Free trip planner software for linux

Planner is a project management application for GNOME.
Enhancements:
- fix bug #353232 - patch to raise majic priority, fixing nautilus behavior when clicking on a planner file
- fix bug #368186 - patch to paint guide lines behind project start date rather than on top - contributed by Arthur Petitpierre
- added -Wno-return-type for compile with database enabled
- patch related to bug #353213 - added #ifdefs to allow compile with libgda 1 or 2, up to libgda-1.9.102
- Added Arabic - contributed by Djihed Afifi
- fix for bug 358415 crash in gantt view, contributed by Arthur Petitpierre and mdpoole trolius org.

Planner is a project managment tool for the Gnome desktop, for planning, scheduling and tracking projects.
Main features:
- Definition of tasks and subtasks, resources and resource groups
- Dependencies between tasks
- Display of the critical path
- Calendars with working/non-working time
- Gantt chart and resource usage overview
- HTML export of project plans
- Translated to nearly 20 languages, e.g. French, Spanish and Swedish
Enhancements:
- fix bug #353232 - patch to raise majic priority, fixing nautilus behavior when clicking on a planner file
- fix bug #368186 - patch to paint guide lines behind project start date rather than on top - contributed by Arthur Petitpierre
- added -Wno-return-type for compile with database enabled
- patch related to bug #353213 - added #ifdefs to allow compile with libgda 1 or 2, up to libgda-1.9.102
- Added Arabic - contributed by Djihed Afifi
- fix for bug 358415 crash in gantt view, contributed by Arthur Petitpierre and mdpoole trolius org.

Planner.el project is an Emacs organizer.

Planner.el is an organizer module for GNU Emacs and XEmacs. It tracks tasks, appointments, and notes in plain text files, which may be published via emacs-wiki.

planner.el is an Emacs module that gives me a summary view of my tasks, schedule, and notes inside Emacs (which incidentally has a nice graphical interface, too). Together with emacs-wiki.el, it lets me easily manage my website.

Another ultra-handy thing is M-x remember from remember.el, which pops up a buffer asking me what I want to remember and stores a note in my daily planner page. For example, this is one such note created by remember.el. A patch contributed by Thomas Gehrlein allows easy navigation of planner pages - simply select dates from M-x calendar.

Personally, I prefer this text-file-based system to Evolution or Korganizer. I remember dropping down to M-x grep to quickly search for something in my daily planner files. I can backup my data files in a .tar.gz. I can perform diffs and version control (although I havent gotten around to doing so yet!). I can even run it in conjunction with the Remembrance Agent.

ClanWar Planner :: Leaque project is a Clan War league administration tool.
It allows the subscribed clans to challenge each other.
It currently supports a ladder but will be extended to a complete tournament system.
It can be used for any game currently played on the Internet and features an advanced access logging facility, on-site statistics, support for many games, an advanced administration system, and different access levels for users.
Version restrictions:
- This is an unstable release which has not yet implemented all the features.
- It is recommended to use onle by developers that are interested in the functioning of it.
- It is absolutely not to be used by end-users since its yet unfinished and may lead to some problems because of missing features (the administration is not yet implemented and the only way to administer it is by using the direct manipulation of the database).
- It is however a good base to add new features easily.
- But why did you publish it then? Well it is mainly because Im currently working on the smaller version (CWPlaner::Clan), since I ran into serious problems (mainly time issues) while developing CWPlaner::Leaque. And I thought it would be a shame to waste the whole work I and Eyeball spent in developing the system.
- I therefore publish it for other developers as a base or reference for their own projects.
- When the first release of CWPlaner::Clan is out I will surely have enough time to review the entire code and the development of CWPlaner::Leaque will go on, so stay tuned :)

Trip on the Funny Boat is a side scrolling shooter game starring a steamboat on the sea.

Trip on the Funny Boat is side scrolling arcade shooter game on a steamboat equipped with a cannon and the ability to jump. The player will need to take advantage of waves to defeat the enemies and dodge hazards.

This game was made for the second PyWeek competition during the week from 25.3.2006 to 2.4.2006.

blueMarine project is about an open source workflow for digital photography.

What does it mean?

Start thinking of an opensource application like Aperture or Lightroom that enables you to organize, develop, print and publish your photos. Pretty standard stuff nowadays. Opensource, at first sight, means that the application is free. Now think of an application written with the Java™ language: the application runs everywhere, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows. Now think of a community of people that adds code, plugins, crazy ideas, integrating some of the latest, cool technologies around, such as GPS positioning or geo-mapping.

Well, this is just the core concept of the blueMarine project.

Lets go on and lets think of the workflow. For the existing commercial applications the workflow starts just after shooting the photo and ends with a print on paper, the photo archived and maybe a web gallery published.

Just for a starter, we could do these things in innovative ways. For instance, trip reports could take advantage of GPS positioning data and Google Maps. Galleries could be presented in form of a virtual 3d gallery with walls and pictures hang on them.

Thinking of it twice, there are holes in workflows supported by current commercial applications. For instance, if you want to filter your images with a sophisticated noise reduction algorithm or if you want to create a bigger composite photo out of several shots, you likely have to use an external application. Some communities, such as amateur astrophotographers, need some very special processing that is usually performed by means of specific software. Wouldnt be better to have all of these facilities integrated in a single front end?

Now, lets broaden our workflow horizon. It can extend well beyond the print or the archival. For instance, an ornithologist usually manages field notes about the bird observed and photographed: directly binding them to photos and maybe GPS positioning data is much better than keeping a separate Excel sheet. It can also start much before shooting the photo. Think of trip planning: maybe you travel to nice places and spot interesting subjects, but not all the conditions are favorable: the weather, the light, the sun position, or the season (snow, blossomed flowers, foliage colors). Maybe you take some photos but at home you decide: hey, Im going to return there next Fall when the trees are reddish. Wouldnt be cool if a software application could allow you to easily manage all of these wanna-shoot-again photos, maybe providing assistance to guess which will be the sun position in a certain day and hour and integrating weather forecasts? And synthetising a trip program that can be uploaded on your palm gear?

Theres a further point with opensource photo workflow. Its related to the world of camera raw formats, that is the way professional DSLR cameras work. They provide you with the raw bits from the sensor that need to be extensively cooked, or developed, for getting a good image. This approach gives a tremendous amount of control to the photographers - too bad that most formats are proprietary and not documented. blueMarine supports the OpenRAW initiative and provide an opensource implementation of developing tools for camera raw formats from an ever increasing number of vendors.

Well, all of this and more is the aim of the blueMarine project.

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