commodo

well, then you can try to contribute to an open source project; should be simple, if you can think of something that you didn't like with a particular piece of software and make it better; the problem would be that you'd need to understand other related code; but that all depends; need suggestions of open source projects ? any language preferred ?

on the server side Linux has no rival; my fav is Debian; Linux hasn't yet conquered the desktop; that's where I say Windows XP/7 still rule; I don't know about Apple's Mac OS X; might be a very good candidate coming back to Linux, Linux has mastered servers, and super-computers; in the top500.org listing of super computers, 90% are Linux based; Linux has mastered embedded devices, phones (Android currently owns the major market share), even though user experience is still not quite as good as Apple's yet; Linux's kernel is indeed the most advanced piece of software ever written; it's the user experience that's still not quite there

I'm coding for fun on Open Game Panel ; I wish I could find more time for it, but I like the idea of their project. It's basically a panel for controlling dedicated servers. It started out as Half-Life Dedicated Server Start (HLDS Start) and then a lot of game configs were added for mods and other games/apps. Still needs a lot of work to reach a level I'd call mature, but whenever I feel like coding PHP, I work on some minor refactoring.

well, I kinda like "What Grinds Your Gears"; reminds me of Family Guy

I got involved in Open Game Panel. I'm doing some work there to update their stuff. I'm working on this because it's fun and eventually I might want to use it to open up a business related to gaming. The reason I got into it was because I liked their distributed architecture. It's still a long way from being called mature, but with some time and effort, it will get there. Other than that I keep a VPS (for about 15 dollars a month) where I have fun with server applications and stuff that I wouldn't want to leave running on my home computer; it's also a learning experience, and maybe I'll monetize this as well. I also keep a domain name pointed to my VPS : http://specialprojectsdivision.org/ ; yeah I know it's long, but it was available. I'll probably put up there some stuff that's interesting and I think it's good to share. The idea right now for me is to have fun with this stuff and hopefully make this fun my day job. I'm not always very enthusiastic about my current day job (as a programmer). I mean, it has it's ups and downs, but it doesn't provide much freedom; it's cool when I get to code on something fun though.

you could try to go to hak5.org and try out the wiki; it's down now, but on it there are show-notes for the episode; it's season 1 episode 5; here's a link to the episode : http://www.hak5.org/episodes/hak5-episode-5-released other than that I think you could try to get hold of Wes to try to explain more stuff to you

Well, there haven't been any good open source TV mixing software. I mean there is a lot software that you can use to mix videos, but not on-the-fly or live. I have checked also the VJ software tools that are out there and some partially do this but it's still not what I wanted. So the idea would be to use some of the existing tools and software out there to make an intuitive GUI with which you can load videos (or live streams), switch between them, do picture-in-picture stuff, add text, watermarks, animations, etc. You don't really need to do all these effects, they're already done by a lot of other open-source applications. I think DirectShow also supports this stuff, so you can use that. You might want to check AviSynth since they already do some of this stuff, and they're just a library. There are other open source software that you could use. The output of the mixed content would preferably have to be a live stream that you can distribute to the internet, but for simplicity, I'd say you can just output it to a monitor. The keywords to this app, would be "a GUI that makes live video/TV/stream mixing easy and intuitive". How does that sound ? If you don't like it, I can try to think of another application.

Well, I wouldn't hammer on that too much; the thing is that a lot of big cities pay better, but expenses are a higher. I mean, I don't want to go to my home town, because I wouldn't find an interesting job in programming, and even if I would find something close to interesting, I would be paid less, maybe about half what I get now. Still my expenses (rent and other stuff) would be fewer and smaller.

this post must sound like a blond bimbo screaming "omg, sale"; but even so, I think that this would deserves some attention; right now all Square Enix games are on sale on steam; I think this will offer last for this week also, I got the Valve complete pack, which is a bit more expensive than the previous one; but if you want to own these games, I think the price is ok; I played enough cracked games to consider it would be time to buy some of them; I think the Square Enix offer will expire soon; the Valve pack will still remain the same; although it looks like they will release Portal 2 soon; I'll probably wait a while before I buy that;

that must mean that software really sux, if 1 gig of RAM still isn't enough; i mean, if we look at smart phones they really can do more with considerably less CPU, power, and RAM;

I subscribe to the these two wholeheartedly. Never did helpdesk, but I know the feeling after all my family and friends call me up and ask me stuff like : "I installed this patch that I found from the internet and it doesn't work; any ideas ?" like I'm supposed to magically know the webpage he got it from and determine "I installed "F*** me I'm annoying Linux" (any kind of obscure distro), and it's really neat, it's a live CD, but I can't get past the boot screen which gives me 3 options : blow up this computer, shoot yourself in the foot, call your know-it-all-tech-guy (that's me)"; I don't know about you guys, but I'd probably choosing one of the first 2, depending on the mood "I reinstalled Windows XP (7 is great in this aspect, really, no pun), and I can't find drivers..." (the good part is that at least by now some of them know about drivers, but still don't know how to get them) ever since 2nd/3rd year of university (I graduated since then), every now and then, a couple of people call me up (when I'm in the middle of a beer... that's annoying), and ask me a Java,C,C++ (or something else) related question; hmmm, heavens, some annoying people are evolving, that's not so bad, but it's in the middle of my goddamn beer; maybe I should at least have them pay for my beer I don't think I have a "high-and-mighty" attitude towards these people, I mean I know that there are other areas where I'm a n00b and some of them would be able to help, but sometimes it can get tiring. The only other people that would truly understand these computer-related-issues would be mechanics; they've been having it rough for a while, because all of their friends call them up mostly when they have car problems and/or ask for advice (e.g. umm, I heard an explosion in my car, what could it be ?).

well, I don't mind microsoft copying some features from Linux/Unix; that's fine; i remember this story i've heard of a marketer and an engineer from the same company talking; but the marketer did not know that the engineer works in the same company; i think they were at a conference; and the marketer was trying to pitch the product to the engineer; and after a while the engineer says : dude, i work on this crap, i know all the bugs inside it; why the hell do you even bother praising it ? on a side note; if you guys are ever pissed and want to get a laugh check this out: it mainly focuses on engineers, but "engineer" to me is another term (or the official term) for "hacker" http://anengineeringmind.blogspot.com/ you can start with this one : http://anengineeringmind.blogspot.com/2008/08/i-do-robots-at-niweek-08.html there aren't many videos; you'll get through them in an hour or less; but it's funny; the guy works in a big company and parodies some of the issues engineers/hackers deal with in a big company

well, Debian is the father of Ubuntu; it's also one of the oldest Linux distros made (93 something); The guy that initiated Ubuntu (Mark Shuttleworth) worked on Debian for a while, but was unhappy with some stuff. He then got reach and started Ubuntu. The general philosophy of Debian's release cycle is: if we don't get bug reports for a while and we've fixed all current bugs, it's a release. The drawback of this is that you get outdated packages, but at least their pretty rock solid. Ubuntu releases every 6 months which makes room for bugs to go into a release, and you have to run aptitude update + upgrade and hope you'll get rid of some. Ubuntu .deb packages are Debian packages, which means that some Ubuntu packages work on Debian and vice-versa; it's more of a matter of resolving dependencies. In fact Ubuntu pulls all it's packages from the Debian main repository which is just too huge to redo. The developers then work to stabilize everything for a release. There is some advantage to Ubuntu however, since they resolve a lot of stability work with the OS and packages, they usually are newer, so there is a project for Debian that pulls packages from Ubuntu repositories back into Debian. Also, Ubuntu did become very popular (because of the marketing involved in it) and that made Debian a bit more popular. Choosing between the 2 (since they're pretty similar) is a matter of use and ideology; personally I prefer Debian for servers; I still don't think Ubuntu Server quite has done properly it yet. I know that BSD OSes are preferred by some, I try to avoid Unix-Linux debates; they're useless, and somewhat religious; Linux is a descendant of Unix. The initiator of Debian (Ian Murdock) did do a nice family tree of the major Linux distros (which is a neat). You can check it on flickr here full-size.

When someone tells me about tweaking a Linux Distro/OS I always think about Gentoo, which is the mother of tweaking Linux. You may try to recompile your kernel with special compiler flags that enable the kernel to use special (and specific) features of the machine you're running it on. By default most distros don't make use of this because they try to cover as many architectures as possible, but even so, Linux is still faster than Windows when it comes to a lot of tasks.

Hey, if you haven't yet noticed, Debian just released it's new stable version called Squeeze on the 6th of Feb 2011 (about 3 days ago). I did an upgrade from Lenny on my server. It went pretty well, some stuff had to be reconfigured because a lot of the packages I had installed were configured by me :P ; major notes that I noticed so far : they upgraded Grub to a newer one; dash is preferred against bash; that leaves room to make a funny like : "hmm, maybe I'll switch to aash, or maybe cash, bash was cool so let's try it with dash" major update for munin; I use it to keep track of my server I'm a big fan of Debian because they make sure that when they release they're stable; I also like Ubuntu, but I don't trust the fact that their release cycles are so small.

cool stuff; I just watched the video on the website which was made at shmoocon 2011; I'd like to maybe get involved a bit more in this stuff later on; for now it's an awesome idea to just make this part of my several (personal) website projects that I have; at least it will increase the page rank of the website on search engines

google launched another one : http://corporatetoday.blogspot.com/2011/02/hack-google-chrome-for-prize-of-20000.html

damn, and i was actually thinking about moving to Australia for a while

awesome competition; there was once that i saw a while back, where the prize was the assembled computer;

i'm trying to upgrade my soul; seems to have a few bugs; the manual's worthless, so no help there

big companies that try to seem all big, solid and serious that charge heavily and a lot for their products, which they ship with a ton of known issues and bugs and some that even slip by them personally, I wouldn't mind if a piece of software (like say... Windows or any other) has bugs in it; but for the love of what's holy and honest, don't try to make it look like it's bullet-proof-ultra-high-quality stuff, cause that's just an invitation for hackers to break it to pieces in such a manner that they'll prefer having their balls cut off rather than having those bugs exposed/found and that ladies and gentleman is what grinds my gears when it comes to the tech industry

Oh, I just remembered; there is this cool project called ReactOS, which is basically an open source rewrite of Windows; it's supposed to be Windows XP compatible, but because it's open source they're usually behind a couple of years and haven't yet reached a stable point, but I think it would be an awesome alternative to Windows. Maybe if they merge their kernel with Linux we'd have a better working model than Wine on Linux.

You can try to look into hypervisor type virtualization technologies. They basically allow you to run in parallel Windows, Linux and whatever. We have some at work, but they're commercial. The idea is that you run a small hypervisor (that's what the program is called) underneath the operating systems and that distributes hardware resources between the OSes. It would be best to have at least a CPU with 4 cores for ideal performance on both OSes, but some of these technologies allow also run on single core machines. Then you can attribute 2 cores to Linux, 2 to Windows (or 1 to Linux and 3 to Windows depending the case), and distribute the RAM between the two, partitions and so on. Of course you'd need 2 monitor outputs, one for each OS, and I think ethernet cards can be bridged by some hypervisors, or at least allows you to create VLANs. Anyway, I was thinking of trying some of the open-source/free ones that are out there; on my initial research (a while back) I found some that were basically virtualization by taping into a host kernel; for example : Cooperative Linux; this one basically just goes deep into the Windows kernel (ring zero) and accesses resources for Linux; it's supposed to be faster this way than running VmWare player or Virtualbox (although they might also have something similar). Once I have found one that taps into the Linux kernel but I can't find it right now. So, there will come a day when users too will be able to run 2 OSes on the same hardware pretty easily and efficiently. Right now, the good stuff is mostly available only in industrial applications and costs a hell-of-a-lot-of-money. Or who knows, maybe Lindows will come back to allow us to easily run both Windows and Linux apps :P

Most likely you'll get a lot of errors in Windows or any other OS; probably not the same but a lot of them in any case. To see them in Windows you have to open VLC, hit Ctrl + M (might work in the Linux/Mac GUI) and set the verbosity level to 2 (or more if it allows you to). That way you can get all sorts of debugging info than can be useful. By default the GUI does not show you debug info, but starting it from the console does. I used VLC to stream video (especially live video from capture cards) and using their debug outputs helped me out a lot. If you're really irritated about it, try setting in the command line the verbosity to zero; you can get a lot of help in their wiki page here. VLC is probably the awesomest cross platform player and also streamer; although as a streamer it's still not very good (I have a passion for audio/video streaming). Lately I've been looking for an open source cross-platform tool that is simple to use and do VJ-ing and live TV video mixing. Haven't had much luck with finding one though; if in 2-3 years one won't appear I'll probably write one up myself in my free time :P There is a new branching in the VLC project called VLMC (VideoLan Movie Creator), but that's not even in alpha yet (I think).

awesome documentary