg to raw audio and it looked perfect to write my own simple player to solve this. I could simply buffer enough audio data that there would be no "skip" in output when switching input files. Perfect.
Then I did some comparisons with sound quality. With Ogg RC1, I encoded part of Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition to both Ogg and MP3 at around 200kbs VBR. The MP3 sounded perfect but the Ogg had audible clicks and pops. Sorry, but that just wasn't acceptable. So I scrapped that idea and went back to MP3, continuing what I had started. I would have to look into another solution to solve the break-between-tracks problem.
I'm now about 2/3 done with the encoding and this happens?;-) Honestly I'm not sure whether I want the quality to be improved... If it is, I'll be tempted to start over, which is a lot of work. If it isn't, I don't get the benefits of Ogg... Hmmm. I'll give it a try and see what happens, though.
I've compressed my entire 13 CD Joe Satrianni collection down to 1 disc of MP3s. I don't own
speakers good enough to discern the difference between the original and the copy. Plus, it's so
much more portable.
Woohoo, another Satriani fan! All of my CDs are encoded to MP3 twice: once at the highest possible quality and once at the second lowest. The high quality MP3s I keep for listening at home, the low quality get burned to CD to play in my MP3/CD player in the car. I use the latest beta (3.88 - whoops, looks like 3.89 just came out) of LAME with VBR.
I have a pretty nice pair of headphones and I can't tell any difference between the high quality MP3 and the CD. Rock, jazz, flamenco, classical, whatever. I've done a number "blindfolded" tests with all the people I can grab, including musicians, and so far not one has been able to tell the difference. Perhaps it would be possible for a select few with a $50k system, but I'm skeptical.
The low quality MP3s are distinguishable with the headphones, but just barely. They actually sound better than most 192kbps MP3s I found on Napster before it went down - a testament to the quality of LAME, I'm very impressed! For listening in the car or on the go, the slight loss of quality isn't noticeable. And averaging around 112kbps, I can fit all 147 Joe Satriani songs on a single CD with room to spare! I've had that one in the car for a few weeks since the G3 concerts.;-)
Back to the point, I'd love to do a blindfold test with the people who were on this panel. If they really can reliably distinguish between the high quality MP3s (I'll bet the quality they encoded at for their test wasn't as high) and CD, I'll be impressed.
Actually, I'll bet that with Google's PageRank indexing technology, this will hardly be an issue. If these websites have no good content, nobody will link to them and they'll get terrible rankings in Google's index. Of course, who knows what could happen with other search engines...
Not that anyone will see this so far down, but I've been using this one for about 8 years now:
if (${?TERM} != 0) then
switch ($TERM)
case "xterm*":
case "screen":
set prompt="%{\033]2;%n@%m:%~\007%}%S%m%s [%c] %U%t%u%# "
breaksw
case "iris-ansi*":
set prompt="%{\033P1.y%n@%m:%~\033\\%}%S%m%s [%c] %U%t%u%# "
breaksw
default:
set prompt="%S%m%s [%c] %U%t%u%# "
breaksw
endsw
endif
Puts "user@host:directory" in the xterm title bar, plus host, dir, time in the prompt. Weee.
Several people have already noted that new forms of art are generally poorly received until quite some time after their introduction.
I wonder if another factor at play is that when you make computer art, you're not actually physically drawing/painting/sculpting something. An analogy is in music (something with which I'm a little more familiar): these days anyone can use sequencing software and other packages to create interesting sounding pieces without being able to play a thing on any real instrument. There are probably people like this in art too: talented in such a way that they can envision and create wonderful masterpieces on the computer, but couldn't draw a stick figure on paper to save their lives.
Synthesizers are sounding more and more realistic, to the point that the average Joe can't distinguish between a piece played by a real orchestra and one played through a high end synth. But music purists will always favor live musicians, arguing that there are subtle nuances of the performance that simply can't be captured by a computer. So it goes over the head of the casual observer, but is critical to the true connoisseur. Same thing with art. One thing that fine art lovers enjoy about good paintings is seeing the textures and brush strokes in the dried paint itself. A painting is not just a picture that could be duplicated easily with a scanner and a good printer - this may be fine for Joe Avg, but not for fine artists. And again, just as in music, I'll bet somebody somewhere is working on technology to better reproduce the subtleties of paintings, sculptures, etc, down to the little physical details that really make them come alive.
On the composition side of things, computers are fairly well accepted as tools to help composers get their initial ideas worked out, before a piece is finished and written for a full live orchestra/band/whatever. And it seems that more and more electronically generated pieces (not necessarily pop stuff) are being accepted on their own merit - I wonder if similar things are happening in the art world? If not now, I'm sure it will happen, slowly...
So did I answer the question? Well, not really... but if computer art is not considered fine art now, I'll bet it will in time. Probably a long time, but it'll get there, slowly. In the meantime, forget what other people think, just make sure you enjoy whatever you like!
We went around the country in this big
van, big blue van, they had, with these machines starting up user groups and demonstrating things. Actually, before
we even shipped BASIC, somebody stole the demo copy out of the van and started copying it around and sending it to
different computer clubs.
I wonder if that was the first ever incident of software piracy?;-)
I've found through my own experience that you need three things in order to be full of energy during the day and sleep well at night:
Eat right. The very recent ask slashdot is an excellent starting point.
Exercise at least 5 times a week. Again see above for some good comments. When you exercise regularly, your body just works more efficiently and this includes sleeping.
Stay on a regular sleep schedule, and get enough sleep. What that schedule is or how much you get daily is up to you to discover, as we all have different needs.
I've found that one key in all of the above is consistency. Our bodies are designed to do everything in cycles. Breaking the cycle or just having erratic behavior to begin with is very hard on your body. But once you get into a regular routine of eating, exercising and sleeping, you'll be amazed at the difference in how you feel. You won't need caffeine because you'll have plenty of energy to go all day.
This is, of course, based solely on my own observations on how my body has reacted to various behavior patterns over the years. I assume it applies more or less to other people but YMMV!;-)
I can't find the link to them at the moment, but studies have also shown that it is better for your sleep (and therefore your
whole body, physical and mental/emotional) if you don't eat a large meal too soon before drifting off for a full night's sleep
Yep. In general, you should try to avoid eating for at least 3 hours before bed (so no bedtime snack). Basically, your metabolism slows down when you sleep, so any calories that are still being digested will turn directly into fat cells rather than be burned off as would happen when you're awake.
Oh, and like the poster below, I agree that actually going outside for a walk is far more enjoyable than a stinkin' treadmill.;-)
Agreed. I lost 35 pounds in 3 months on a fairly agressive schedule using this plan. My pants are nice and comfy again, and I have no problem zooming up hills now when I mountain bike.
While the Hacker's Diet doesn't really cover nutrition, it gives you the tools to continue making forward progress and more importantly, keep the weight off when the diet is over. Just a minute or two each day to record your weight and calorie intake. He even provides programs, complete with source code, to help you track everything. I extended it a little bit into a CGI that I run on my FreeBSD box, so I can enter my foods and calorie values from anywhere.
That said, nutrition and exercise are also very important. Lots of other good comments here on that stuff.
I was getting all geared up to build myself one of these almost 2 years ago, did some research, bought most of the parts, and then didn't have any time to actually build the thing. Ah well, such is life.;-) For now, my custom perl script allowing me to instantly call up any of my 300 CDs worth of mp3s is good enough.
Here are some useful links I found while doing my research:
I was about to say the same thing. For most people, especially in technical fields, there's a difference between hours of work and hours of productive work. My friends and I agree that we generally put in about 3 or 4 hours (or less) of productive work a day on average. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Of course, when you're near a deadline, that number can easily jump up to 12 or more...
The rest of the time is either spent doing real work at a more relaxed, lazy pace, or goofing off, surfing the web etc. Although I have to say that the majority of my web surfing from work is technology related, and occasionally something I found on the web a few months ago suddenly turns out to be relevant to my project at work. It's always nice to have those instances to justify goof off time. I save the non-technology web surfing (interpret however you like, probably not what you were thinking) for home.
I always wonder what people did to goof off before the internet. Anyone have any insights/stories? Did people goof off just as much, but in different ways? Or did we get more work done back then?
Getting back to the question posed in the article, I "work" 40 hours a week and not more unless overtime pay is preapproved - I value my life outside of work. Southern CA Software/System Engineer for an aerospace company. Posting this from work.;-)
BYOND (Build Your Own Net Dream). Ok, you still have to be a programmer but the language is very elegant and easy to learn if you know C/C++, and the best part is, it handles networking transparently for you.
The above is certainly not for everyone. The graphics capabilities are severely limited in the current version, but if you can work within the framework they provide, you'll find that it's a joy to use and extremely easy to write your own games. It won't help you if you're looking to break into the popular 3D gaming industry, but it's great for the hobbyist/2D game writer. And who knows, when the graphics get the much needed facelift, maybe this will be the next big development platform in a few years.;-)
Try ebay. While you might not find anything as cheap as current DIMMS, it's pretty easy find SIMMs for under a buck a meg, which is still fairly reasonable.
This post is still on topic because buying said memory from ebay will allow you to run those sexy new themes that will come out of this contest.;-)
2) all my images seem to have kept their Picture View 1.1 bindings, and I don't know an easy way of changing the bindings for the several 100 images. Picture viewer FYI is the Quicktime 4 simple
picture viewer.
If you mean changing the Creator so that they open up in something else, try File Typer. It's a Classic app, so maybe it'll be easier in native OS 9.1 rather than the Classic environment under OS X? Anyway, just select all your images, drag them onto the file typer icon, and change the Creator to whatever you want - if you have an example file that works the way you want, use Same As...
Not sure of the exact details since my Mac is at home... Also I have no idea how file types/creators work in OS X since I haven't used it, so maybe this will be less than helpful.
Re:I've been wondering about this for years ...
on
Preview Of Linux 2.5
·
· Score: 1
I had the exact opposite problem. I tried out FreeBSD, but I went back to linux because I could no longer stream and mix 24 tracks in my harddrive recorder app due to slower disk IO.
Just wondering, did you turn on soft updates for your FreeBSD filesystems? I switch from Linux to FreeBSD couple months ago and also noticed much slower disk/filesystem performance. As soon as I turned on soft updates (tunefs -n enable/dev/ad1s2a, etc), the difference was amazing. Dunno why the install had it turned off by default.
My Linux system was running 2.2.17 with ext2fs. I kind of wonder how Reiserfs compares now, but I'm loving FreeBSD so much I have no desire to go back and find out.;-)
As far as I know, it doesn't let you make any decisions on what to do before picking up, based on callerid. I used to have a system where it would answer on the first ring if callerid was "Unavailable" (always telemarketers). It was based on the voice modem package I found here. I hacked the shell script in that package to convert to perl and added the callerid functionality. Problem was, I switched to FreeBSD back in December and the accompanying "voice modem control program" in that package would neither run as a linux binary or as compiled for FreeBSD natively. So, I set out to find/develop a better solution.
I think I'm most of the way there, but I haven't had time to finish it in a couple months. Basically I translated the voice modem control program's functionality to a perl module so the entire thing could be in perl. I had grand ideas of developing it so that other people could add modules for other modems (mine's a USR interal voice modem), and make it into a nice user-friendly package that many people could use. Oh, if only I had the time...;-)
For now, til I finish that up, I'm using a pretty generic configuration of vgetty. It works, but it's not pretty. Not only do I not have the luxury of callerid-based actions before pickup, but vgetty seems to not be able to detect dial tone and end the recording of incoming messages very well. I get all these telemarketer hangup messages that end up being 2 minutes of dial tone/"please hang up and try your call again" messages. Those messages shouldn't even get that far - the dial tone should be detected and a short message discarded.
Anyway, once you get messages saved onto disk, converting them to an appropriate format and making available over the network is pretty easy to do with some scripts, utilities, etc as others have alluded. Feel free to email me if you're interested in this thing I'm working on, just no guarantees about a timely release!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
The one program that impressed me the most was VMWare 2.0 for Linux running flawlessly under FreeBSD. It requires a kernel module but somebody ported that to FreeBSD and it works like a charm. One of the many, many reasons I switched to FreeBSD permanently after running Linux for 7 years.
Will they just sit around and keep getting paid due to some accounting glitch, or what?
(although, I'm guessing they'll work for the parent company...)
Unfortunately, even for someone like me who doesn't have to have it every day, it's all too easy to get back into it. I broke the streak not because I really wanted a caffeinated beverage, but because I felt like 13 months was long enough. I still don't drink much caffeine in general, but no longer going for the streak meant that the door was wide open for the occasional binge when not getting enough sleep. The last two weeks are a prime example - a busy time at work plus moving to a new apartment mean not much sleep. I'm on my 4th Mountain Dew of the day as I type this and I don't feel that great. My brain may not be nodding off to sleep, but my body, and especially my heart, feels like crap.
A day or two without caffeine and I'll be feeling much better...
Pretty interesting stuff.
I saw the word Aircraft in the submission text and thought it was going to be a little 4" R/C plane/helicopter that could be flown around the office for fun and mayhem. Now, that would have been cool. Ah well, the rover is still kinda neat, especially with the camera option.
Heh, I was thinking the same thing (except for the part about not being much of a Van Halen fan, obviously)... ;-) I had thought about striping my computer case like I did one of my guitars but never had the time. Doing it to one of these IBM cases would certainly be an added bonus!
No kidding. I signed up yesterday myself. Sigh, there go my chances of getting a freebie out of the deal...
For just a split second, I was hopeful that it was talking about BYOND, a fabulous game development environment. (in their language, the standard "player" object is called a mob) Oh well. Interesting read, though.
One problem I've had with MP3 is that I have yet to find any player that will play consecutive MP3 files with absolutely no break in the audio stream between files. It seems that every one of them has to close the old file, open the new file, read some information, then finally start decoding. In the meantime, there's been a split second break in audio output. Not good for live CDs or any time two tracks continuously merge together. I looked at the API for decoding Ogg to raw audio and it looked perfect to write my own simple player to solve this. I could simply buffer enough audio data that there would be no "skip" in output when switching input files. Perfect.
Then I did some comparisons with sound quality. With Ogg RC1, I encoded part of Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition to both Ogg and MP3 at around 200kbs VBR. The MP3 sounded perfect but the Ogg had audible clicks and pops. Sorry, but that just wasn't acceptable. So I scrapped that idea and went back to MP3, continuing what I had started. I would have to look into another solution to solve the break-between-tracks problem.
I'm now about 2/3 done with the encoding and this happens? ;-) Honestly I'm not sure whether I want the quality to be improved... If it is, I'll be tempted to start over, which is a lot of work. If it isn't, I don't get the benefits of Ogg... Hmmm. I'll give it a try and see what happens, though.
Woohoo, another Satriani fan! All of my CDs are encoded to MP3 twice: once at the highest possible quality and once at the second lowest. The high quality MP3s I keep for listening at home, the low quality get burned to CD to play in my MP3/CD player in the car. I use the latest beta (3.88 - whoops, looks like 3.89 just came out) of LAME with VBR.
I have a pretty nice pair of headphones and I can't tell any difference between the high quality MP3 and the CD. Rock, jazz, flamenco, classical, whatever. I've done a number "blindfolded" tests with all the people I can grab, including musicians, and so far not one has been able to tell the difference. Perhaps it would be possible for a select few with a $50k system, but I'm skeptical.
The low quality MP3s are distinguishable with the headphones, but just barely. They actually sound better than most 192kbps MP3s I found on Napster before it went down - a testament to the quality of LAME, I'm very impressed! For listening in the car or on the go, the slight loss of quality isn't noticeable. And averaging around 112kbps, I can fit all 147 Joe Satriani songs on a single CD with room to spare! I've had that one in the car for a few weeks since the G3 concerts. ;-)
Back to the point, I'd love to do a blindfold test with the people who were on this panel. If they really can reliably distinguish between the high quality MP3s (I'll bet the quality they encoded at for their test wasn't as high) and CD, I'll be impressed.
Actually, I'll bet that with Google's PageRank indexing technology, this will hardly be an issue. If these websites have no good content, nobody will link to them and they'll get terrible rankings in Google's index. Of course, who knows what could happen with other search engines...
Not that anyone will see this so far down, but I've been using this one for about 8 years now:
if (${?TERM} != 0) then
switch ($TERM)
case "xterm*":
case "screen":
set prompt="%{\033]2;%n@%m:%~\007%}%S%m%s [%c] %U%t%u%# "
breaksw
case "iris-ansi*":
set prompt="%{\033P1.y%n@%m:%~\033\\%}%S%m%s [%c] %U%t%u%# "
breaksw
default:
set prompt="%S%m%s [%c] %U%t%u%# "
breaksw
endsw
endif
Puts "user@host:directory" in the xterm title bar, plus host, dir, time in the prompt. Weee.
I wonder if another factor at play is that when you make computer art, you're not actually physically drawing/painting/sculpting something. An analogy is in music (something with which I'm a little more familiar): these days anyone can use sequencing software and other packages to create interesting sounding pieces without being able to play a thing on any real instrument. There are probably people like this in art too: talented in such a way that they can envision and create wonderful masterpieces on the computer, but couldn't draw a stick figure on paper to save their lives.
Synthesizers are sounding more and more realistic, to the point that the average Joe can't distinguish between a piece played by a real orchestra and one played through a high end synth. But music purists will always favor live musicians, arguing that there are subtle nuances of the performance that simply can't be captured by a computer. So it goes over the head of the casual observer, but is critical to the true connoisseur. Same thing with art. One thing that fine art lovers enjoy about good paintings is seeing the textures and brush strokes in the dried paint itself. A painting is not just a picture that could be duplicated easily with a scanner and a good printer - this may be fine for Joe Avg, but not for fine artists. And again, just as in music, I'll bet somebody somewhere is working on technology to better reproduce the subtleties of paintings, sculptures, etc, down to the little physical details that really make them come alive.
On the composition side of things, computers are fairly well accepted as tools to help composers get their initial ideas worked out, before a piece is finished and written for a full live orchestra/band/whatever. And it seems that more and more electronically generated pieces (not necessarily pop stuff) are being accepted on their own merit - I wonder if similar things are happening in the art world? If not now, I'm sure it will happen, slowly...
So did I answer the question? Well, not really... but if computer art is not considered fine art now, I'll bet it will in time. Probably a long time, but it'll get there, slowly. In the meantime, forget what other people think, just make sure you enjoy whatever you like!
We went around the country in this big van, big blue van, they had, with these machines starting up user groups and demonstrating things. Actually, before we even shipped BASIC, somebody stole the demo copy out of the van and started copying it around and sending it to different computer clubs.
I wonder if that was the first ever incident of software piracy? ;-)
I've found that one key in all of the above is consistency. Our bodies are designed to do everything in cycles. Breaking the cycle or just having erratic behavior to begin with is very hard on your body. But once you get into a regular routine of eating, exercising and sleeping, you'll be amazed at the difference in how you feel. You won't need caffeine because you'll have plenty of energy to go all day.
This is, of course, based solely on my own observations on how my body has reacted to various behavior patterns over the years. I assume it applies more or less to other people but YMMV! ;-)
Yep. In general, you should try to avoid eating for at least 3 hours before bed (so no bedtime snack). Basically, your metabolism slows down when you sleep, so any calories that are still being digested will turn directly into fat cells rather than be burned off as would happen when you're awake.
Oh, and like the poster below, I agree that actually going outside for a walk is far more enjoyable than a stinkin' treadmill. ;-)
While the Hacker's Diet doesn't really cover nutrition, it gives you the tools to continue making forward progress and more importantly, keep the weight off when the diet is over. Just a minute or two each day to record your weight and calorie intake. He even provides programs, complete with source code, to help you track everything. I extended it a little bit into a CGI that I run on my FreeBSD box, so I can enter my foods and calorie values from anywhere.
That said, nutrition and exercise are also very important. Lots of other good comments here on that stuff.
Here are some useful links I found while doing my research:
- First, check a similar ask slashdot story
- MP3 Server Box
- An even older related slashdot story
- LCDAT - Linux Compressed Digital Audio Transport
- Linux Central has lots of LCD display modules that are perfect for this.
- Cajun Car Audio Jukebox
- Linux MP3 Players Project Page
- You already know about LIRC but here's the link for those who may not.
I don't know anything about DVD stuff, but hopefully these will be useful.The rest of the time is either spent doing real work at a more relaxed, lazy pace, or goofing off, surfing the web etc. Although I have to say that the majority of my web surfing from work is technology related, and occasionally something I found on the web a few months ago suddenly turns out to be relevant to my project at work. It's always nice to have those instances to justify goof off time. I save the non-technology web surfing (interpret however you like, probably not what you were thinking) for home.
I always wonder what people did to goof off before the internet. Anyone have any insights/stories? Did people goof off just as much, but in different ways? Or did we get more work done back then?
Getting back to the question posed in the article, I "work" 40 hours a week and not more unless overtime pay is preapproved - I value my life outside of work. Southern CA Software/System Engineer for an aerospace company. Posting this from work. ;-)
The above is certainly not for everyone. The graphics capabilities are severely limited in the current version, but if you can work within the framework they provide, you'll find that it's a joy to use and extremely easy to write your own games. It won't help you if you're looking to break into the popular 3D gaming industry, but it's great for the hobbyist/2D game writer. And who knows, when the graphics get the much needed facelift, maybe this will be the next big development platform in a few years. ;-)
Dang, and I didn't even think mp4 was out yet. If that's really true, I'll stick to listening to mp3s, thank you very much!
This post is still on topic because buying said memory from ebay will allow you to run those sexy new themes that will come out of this contest. ;-)
If you mean changing the Creator so that they open up in something else, try File Typer. It's a Classic app, so maybe it'll be easier in native OS 9.1 rather than the Classic environment under OS X? Anyway, just select all your images, drag them onto the file typer icon, and change the Creator to whatever you want - if you have an example file that works the way you want, use Same As...
Not sure of the exact details since my Mac is at home... Also I have no idea how file types/creators work in OS X since I haven't used it, so maybe this will be less than helpful.
Just wondering, did you turn on soft updates for your FreeBSD filesystems? I switch from Linux to FreeBSD couple months ago and also noticed much slower disk/filesystem performance. As soon as I turned on soft updates (tunefs -n enable /dev/ad1s2a, etc), the difference was amazing. Dunno why the install had it turned off by default.
My Linux system was running 2.2.17 with ext2fs. I kind of wonder how Reiserfs compares now, but I'm loving FreeBSD so much I have no desire to go back and find out. ;-)
I think I'm most of the way there, but I haven't had time to finish it in a couple months. Basically I translated the voice modem control program's functionality to a perl module so the entire thing could be in perl. I had grand ideas of developing it so that other people could add modules for other modems (mine's a USR interal voice modem), and make it into a nice user-friendly package that many people could use. Oh, if only I had the time... ;-)
For now, til I finish that up, I'm using a pretty generic configuration of vgetty. It works, but it's not pretty. Not only do I not have the luxury of callerid-based actions before pickup, but vgetty seems to not be able to detect dial tone and end the recording of incoming messages very well. I get all these telemarketer hangup messages that end up being 2 minutes of dial tone/"please hang up and try your call again" messages. Those messages shouldn't even get that far - the dial tone should be detected and a short message discarded.
Anyway, once you get messages saved onto disk, converting them to an appropriate format and making available over the network is pretty easy to do with some scripts, utilities, etc as others have alluded. Feel free to email me if you're interested in this thing I'm working on, just no guarantees about a timely release! ;-)