Open Source Pixels

In addition to Desktop environments there are window managers that are separate programs that manage the windows and interface that you use. The reason you would explore the option of a different window manager is that it will use much less resources than the GNOME or KDE Desktop. However, less resources in terms of RAM and CPU means more basic features. In initial testing in similar settings for each these are the results. It is very clear that GNOME uses considerably more resources than any of the alternative window managers.

1. SMPlayer SMPlayer is a fully featured video player built using the Qt 4 libraries. It basically plays anything, including DVDs and ISO images, but it skipped the menus when reading DVD ISOs. It’s complete and it offers plenty configuration options, including for subtitles and the interface itself, allowing to choose the icon set and the style used. You can also configure the language SMPlayer uses for its interface, including English, Romanian, Polish, German and many other. I was impressed to see translations are pretty much complete.

The library is a contribution to GtkAda, an Ada
bindings to GTK+ toolkit. It deals with the
following issues: tasking support; custom models
for tree view widget; custom cell renderers for
tree view widget; multi-columned derived model; an
extension derived model (to add columns to an
existing model); an abstract caching model for
directory-like data; tree view and list view
widgets for navigational browsing of abstract
caching models; file system navigation widgets
with wildcard filtering; resource styles;
capturing the resources of a widget; embeddable
images; some missing sub-programs and bugfixes; a
measurement unit selection widget and dialogs; an
improved hue-luminance-saturation color model;
simplified image buttons and buttons customizable
by style properties; controlled Ada types for GTK+
strong and weak references; and a simplified means
to create lists of strings.

htmLawed is a PHP script that makes input text
more secure, HTML standards-compliant, and
suitable in general from the viewpoint of a
Web-page administrator, for use in the body of
HTML 4 or XHTML 1 or 1.1 documents. It is a
customizable HTML/XHTML filter, processor,
purifier, and sanitizer. It can ensure that HTML
tags are balanced and properly nested tags,
neutralize code that may be used for cross-site
scripting (XSS) attacks, and limit the allowed
HTML elements, tags, attributes, or URL protocols.

Pantry is a command line nutrient analysis
program. It will help you track your food intake
and analyze recipes for their nutrient content.
Because it works entirely from the command line,
it is very fast to use, powerful, and flexible.

ciopfs (case insensitive on purpose file system)
is a stackable or overlay Linux userspace file
system (implemented with FUSE) which mounts a
normal directory on a regular file system in a
case-insensitive fashion.

Apple’s OS X, which has been an official certified Unix system for some time now, is often installed onto Internet-exposed or intranet-only Web servers for serving up dynamic content. I’ve worked with such configurations for a couple of years, and with GNU/Linux alternatives for even longer. There are at least three reasons why GNU/Linux systems do the job better.

This tutorial shows how to configure Zimbra Collaboration Server (ZCS) and Samba to act as a primary domain controller (PDC) that uses LDAP as a centralized database for authenticating users on Linux and Windows desktops.

During the recent discussion of the OAI-ORE drafts (which use RDF), the claim was made that RDF is serialized in RDF/XML and thus could be considered an XML representation of the underlying data model. My response to that was that the RDF model is different from XML, and that it thus is pretty hard to process RDF/XML using XML tools, in particular when considering all constructs allowed by RDF/XML, and maybe even the possibility how to update RDF/XML data using XML tools alone.

I tried for some time to find a general-purpose RDF/XML parser written in XSLT, but so far could not find one. But Google is imperfect and i might not know the best places where to look. So here is my question: Is there a general-purpose RDF/XML parser written in XSLT? It has to support all the fun stuff allowed by XML and RDF/XML, such as weird uses of namespace declarations, XML Base, rdf:ID and RDF/XML syntactic sugar. It must accept anything that is valid RDF/XML. As a result, it should produce some form of normalized RDF/XML, but I really don’t care that much about the exact format (ideally, it should be XPath-friendly). The parser must be robust enough to produce the exact same normalized result for inputs that look radically different because of XML and RDF/XML syntax variations.

I am really interested to see whether such a beast exists, and if so, how big it is. My guess is that it’s not trivial to write such a parser, but it definitely is possible. After finding out whether such a beast exists, my follow-up question will be whether there is an associated function library that can then work on the parsed RDF model, so that the data can be traversed, queried, updated, and serialized.

Through all the Windows and Microsoft bashing on the intertubes, it’s almost easy to forget that Windows does, in fact, have quite a few positive aspects as well. One of those aspects is the modularity of its installation system, which allows you to create your custom installation image of Windows - with relative ease. Sadly, Microsoft decided to keep this ability away from normal users, making it a sort of OEM tool only. Lucky for us, there’s a tool called vLite/nLite which allows us to slipstream fixes, applications, and drivers into the installation image as we please. This functionality of course also made its way to the ‘underground’ community, who used it to produce something called TinyXP. APCMag decided to take a look at it.