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When it comes to cheap and secure off-site backup and storage, few services can beat Amazon S3. And if you want to easily back up your OpenOffice.org documents on Amazon S3, you can do so using a simple OpenOffice.org Basic macro and the aws Perl scripts.

Apache, among many other httpds, can be configured to log to an executable's STDIN instead of a file. But older Apaches, again like other httpds, won't let you pipe that programme's output to another's input, so you're limited to whatever the one was made to do.* httpd error logs often contain error conditions one wants to be alerted about, but for most people that means either monitoring it with some variant of tailf running on the host, or sshing to the host to run tail (or tail -f) on the log, piped to egrep, etcetera. This kind of set-up can work fine for one or two web servers, but gets cumbersome when you have more than just a few, and can become impracticable when dealing with many or when the error logs are being written to frequently.

At the CanSecWest Vancouver 2009 conference's PWN2OWN hacker's competition the Safari, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox browsers were successfully hacked to run code on their systems. The Chrome browser was recognized as being the least impacted by the hackers.

Many websites offer feeds as a way to promote most recently added articles, stories or updates. Most of these are accessible through links titled “XML” “RSS” or “ATOM”. These different types of feeds all use the same fundamentals to bring you the latest from a specific website. By using feeds you can collect and read information on topics without ever visiting the website which the text belongs to.

Sometimes you might run into an internet radio station or stream that you like, but which keeps dropping out because of too many people listening. So what can you do about it? This tutorial shows you how to use Icecast2 to set up a simple stream mirror on Linux.

This document describes how to set up Openbravo ERP (enterprise management system) on Debian Lenny. Openbravo is an open source ERP solution designed specifically for the SME (small to midsize firm). Developed in a web based environment, it includes many robust functionalities which are considered part of the extended ERP: procurement and warehouse management, project and service management, production management, and financial management.

Calgary, AB – Over 200 information technology professionals and open source enthusiasts are set to descend on the Coast Plaza Hotel in Calgary. The Calgary Open Source Systems Festival (COSSFEST) is a two-day trade show featuring multiple speaking tracks and workshops demonstrating the use of open source software solutions.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” But it makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem. Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

[Not directly FOSS related, but a truly fantastic read in light of our discussions on (the quality of) journalism that we had in the forums recently. -- Sander]

While a relatively simple device, web-cameras are still an area on Linux that can be problematic when it comes to compatibility and the device functioning properly. The level of Linux support for USB web-cameras has improved quite a bit in recent years, and for many devices it is now a plug-and-play experience, but that is not the case for all devices. In this article we are taking a brief look at the Logitech QuickCam Communicate Deluxe. The QuickCam Communicate Deluxe has a 1.3 mega-pixel sensor with the capabilities to capture video up to a resolution of 1280 x 1024 at 30 frames per second.

The Advanced Packaging Tool, which has since been ported by Conectiva for use with rpm and has been adopted by some other distributions. The apt-get command is a powerful command-line tool used to work with Ubuntu’s Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) performing such functions as installation of new software packages, upgrade of existing software packages, updating of the package list index, and even upgrading the entire Ubuntu system.

Device-mapper (hereafter, dm) is one of the best collection of device drivers that I have ever worked with. It brings high availability, flexibility and more to the Linux 2.6 kernel. Device-mapper is a Linux 2.6 kernel infrastructure that provides a generic way to create virtual layers of a block device while supporting stripping, mirroring, snapshots, concatenation, multipathing, etc. While many modules are built on top of device-mapper, the focus of this article is on multipath-tools.

The original edition of this book was published the better part of a decade ago and both the 1st and 2nd editions did fairly well in the reviews and on the market. What does this 3rd edition have to offer and who is it offering it to? The blurb on the back states that the "...new edition clearly documents every SQL command according to the latest ANSI standard and details how those commands are implemented in Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Oracle, 11g, MySQL 5.1, and PostgreSQL 8.3". Of course that was written by either one of the authors or the O'Reilly editorial staff, so you'd expect them to say such a thing. Assuming all this is true and you need to know the SQL commands relative to those products, then I guess you'll really want this book.

Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time communication between two or more individuals based on typed text. The text is conveyed via devices connected over a network such as the Internet. There are a number of different instant messaging protocols which are used by the major networks. The primary ones are XMPP (used by Google Talk, Jabber etc), AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger (formerly called MSN Messenger), and the venerable Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The IM clients featured in this article either cater for as many different networks as possible, or focus on a small subset.

A while ago somebody asked me what he could tell his boss to convince him to migrate to Linux, so I made him a small list.

If you have an Asus WL-500W, the DIYers’ favourite wireless router, and have installed the Oleg custom firmware on it, then you would have set up a shutdown script for it. This is especially important if you have a USB hard disk attached to it. There are many such scripts available in Oleg’s firmware that you can tweak. The one that we are going to talk about today is named “pre-shutdown” and it is exceuted just before the router is about to shutdown and we'll see an example that will allow us to shut it down gracefully.

For those interested in turn-based strategy games, Battle For Wesnoth 1.6 is now available on Linux and other supported platforms. This major update to Battle For Wesnoth brings a new campaign (called The Legend of Wesmere), many multi-player improvements, improved game graphics, new terrain types, user-interface improvements, and an improved map editor.

The open source GNOME desktop project has changed version control systems (VCS) to Git. The Git version management system was originally created by Linus Torvalds for the development of the Linux kernel. Other projects managed with Git include Ruby on Rails, WINE, X.org and Perl.

Which web browser client is least at risk from hackers? If the PWN2OWN hacking competition is any measure of client security, then the clear winner was Google Chrome.

Just when you thought you were rid of that damned paperclip ;)

Now to begin with, let’s first understand how to evaluate the performance of java code and protect the java code from tainted objects. We’ve already talked about Tainted Object Propagation in my previous post in context with databases. now, it is in context with application code. I’ll explain this with an example of enum pattern.