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Sep 2009 Port Check Program (in C) Part 4 In part 1 an examination of creating an ultra simple single port single host port check program was done. Part two of the series the code was broken out between a header file and source file, input validation added, a usage message defined and a Makefile was setup for simple recompiling. The most recent installment added a timed host pre-check component to ensure that a connect() would not potentially "sit and spin" when a host is not available.

Shaun Walker, chief architect and co-founder at open source vendor, DotNetNuke, defended his decision to join the interim board of directors of the Microsoft-sponsored CodePlex project.

Maintaining a complex web application that uses a lot of Javascript for client-side, "AJAX"-style interactivity is rather difficult. The clumsiness of the Javascript language itself, as well as the various tricks needed to make an application work consistently across multiple browsers, all of which must be wrapped up inside HTML, makes for a jumble of issues for the application developer. Pyjamas is meant to ease that development, by allowing client-side applications to be written in Python, then translating that code to Javascript for use by the browser.

Rasmus Lerdorf is undoubtedly the most famous Greenlandic geek alive. Having created PHP as a bunch of hackish scripts to support his website in 1995, he turned it into a powerful, fully fledged language that's now used by millions around the world. Linux Format magazine caught up with him to find out more about his position in the PHP camp today and the decisions he made early on that made the project a whopping success.

FOSS adherents are happy to discuss all the reasons that open source is attractive to users and to other developers, from "it's free!" to "the philosophy of open source." Sometimes, they talk about the reasons that people avoid open source, such as "I want a phone number for tech support." But the hard fact is that sometimes people try an open source application — such as yours — and they end up not using it. I realize this is hard to imagine. But it happens, and not merely because the users have evil in their hearts.

A security researcher has discovered a cluster of infected Linux servers that have been corralled into a special ops botnet of sorts and used to distribute malware to unwitting people browsing the web. Each of the infected machines examined so far is a dedicated or virtual dedicated server running a legitimate website, Denis Sinegubko, an independent researcher based in Magnitogorsk, Russia, told The Register. But in addition to running an Apache webserver to dish up benign content, they've also been hacked to run a second webserver known as nginx, which serves malware.

360.000 IBM workers have been told to stop using Microsoft Office and switch to the Open Office-based software Symphony.

I have discovered that one of the most powerful avenues of learning is the ability to ask questions. When people can ask questions learning occurs. Why is asking questions so important? Well it is the old agony of getting stuck on one small thing.

Their are some things we are going to need. Some well made signs. Some poorly constructed signs! (We want to make sure the well made signs really stand out) Their is one rule, we do not allow protest Brownies.

Over the past years I have helped a number of people switch to Linux. One of these folks is a good friend of mine who has recently taken an interest in my collection of LiveCD's. I carry a cd carrier in my backpack so I always have my livecd's with me and my friend wanted a copy of gOS.

Do your remember Moblin? This project will now be integrated into Fedora Mini - the lightweight Linux distro targetted at Netbooks/Nettops.

Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning, or WebDAV, WebDAV is a protocol that allows for convenient mounting of a remote server on your desktop for easy file access. Once setup, using it is as simple as any other drag and drop navigation on your desktop. this tutorial show you how to install and setup a webdav server on fedora 11

For those of us on the outside of Sun Microsystems, the future of the Sparc processor and its related server platforms has been the subject of much speculation and debate. But for Sun's largest customers, the mystery has been over since sometime in June. That's when Sun's execs made the rounds to the biggest Sparc shops in the world and gave them a preview of the Sparc roadmap over the next three years. Under non-disclosure, of course. Like that was going to hold, considering all of the curiosity in the wake of Oracle's pending $7.4bn (net around $5.2bn) acquisition of Sun.

A survey of 118 enterprise IT and development executives conducted by open source solution provider OpenLogic concludes that the "Open Core" model for open source licensing trails behind dual licensing and open source with commercial support, in terms of acceptability to the enterprise.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 was released earlier this year, but unlike in years past and contrary to their original six month release cycle, there will not be another OpenSolaris distribution release in 2009. Instead, the next slated release is OpenSolaris 2010.02, which should be out in early February of next year. It is far too early to speculate everything that this next Sun operating system will have in store, but we do have some screenshots off a recent SXCE build and other details.

Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems hasn't been fully sanctioned by anti-trust entities and Oracle already has a message for customers: we'll continue to care intensively about SPARC and Solaris. Something's missing here: MySQL.

One of the highlights of the behind-the-scenes changes in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the addition of Grand Central Dispatch. Apple have now open sourced the code to Grand Central under an Apache 2.0 licence. Grand Central is a user and kernel space library which adds new language features, runtime libraries and other enhancements to support concurrent code execution on multi-core hardware.

If you think about learning how to create dynamic database-driven web sites, the simplest way is to start with PHP and SQLite. Ubuntu is a wonderful Linux distribution that makes installation of this software extremely easy.

Bash functions, unlike functions in most programming languages do not allow you to return a value to the caller. When a bash function ends its return value is its status: zero for success, non-zero for failure. To return values, you can set a global variable with the result, or use command substitution, or you can pass in the name of a variable to use as the result variable. The examples below describe these different mechanisms.

In a surprise move, Apple has open-sourced its Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) technology under the Apache 2.0 public license. Baked into the recently released Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, GCD eases the programming challenges that developers face when coding for multicore processors. You can download a PDF of Apple's half-marketing, half-technical description of it here.