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Ah Twitter in the news again, the bad guys sure do keep up with new trends. After being taken offline for a while by a Joejob DDoS attack Twitter is in the news again – this time it’s being used as the command channel for a Botnet.

[Didn't this come up a theory in conversation recently? - Azer]

Now let me explain to those who might not have experienced something like this. Here you have two complete strangers, encased into a compartment roughly six feet by six feet by four feet, traveling a total of 2300 plus miles for hours on end. Two people with their own idiosyncrasies, habits and ways... What are the odds that a combination of ten fingers would be around a one or more throats halfway through the endeavor? One would imagine very good...

More developers are contributing more code to the development of Linux, and are speeding up in the process, according to a new study from the Linux Foundation. The latest "Who Writes Linux" report is now its second year, tracking the development of Linux from the 2.6.24 kernel to the recent 2.6.30 kernel release. The report found that that there Linux saw a net increase of 2.7 million lines of code between the 2.6.24 and 2.6.30 releases, compared to the almost 300,000 lines added in the run-up to 2.6.24. That code was contributed to Linux at a faster rate and by more developers than the previous release, the report also found. Surprisingly, Linux founder Linus Torvalds is no longer among the top 30 Linux contributors over the course of the last year, as measured by the total number of changes. Since the 2.6.24 kernel, Torvalds contributed 254 changes. In contrast, Red Hat kernel developer Ingo Molnar contributed 1,164 changes between the 2.6.24 and the 2.6.30 kernel releases.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is considering a new version of its Landscape remote management tool that may appeal to solutions providers and service providers. Here’s the scoop.

Greg Luck, founder of distributed Java caching technology Ehcache, is to join US start-up Terracotta. Ehcache will now find itself under the umbrella of Java specialist Terracotta, whose eponymous Java clustering application is available both as an open source edition and as a commercial edition with maintenance and support.

A few recent stories from experts in the field or journalists have raised my ire more than a bit. Seemingly well intentioned, to inform and educate the reader, criticized where more research (or common sense) would have served better.

What are the first things you should look at after learning of a sudden change in MySQL server performance?

The Fraunhofer Institute has published a whitepaper on the interoperability of Office Open XML (OOXML) and the Open Document Format (ODF). Microsoft had a hand in its development.

You think you own your stuff that you paid your own money for? The Sony PS3, the XBox, the Palm Pre? Think again---these titans of tech are not selling products...

PySide, a new API for Python programmers who want to use Nokia's Qt framework, has been released. PySide is LGPL licensed and Nokia funded. The developers hope that this first public version of the PySide library, while it is still a work in progress, will become a new standard for developing Python/Qt applications.

The many thousands of free games available for Linux has made it difficult to select which ones deserve a special mention. For this article, our objective is not to necessarily select games which have flawless graphics and sound, but instead to identify games which are highly addictive and have great playability. It has taken us weeks of heated discussions to whittle down the games into just 42 titles.

Satellite receivers from Viasat, Yousee and Stofa use a Linux system as software base. Danish developer Rasmus Rhode suspects a breach in the GPL.

This release contains many small improvements like using keysymbols in the configuration file, named workspaces, borderless windows, an IPC interface, etc. (see the release notes for a complete list of changes). Press "read more" to get an introduction to what i3 is.

The following will install and configure DRBD, OpenAIS, Pacemaker and Xen on OpenSUSE 11.1 to provide highly-available virtual machines. This setup does not utilize Xen's live migration capabilities. Instead, VMs will be started on the secondary node as soon as failure of the primary is detected. Xen virtual disk images are replicated between nodes using DRBD and all services on the cluster will be managed by OpenAIS and Pacemaker. The following setup utilizes DRBD 8.3.2 and Pacemaker 1.0.4. It is important to note that DRBD 8.3.2 has come a long way since previous versions in terms of compatibility with Pacemaker. In particular, a new DRBD OCF resource agent script and new DRBD-level resource fencing features. This configuration will not work with older releases of DRBD.

Another update here on the release cycle of 5.0 for all our thrilled fans. Beta 1 of Gnome and KDE has been released to testers. We will be in this phase till about Sept. 2nd as Fabio is taking vacation till than. Once he gets back, we will than look at the issues to hammer out a beta 2. So far I have only gotten to try out the gnome edition. So we are kinda looking at least the middle of Sept before a final version will be out and for sure by the end of Sept, knock on wood.

Last week I took the 20-minute BART ride from the East Bay over to Moscone West in San Francisco to visit what was once known as LinuxWorld and is now OpenSourceWorld, Next Generation Data Center, and CloudWorld all rolled into one event. Like many others, having been to previous LinuxWorlds, I was curious to see how this re-branding and grouping of events would pan out. LinuxWorld had been getting quite the panning (no pun intended) over the last five years or so, so could the new event cut the mustard and reel back in its once committed group of sightsee

The Linux Foundation has released the first update to the popular "Who Writes Linux" study originally published in April 2008. The study is written by kernel developers Jon Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman and surfaces the people who are writing the code, the companies that are sponsoring the work, and the pace of development.

For those that don't know, East Austin isn't exactly Beverly Hills...Not by anyone's stretch of the imagination. Through it's reputation for violence, gang activity and drug trade, East Austin is populated with some of the nicest people there are. I now know many of them. Hard-working and loving people that just haven't yet found their way out of that place. We decided to do what we could to give them a hand...a guiding hand out of there.

This is the second part of the two-part tutorial. In this tutorial, we are going to look at how to model a character head in Blender. Along with basic modeling tools we will also focus heavily on good topology and how to create a clean mesh that will deform well during animation. To read the first part, click: Character Head Modeling in Blender: Part 1

The first development release for Fedora 12 (codenamed Constantine), Alpha 1, was supposed to be released this week. However, Red Hat has pushed back its release to next week Tuesday. While there is this seven-day delay, an Alpha 1 RC1 ISO spin is available and we decided to provide a very early and brief look at the Fedora 12 release.