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Organizing disparate pieces of data on the hard disk and from the Web is a tricky proposition. For example, as I am learning Japanese, I have hundreds of text notes, images, loose Web pages, scanned articles, and other small pieces of data, which I refer to as "stuff." Desktop search applications can locate files and find text in them, but they cannot organize anything. Putting things into separate folders doesn't really solve the problem. Fortunately, two utilities, ScrapBook and BasKet, help me collect and organize "stuff" in a structured fashion.

Scalix, which makes email and collaboration software for Linux desktops and servers, announced June 15 that it has deployed more than 1 million mailboxes using its AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) based software. Scalix's Linux email client software offers full-featured desktop and web-based email and calendaring, the company said.

Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Live and MSN marketing, Martin Taylor, occupied the chair for just three months before he was unceremoniously "disappeared." This is bad news for Windows Live competitors, who have been thoroughly enjoying pratfalls similar to those made by Taylor in his previous assignment: Microsoft's silly anti-Linux crusade, "Get the Facts."

DistroWatch reports - DSL now boots to Unionfs; new boot option 'legacy' to boot without Unionfs; moved MyDSL local extension loading functionality from emelfm to MyDSL desktop icon; new mountable MyDSL extension type unc with automatic branch management; adjust Getting Started / Dillo screen to support booting 640x480; added ACPI modules for newer power management support; New FUSE support; new sshfs support for simple remote network mounts; new theme 'A Penguin with a Hat'; new unc extension section in the MyDSL repository.

OSDir has some nice shots of this fresh DSL release in the DSL 3.0 Screenshot Tour.

Atomicity is a property of an operation either to succeed or fail completely. Disks assure atomicity at the sector level. This means that a write to a sector either goes through completely or not at all. But when an operation spans over multiple sectors of the disk, a higher-level mechanism is needed. This mechanism should ensure that modifications to the entire set of sectors are handled atomically. Failure to do so leads to inconsistencies. This document talks about the implementation of the Journaling Block Device in Linux.

Silver anniversaries are normally joyous occasions, but not this one. June 5, 2005 marked the 25th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS. Amid the calls for greater awareness and increased funding was recognition that, from a medical viewpoint, billions of dollars spent on research had produced little progress in recent years. Find out how Linux is part of the fight to cure this disease once and for all.

Greg KH posted an updated patchset for removing devfs from the mainline Linux kernel as was already done in the -mm kernel, "they are the same 'delete devfs' patches that I submitted for 2.6.12 and 2.6.13 and 2.6.14 and 2.6.15 and 2.6.16. It rips out all of devfs from the kernel and ends up saving a lot of space." The idea of removing the unmaintained devfs whose functionality has been replaced by udev has been discussed since late 2003 [story], gaining momentum in 2005 [story] and leading to lengthy debates [story]. In his latest email Greg went on to explain, "since 2.6.13 came out, I have seen no complaints about the fact that devfs was not able to be enabled anymore, and in fact, a lot of different subsystems have already been deleting devfs support for a while now, with apparently no complaints (due to the lack of users.)" Greg continues to make the case for removing devfs:

"This patchset has also been in the -mm tree, with no complaints or issues for the past few months. It's also been almost a full year past the date when we said we would delete devfs from the kernel tree in the file, Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt, almost two years since we publicly announced to the world that devfs would be removed from the kernel tree. So I think people have had plenty of advance notice that this was going to happen by now :)"

INDIANAPOLIS, IN -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 06/21/2006 -- ANGEL® Learning, recognized innovator of enterprise e-learning software and services, today announced it is contributing substantial intellectual property to the IMS Global Learning Consortium. The contribution of ANGEL Learning source code to the IMS/GLC common cartridge digital content standards development serves the greater good of the education community and represents the first reference implementation offering by an LMS provider.

A blogger's claim that one rogue operator tricked Google into indexing over 5 billion bogus pages serving Pay-Per-Click ads has helped solidify the claims of the legal teams chasing the search giants: PPC advertisers may, in fact, be getting screwed through faked clickery. At the same time, it helps explain the increasing irrelevance of search results. This, for many, is a deal killer. Searchers and advertisers alike need a better model. But who can deliver it?

Plugging a new PC into your network, going out for a healthy walk, and returning to a completed operating system installation is one of life's little pleasures. Remember, laziness is a virtue in network administration. Hamsters spend their lives running the same circles. Network administrators automate repetitive tasks.

What exactly is the Internet? This article will explain the concepts required to understand BGP, our next Networking 101 topic. Shipping packets around the Internet requires the cooperation of separate organizations, so it isn't as straightforward as learning about an IGP routing mechanism.

Ubuntu has become the most popular Linux distribution for new Linux users. It's easy to install, easy to use, and usually "just works." But moving to a different operating system can be confusing, no matter how well-designed it is. Here's a list of tips that might save you some time while you're getting used to Ubuntu.

This list is compiled from a variety of sources and is intended for anyone who wishes to find centralized reading material about Eclipse. One of the biggest challenges new Eclipse users face is where to find the right information for a task. This article provides a small step in solving that problem.

In an earlier article, I covered the basics of making outlines in Emacs, but there's a lot more that you can do with them. In this article I'll show how to export and print outlines, customize outline heading line colors, and use outline mode's special features in everyday documents -- such as numbered lists, traditional outlines with Roman numerals, and even book manuscripts containing chapter and section headings.

Write a program in Haskell that translates C type declarations into English.

Transactional support has long been on the wish list of most MySQL developers and, with the release of MySQL 4.0, this wish was finally granted. Not long after MySQL 4.0, PHP 5.x was released with a new MySQL extension, MySQL Improved, which allowed PHP developers to access these new transactional capabilities using native PHP functions. This brief tutorial will show you how to use these MySQLi functions to implement MySQL-based transactions with PHP.

Why the state may finally be poised to stick it to Microsoft

Six months after political territorialism and big-money lobbying threatened to ice Massachusetts’s first-in-the-nation adoption of OpenDocument standards, the revolutionary (and unbearably geeky) tech proposal is, amazingly enough, still alive. Pretty much, anyway.

World Cup fever has hit the IT world. Tectonic reviews some of the coolest technological spin-offs from the world's biggest sporting event.

The executive who coordinated Microsoft's anti-Linux campaign has quit the company less than three months after moving to a position revamping MSN's marketing.

[What a crock! This article says, 'Microsoft's "get the facts" campaign saw Taylor amass a body of fact-based evidence [...]'. What facts? What evidence? TheReg sure has deteriorated, IMO. -- grouch]

Xandros 4.0, the first new version of Xandros Inc.'s desktop Linux distribution in a year and a half, arrived on June 20. Xandros 4 is based on Debian Sarge Linux, with LSB (Linux Standard Base) improvements courtesy of the DCC Alliance's Common Core.