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The folks at One Laptop Per Child got back to me with a statement following my recent blog post on its plans to sell through online commerce giant, Amazon. It was tough to get many details on this story because the only information came from a news items briefly quoting an OLPC team member who blabbed prematurely about the Amazon deal. An OLPC spokesperson told me the group didn’t issue a press release because Amazon doesn’t announce things until they’re available at their online storefront.

A posting to the Google Groups Chrome support forum has announced the availability of an update to the Chrome browser. According to the poster, the Chrome 0.2.149.27 update fixes 'confirmed security vulnerabilities' although despite requests from users in the forum declined to expand upon what these might be. However, a little digging revealed that it is likely to be the buffer overflow problem that was identified by a Vietnamese security researcher on September 5th.

On August 22, the Fedora Project released an "infrastructure report" confirming what most observers had, by then, suspected: the project had suffered a major security breach. The attacker got as far as a system used to sign packages distributed by Fedora. That, of course, is something close to a worst-case scenario: if an intruder has control over such a system, it's a relatively small step to capture the package signing key and the passphrase used to employ that key. And those, in turn, could be used to create hostile packages which would be accepted as genuine by Fedora installations worldwide.

Here's another topic that relates to our larger series on number pools and guaranteed combinations within fixed lists while still being worthy of having its own post. Regular expression matching with Perl for Linux or Unix is fairly simple at its most basic (as are most implementations of regular expression matching). Taken to its most remedial level, you can use a regular expression as a poor man's "grep" (and, oddly enough, the "re" in grep actually stands for regular expression). Although this use of regular expression pattern matching does have its place, it doesn't really merit use outside of tools designed to apply it in that manner and will suck all the joy right out of creating your own regular expressions.

Amid all the hype about Microsoft's virtualization strategy, some pundits are starting to wonder if VMware has replaced Linux as the biggest threat to Microsoft. The VAR Guy sure thinks so.

In many cases, adding a graphical interface to Python scripts means getting your hands dirty with TKinter or other GUI programming kits. This exercise is usually reserved for users who have already acquired decent Python programming skills, as it requires some serious code wizardry. Thankfully, the EasyGui module allows you to add some GUI goodness to your Python scripts without going through coding rigmarole. Using EasyGui, you can add visual elements with just a few lines of code.

The Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has upgraded its India-focused GNU Linux distribution. Version 3.0 of Bharat Operating Systems Solutions (BOSS) Linux adds GNOME and KDE desktop environments, Bluetooth support, and support for 18 Indian languages, says C-DAC.

Microsoft's new Windows ad, featuring Jerry Seinfeld, is outdated and not very funny -- but it's highly revealing of all that's wrong out there in Redmond. The background: Windows is losing market share to Apple's Mac OS and even Linux. And Vista, the latest version, has been a big fat dud. Businesses have shunned it outright, and many consumers find it unintuitive and difficult to use. So, Microsoft hired "award winning" agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky -- at a reported cost of $300 million -- to give Vista, and the Windows franchise in general, an image makeover. The Seinfeld ad debuted Thursday and it's the first piece of an integrated marketing campaign covering TV, the Web, and point-of-sale outlets.

With Labour Day past, we back in the season of slide shows -- million of them daily in both academia and business. For over a decade now, slide shows have become an accepted prop for public speaking, regardless of whether they are useful or well-designed, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. You can, of course, just acquiesce and accept that as soon as you click to the first slide, most of your audience will sigh deeply and sit back low in their chairs. But, if you really want to make slide shows work for you, you'll think before opening up the Impress wizard.

Barton George, one of the best-known open source evangelists at Sun Microsystems, has left the company. Here's why Ubuntu Linux fans (in particular) should care, according to The VAR Guy.

I recently sat down with my 12-year-old son Ian, who agreed to sit still long enough to try a few typing teacher applications on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Ian has a lot of experience on the computer but, until now, he has subscribed to the hunt and peck typing philosophy. Fortunately, we found a number of open source typing tutorial programs to download and test. Ian and I looked at three GPL-licensed apps: Klavaro, TuxTyping, and KTouch.

Red Hat, which bills itself as the world’s leading open-source solutions provider, has managed to make free software pay by gathering, extending and packaging Linux and complementary open-source components into certified and supported products that are ready for enterprise consumption. As the focus of IT attention shifts to new platforms, including virtualized environments, Red Hat has turned to an IT industry newcomer, former Delta Airlines Chief Operating Officer Jim Whitehurst, to guide the open-source leader.

A local AM Radio show that I have been a guest on several times interviewed Richard Stallman on their most recent show. Over 40 minutes of Mike Cady and the guys talking to Richard, good stuff. - Scott

Wireless management on Linux is a bit of a hodge-podge, especially for roaming users. NetworkManager, KWifiManager, and various other utilities that have come and gone all attempt to make managing different network connections easy. wicd (pronounced "wicked"), the wireless interface connection daemon, tries to do the job better, so we're going to give it a test drive.

Microsoft and Novell are set to further their bi-directional virtualization efforts at VMworld. Here’s the scoop, from The VAR Guy.

The new generation of inexpensive netbooks may be wonderful, but for my main desktop I want a real machine -- something I can open up, clean, and add to. So I was extremely tickled recently to trade for a new LinPC, an economical personal computer that features PCLinuxOS MiniMe 2008 preinstalled and ready to go. The LinPC's motherboard is an MSI K9N6SGM-V V2 in a Micro-ATX form factor. An AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual-core processor powers the system, aided by a gigabyte of RAM. It has a 1GHz front side bus and supports up to 2GB of DDR2 533/667/800 RAM. Included is a Realtek RTL8201CL Ethernet chip and Realtek ALC888 7.1 High Definition Audio. It has the standard ports, including four USB ports and six-port audio. The Nvidia MCP61P GPU is equivalent to an Nvidia 6100. Expansion slots are one PCI Express x16, one PCI Express x1, and two PCI (all open upon delivery). There are two memory slots, with one open.

This True IT Tale of Horror takes place in an American public school district. It is my hope that this reassures parents everywhere that their precious future generations are being well-prepared for life by the finest and most dedicated minds in education. Dedicated to what, you ask? Well...um...

OpenICE.org, a community of engineers, hackers, and users, launches today going up against two giants in the mobile computing industry, Microsoft, with its Sync product and Intel with their moblin based car infotainment platform.

For years, Xen and VMware have been the virtualization technologies of choice for open source operating systems vendors. With Red Hat's acquisition of Qumranet yesterday and its competing Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) open source hypervisor the winds of change may be blowing, or not. While Red Hat is now betting at least $107 million that KVM is the future of virtualization, other vendors in the open source virtualization space aren't so sure.

Wireless management on Linux is a bit of a hodge-podge, especially for roaming users. NetworkManager, KWifiManager, and various other utilities that have come and gone all attempt to make managing different network connections easy. wicd (pronounced "wicked"), the wireless interface connection daemon, tries to do the job better, so we're going to give it a test drive.