Free workplace etiquette software for linux

Etiquette provides an interaction protocol construction tool.
Etiquette is an interaction protocol construction toolkit. The projects goal is to build a framework for rapid design of network communication code.
Etiquette interaction protocols are intended to describe valid communication processes that can occur in networked applications, along with error-handling code.
Etiquette provides protocol tracing and single-stepping support.
Main features:
- First-class interaction protocols
- Support for legacy protocols
- Basic error handling
- Debugging facilities
- Iteration syntax
- TCP/IP communication transport
- HTTP subset protocol
Enhancements:
- New upstream version, much improved and new underlying protocols.

Acme::OneHundredNotOut is a raise of the bat, a tip of the hat.

I have just released my 100th module to CPAN, the first time that anyone has reached that target. As some of you may know, I am getting ready to go back to college and reinvent myself from being a programmer into being a missionary. I dont forsee that many more Perl modules coming out of this.

Of course, this doesnt mean that Im going to abjure usage of Perl forever; any time theres a computer and something I need automated, out will come the Swiss Army Chainsaw and the job will get done. In fact, we recently needed to manipulate some text from a mission handbook to translate it into Japanese, and Perl was there handling and collating all that.

But 100 modules is a convenient place to stop and take stock, and I hope that those of you who have benefitted from my modules, programs or writing about Perl will forgive me a certain spot of self-indulgence as I look back over my CPAN career, especially since I feel that the diversity of modules that Ive produced is a good indication of the diversity of what can be done with Perl.

Lets begin, then, with some humble beginnings, and then catch up on recent history.
The Embarrassing Past

Contrary to popular belief, I was not always a CPAN author. I started writing modules in 1998, immediately after reading the first edition of the Perl Cookbook - yes, you can blame Nat and Tom for all this. The first module that I released was Tie::DiscoveryHash, since Id just learnt about tied hashes. As with many of my modules, it was an integral part of another software project which I actually never finished, and now cant find.

The first module that I ever wrote (but, by a curious quirk of fate, precisely the fiftieth module I released) was called String::Tokeniser, which is still a reasonably handy way of getting an iterator over tokenising a string. (Someone recently released String::Tokenizer, which makes me laugh.) This too was for an abortive project, webperl, an application of Don Knuths WEB system of structured documentation to Perl. However, given the code quality of these two modules, its perhaps just as well that the projects never saw the light of day.

There are a few other modules Id rather like to forget, too. Devel::Pointer was a sick joke that went badly wrong - it allowed people to use pointers in Perl. Some people failed to notice that referring to memory locations directly in an extremely high-level language was a dangerous and silly thing to do, and actually used the damned thing, and I started getting requests for support for it. Then at some point in 2001, when I should really have known better, I developed an interest in Microsofts .NET and the C# language, which I still think is pretty neat; but I decided it might be a good idea to translate the Mono projects tokenizer and parser into Perl, ending up with C::Sharp. I never got around to doing the parser part, or indeed anything else with it, and so it died a lonely death in a dark corner of CPAN. GTK::HandyClist was my foray into programming graphical applications, which started and ended there.

Bundle::SDK::SIMON was actually the slides from a talk on my top ten favourite CPAN modules - except that this changes so quickly over time, it doesnt really make much sense any more.

Finally, Array::FileReader was an attempt to optimize a file access process. Unfortunately, my "optimization" ended up introducing more overheads than the naive solution. It all goes to show. Since then, Mark-Jason Dominus, another huge influence in the development of my CPAN career, has written Tie::File, which not only has a better name but is actually efficient too.

The Internals Phase

1999-2000 were disastrous years for me personally but magnificent years Perl-sonally. Stuck in a boring job and a tiny flat in the middle of Tokyo, I had plenty of time to get stuck into more Perl development. I felt that getting involved with perl5-porters would be a good way of gettting to know more about Perl, and so I needed a hobby horse - an issue of Perls development that I cared about. Since I was in Japan and working a lot with non-Latin text, Unicode support seemed a good thing to work on, and so Unicode::Decompose appeared, while I fixed up a substantial part of the post-5.6 core Unicode support.

Id recommend this way to anyone who wants to get more involved in the Perl community, although I was very lucky in terms of who else happened to be around at the time: Gurusamy Sarathy was extremely gracious in helping me turn my fledgling C code into something fit for the Perl core, and he also helped me understand the perl5-porters etiquette (yes, there was some at the time) and what makes a good patch, while Jarkko Hietaniemi was always good for suggestions of interesting things for keen people to work on. Seriously, get involved. If I can do it, anyone can.
Anyway, this fixation with understanding the Perl 5 internals, and especially the Perl 5 compiler, (due to yet another of my Perl influences, the great Malcolm Beattie) led to quite a torrent of modules, from ByteCache, an implementation of just-in-time compilation for Perl modules, through B::Flags and B::Tree to help visualising the Perl op tree, to uninit, B::Generate, optimizer and B::Utils for modifying it.

Perl About The House

Now we abandon chronological order somewhat and take a look at the various areas in which Ive used Perl. One of these areas has been the automation of everyday life: checking my bank balance with Finance::Bank::LloydsTSB (the first Perl module to interface to personal internet banking, no less) and my phone bill with a release of Tony Bowdens Data::BT::PhoneBill.

Finance::Bank::LloydsTSB was meant to go with Finance::QIF, my Quicken file parser, to produce another now-abandoned idea, a Perl finances manager. It seemed that Im only capable of producing modules, not full standalone applications - or at least, it seemed that way until I produced Bryar, my blogging software, based on the concepts from Rael Dornfests blosxom and beginning my adventures with Andy Wardleys Template Toolkit. Bryar also tuned me in to the Model-View-Controller framework idea, of which more later.

Another project I briefly played with was a personal robot, using the Sphinx/Festival speech handling and recognition modules from Cepstral and Kevin Lenzo. I didnt have X10, so I couldnt shout "lights" into the air in a wonderfully scifi way, but I could shout "mail" and have a summary of my inbox read to me, "news" to get the latest BBC news headlines, and "time" to hear the time. Of course, getting computers to tell the time nicely takes a little bit of work. I dont like "Its eleven oh-three pee em", since thats not what someone would say if you asked them the time. I wanted my robot to say "Its just after eleven", and thats what Time::Human does. Shame about the localisation.

Page Title Eraser is a Firefox extension which provides more privacy at your workplace by hiding the title and icon of a selected tab.

I always open several tabs in a Firefox window, but I would not like other people see some of tabs labels. So I wrote the PTE extension which helps me to have such feature. I hope that it can be useful for office people.

The Page Title Eraser adds menu item to the page context menu and "Tools" menu items. "Right-click" menu includes a "Hide title" menu item now. Using this item you can hide/show tab and window titles and tab icon. Each tab has its independent instance of this item.

Since version 0.3.0 you can hide or show all tabs labels using "Hide all titles" menu item. Using the "Options" window you can tell PTE to hide/show the icons of tabs as well as the titles of tabs (see screenshots).

Toolbar button and hot key combination (Ctrl + Shift + H) are also available.

Translations included: Arabic, Arabic (Saudi Arabia), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Dutch (NL), English, French, Italian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Spain).

VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing.
The two computers dont even have to be the same type, so for example you can use VNC to view an office Linux machine on your Windows PC at home. VNC is freely and publicly available and is in widespread active use by millions throughout industry, academia and privately.
RealVNC is a UK company founded in 2002 by a team from the world-leading AT&T Laboratories in Cambridge. The company was established to commercially develop, enhance and promote VNC, the innovative remote access software with a widespread international user base.
VNC (Virtual Network Computing) software makes it possible to view and fully-interact with one computer from any other computer or mobile device anywhere on the Internet. VNC software is cross-platform, allowing remote control between different types of computer. For ultimate simplicity, there is even a Java viewer, so that any desktop can be controlled remotely from within a browser without having to install software.
VNC has a wide range of applications including system administration, IT support and helpdesks. It can also be used to support the mobile user, both for hot desking within the enterprise and also to provide remote access at home, or on the road. The system allows several connections to the same desktop, providing an invaluable tool for collaborative or shared working in the workplace or classroom. Computer support within the geographically spread family is an ever popular use.
The open source version of VNC has been freely available since 1998, and more than 50 million copies of the software have been downloaded. The software has also appeared on numerous magazine cover disks, and for several years all popular versions of Linux have included VNC. It is in active use by many millions in industry, commerce, education and at home. Virtually all Fortune 500 companies use VNC, and installations of VNC across thousands of workstations are commonplace.
Enhancements:
- FIXED: Security vulnerability.

yEd is a powerful graph editor that is written entirely in the Java programming language. It can be used to quickly generate drawings and apply automatic layouts to all kinds of diagrams and networks. yEd is available as a free download with unrestricted functionality!
yEd makes use of the yFiles library which is a Java class library for viewing, editing, optimizing, drawing, and animating diagrams, networks, and other graph-like structures.
yEd is built using 100% lightweight Swing components, i.e., it will run on any platform for which there is a suitable Runtime Environment available.
Main features:
yEd can be used to automatically layout complex graph structures. Several highly sophisticated layout algorithms have been implemented and ship with yEd. They can be used to either arrange the items fully automatically or support the user during a manual layout.
- New in version 2.3.1: Interactive Hierarchical Layout can be used to interactively layout hierarchical or pseudo-hierarchical scenarios.
- Hierarchical Layout can be used to perfectly visualize hierarchical or pseudo-hierarchical scenarios.
- Orthogonal Layout produces clear representations of complex networks.
- Organic Layout and Smart Organic Layout produce clear representations of complex diagrams like ER-diagrams, UML diagrams and many more.
- Organic Edge Router reroutes edges in existing drawings organically.
- Orthogonal Edge Router can reroute edges in existing drawings orthogonally.
- Circular Layout portrays interconnected ring and star topologies perfectly.
- Tree Layout can be used to visualize tree-like structures in many different ways.
- New in version 2.3.1: The tree layout algorithms can also be used on graphs that are almost like trees.
yEd enables users to create groups of nodes. These groups can be visualized and nested to virtually any degree. Of course the new layout algorithms support this type of visualization perfectly. Using this feature complex structures can be visualized and laid out even clearer than before.
Another one of yEds most powerful features is its ability to automatically assign label positions. This will help the user to easily build better readable diagrams.
yEd has an intuitive user interface that complies with the design guidelines for Java applications. Among its various features are:
- New in version 2.3.1: a customizable workplace lets you arrange your tool windows to your needs
- New in version 2.3.1: table-like property editors allow you to configure the graphical properties easily
- Internationalization: yEd has been localized in English, German, and partially in Japanese
- New in version 2.3.1: a sophisticated print preview allows you to preview the printing results (especially useful for poster-printing)
- Session Management: yEd remembers and manages your settings
- Undoability support
- Clipboard facility
- Keyboard shortcuts for most of the functions
- Integrated help system
yEd can be used to build, modify, and visualize graph structures. They can be loaded using several different file formats, among them are:
- Full support for the YGF file format. The native file format.
- Full support for the XML-based GraphML file format.
- Full support for the GML graph file format. GML is a popular text-based graph file format.
- New in version 2.3.1: Full support for the XML-based GML graph file format. This is a variant of the GML language that uses XML syntax.
- Import of arbitrary XML files. An XSLT stylesheet must be given that transforms the XML input into a valid GraphML. Predefined stylesheets for Ant build scripts, the OWL Web ontology language and others are included.
- Export to the SVG vector graphics file format.
- Export to the Windows Meta File (WMF) file format. A vector graphics format used in almost any Windows application.
- Export to JPG and GIF file formats. Export large images as multiple images and HTML tables also supported!
- New in version 2.3.1: Export to BMP (on Windows machines) and PNG file formats.
All of the image export formats can be fully customized.
The editor supports the complete set of graphical attributes necessary for effective graph visualization. It offers built-in support for:
- preconfigured node types for UML object diagrams and class diagrams!
- multiple labels for nodes and edges
- multi-line and icon labels
- powerful searching and selection utilities
- zooming and overview
- a set of beautiful icons to get you started with your first diagrams