Re: X Accessibility (Was: Gnopernicus ...)
On Tue, 24 Aug 2004, Veli-Pekka Tatila wrote:
> Andor Demarteau wrote:
> > I don't think xmms codecs are supported, but I'm not sure.
> By codec , do you really mean compressor decompressor or something more
> sophisticated? To me codecs are algorithms that turn some compressed file
> format into ordinary PCM that the player can then play back. The kinds of
> plug-ins I'm talking about, although called input plug-ins in Winamp, often
> generate or synthesize new audio in stead of just compressing or
> decompressing. Like emulating the sound hardware and CPU of a gaming console
> and playing back raw assembler dumps of such music. Winamp has also got
> DSP-plugins that can apply effects on audio streams in real time. I hope
> there are something similar in Mplayer. Using a time-stretching plug-in in
> Winamp, I'm able to read compressed mp3 audio-books almost twice as fast as
> usual, and all in real time for free.
no codecs are only used for compress/decompress audio/videio in/output
even for the Video4Linux stuff.
Effects like that are possible under linux, but are done by a program
called sox that also does file-conversion.
However,, mplayer has -speed option but I'm not sure if it will go over
1.0 (normal) speed.
> > i.e. you could grand someone root-access only to run apt-get ro all
> > apt* tools.
> > It works on a basis of regex's
> Thanks for the breakdown. Regexps are one of the few things I've really
> learned to like in Unix-style OSes so far. the other thing is the
> command-line syntax
> progname -switch
> in stead of
> progname /s /w /i /t /c
progname -switch --switch or even --switch -s
SOmetimes shorthand versions are available, quite handy.
> Where all the spaces and other slashes are just redundant and make parsing
> more difficult, too.
true.
> Um, still, isn't granting root access to some program a potential security
> risk?
yes it is. However with sudo you can pretty selective grand access.
i.e. if you only give apt* access, the user can't change the
root-passowrd.
Another more security-risky thing is to set programs +s (run setuid).
The program then runs always with root-premissions, very risky.
> > section508 stuff in the US, they want it accessible.
> > So they are indeed a heavy developer in that project.
> It's real nice some commercial firm with expertise on accessibility is
> willing to contribute for free.
yes and get the benefit of the free stuff to use in there own commerical
project called SunOS :)
SUN is more a hardware-vendor then software so it's not too surprising.
> Another silly question:
> I usually dislike cryptic and ambiguous command names, such as many things
> in Linux (ps, cp etc...), but really like SQL as far as the syntax goes. Is
> there a shell whose notion of dealing with files and programs is vaguely
> similar to SQL queries? Something that resembles natural language as much as
> is possible and practical, as well as letting me run SQL-styel queries to
> get at file statistics. Perhaps even psudo object oriented command
> structures where you'd say
> file1->copy(file2, other, arguments);
> IN stead of the usual.
pff. ambiguous?
Anyway, if you want cp to be copy and so on, you could either:
- make symlinks with these names
- make aliases in your shells rc-file.
You could look at tclsh in which you can use tcl-statements, but AFAIK
nothing exists in the range you want.
> > better use java then.
> NOt really. Perl and C allow much better direct hardware access as far as I
> can tell. Also, although Java supports regexp, the object orientation seems
> to be just on the way most of the time. Regexp in Perl is so much more
> practical.
not too surprising, perl was created with regexp in mind and a sole goal.
> I need to do some fairly complex regexp parsing in Java and ...
> I'm going to test and write things in Perl first and then translate it to
> Java when I'm sure it works, hehe.
java has the possiblity to generate C-header files. might be interesting.
> > there are native-compilers around as well
> Any free ones out there? I'm moderately interested.
none that spring to mind, however the Vrije Universiteit hear in Amsterdam
may ahve some stuff on their site.
They use native compilers for their linux cluster.
>
--
Andor Demarteau E-mail: ademarte@students.cs.uu.nl
student computer science www: http://www.students.cs.uu.nl/~ademarte/
UU based & VU guest-student jabber,icq,msn,voip: do ask ;)
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chairman Stichting Studiereizen STORM www: http://www.stistusto.nl
vice-chairman USF Studentenbelangen executive committee 2002-2003
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