Free ahead nero 6 software for linux

NeroRip is a tool that rips tracks from Nero 5.x images and makes it possible to burn them using standard Linux CD mastering programs.

The Wonder Shaper is a very special network shaper script with a lot of features. Works on Linux 2.4 & higher.

Goals

I attempted to create the holy grail:

* Maintain low latency for interfactive traffic at all times.

This means that downloading or uploading files should not disturb SSH or even telnet. These are the most important things, even 200ms latency is sluggish to work over.

* Allow surfing at reasonable speeds while up or downloading

Even though http is bulk traffic, other traffic should not drown it out too much.

* Make sure uploads dont harm downloads, and the other way around

This is a much observed phenomenon where upstream traffic simply destroys download speed. It turns out that all this is possible, at the cost of a tiny bit of bandwidth. The reason that uploads, downloads and ssh hurt eachother is the presence of large queues in many domestic access devices like cable or DSL modems.

Why it doesnt work well by default

ISPs know that they are benchmarked solely on how fast people can download. Besides available bandwidth, download speed is influenced heavily by packet loss, which seriously hampers TCP/IP performance. Large queues can help prevent packetloss, and speed up downloads. So ISPs configure large queues.

These large queues however damage interactivity. A keystroke must first travel the upstream queue, which may be seconds (!) long and go to your remote host. It is then displayed, which leads to a packet coming back, which must then traverse the downstream queue, located at your ISP, before it appears on your screen.

This HOWTO teaches you how to mangle and process the queue in many ways, but sadly, not all queues are accessible to us. The queue over at the ISP is completely off-limits, whereas the upstream queue probably lives inside your cable modem or DSL device. You may or may not be able to configure it. Most probably not.

So, what next? As we cant control either of those queues, they must be eliminated, and moved to your Linux router. Luckily this is possible.

Limit upload speed somewhat

By limiting our upload speed to slightly less than the truly available rate, no queues are built up in our modem. The queue is now moved to Linux.

Limit download speed

This is slightly trickier as we cant really influence how fast the internet ships us data. We can however drop packets that are coming in too fast, which causes TCP/IP to slow down to just the rate we want. Because we dont want to drop traffic unnecessarily, we configure a burst size we allow at higher speed.

Now, once we have done this, we have eliminated the downstream queue totally (except for short bursts), and gain the ability to manage the upstream queue with all the power Linux offers.

Let interactive traffic skip the queue

What remains to be done is to make sure interactive traffic jumps to the front of the upstream queue. To make sure that uploads dont hurt downloads, we also move ACK packets to the front of the queue. This is what normally causes the huge slowdown observed when generating bulk traffic both ways. The ACKnowledgements for downstream traffic must compete with upstream traffic, and get delayed in the process.

We also move other small packets to the front of the queue - this helps operating systems which do not set TOS bits, like everything from Microsoft.

Allow the user to specify low priority traffic (new in 1.1!)

Sometimes you may notice low priority OUTGOING traffic slowing down important traffic. In that case, the following options may help you:

NOPRIOHOSTSRC
Set this to hosts or netmasks in your network that should have low priority

NOPRIOHOSTDST
Set this to hosts or netmasks on the internet that should have low priority

NOPRIOPORTSRC
Set this to source ports that should have low priority. If you have an unimportant webserver on your traffic, set this to 80

NOPRIOPORTDST
Set this to destination ports that should have low priority.

See the start of wshaper and wshaper.htb

Results

If we do all this we get the following measurements using an excellent ADSL connection from xs4all in the Netherlands:

Baseline latency:
round-trip min/avg/max = 14.4/17.1/21.7 ms

Without traffic conditioner, while downloading:
round-trip min/avg/max = 560.9/573.6/586.4 ms

Without traffic conditioner, while uploading:
round-trip min/avg/max = 2041.4/2332.1/2427.6 ms

With conditioner, during 220kbit/s upload:
round-trip min/avg/max = 15.7/51.8/79.9 ms

With conditioner, during 850kbit/s download:
round-trip min/avg/max = 20.4/46.9/74.0 ms

When uploading, downloads proceed at ~80% of the available speed. Uploads at around 90%. Latency then jumps to 850 ms, still figuring out why.

What you can expect from this script depends a lot on your actual uplink speed. When uploading at full speed, there will always be a single packet ahead of your keystroke. That is the lower limit to the latency you can achieve - divide your MTU by your upstream speed to calculate. Typical values will be somewhat higher than that. Lower your MTU for better effects!

A small table:

Uplink speed | Expected latency due to upload
--------------------------------------------------
32 | 234ms
64 | 117ms
128 | 58ms
256 | 29ms

So to calculate your effective latency, take a baseline measurement (ping on an unloaded link), and look up the number in the table, and add it. That is about the best you can expect. This number comes from a calculation that assumes that your upstream keystroke will have at most half a full sized packet ahead of it.

This boils down to:

mtu * 0.5 * 10
-------------- + baseline_latency
kbit

The factor 10 is not quite correct but works well in practice.

Your kernel

If you run a recent distribution, everything should be ok. You need 2.4 with QoS options turned on.

If you compile your own kernel, it must have some options enabled. Most notably, in the Networking Options menu, QoS and/or Fair Queueing, turn at least CBQ, PRIO, SFQ, Ingress, Traffic Policing, QoS support, Rate Estimator, QoS classifier, U32 classifier, fwmark classifier.

In practice, I (and most distributions) just turn on everything.

The scripts

The script comes in two versions, one which works on standard kernels and is implemented using CBQ. The other one uses the excellent HTB qdisc which is not in the default kernel. The CBQ version is more tested than the HTB one!

See wshaper and wshaper.htb.

Tuning

These scripts need to know the real rate of your ISP connection. This is hard to determine upfront as different ISPs use different kinds of bits it appears. People report success using the following technique:

Estimate both your upstream and downstream at half the rate your ISP specifies. Now verify if the script is functioning - check interactivity while uploading and while downloading. This should deliver the latency as calculated above. If not, check if the script executed without errors.

Now slowly increase the upstream & downstream numbers in the script until the latency comes back. This way you can find optimum values for your connection. If you are happy, please report to me so I can make a list of numbers that work well. Please let me know which ISP you use and the name of your subscription, and its reputed specifications, so I can list you here and save others the trouble.

Installation

If you dial in, you can copy the script to /etc/ppp/ip-up.d and it will be run at each connect.

If you want to remove the shaper from an interface, run wshaper stop. To see status information, run wshaper status.

KNOWN PROBLEMS

If you get errors, add an -x to the first line, as follows:

#!/bin/bash -x

And retry. This will show you which line gives an error. Before contacting me, make sure that you are running a recent version of iproute!

Recent versions can be found at your Linux distributor, or if you prefer compiling, here:
ftp://ftp.inr.ac.ru/ip-routing/iproute2-current.tar.gz

GeBoP project is a general strategic boardgame player.
GeBoP allows you to play 9 strategic boardgames against the computer or against another player. You can even watch a number of computer players fight among themselves.
Some of the games can be played with a variable number of players, and other games can be played on various board sizes. GeBoP features a unified best move engine.
Because of this, additional strategic boardgames are easy to add to the application.
Enhancements:
- ersion 1.6 of GeBoP is a nice and complete version. However, I could still do some work on the algorithms for playing the computer uses, and some of the games use rather na?e evaluation functions at the moment. I plan to do this some time in the near or otherwise far future.
- Since you are reading this file, you are probably a Haskell programmer. If you feel like implementing your favorite game for GeBoP, please go ahead and mail it to me when youre done :)

Blob Wars : Blob and Conquer is a 3rd person action shooter. With the apparent defeat of Galdov and the reclaiming of the Fire, Space, Time and Reality Crystals, the Blobs battle was only just beginning.
Bob had rescued many Blobs and fought many battles, but now he had an ever bigger task ahead of him. The Blobs homeworld is still littered with the alien forces and Bob once again makes it his task to lead the counter attack.
But even without Galdov the aliens are still extremely well organised.
Main features:
- Explore and battle in full 3D environments
- Use and aquire mutliple weapons (uzis, shotguns, grenades)
- Fight familiar enemies - Assimilated Blobs, Eye Droids.
- Auto targetting enables you to maintain a lock on enemies whilst dodging around
- Blob allies - Fight alongside buddies such as Teeka the Scout

FuseNRG allows you to mount Ahead Nero NRG files on your Unix system with FUSE. On the mounted directory, there will be an ISO file, equivalent to the original NRG file. Such ISO file can be mounted with fuseiso or burned to a CD with cdrecord or even Ahead Nero itself.

Advantages over nrg2iso:

it does not require extra disk space for the ISO file
it does not require extra memory for the ISO file
you dont have to wait for the file to be converted (conversion is done on the fly)

Example:

$mkdir ../testNRG
$ls -la ../testNRG
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 quinho quinho 4096 May 19 00:39 .
drwxr-xr-x 16 quinho users 4096 May 19 00:39 ..

$./fusenrg ../neroImage.nrg ../testNRG

$ls -la ../testNRG
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Dec 31 1969 .
drwxr-xr-x 16 quinho users 4096 May 19 00:39 ..
-r--r--r-- 1 quinho quinho 21821596 May 18 23:05 neroImage.nrg.iso

$mkdir ../testISO
$fuseiso ../testNRG/neroImage.nrg.iso ../testISO

$ls -la ../testISO
total 5234
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 2048 May 18 21:25 .
drwxr-xr-x 16 quinho users 4096 May 19 00:39 ..
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 15157180 Apr 21 15:44 DVB-T.rar
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 65989 Apr 19 23:00 PriceList MSRP April 2007.pdf
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 782 May 15 17:48 Shortcut to My Bills from December.gnumeric.lnk
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1978 Apr 14 17:52 Users Guide.lnk
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 34354 Mar 8 07:02 MySampleDocumentation 2.txt

$fusermount -u ../testISO
$fusermount -u ../testNRG
$rmdir ../testISO ../testNRG

Podracer is a podcast downloader. It takes a file with the URLs to all your podcast rss feeds and goes and gets the mp3s and stores them in a specified location. Podracer is a Bourne Shell script with an internal BitTorrent downloader written in Python.
Main features:
- Catchup feature updates the log without downloading all podcasts
- Run as a cron job to automatically receive podcasts
- Properly fails (with no error message for the sake of cron) if already running
- Download podcast enclosures of any file format
- Support for BitTorrent downloading and seeding of podcasts
- Configurable seed time management - seed torrents for an hour or a day
- Background torrent seeding continues after program ends and stops automatically
- System-wide and user-specific configuration
- User-specific subscription file and podcast download directories
- Commentable subscription file - go ahead and mark it up
- Fully configurable placement of files and directories
- Support for dynamic creation of download directories, i.e. based on date/time
- Appears in podcasters logs as a podcast receiver
- Automatic creation of m3u playlists
- User may request that m3u not be created
- Automatic removal of empty download directories
- Your suggestions...

Time::Warp is a Perl module to control over the flow of time.

SYNOPSIS

use Time::Warp qw(scale to time);

to(time + 5); # 5 seconds ahead
scale(2); # make time flow twice normal

Our external experience unfolds in 3 1/2 dimensions (time has a dimensionality of 1/2). The Time::Warp module offers developers control over the measurement of time.

API

to($desired_time)

The theory of relativity asserts that all physical laws are enforced relative to the observer. Since the starting point of time is arbitrary, it is permissable to change it. This has the effect of making it appear as if time is moving forwards or backward instanteously. For example, on some types of operating systems time starts at Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 (this will likely change as we approach 2030 and with the acceptance of 64-bit CPUs).

to(time + 60*60); # 1 hour ahead

scale($factor)

Changes the speed at which time is progressing.

scale(scale * 2); # double the speed of time

Note that it is not possible to stop time or cause it to reverse since this is forbidden by the second law of thermodynamics.