Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Your editor recently "celebrated" yet another birthday; one asks "which birthday?" at the risk of making him grumpy indeed. During that celebration, a surprising present turned up, in the form of an Amazon Kindle book reader. That presents an opportunity to play with a new toy, something your editor is not known for turning down, even when the toy is as problematic as the Kindle. In the process, your editor turned up some free software which helps to make the device rather more useful.

The Open Invention Network (OIN) today announced that it was starting a new programme to acquire patents from "entrepreneurial inventors". The Distinguished Inventors Patent Acquisition programme offers cash for accepted patents while allowing the inventor to patent enhancements to the accepted patent. The OIN believe the programme will help independent inventors turn their patents into money, without them selling their patents to patent trolls, or companies seeking to "impede innovation".

The Debian project is planning a whole series of enhancements for Debian 5.0 "Squeeze." A few results of the currently running Google Summer of Code are beginning to creep into it.

The myTouch 3G, T-Mobile's second Android-powered smartphone in a year, nixes the slide-out keyboard of the G1 in favor of a touchscreen-only keypad. Battery life, camera, software and Microsoft Exchange compatibility are among the new handset's improvements. However, the touchscreen keyboard and the lack of a dedicated headphone jack were annoying.

SUSE Linux used to be a very KDE-centric distribution. Then Novell came around, bought SUSE and Ximian, and slowely but surely they turned the now-openSUSE distribution into effectively a GNOME-centric distribution with KDE as its sidekick. The openSUSE community, however, doesn't appear to be particularly happy with KDE being a sidekick.

Chromium developer Tim Steele has revealed that Google is working on a new cloud synchronisation function for its Chrome web browser. Chromium is the open source base on which Google's WebKit-based Chrome web browser is built. In his post on the Chromium development message board, Steele says that the feature for syncing user data will be linked to a users Google account and that work is being started in the Chromium project this week.

The Mono developers have announced a limited beta and September release of MonoTouch, an edition of Mono for the Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The open source .NET implementation has had some hurdles to overcome to be able to work within Apple's technical and legal requirements.

Every few weeks Nuno Pinheiro and the KDE Oxygen Icons team are publishing a new usability survey online to get feedback from users on the look and feel of icons. In particular, the Oxygen team is looking for feedback from individuals that have had no exposure to KDE, so if you are at home or at work, poke your friends and family and have them complete the survey, or simply take the survey yourself. The current survey is on icons for KDevelop 4 which is a major rewrite of KDevelop for KDE 4. So if you have a moment, grab someone and complete the KDevelop Icons Survey now.

Film effects specialist Sony Pictures Imageworks has released five digital image-manipulation software tools under open source licenses. While Imageworks has released other open source software in the past, the release of five tools at once brings its involvement in open source to a new level, the company said on Monday, in an announcement marking the beginning of the Siggraph computer graphics trade show in New Orleans.

For some, databases can be pretty intimidating. I remember some of the convoluted code I wrote years ago in order to avoid having to learn how to access a database from my programs. But it's actually not that hard to access a database, even in C/C++.

Open source and education are natural fits-- open source encourages experimentation and exploration, and the opportunity to learn computing, rather just how to be a little cog in a giant data-processing machine. Cynthia Harvey gives us a taste of the possibilities with this list of 55 open source educational applications.

FOSS coders are a strange breed. Many devote years of their lives and unquantifiable amounts of their passion to a job that may return nothing in the way of concrete rewards. It can, in fact, be thankless -- FOSS coders may get ridicule and criticism instead of riches. Why do they do it? "[Humans] need a purpose in life," says blogger Robert Pogson, "and for some, that purpose includes coding."

A new Google project, Simple, aims to be as BASIC as possible. Simple is very much a work in progress, but currently consists of a compiler and runtime for the Simple language, which is a dialect of BASIC specifically for developing Android Applications. Simple programmers can define static or dynamic forms and manipulate them with BASIC like commands. The hope is that a simple programming language, based on BASIC, will open up programming Android devices to a wider audience.

You may have noticed the odd bit of celebration around the magic billion downloads milestone for Firefox. Of course, as Mozillans themselves point out, that figure doesn't tell us very much; more useful, perhaps, are stats like 300 million users, but that too is only an estimate. And in any case, I think looking backwards is precisely the wrong thing to do at this point: what we need to ask is how do we get the *next* billion downloads – and why do we want them?

A common complaint about GNOME is that it has a certain fetish for icons. Menu entries, buttons - everything has an icon attached to it which often wastes space needlessly by making buttons larger than they need to be, as well as menus wider than they need to be. The good news (for me, at least) is that the next GNOME release will have all these icons removed.

Recently, five college professors spent an intense five days with Red Hat employees and other members of the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Red Hat called the experience POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience). The goal of the week was to show how FOSS could be used in post-secondary education, and to create a community to further the goal.

CentOS is alive. Two days after a core group of developers posted an open letter to primary admin Lance Davis, threatening to fork the open source OS if he didn't discuss his apparent disappearance from the project, Davis has answered their call - and he seems to have quelled their complaints.

The cross-platform Qt GUI framework now runs on Wind River's VxWorks real-time operating system, although it currently still requires a separate X11 server to be installed. The Qt developers point out that this version of Qt will probably never run without being customised for each respective version of VxWorks.

Fun with NULL pointers, part 1 took a detailed look at the long chain of failures which allowed the kernel to be compromised by way of a NULL pointer dereference. Eliminating that particular bug was a straightforward fix; it was, in fact, fixed before the nature of the vulnerability was widely understood. The importance of this particular problem is, in one sense, relatively small; there are very few distributions which shipped vulnerable versions of the kernel. But this exploit suggests that there could be a whole class of related problems in the kernel; there is a definite chance that similar vulnerabilities could be discovered - if, indeed, they have not already been found.

Microsoft had to report a 30% slump in sales for the last quarter. Their report to the U.S. SEC includes a rundown of their risk and competition factors. Among their concerns are Linux and open source untertakings, but also their own partners HP and Intel.