Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Teaching and learning have always had a collaborative element, but wiki technology has in recent years made collaboration central to the method of many educators. Since they can be edited by anyone with access to them, education wikis are ever-changing and evolving documents that ideally represent the wisdom of the student crowd.

Juliet Kemp explores the incredibly useful xargs command. It takes in input and executes your chosen command on it. Deceptively simple in concept; extremely powerful in execution. Here we'll look at xargs with find, and then at some other possibilities.

A cellular plan using an EVDO modem can provide a connection with bandwidth of approximately 3Mbps to the client and 1.5Mbps up to the provider (comparable to DSL) for a much lower cost than alternatives such as satellite. For applications requiring high-quality audio transmission from remote locations, such as the radio remotes we do at the radio station where I work, a Linux laptop with an EVDO modem and VoIP software offers an inexpensive and reliable solution. Here's what you need to get started.

My dad has been pestering me for some time to find him an open source tool that he could use to follow the market trends. He's been thinking about investing a little something in the market, but not without due diligence. Grism, written in Ruby, is the tool my dad now uses to easily follow the changing market trends. It allows you to create watchlists and portfolios and offers charts to help you gauge the performance of particular stocks.

Open source projects and vendors are trying a variety of technical approaches to replacing the expensive but ubiquitous Microsoft Exchange. While none is yet a drop-in replacement, some administrators can get a TCO advantage by switching.

If you're a frequent business traveler who keeps important company files on your laptop, using a centralized management solution to back up files automatically during a fixed time interval won't work. Instead, consider Box Backup, which backs up files from a laptop directly to a backup server over an encrypted link. Box Backup doesn't rely on server-initiated backups. Whenever laptops, or other clients, connect to the backup server, the backup can start immediately. You are assured that the files are secure, because Box Backup uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to encrypt data straight to the backup server's disks. In addition to the usual snapshot type of backup, Box Backup also lets you make a continuous backup for every change in files while connected to the server. Best of all, Box Backup is free.

Bordeaux is a commercial User Interface to the Wine software that allows Linux systems to run Windows software. The Bordeaux Technology Group distributes this software and provides professional support to companies and individuals running Windows apps on Linux (and soon FreeBSD). I interviewed Tom Wickline to get some details and find out what they're up to now.

We are in an economic downturn, perhaps even a full-blown recession. Any doubts I had about that were removed by two related, recent phenomena. The first is that whenever I walk down a high street I see almost every single retailer involved in near permanent 'sales'. Looking into the figures confirms the picture - sales on the high street have fallen for four of the past five months.

Solid state drives are in the news right now and IBM has not only pushed the speed barriers for these small devices but is also testing a 4 terabyte SSD. On the Linux front, Intel has bought a Linux distributor and Novell's Linux revenues jump 30% this quarter. And finally (so to speak) Bloomberg accidentally killed Apple supremo Steve Jobs this week.

The Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) project is not one to sit at the top of the Debian popularity contest results; it provides tools for model railroad enthusiasts. But the legal wrangling around JMRI has made it one of the more important projects in our community at this time. JMRI has suffered some legal setbacks, but much of that was turned around by the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals on August 13. The result is a vindication for much of the legal reasoning behind free software licenses.

The KOffice team, developers, students, packagers and bug reporters have prepared the final Alpha release of KOffice 2.0: KOffice 2.0 Alpha 10. KOffice will enter feature freeze in two weeks, so the next release will be the first Beta. And we are committed to releasing as many Beta's as is necessary before declaring Release Candidate status for KOffice 2.0.

Google has undone an earlier ban on the Mozilla Public License, an option for open source projects hosted at its Google Code site. Ostensibly as part of an effort to discourage the proliferation of open source licenses, Google dropped support for the MPL earlier in August. Now, though, the company reconsidered, restoring it and adding support for the Eclipse Public License as well.

Walter Bender's question 22: What “shoulders of giants” should we stand on? What is it that children should learn? Are there any universals? How do children decide whom and what to believe? I've been providing what I think is a good answer to these questions for some time now but often the response is muted and contradictory. It's not my original answer, it originates from Alan Kay and his analysis originates from anthropologists. The answer is not that children should learn universals but there needs to be more focus on what Kay has called the "non universals". From anthropological research of over 3000 human cultures, Kay presented two lists, the first were universals, the things that all human cultures have in common.

Project Gutenberg, the online library of more than 25,000 free books, is a treasure trove for bookworms and casual readers alike, but turning electronic text files into a readable form is not as easy as it may seem. In theory, since etexts are just plain text files, you should be able to open and read them on any platform without any tweaking. In practice, however, this approach rarely works. Hard line breaks, for example, may ruin the text flow, making it virtually impossible to read the book on a mobile device. Another problem is that most books are stored as single files, so locating a particular chapter or section in a lengthy book can be a serious nuisance. Then there are minor but annoying formatting quirks, such as inconsistent handling of italicized text, use of straight quotes instead of smart ones, and so on.

The purpose of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is probably obvious from its name -- but what does promoting free software mean in terms of everyday activity? Examining the roles of the organization shows how complex the FSF's advocacy role has become. It also reveals the range of services available to the free software community, and helps to explain how such a small group has had such a major influence on computer technology. As a 501(c)3 charity in the United States, the FSF is run by a board of directors. The current board includes FSF founder and president Richard M. Stallman and long-term member Henry Poole, but, in the last few years, new faces have appeared on the board.

What's that super-bright star in the western sky after sunset? Was the moon full last night? Is Mars visible now? What time will the sun set on Saturday? Do you ever look up at the sky and wonder about it? Your Linux desktop has lots of astronomy programs that can help you explore the night sky. This article will start with the one that's easiest to use: KStars. KStars is a nifty "planetarium program" that's probably available through your Linux distro. Don't let the "K" scare you off -- kstars works fine even if you're not running KDE.

Intercepting Internet traffic and spying on the communication between two computers is a gold mine for hackers. Now Carnegie Mellon University researchers hope software they've built will make it harder for criminals to hit that jackpot. The software, for use with latest version of the Firefox Web browser, creates an additional way for people to verify whether the site they're trying to visit is authentic.

This month saw the release of LyX 1.6 release candidate 1. Occupying a position somewhere between a word processor and a mark-up editor, LyX is designed to meet the needs of professional and academic writers by allowing them to focus on their content rather than formatting and layout. It achieves this by eschewing some of the WYSIWYG conventions of a word processor. We've covered LyX in the past, so this time we'll focus on the enhancements that the 1.6 release brings with it.

At Akademy 2008, KDE Release Team members Sebastian Kügler and Dirk Müller discussed the future of KDE's development process. Describing the challenges KDE faces and proposing some solutions, they spawned a lot of discussion. Read on for a summary of what has been said and done around this topic at Akademy.

Last week I discussed the SliTaz Linux distro and the use of QEMU to launch a virtual machine on Windows in which SliTaz or pretty much any other operating system can run. As always, your feedback didn't disappoint. Reader Art Gibbens wrote, "Thanx so much for the tip on QEMU. I also stuffed both a Knoppix and PCLinuxOS [ISO files] in the folder (separately - of course) and they both came to life. I had to tweak screen resolution in Knoppix and the login doesn't work in PCLinux, which I would think could both be rectified. Keep up the good work!"