Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This year's Google Summer of Code is drawing inexorably to its close: the first indication that season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is indeed upon us. The KOffice students are busy tying up the last threads, adding the last flourish of polish that makes all the difference before they will slake the satisfied sigh that goes with work well-done. So - what did we achieve this year? In our very best tradition, read on for an overview!

Last week's 8th Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre (Free Software Regional Sessions) at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was an opportunity for around 1,300 FOSS enthusiasts to share experiences, learn more, and have fun together. Newcomers and advanced users, sysadmins and developers, all learned about and discussed a wide range of issues in more than 140 sessions in three days. There were also a space for the community organizations and companies to show, talk, and advocate about their activities and products.

Although open source software has gained a place in enterprise networks alongside proprietary software, it can't seem to shake doubts about security and intellectual-property issues that have long dogged the movement.

SQL injection attacks can allow hackers to execute arbitrary SQL commands on your database through your Web site. To avoid these attacks, every piece of data supplied by a user on a Web form, through HTTP Post or CGI parameters, or other means, must be validated to not contain information that is not expected. GreenSQL is a firewall for SQL -- it sits between your Web site and MySQL database and decides which SQL statements should and should not be executed. At least that's the idea -- in execution, I found some open doors.

When I wrote the first article in this series, the intent was to show how a html form could be used to transfer external input to existing web pages on the fly. By definition that is dynamic web content. This was the real goal of this series. Unfortunately, security concerns diverted my attention. To reset the balance, I had begun to rewrite the introduction, however, that corrective measure is still not complete. Despite this, I think it is more important to demonstrate the original intent. Thus, I have written this article describing the easiest method to transfer some dynamic content into active web pages.

It's not often we here at LinuxInsider get to write about celebrities -- other than the Richard Stallman variety, of course -- and indeed, many of the geeks who grace our pages from time to time seem to shun the limelight rather than seek it out. So it was with great glee this week that we found cause to mention none other than Jerry Seinfeld.

The bookmark tagging feature introduced in Firefox 3 is not particularly difficult in use: when bookmarking a Web page, enter the tags you like into the Tags field of the bookmarking dialog window and you are pretty much done. Tagging provides a more flexible way of keeping track of bookmarks than traditional folders. The folder-based system provides an "either/or"-solution to filing bookmarks. For example, you could place a bookmark for an article about installing OpenOffice.org on Puppy Linux in either a Linux or OpenOffice.org folder, but not in both. With tags, you don't have this problem: you can assign as many tags as you like, so the bookmark becomes filed under several categories at the same time.

Last week was kind of amazing -- I knew a number of things that were going to be happening at IDF but was blindsided by an announcement Intel made that could change the world as we know it. Nikola Tesla turned over in his grave, and we are one step closer to his Tower of Power. Intel also fleshed out its Atom platform, which I think forms the basis of a new class of cloud computing-based client devices.

[Lookout ahead, Rob Enderle Alert. - Scott]

Once upon a time, a Linux distribution would be installed with a /dev directory fully populated with device files. Most of them represented hardware which would never be present on the installed system, but they needed to be there just in case. Toward the end of this era, it was not uncommon to find systems with around 20,000 special files in /dev, and the number continued to grow. This scheme was unwieldy at best, and the growing number of hotpluggable devices (and devices in general) threatened to make the whole structure collapse under its own weight. Something, clearly, needed to be done.

Two years ago, Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy $240 million worth of support vouchers for Novell Inc.'s SUSE Linux operating system as part of a controversial partnership deal between the two vendors. Now Microsoft is reaching into its pocket again, to the tune of another $100 million. The once-bitter rivals -- which are still facing off against each other in an antitrust lawsuit that Novell filed in 2004 -- jointly announced last week that Microsoft has committed to purchase up to $100 million worth of additional support vouchers from Novell, starting Nov. 1.

Over the past three months, I've been communicating at length with several leaders in the Open Source Software (OSS) community about how best to license software patents in a way that supports the goal of OSS developers, users, and distributors. I've learned a great deal along the way about the uneasy relationship between OSS and software patents.

At this point we've seen a ton of Dell's upcoming Inspiron 910 / Mini Inspiron, but until this thing hits the street for real it looks like our pal Mr. Blurrycam has a new favorite target. Here's the 8.9-inch netbook testing Ubuntu somewhere, with a far less ugly keyboard than last time -- maybe next time it'll sprout some function keys.

LXer Feature: 24-Aug-2008

This week we have Anti-Linux sites to follow, old flame wars, scientific software for Linux, Microsoft and Novell renew their pact, Microsoft attempts to save face with Vista advertising campaign, Linux myths debunked and I wrap it all up with a really bad patch cable and a nice nugget of FUD.

The Linux 2.6.26 kernel had featured updated Intel and ATI DRM that added the needed kernel support for the ATI R500 and Intel GMA 4500 3D support. While the merge window for the Linux 2.6.27 kernel has already closed, we will hopefully see a few more Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) patches. We've already seen DRM file restructuring early on in the 2.6.27 cycle, but David Airlie has requested Linus Torvalds incorporate a few additional patches.

Not long after Joichi Ito uploaded a photo he had taken of Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia last year, he noticed something odd. Most of the Internet luminaries and technology gurus who had write-ups on Wikipedia had poor-quality photos or none at all. It wasn't just that."I realized that some famous people have no free photos online," says Ito.

We all know that Linux is about choice. Everyone has the choice of what they use and how they use it, provided they have access to a tame hacker with suitable programming skills. A consequence of this is that there's a huge range of software out there. If there's a popular favourite for a given task, you can bet your bottom dollar there'll be at least one alternative. You've only to look at the package selection options in most distro installers to see just how many choices you can make before you even start using your distribution.

A French robotics start-up called Wany Robotics has announced two mobile, mini-ITX-based sensor robots that run Linux. Aimed at educational and R&D applications, the PeKeeII robots are based on Via C3 or Intel Core 2 Duo processors, and offer sensor telemetry, ultrasound, and laser detection. Wany offers "Advanced" and "Ultimate" robots, both of which are built atop the same "Essential" PeKeeII model. Supplied without an onboard computer or OS, the Essential model is equipped with dual 12V DC motors running off of a 12V 7A/h NiMh battery. It has two odometers, 360-degree bumpers, and light and temperature sensors.

Opera Software has patched seven vulnerabilities in its flagship Opera browser, but declined to provide information about one of the bugs. The Norwegian browser developer hinted that other programs, not yet unpatched, were also affected by the flaw. Wednesday's update to Opera 9.52 fixes multiple bugs - seven in the Windows version, five in the Mac edition and six in the Linux browser - that range from "extremely severe" to "not severe" in the company's five-step threat ranking system.

Microsoft has dropped another ton or three of cash on Novell and in celebration they issued a joint press release announcing this new phase of their relationship. I was never a fan of the original deal, feeling that it violated the spirit if not the letter of the GPL. Some purport that it has increased the usage of Linux in the enterprise; that's a claim for which I don't have the numbers to verify or debunk. Honestly, I sort of doubt much of anyone really does.

Garry Saddington is ICT co-ordinator at Skegness Grammar School. It is a specialist sports college and a specialist maths and computing college with nearly 800 pupils, and has a boarding provision for around 60. Alistair Crust is responsible for serving the technology needs of the Skegness Grammar School community. All the school’s 180 curriculum computers run GNU/Linux. These run as thin-clients using the Linux Terminal Server Project, which uses low power clients with most of the processing being done on fewer, more powerful, servers.