Please consider joining Bibliophile on sourceforge, which is a collection of a lot of the other open source literature management software. The effort is fairly informal, but we'd like to share tools for importing, exporting, and cross-site searching.
Thanks. I suppose I should have elaborated that I wanted something that was (if possible) (1)lighter weight and (2)compatible with both PHP4 and PHP5. Last time I checked, there were reported problems using the relevant PEAR modules with PHP5. Do people really have to have a conditional based on the PHP version number to get it to work correctly?
The book uses PHP5's built-in support for XML. PHP4 can have similar support through PEAR. But what should those of us who release PHP apps targetted for use by people who might still be on PHP4 hosts with no PEAR use? I've used the ActiveLink PHP XML package with good results for creating XML, but it doesn't yet have any support for XSLT and XPath. Are there any minimal packages which can supply this without having to rely on PEAR or PHP5?
try as I might, with a friend at the other end of a 28.8 connection and also locally in my home between two PC's with 100Mbit/s connections, I could not get anything better than short bursts of audio to either end...Did you have any luck with PGPfone?
I seem to recall that full duplex sucked in this way on 56.6. I think I half duplex (push-to-talk) was passable. But it was also so inconvenient, so I opted to not secure voice traffic. I thought I tried it on broadband with a bit more luck. It didn't seem to suck significantly more than any other VoIP at the time. I do think that the Macintosh version was slightly more reliable (it was originally released on the Mac & eventually ported to win32). (And, again, it didn't suck THAT much more than any other Mac Class app.)
I think I tried it with the V1 series however.
v1+win32 might have been part of the problem. I don't recall the differences between v1 and v2, but NAI seems to have killed much of the goodness in any of the apps they acquired, so I wouldn't exactly hold my breath.
I hope a Zfone proxy is made so that hardware ATA's can be secured?
Indeed. And that hardware SIP devices start adopting it (some should be able to adopt it via firmware, not that the hardware manufacturers will actually DO that).
I can remember Phil's PGPfone which was released before VoIP was "the next big thing." It used GSM speech compression and 3-DES/CAST/Blowfish cryptography "to give you the ability to have a 'real-time' secure telephone conversation" (directly over 14.4 Kbps (or faster) modem-to-modem, through the Internet, or through AppleTalk).
That died. It is good to see a new alternative that has adopted newer standards.
You can install source dpkgs and binary ebuilds too. (I also use FreeBSD, but think that portage has smoothed out installation from source & that dpkg is fine for installation from binaries.)
I usually find the most interesting criticisms of Gentoo (and the most insightful questions about it) come from Debian users. Yours are certainly no less relevant than others I've read.
I've used both Debian and Gentoo. I am now (mostly) using Gentoo and not Debian. I hope you might find my perspective helpful. (But it should also be stated I also use ports on FreeBSD, and I have come to the conclusion that source-based distros are easier for me to use.)
As for the first I think that compiling from source may well give you a speedup. But when my computer is setting with me at the desktop/ssh session very few processes are running and the network latency / my thinking time are most likely to be the biggest source of delays.
How I'd love to have so much dead CPU time! If your computer's not doing anything for you, why bother having one? Truth be told, one can reap performance gains in more definitive ways than trying to have your compiler make different binaries. As you indicated, running few processes helps. As can swapping in a custom kernel and/or using a faster filesystem (both of which you can do on Deb fairly easily).
True for heavily loaded servers the compilation might give you a boost but I'd be suprised if it was significant.
I don't usually see a huge advantage, but it does depend on the app. For desktop users, app launchtime is often significant. I do think using '-Os' to make smaller binaries (which get into memory faster) does usually create a noticeable benefit. And for workstation/server apps, every few percent for "faster" apps could be helpful to some people (but I agree that it is typically only a few percent). But just leaving apps open is often "good enough" for load time & perhaps there aren't many who really need the extra few percent.
These do strike me as an insanely useful thing.
Yes. Absolutely. Particularly when you have relatively common needs across all apps. Perhaps you want to run an X-less server? Or perhaps you want to have apps with only KDE/QT or only Gnome/GTK+ or what not. USE comes to the rescue.
But I have one niggling little doubt: I suspect they only work for code that supports it. e.g. project foo has optional support for libbar. If the upstream/original code doesn't have a feature marked as optional I don't imagine the Gentoo people would rework it to strip it out.
You are typically correct. But the thing is that foo more often than not will have optional support for some feature. But some gentoo ebuilds do, indeed, have USE flags that aren't just./configure flags for some applications. For example, you can install xpdf with the 'nodrm' use flag, which applies a patch to cause xpdf to ignore drm restrictions. Indeed, for making custom ebuilds, USE flags prove to be quite useful: you can use them to test multiple patches without the need to apply a given patch to all installations & can easily check which features a certain app has (by checking which flags it was emerged with).
Finally the merging of configuration files in/etc seems useful. But I wonder if this is the correct approach. My distribution of choice, Debian, already does its utmost to preserve all configuration file changes automagically. I find it hard to understand what Gentoo does differently which makes it better.
Gentoo's approach gives the user more choice. It preserves your old files by default. You can choose to replace the old config with a newer config or, more useful, merge (typically using sdiff) in changes between the old and new config. It doesn't choose what is best for you.
Debian's defaults are normally sane. But not always.
But one thing is true: If you're building from source and making use of modified USE flags and compiler flags then changes are you're the only person in the planet with a particular setup - that means
Also, tweaking a plot with gnuplot is a tedious code, compile, run cycle. Saving the parameters of a GUI plot (like excel, kaleidagraph, etc.) for reuse is difficult howerver. Isn't there something that does both?
Scripts aren a good idea (and programs like ploticus may have the autmation you seek down to a tee), but nearly all high-level plotting software which has a nice GUI also has some way of not only templating, but also saving plotting styles. One can even just replace the data in a plot that is already formatted nicely. This is precisely what I do with Grace (which runs on nearly any platform (though requires X11 for OS X and cygwin for win32)). You can script it or edit the saved file (which is just plain text) too.
Finally, if you are designing your own manipulations, matplotlib is O.K. You can write fairly short python scripts & matplotlib has slightly easier (so some would say better) GUI manipulations than gnuplot. Neither matplotlib nor gnuplot would be my first choice for publication quality graphs. You should really give Grace a try.
I also immediately thought of the Linux Standard Base. Unfortunately, that relies on rpm (which Ubuntu (and others) don't use by default, but which can be supported if certain packages are installed).
I don't see what would be so bad if Dell started doing what a lot of software companies do--support the biggest few (Red Hat and/or SUSE). Hobbyists will be happy knowing the hardware works with SOME distro. If Dell finds it economically feasible, they can add support for other distros (possibly even as some pay-extra-for-support). Monarch computers and others do exactly this--installation costs for various distros depend on the cost of a license & time and difficulty of install. The support for some of these is provided through the O.S. vendor. Or you can purchase extended support at a fee (which can also relate to the time and difficulty of support).
While Excel is fine for "quick and dirty" plotting & Gnumeric (and other spreadsheets) are "O.K.," none of these are really intended for plotting. My personal favorite is grace, but there are plenty of others like ploticus, gnuplot, gri, Scigraphica, and hippodraw.
Hopefully there's a way to convert all my current data (about 50 hours of entry worth) into GnuCash's format. I'm definitely willing to give it a try.
Gnucash does have QIF import. Moving between any financial application often leads to "strange things," but my migration went O.K. (You also used to be able to pay someone to migrate your data to Gnucash for you, though I never used that service...)
The ability to auto-download my credit card and bank info is totally worth the $30.
But Gnucash also has OFX support to do this! I even have a cron job set to download both the info from my financial institutions and my stock quotes each day--whether I open GnuCash or not.
It would be nice for someone to do a mini-review or comparison of the different FOSS or FOSS-friendly financial packages, because frankly, I'm ready to leave Intuit.
So far they have raised $840 dollars against an estimated cost of 1 million per episode.
$1M is relatively cheap for a network. They are more concerned about the opportunity costs. That is, they can get a lot more ad revenue from shows that people actually watch. Not to make any judgements of the show itself--I paid for my Serenity ticket on opening night--but no network is going to put on a show that is a ratings disaster just because it is free.
Recall, also, the attempt to "Save Enterprise" the same way. The money was raised (much more than $840!) & it was still axed.
Any suggestions for better handling of the pasted text? If there are line breaks which aren't preceded by spaces, it could be intentional (ASCII art, tables, outlines, code, and other formatted text). I'm not a TB dev., but I know devs. of a few email programs. The only thing I can think of is a setting for what it does by default with pasted text & perhaps a right-click menu option (pasteformatted/flowed vs. paste unformatted/unflowed) which is disabled by default (for a simple interface), but could be enabled for power users...
If you've composed all of the text in the Thunderbird editor, it wraps gracefully in both 1.0.7 and 1.5. That is:
This is a sample wrapped paragraph I use as an example. It is really pointless and narrow.
becomes something like:
This is a sample wrapped paragraph, WHICH I use as an example. It is really pointless and narrow.
Wrapping of quoted text which you change can be problematic. And pasting text which has line breaks from an external program can be problematic, as TB assumes that is very intentionally formatted & will not format=flowed it. I think that pasting text where a space precedes a line break (as in format=flowed), it might work. Pasted text with no line breaks certainly wraps gracefully.
P.S. An external editor is the right thing, when I use mutt (and I really like it), but, IMHO, it is not the right thing for the mail client intended for a wide public.
Outlook certainly lets you at least use MS Word as an editor. (I'm not saying that Outlook is something to emulate, but I think it is an example of something targetted to the "wide public" over others.) The internal editor could use a bit more polish, but it seems to be "good enough" & I think external editor support is useful for the few power-users who don't find it good enough.
There is an extension for external editors. Furthermore, Thunderbird supports format=flowed text & wrapping seems fine to me for messages which were intended to be wrapped.
If you need to frequently access data from a removable device or you need to share it with computers (some of which you don't control), tape is bad because it is slow & not on all machines & less portable. A CD-R, DVD+/-R, or USB stick are great options.
They aren't great backup devices, though. You should keep additional backups of any content on these, just as you do with your hard drive.
As far as backup goes, tape is the king. Even small workgroups should consider implementing an automated tape backup server. There is some up-front cost, but it saves A LOT of head aches down the road.
This up-front costs keeps it out of many home users setups. Used or low capacity equipment can be cheap, but the least expensive options (such as AMANDA w/ a single cartridge firewire drive) still take an enthusiast to setup.
Optical media is often "good enough" for home users: it usually isn't the end of the world to lose a disc of MP3s. But making copies of the discs & periodically verifying the integrity of important discs would be prudent.
I've put my money where my mouth is and have donated to my favorite open source projects. I encourage everyone else to do something similar (as incentive for many in the U.S. at this time of the year: some projects are run non-profit, so your donations may be tax deductible.
I have no problems with PostScript (anoter open standard by Adobe), but am skeptical of the few who suggest it was so good that there was no need for PDF.
PDFs open faster with less computational resources, as they include interpreted results of PostScript. The font embedding & substitution, as well as the use of modern & efficient bitmap graphics (jpeg, jbig2, etc.) are also substantial.
Slashdot Mirror
Please consider joining Bibliophile on sourceforge, which is a collection of a lot of the other open source literature management software. The effort is fairly informal, but we'd like to share tools for importing, exporting, and cross-site searching.
(FWIW: I'm involved with refbase)
Thanks. I suppose I should have elaborated that I wanted something that was (if possible) (1)lighter weight and (2)compatible with both PHP4 and PHP5. Last time I checked, there were reported problems using the relevant PEAR modules with PHP5. Do people really have to have a conditional based on the PHP version number to get it to work correctly?
The book uses PHP5's built-in support for XML. PHP4 can have similar support through PEAR. But what should those of us who release PHP apps targetted for use by people who might still be on PHP4 hosts with no PEAR use? I've used the ActiveLink PHP XML package with good results for creating XML, but it doesn't yet have any support for XSLT and XPath. Are there any minimal packages which can supply this without having to rely on PEAR or PHP5?
Any Ekiga (formerly GnomeMeeting) devs care to comment on whether they'll support this?
I can remember Phil's PGPfone which was released before VoIP was "the next big thing." It used GSM speech compression and 3-DES/CAST/Blowfish cryptography "to give you the ability to have a 'real-time' secure telephone conversation" (directly over 14.4 Kbps (or faster) modem-to-modem, through the Internet, or through AppleTalk).
That died. It is good to see a new alternative that has adopted newer standards.
Another "oldy but goody" was Speak Freely.
You can install source dpkgs and binary ebuilds too. (I also use FreeBSD, but think that portage has smoothed out installation from source & that dpkg is fine for installation from binaries.)
I've used both Debian and Gentoo. I am now (mostly) using Gentoo and not Debian. I hope you might find my perspective helpful. (But it should also be stated I also use ports on FreeBSD, and I have come to the conclusion that source-based distros are easier for me to use.)
How I'd love to have so much dead CPU time! If your computer's not doing anything for you, why bother having one? Truth be told, one can reap performance gains in more definitive ways than trying to have your compiler make different binaries. As you indicated, running few processes helps. As can swapping in a custom kernel and/or using a faster filesystem (both of which you can do on Deb fairly easily).
I don't usually see a huge advantage, but it does depend on the app. For desktop users, app launchtime is often significant. I do think using '-Os' to make smaller binaries (which get into memory faster) does usually create a noticeable benefit. And for workstation/server apps, every few percent for "faster" apps could be helpful to some people (but I agree that it is typically only a few percent). But just leaving apps open is often "good enough" for load time & perhaps there aren't many who really need the extra few percent.
Yes. Absolutely. Particularly when you have relatively common needs across all apps. Perhaps you want to run an X-less server? Or perhaps you want to have apps with only KDE/QT or only Gnome/GTK+ or what not. USE comes to the rescue.
You are typically correct. But the thing is that foo more often than not will have optional support for some feature. But some gentoo ebuilds do, indeed, have USE flags that aren't just ./configure flags for some applications. For example, you can install xpdf with the 'nodrm' use flag, which applies a patch to cause xpdf to ignore drm restrictions. Indeed, for making custom ebuilds, USE flags prove to be quite useful: you can use them to test multiple patches without the need to apply a given patch to all installations & can easily check which features a certain app has (by checking which flags it was emerged with).
Gentoo's approach gives the user more choice. It preserves your old files by default. You can choose to replace the old config with a newer config or, more useful, merge (typically using sdiff) in changes between the old and new config. It doesn't choose what is best for you.
Debian's defaults are normally sane. But not always.
Finally, if you are designing your own manipulations, matplotlib is O.K. You can write fairly short python scripts & matplotlib has slightly easier (so some would say better) GUI manipulations than gnuplot. Neither matplotlib nor gnuplot would be my first choice for publication quality graphs. You should really give Grace a try.
I also immediately thought of the Linux Standard Base. Unfortunately, that relies on rpm (which Ubuntu (and others) don't use by default, but which can be supported if certain packages are installed).
I don't see what would be so bad if Dell started doing what a lot of software companies do--support the biggest few (Red Hat and/or SUSE). Hobbyists will be happy knowing the hardware works with SOME distro. If Dell finds it economically feasible, they can add support for other distros (possibly even as some pay-extra-for-support). Monarch computers and others do exactly this--installation costs for various distros depend on the cost of a license & time and difficulty of install. The support for some of these is provided through the O.S. vendor. Or you can purchase extended support at a fee (which can also relate to the time and difficulty of support).
While Excel is fine for "quick and dirty" plotting & Gnumeric (and other spreadsheets) are "O.K.," none of these are really intended for plotting. My personal favorite is grace, but there are plenty of others like ploticus, gnuplot, gri, Scigraphica, and hippodraw.
Recall, also, the attempt to "Save Enterprise" the same way. The money was raised (much more than $840!) & it was still axed.
Any suggestions for better handling of the pasted text? If there are line breaks which aren't preceded by spaces, it could be intentional (ASCII art, tables, outlines, code, and other formatted text). I'm not a TB dev., but I know devs. of a few email programs. The only thing I can think of is a setting for what it does by default with pasted text & perhaps a right-click menu option (pasteformatted/flowed vs. paste unformatted/unflowed) which is disabled by default (for a simple interface), but could be enabled for power users...
There is an extension for external editors. Furthermore, Thunderbird supports format=flowed text & wrapping seems fine to me for messages which were intended to be wrapped.
For 1.0.7 on Linux:
Edit->Account Settings->Composition & Addressing & de-check "compose messages in HTML format"
I think it is the same on win32, but don't have a box near me to check.
If you need to frequently access data from a removable device or you need to share it with computers (some of which you don't control), tape is bad because it is slow & not on all machines & less portable. A CD-R, DVD+/-R, or USB stick are great options.
They aren't great backup devices, though. You should keep additional backups of any content on these, just as you do with your hard drive.
As far as backup goes, tape is the king. Even small workgroups should consider implementing an automated tape backup server. There is some up-front cost, but it saves A LOT of head aches down the road.
This up-front costs keeps it out of many home users setups. Used or low capacity equipment can be cheap, but the least expensive options (such as AMANDA w/ a single cartridge firewire drive) still take an enthusiast to setup.
Optical media is often "good enough" for home users: it usually isn't the end of the world to lose a disc of MP3s. But making copies of the discs & periodically verifying the integrity of important discs would be prudent.
I've put my money where my mouth is and have donated to my favorite open source projects. I encourage everyone else to do something similar (as incentive for many in the U.S. at this time of the year: some projects are run non-profit, so your donations may be tax deductible.
I have no problems with PostScript (anoter open standard by Adobe), but am skeptical of the few who suggest it was so good that there was no need for PDF.
PDFs open faster with less computational resources, as they include interpreted results of PostScript. The font embedding & substitution, as well as the use of modern & efficient bitmap graphics (jpeg, jbig2, etc.) are also substantial.
I personally like gFTP, but FZ 3 will have native Linux support. See development diary. Or perhaps you want some nightly builds?