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I've got several machines downstairs in my basement office, of course, but in our family the others have computers too. we've set some basic rules for it. Notably, they can't just play all those flash games all the time. And sometimes, if they don't do their homework, we disallow it entirely, or - happily more commonly - we give extra time for good behaviour or for some homework that needs more googling. But I'm a geek, and I'm not at all interested in trying to do any of this manually. So I wrote a simple internet usage tracker for them, which allows me to set usage limits per kid, and which tracks how much time they use online, and forcibly logs them off if they go over the limits.

Iconv makes character set conversion easy. Remembering all of your character sets can still be hard. Today's topic was obliquely referenced in yesterday's post on using the online multilingual dictionary from the Bash CLI. Yes, after I woke up around 1 am and thought about it, the results did seem odd. It turns out, when I went to the page, that the multilingual dictionary on reference.com is actually house within a frameset under the online Thesaurus. My belated apologies for getting the name incorrect, although, if you think about it, it's not even a multilingual dictionary (not really).

Linux breaks out with Mono 2.0 today. You can develop and run all your .NET 2.0 applications on Linux.

As I had predicted earlier this year LinuxWorld is no more. Well not quite. LinuxWorld the big Linux show that occurs ever year in San Francisco is morphing into a new show called OpenSource World. The re-naming follows a move by O'Reilly to bring the OSCON conference to San Francisco earlier this year

I recently got the chance to talk with Gentoo Catalyst/Genkernel Release Engineering Lead Andrew Gaffney and developer/council member Donnie Berkholz about Gentoo Linux, the challenges it is facing, and the work that is being done by the community -- from veteran developers to new users -- to overcome them.

This article, and the one to follow, are based on a Software Development class I taught a few years ago. The students in this class were non-programmers who had been hired to receive bug reports for a compiler product. As Analysts, they had to understand the software compilation process in some detail, even though some of them had never written a single line of code. It was a fun class to teach, so I'm hoping that the subject translates into interesting reading.

I must say I have always loved SUSE for the desktop, but after a month or so I always wind up switching back to Ubuntu or Ubuntu based Distributions. Now OpenSuse always maintains it's beautiful look as always as well as the infamous YAST tool. In the end of this install it failed trying to install GRUB, since this is in Beta I would have to assume this is a bug but none the less OpenSuse is a great OS. Enjoy the ScreenShots below.

For various reasons, not everything is configured in the easiest way for a new user. Because of this, some simple and quick modifications can make the life of a new Ubuntu user much easier.

I respect Richard Stallman for the same reason I respect gravity. The man is a force of nature. He is like the iron core of the Earth: fixed, central, essential. So, when I read a story like "Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman", which ran in the Guardian last week, I take notice. And I'm not alone. A search on Google for stallman "cloud computing" brings up 142,000 results.

I have read a number of heated complaints about Ubuntu's default implementation of sudo privileges in preference to simple root access. While I have issues with some of Ubuntu's implementations and features, this is not one of my complaints. Indeed, I prefer it. I have an administrative account that has sudo rights that I do not normally use. My activities are primarily restricted to another user's account that lacks any machine administrative rights [1.]. However, I use a single command to gain full root access rights when I desire it. Perhaps those driven away from Ubuntu due to this one issue might reconsider.

Berdou examined parallels and disconnects between paid and volunteer contributors in the GNOME and KDE projects, using earlier incidents of such events (such as the Gstreamer/Fluendo SL summit). The hypotheses and analysis she presents are thought-provoking.

One of Facebook's two cofounders is jumping ship to start his own Internet company. Dustin Moskovitz announced he'll leave the social networking site in about a month. He and colleague Justin Rosenstein, a Facebook engineering manager who previously worked at Google, will launch a new enterprise software business.

Joe Brockmeier has an interesting piece up on the differences between paid and volunteer open source contributors. In it, he cites this post from former Debian Project Leader Martin Michlmayr, and a paper by Evangelia Berdou. "Berdou finds that paid developers take up key positions in projects, while volunteers often work on the periphery." I agree with Joe that the combination of these two types of contributions can be very powerful.

Some time ago I had a long talk with an IBM’er about social networking. He said the first key to bringing social networking to business was a simple directory. We should all have our own page somewhere, whether as individuals, as members of a hierarchy, or as business entities. We need to be found, and have our expertise known. Then we need to use that directory to network with others. That’s a key idea behind Bluehouse, the service IBM launched in beta today.

Most free software projects produce applications for users. A minority, however, produce specifications or libraries for developers and other contributors. An example of this second type is the recently announced Manju project, whose goal is to make themes easier to create. The project's goal is to write the specifications and scripts for using scalable vector graphics (SVG) files to store widget and other theme-related information that can be used on a variety of toolkits.

The upcoming Ubuntu 8.10, alias Intrepid Ibex, is now in beta. Armed with new base elements such as Linux kernel 26.2.7, GNOME 2.24 and X.Org 7.4, Ubuntu 8.10 is due to be released by October. Beta versions of the add-ons Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu-Studio and Mythbuntu are also available for testing.

Microsoft lobby platform"Voices for Innovation", which is managed by APCO (a well-known lobby firm in Brussels of which Microsoft is a client), has sent an alert to their corporate members asking them to lobby against a parliamentary resolution led by Rocard-Cotigny-Geremek-Geremek, which is asking to migrate the European Parliament systems to FLOSS, and to give some funds for R&D of FLOSS in Europe.

IBM has joined the companies jostling for position in the cloud computing space. The company has announced a variety of offerings that it claimed would allow users to better manager data and make collaboration easier. The company has opened up the beta for Bluehouse, the company's so-called Facebook for the enterprise. The software has been available in closed beta for the past nine months but is now being made available to anyone. The company said that Bluehouse would combine social networking and online collaboration tools to help organizations to share documents, contacts, engage in joint project activities, host online meetings, and build social networking communities through a Web browser.

A recent interview quoted an MSI executive as saying that returns of Linux netbooks were more than four times higher those of Windows XP netbooks. However, the quote may say more about MSI's Linux implementation than the suitability of Linux as a netbook OS.

FUEL (Frequently Used Entries for Localization) aims to solve the problem of inconsistency and lack of standardization in computer software translation in a new and unique way. Initiated by Red Hat, the project is trying to give a better experience to end users of a localized desktop by resolving the issues of standardization and inconsistency. It's hard for a naive user to digest five different replacements for a simple word on a computer menu like File or Save. Getting used to inconsistent terminology can be a major hindrance in path of the popularity of localized desktop. Therefore, FUEL's aim is to come up with the most appropriate and acceptable translations by collaborating with active communities and localizers who are having standardization problems in translation.