2739233
submission
Qbertino writes:
Hello fellow Slashdotters. I've got a rather unusual problem: I'm a Linux veteran and haven't used Windows for production work since 8 years ago and stopped using it entirely about 6 years ago. However, I'm about to recieve a brand new Laptop as an xmas present from my employer and it comes with Vista preinstalled. I'd like to use the preinstalled OS as a foundation for working with some apps I use at work that only run on Windows, so I'd like to keep the install if possible. And, no, there are no replacements for these on Ubuntu. What can I do to clean up Vista and remove any crap that bogs down the system or gets me angry by nagging me with "Please register this OS and give us your genetic fingerprint" popups and simular shite MS has been pissing off people with lately? I'm even willing to pay 30 Euros or so for Windows cleanup utilities, maybe there is something you Windows guys can recommend? Any free tools I should run before doing anything on Vista? Thanks for any help.
2109685
submission
Qbertino writes:
I am, just as many other slashdotters, the typical Generation X geek. I started programming in my teens in the mid-80s and have done it ever since, with maybe a few year break inbetween. In 1999 I joined the first web craze full-scale and have since then been developing software and contributing to IT projects for a living. I currently have a compareatively safe and fun job in a currently booming market (MMO Gaming) and a chance to yet again try out the newest of technologies in my field and even get paid for it.
However, I've grown increasingly weary of a world embracing IT technologies where I feel they don't belong. IT-Bots deciding wether someone is elligeble to a credit or not or a terrorist or not based on some obscure metadata, indian taxi-drivers required not to smile in order for bots to be able to read their faces, bizar amounts of virtual/digital money being leveraged to unhinge entire economies, ect. pp. ... you get the picture.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think the world will end because of this, but I do think people will have to move away from IT in order to reclaim their lives and that this will hurt our field of expertise where it actually *is* usefull and meant to advance humanity.
On the other hand, people are starting to think this is normal. They don't see the nature of computers or the web, but simply take it in without even reflecting it. And the scary part about it is that no matter how ineffective it is, it is actually more effective for everyday life to mostly stear clear of IT and not become to dependant on it. Which — as I see it — only IT experts can actually really do proactively. What I'm saying is that more and more I see it becoming increasingly difficult to actually see the work I do actually benefit the people around me. What I see is a huge machine decoupled from humanity, squeezing the last bit of net gain out of everything and sinking people to mere co-dependant parts of it rather than empowering individuals.
What are your observations? Similar, or is this just some sort of a winter depression I'm having? I don't see myself as overly romantic or backwards — on the contrary — but could it be that we as IT geeks more proactively have to embrace a counterculture? And maybe stand up against a world in which *everything* is ruled by IT? What do you fellow slashdotters think?
705267
submission
Qbertino writes:
After a long developement time and massive improvements in functions and featureset the CakePHP project has released RC1 of their Web Application Framework. CakePHP is one of the popular full-scale MVC web frameworks written in PHP. Unlike most others, it still actively supports PHP 4, allthough not with all features and it is officially inspired by Ruby on Rails.
580564
submission
Qbertino writes:
The 'Big Eavesdropping Attack' ('Großer Lauschangriff'), a set of german anti-terrorisim laws forcing network and telco providers to store any connection data for 60 days (amoungst other things), is a major YRO/privacy issue in Germany. According to Spiegel Online (Article in German) the German Supreme Court has invalidated substancial portions of the bill in a short-notice arbitration. This is yet another instance in a series of swattings of the German gouverment for this sort of thing from the Judges of the German Supreme Court. A big relief for all whom it concerns. Nice to see the authorities still believe in citizens rights. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
499106
submission
Qbertino writes:
According to the major German news-site Spiegel Online, Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo for $31 per share, adding up to 44 Billion for a majority in shares. Prices for Yahoo shares started climbing after the news. Tricky thing. This would reduce the amount in Microsofts piggybank considerably and could backfire big time if their plan doesn't work out. And this time there'd be not much left to pay off the mistake. It's suprising to see MS announcing such a bold move. Is Yahoo really worth that much? And doesn't this appear a tad desperate?
295113
submission
Qbertino writes:
I'm proud owner of an older 12" G4 iBook (1,0 Ghz) from a few years ago, the one many geeks have and liked to use because of it's price/performance ratio for a subnotebook. Many people I met use it to run Debian Linux PPC or some other OSS operating system and do their programming on it. However I mostly do web developement where the OS hardly matter and I've come to like the benefits of running the native OS and the neat and frictionless hardware integration that comes with it. I do quite a lot of Flash developement aswell and need to be able to use the official Flash IDE from Adobe.
The downside is that the desktop bogs down the systems performance which I'd like to use for other things by running a replacement of the Aqua Workplace Shell & desktop enviroment. There are quite a few wps replacements for windows — I've use Litestep with Windows 2000 — but I'm looking for one for OS X. What lightweigth WPS replacements are there for OS X and what other strategies are there to take some weight off an OS X desktop?
85492
submission
Qbertino writes:
The high-end open-source 3D engine Crystalspace has reached Version 1.0. From the website: "After almost 10 years of development we finally release Crystal Space and Crystal Entity Layer 1.0!"
Crytalspace has several sub-projects: A game engine called CEL, a scripting exstension for that game engine called Cellstart, and CrystalCore, a single-player FPS Demo-Game built to show off Crystalspaces features. Crystalspace is generally considered a modern and extremely powerfull 3D engine and allready is in use in commercial products.
73030
submission
Qbertino writes:
A company called Applied Business Technologies Inc. has recently released an open source web RAD system and application server based on Java and Java EE. It's called jVantage and seems to do away with the usual 1995ish grind Java developers have to put up with before having a decent web application ready. The developement enviroment is completely web based and somewhat reminiscent of the way the Python web application server Zope handles things. The screencast demonstrations (front page, bottom right) — in django/rails/cake/yourFavoriteWebFramework style — display an impressive set of features and a developement speed that is nearly breathtaking and faster even than with the aforementioned code-generating frameworks. It's nice to see now that Java has completely joined the OSS world it also is quickly catching up with the goodies other enviroments have to offer. And even picking up the Zope concept. With projects like these and the mature OSS developement pipeline Java has it may even be able to step back into the ring with PHP in the everyday web developement game. They've got me (Python, Zope & PHP Fanboy) curious anyway.
70148
submission
Qbertino writes:
Apple introduces the iPhone. The Specs go as following: Touchscreen controlled with a patended gesture system, OS X, 61x12x115 mm, 480by320 Screen resoltution, 4 or 8GB storage, 4-Band GSM, Edge Bluetooth, WiFi, 2 Megapixels Camera, Battery Time for Talk, Video, browsing: 5 hrs, Audio Playback 16 hrs., Weight: 135 grams. Looks: Sweeet. ... I want one.
37892
submission
Qbertino writes:
I'm currently working myself into a large web application project (Flash / Ajax / PHP 4 / MySQL 4) for which I'm supposed to become the lead maintainance programmer. Currently I'm trying to wrap my head around an admin area where each user interaction triggers roughly around 10 actions that range from Ajax calling variables from special PHP files, flash components loading subcomponents and those yet again loading stuff from other PHP files — data passing to and fro via GET *and* POST — and all of the server side stuff doing roughly 5 to 10 DB actions via individual class related custom SQL statements, each of which are stored in seperate, class related PHP files (neatly named though, I have to admit). Allthough naming is somewhat consitent and PHP Documentor did a good job at listing APIs, there is no written documetation about which component is supposed to do what and how they relate to one another. [sarcasm]"Gee, thanks a bunch. Yeah, I believe the manager though you were doing a good job at the documentation, since it looks soo neat with the right stylesheet."[/sarcasm]
Needless to say, the thing is living hell to work through and is a prime example of the big downside of web-developement. I'm starting to miss a solid callstack debugger, and web-call-tracer or whatever you call it, to keep track of what's going on if I load template X with Master Flash Component Y.
We use Eclipse with no success so far in getting the debugger to work correctly (still working at it), but that won't be enough anyway. I need to keep track of what's going on between client(browser) and server, what's going on *in* the server (that's the classic debugger, I know) and what's going on between serverapp and DB. And all of that *at the same time*.
Since PHP is the most commonly used server enviroment I expect a measurable set of tools available to tackle this problem, some well-configured Unix CLI "scope-tracker" or watchamacallit or something and maybe a sophisticated logfile-reader or so. Any suggestions on how I can approach this problem? Note: The original programmer is long gone, so whooping his lazy ass for not documenting properly is not an option.
