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Computer programming can be a fun hobby, as I learned when I programmed Apple II computers last century. Back then, I'd lie on my bed and dream up some educational game, then run over to my Apple //c to bring the game to life. Sometimes in less than two hours I could go from raw idea to working prototype. The most fun part was sharing the programs I created with friends and having them suggest improvements.

As of today the rubygems team has discovered a malicious gem pushed into rubygems.org, which may tampered some of the gems in the site...

When you run a webserver behind a reverse proxy or HTTP accelerator such as Varnish, the webserver access logs will display the IP of the proxy (generally 127.0.0.1) instead of the end user’s IP. This is a problem when you have a software like webalizer, awstats or similar log file analysis program, because you lose one of the most important information: “Who is the requestor of a page ?”, also having all the access coming from the same IP (127.0.0.1) you lose information such as “what’s the browsing pattern of visitors ?” “Is someone trying to do something Nasty ?” In this small how-to I’ll show how to put this information back on your Nginx log files in 2 different ways.

Developers at KDE are planning to merge the code for their Plasma Desktop, Plasma Netbook and Plasma Active user interfaces in the not-too-distant future, according to a blog post by Aaron Seigo. As he explains, individual programs are currently responsible for each shell; their sources, however, consist of just three to ten thousand lines of code, since they otherwise make use of a common code base.

XBMC 12 Frodo also includes Live TV and PVR functionality along with the RPi and Android support

The developers of the VLC video player have warned of a crashing bug in the latest 2.0.5 version of the application, which might be exploited to execute arbitrary code. The issue is a problem in the ASF demuxer (libasf_plugin.*), which can be tricked into overflowing a buffer with a specially crafted ASF movie. The developers note that users would have to open that specially crafted file to be vulnerable and advise users to not open files from untrusted third parties or untrusted sites.

Nagios is a monitoring tool under GPL licence. This tool lets you monitor servers, network hardware (switches, routers, ...) and applications. A lot of plugins are available and its big community makes Nagios the biggest open source monitoring tool. This tutorial shows how to install Nagios 3.4.4 on CentOS 6.3.

If you adopt just one security tool this year, make it KeePass. This free and open-source password manager is available for Windows, with unofficial ports for iOS, Android, Linux, and Mac OS X. A secure, lengthy, completely random password goes a long way towards improving your security–and having a separate password for each and every website and service you use is the single most important thing you can do to keep secure.

The following tutorial will teach Nexus 7 users, who installed the Ubuntu Linux operating system on their tablet, how to re-install Android and remove Ubuntu from Nexus 7.

There are tablets and seven-inch tablets and portable devices that wear their Android affiliation on their sleeve, but Samsung has gone and combined the best of all that has come before and pushed it someplace decidedly newer and better with their new Samsung Galaxy Tab 2. As the name will tell, the two models in this line represent a second generation of Samsung's popular Galaxy Tab, and the 7.0 iteration we tried affirms the evolution away from the ten-inch range and toward a more compact, increasingly common seven-inch screen size that is more affordable and generally easier to handle. (For those who prefer the larger form factor, Samsung does also offer a 10.1-inch second-gen model.)

Today I present to you the interview with Jordan Brock of Hit the Sticks developers of Just Tactics (which we are doing a key give-away here!).

Are you looking for a reliable virtualization package to run multiple virtual machines that handle unmodified Linux or Windows images? Then look no further than your existing Linux configuration. It already has the underpinnings to support Kernel-based Virtual Machine. You need look no further than your distro's package repository to install KVM.

A new distribution popped up on my radar last month when it was added to the Distrowatch.com database. It probably helped that its newest release was codenamed "GameOver" and featured lots and lots of games. Yesterday its team released 2.1 "Eris" Ultra. GameOver was a pretty cool release. It looked tough, but beyond that and its impressive list of games, it also featured Desura for Linux, Steam beta for Linux, and Wine & PlayOnLinux. It used LXDE on top of a Debian Wheezy base and shipped with codecs and plugins for full multimedia enjoyment, but opted for Nouveau NVIDIA graphics drivers.

LibreOffice in recent years for an office productivity suite on the Linux desktop after disturbances resulting in LibreOffice being forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Fedora is one of the distributions that has been living with LibreOffice, OpenOffice may come back as an option in Fedora 19.

In an age where Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is the dominant tech company and proprietary smartphones and tablets account for an ever-growing segment of the market, it can be easy to forget that not all hardware is built on closed standards. Opengear, however, reminded the channel recently that open hardware platforms can be profitable as well with the announcement of two significant achievements in the remote-management market.

The desktop computing landscape is rapidly changing all around us. Microsoft is now pushing Windows 8, the biggest change Microsoft has made to the desktop since Windows 95. This means that whether a Windows user chooses to switch to Mac OS X, Linux, or stick with Windows, he/she is in for a new learning experience. A transition to Linux may just be more familiar than making the jump to Window 8, and there are many open source alternatives to popular Windows applications. This large list of open source alternatives could make your transition to Linux easier than you thought possible.

Booting Linux using UEFI just once on various Samsung laptops is enough to permanently stop them working. Several reports have been posted on the Ubuntu bug tracker, but the problem is likely to also be present in other Linux distributions, as it appears to be caused by a kernel driver for Samsung laptops. Kernel developers are currently discussing a change which would disable the driver when booting via UEFI.

Fedora 18 features the exciting Gnome 3.6 desktop which offers numerous aesthetic and usability enhancements. Here I will point out many of the various improvements, so you can decide if Fedora 18 is the right distribution for you.

HP is preparing to launch its first entry into the Chromebook marketplace, if a PDF found on its site can be believed. According to this listing, HP's currently-unannounced Pavilion Chromebook will feature a 1.1GHz Celeron processor, 2GB of RAM, a 16GB solid-state drive, and a 14-inch, 1366 x 768 display.

And now we come to my favorite part of this series, high-end Linux audio production. Linux is a superior platform for professional audio production: stable, efficient, and you don't get gouged for software licenses. You have to be careful to select audio hardware that is well-supported on Linux, but this is less of a problem than it used to be.