Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Last week, SugarCRM made version 5.1 generally available. With its beta release earlier this year, the open source CRM provider broke new ground, providing innovations in business intelligence and an intriguing mobile app for the BlackBerry and the iPhone. Developers are particularly excited about the release's module builder enhancer and customization capabilities.

While Google's new Chrome web browser has been met with a lot of praise and positive responses (well, mostly, at least), there has been one nagging issue that arose quite quickly after people got their hands on Chrome: the End User License Agreement accompanying the browser. It more or less granted Google the rights to everything seen or transmitted through the browser. Google now changed the EULA, saying it was a big case of woopsiedoopsie.

Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer lost nearly a full percentage point in market share during August, the browser's biggest drop in three months, a Web metrics firm said today. IE's rivals -- Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox, Apple Inc.'s Safari and Opera Software ASA's Opera -- all extended their shares at IE's expense last month. But all those browsers, Microsoft's included, now face competition from Google Inc., which yesterday launched a new browser, dubbed Chrome, that immediately grabbed 1% of the market, Net Applications Inc. said today.

My copy of Oxford defines open as: unconcealed circumstances or condition. Way back in the day when the GNU operating system was getting going, they coined the mantra: Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer. Last month, I talked about transparency and how important it was in software and systems. Just as important are standards, and, more important following those standards. Today, in Computerworld, a different issue has been raised. The value of standards.

Adopting an open source library automation system allowed a small group of libraries on Maryland's eastern shore to save money and create a more intuitive, user-friendly catalog system for both librarians and patrons. Library automation systems allow librarians to keep track of which materials patrons have checked out and when those materials are due back in. They also allow patrons to access the library's catalog system online to search for books and put them on hold, as well as renew books they've already checked out.

This past winter, Red Hat announced the release of a product called MRG–a computing platform that features high-speed messaging and allows high-throughput computing, realtime transactions, and workload management. Not sure what all that means? We weren’t either. So we contacted Brian Che, the project manager for MRG, to see if we couldn’t get a few questions answered. He obliged, and so we bring you the MRG QandA. Still have questions of your own you want answered? Comment and let us know…

If you do your Debian package management from the command line, you are probably aware of utilities that search the cache of available programs, such as apt-cache, apt-file, and dpkg. Possibly, too, you have cursed the limited search information available in graphical interfaces like Synaptic, which does not extend much beyond searching for the description, name, versions, and dependencies. Now, the GNOME Debian Package Finder (gpfind) is in the process of bring much of the command-line search capacity to the desktop -- although, at version 0.1.6, it is still too rough to replace its command-line equivalents for most users.

Google Inc.'s new Chrome browser grabbed 1% of the browser market in its first day out in public, Web metrics providers said today. Both U.S.-based tracking company Net Applications Inc. and Irish vendor StatCounter put Chrome's total market share at around 1%, less than 24 hours after the browser's launch, passing rivals such as Opera and Netscape in the process. "This is a phenomenal performance," said CEO Aodhan Cullen, in a post to StatCounter's blog today. StatCounter, which provides free visitor statistics tools to Web developers, monitors traffic on the sites run by its 1.5 million members.

As Networking 101 begins moving on up the stack toward the layers involved with routing, we must pause for a moment. Some attention needs to be paid to the most misunderstood protocol: ICMP. Managers and administrators alike should understand what ICMP is really used for if they plan on making firewall policy decisions, and administrators can use ICMP knowledge to fully understand routing issues.

Firefox developer Mozilla has claimed its decision to reinvent the command line to make mashups easier has received an overwhelming response from developers. Mozilla Labs last week released an experimental plug-in called Ubiquity, which lets users call up a command line entry box and type in commands to carry out additional functions beyond those defined in the Firefox graphical user interface (GUI). Mozilla project leader Aza Raskin said developers have already contributed thousands of new commands to Ubiquity. "In under a week, we have a roughly comparable number of Ubiquity commands as there are Firefox extensions," Raskin said.

I move from computer to computer constantly -- desktops, laptops, testing machines -- and rather than worry about synchronizing the assorted hard disks content, I prefer to keep one central copy of my documents that I can access anywhere. I do that using wdfs, the WebDAV file system for FUSE. Keeping one set of files means never worrying about synchronization and merging. Changes never get unknowingly overwritten, and I have a single, simple backup strategy. WebDAV is the Distributed Authoring and Versioning extension to HTTP. On Apache systems it is usually implemented with mod_dav, and many Web hosting companies provide it as an option, giving you a simple "flip a switch" path to run your own WebDAV server.

After last week's update to the KDE 3.5 series, today's KDE release updates the stable KDE 4.1 branch to KDE 4.1.1. It bears the codename "Cebidae" referring to an in-joke often made during Akademy 2008. With only a good month of development time -- and Akademy in between -- the changelog is still impressively long. Pretty much all applications have received the developers' attention, resulting in a long list of bugfixes and improvements.

phpLogCon provides a user-friendly Web interface to your system logs. It can handle logs from both Linux and Windows systems, so an administrator can log in to a single phpLogCon site to see what is happening on all the machines on a network. phpLogCon is not available in the Ubuntu, openSUSE 11, or Fedora 9 repositories. It will be in Fedora 10 and is packaged in the Fedora development repository. I'll download and build phpLogCon version 2.3.9 from source using an i386 Fedora 9 machine.

The initial beta product is available in 122 countries and 40 languages but for Window (XP and Vista). Google says Mac and Linux versions are now high priority but these are still months away. However Google's vice president product development, Sundar Pichai, said that, with the launch of the Windows beta, development resources had been redeployed to accelerate the Mac and Linux versions. Chrome is completely open source and Google says it will remain that way. Its rationale being that, because every one of Google's services is delivered through a browser it is in its interest to engender competition and innovation in the browser market to ensure users' experience of Google services is optimal.

A decision to dismiss appeals against the controversial fast-track approval of a Microsoft document format has provoked six members of global standards-setting body ISO to question ISO's relevance. Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela -- countries with fast-growing IT markets -- had appealed against ISO's stamp of approval for Microsoft Office Open XML,

Another front may be opening in the battle for mobile platform supremacy. Microsoft is rumored to be planning to launch its own mobile application store. If the buzz is true, Microsoft may not be as late to the party as some would think. Android hasn't yet debuted. Apple, for its part, is facing push-back on many fronts.

I've noted before that writing to MPs/MEPs seems to be remarkably effective in terms of generating a response. The naïve among us might even assume that democracy is almost functional in these cases. I'm not sure whether that applies to something as large and inscrutable as the European Commission, but it's certainly worth a try, especially in the context of open source and open standards.

Google launched an open-source web browser claimed to feature "enhanced stability and security." Downloadable now for Windows and expected soon for Linux and MacOS, Google Chrome features a new JavaScript engine, a private browsing mode, and tabs whose memory areas are protected from one another.

Open-source middleware maker Continuent has launched a database scale-out stack called Tungsten, which supports open-source databases like MySQL and proprietary wares from the likes of Oracle Corp. Last week, the company published code for Tungsten Replicator, a master-slave replication tool for MySQL, wrote Robert Hodges, chief technology officer at Continuent, in a blog post. Master-slave replication allows a "master" database to sync up with a number of "slaves," allowing a workload to be scaled out.

Sam Ramji is a busy man. As Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy, his job is a big one: overseeing the company's initiatives in Linux and open source. Wait a second – Microsoft’s strategy in open source? Yes, that’s right. The planet’s largest software company, whose relationship with open source has been, at best, hypercompetitive – Linux partisans might describe it less diplomatically – is reaching across the divide to the (formerly) enemy camp.