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So far the Windows Vista books I've reviewed (Easy Microsoft Windows Vista (QUE) and Microsoft Windows Vista Unleashed (SAMS)) have been for the beginner/home user and home/small office/small business user respectively. From the introductory material in Windows Vista in a Nutshell, it seems this book is for the SOHO user as well, with a small nod to corporate users. For a "Desktop Quick Reference", this book weighs in at a hefty 732 pages. Though probably not the largest "In a Nutshell" book ever published, it's still pretty big, indicating that there's a lot of road to cover with Windows Vista. After getting into the book and the subject matter, I started to wonder if 732 pages was even close to enough.

Theodore Ts'o announced that the 2007Linux Kernel Summit will be moved from its usual location in Ottawa, Canada, taking place this year in Cambridge, England. Ted described the move as a one-time experiment to be re-evaluated at a future date to see if it's worth moving the Kernel Summit to other locations in the future. He noted,"I understand that if it were only up to us developers, we'd want to have the conference in Honolulu, or perhaps in Australia or New Zealand. Unfortunately there are other stakeholers and other financial realities involved." Regarding this year's summit, Ted explained:"This year, the Kernel Summit will be held in Cambridge, England, at the DeVere University Arms Hotel, September 5-6 (with a welcome reception on the 4th). The decision to move the Kernel Summit to England is a one-year experiment based on the very strong request of last year's kernel summit attendees to try a location outside of Ottawa, and especially from the roughly 1/3rd of the attendees that come from the UK or Europe.

A lot of folks have an unhealthily casual attitude towards securing their wireless networks. "Oh, it's nice to share" some say. Others think "I have nothing to interest a cracker, so why bother?" Both attitudes are inviting trouble. There is nothing to be gained from leaving your systems open to be used as warez, porn or mp3 servers, or Borged into a spam botnet. Or to find yourself struggling with slow network speeds because some freeloading hog is overloading your bandwidth.

Novell Inc might have signed a patent and interoperability deal with Microsoft Corp but it is not about to give up competing with the software giant and last week released a study that suggests its Linux desktop product is better value than Windows Vista.

The second beta of Json-lib 1.0, an open source Java library "for transforming beans, maps, collections, java arrays and XML to JSON and back again to beans and DynaBeans." The function type from JavaScript is not part of the JSON format "officially" but it is supported as well.

All the best operating systems come on USB...So, you're tired of Windows and thinking of trying Linux. There are lots of good distros, RedHat or Novell have all the enterprise cred you might need. And there's a support community too, it's a no brainer...

The Electoral Enrolment Centre has consolidated electoral rolls on the open-source PostgreSQL database, replacing a group of disparate databases spread around the country. The updated New Zealand electoral roll management system, dubbed Mike, has been in the works since 2003 and is now in production, replacing a collection of Oracle databases with Visual Basic front-ends.

The Big Four providers of network monitoring and management tools have fined-tuned their products to cater to large corporations. What about small businesses that often find the tools bloated with unnecessary features? Companies like GroundWork Open Source offer more customizable solutions. GroundWork's VP of Products Tony Barbagallo thinks the industry is in for a change.

Following up announcement of its 'Unbreakable Linux' program last fall, Oracle Corp has unveiled extensions for its Enterprise manager administration tool, which will be bundled into two of its three Linux support tiers.

Great thoughts from an application-building perspective.

Lonesome dove makes an old friend

Sun Microsystems once again has eyes for Intel, and this time it's serious.

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, currently investigating personal Internet security, were told this week that the public face real difficulties in reporting internet based crime. Representatives of Microsoft and members of the open source community agreed that police lack the skills and expertise to deal effectively with cases of internet crime that are brought to them.

Create and Manage Virtual Machines Using VirtualBox in Ubuntu

MediaWiki is a great PHP-based wiki implementation that is used to power many sites, including Wikipedia. It's quite flexible, very secure, and extremely easy to use. It's also extremely simple to write plugins for it.

Backup and Restore Linux Partitions Using Partimage

Bangalore, 22 January 2007: - US based SpikeSource, a leading provider of business ready open source solutions with its 'centre of innovation- located at Bangalore, today announced that it has partnered with Noida based InfoAxon Technologies, a leading provider of Professional Open Source Business Productivity Solutions, as 'SpikeSource Solution Provider- for India. InfoAxon is the first company in India to be signed by SpikeSource as its Solution Provider

The Open Source Developer Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG), two groups trying to standardise and steer Linux, have merged in an effort to increase their influence.

FreeNAS is a small, powerful, full-featured implementation of FreeBSD as a network-attached storage device. (It also happens to be January's Project of the Month at SourceForge.net.) If you're a Linux user like me, the BSD-speak used for devices and such might give you pause, but other than that small caveat, installation and usage shouldn't be a problem. It's powerful enough to be used in the enterprise, but it's friendly enough so that even a typical home office user can take advantage of it. Here's how I created an easy-to-use NAS device for rsync backups and FTP server on my LAN.

The two major forces behind driving the commercialization of Linux will merge to form an all embracing group. Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group will combine to form a new organization called Linux Foundation.

The Meraka Institute will be holding a three-day workshop in February focused on information and communications technology and its role in advancing development.