Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Clay Shirky's book on what information technology is doing to our world, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, has important things to say to anyone interested in open source software (OSS). His thoughts on the evolving effects of the technological revolution we are all living in make for a fun way to spend a few hours.

The kernel developers are generally quite good about responding to security problems. Once a vulnerability in the kernel has been found, a patch comes out in short order; system administrators can then apply the patch (or get a patched kernel from their distributor), reboot the system, and get on with life knowing that the vulnerability has been fixed. It is a system which works pretty well.

SqlSync lets you compare two databases to see which tuples have been added, removed, and changed. You can also use SqlSync to make one database a clone of another and maintain its contents to be that way. One benefit of using SqlSync to perform synchronization is that you can perform heterogeneous syncs -- for example, from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

Ask average computer users what FOSS is about, and, if they've even heard of it, they'll probably say something about the source code being publicly available. The problem is that the community has done a deplorable job of explaining itself to outsiders. Focused on the immediate concerns of developers, the Open Source Definition lists only one right out of ten (to redistribute the software) that might be of interest to average computer users. The more concise Free Software Definition includes two out four points for the average user (the rights to redistribute and to run the program for any purpose). But, in practice, those who use it tend to be focused on the rights given to developers like themselves.

AbiWord just had a great 2.6 release and the developers took several hours of their spare time over a few weeks period answering questions and providing information. Thanks to the team and especially MarcMaurer for his time and patience. We present you a detailed interview with the AbiWord team on a broad range of topics.

This will be my last post from JavaOne this year–I’m headed back home. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of the JBoss crew is. They’re here through Friday to bring you more packed mini-sessions at the Pavilion booth and a few more technical sessions. Here’s the schedule for the rest of the week and another personal recommendation.

I use Tomboy, an open source notetaking app, to cull and organize the hundreds of bits of information I track, and to prioritize it on to-do lists on the fly. When we first reviewed Tomboy 0.3.5, it had some obvious flaws. The project has had a number of updates since then, and the newest version, 0.10.0, really makes the grade. If you use the GNOME desktop environment, chances are you already have Tomboy on your system, since it's part of the GNOME project. If not, or if you want to update to the latest version, you'll find it at the GNOME's Web site.

Monday’s CommunityOne crowd was manageable and pretty much what I expected. Tuesday’s crowd was larger, but I walked straight into the technical sessions without a problem. This morning I stepped outside for a few minutes, and when I came back in, there was a line stretching across the entire large hallway and down an adjacent narrow one. Then I realized that was the line I wanted to be in. At the end of that long (but quickly moving) line, Gavin King from JBoss spoke to a standing-room-only crowd about the basics of Web Beans. The presentation included a lot of example code, stepping everyone through binding types, deployment types, producer methods, and more.

Slackware Linux has stood strong for more than a decade by refusing to compromise. There was a time when people used to say, "If you want to learn Linux and learn it well, give Slackware a try." Attila Craciun, a Romanian software developer and Linux enthusiast, has ported the Slackware tree to the AMD64 architecture to create the Bluewhite64 distro. We spoke with him to find out about Bluewhite64, where it came from, and where it's going.

Ubuntu Linux 7.04 is now available for Sharp's Zaurus PDAs. The 0.1 release comes with a minimalist filesystem that can be launched in an emulator, enhanced with software from the vast Ubuntu archives, and then flashed onto a real Zaurus. The Zaurus Ubuntu project was created by "Omegamoon," a hacker who has previously worked on ports of Fedora Linux and Google's Android phone stack to the Sharp Zaurus. He suggests first trying the distro out in the free QEMU emulator, where configuration and tweaking is easier than on real hardware. Once customizations have been completed, it can be installed on Zaurus PDAs such as the SL-C3100, he says.

If Creative Commons (CC) has any say in the matter, the Web will soon have a standard machine-readable notation for licenses. Named the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL), the notation has been under development for the last few years, partly with the cooperation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3). It is described in a paper by four Creative Commons employees and published by Communia, a European site that explores the relationship between technology and the public domain. Creative Commons plans future presentations of ccREL, and is also actively explaining the need for it -- which is what CC's Chief Technology Officer, Nathan Yergler, was doing when Linux.com caught up with him at the recent Open Web Conference in Vancouver.

Browser maker Opera has released an early version of a tool to help developers debug web pages. It hopes Opera Dragonfly will assist developers in making the experience of surfing the net consistent across web-enabled mobiles, desktops, and consoles while prompting the adoption of open standards. Opera Dragonfly is designed to debug web pages, widgets, and web applications on any device. The Alpha version of the tool comes with Opera 9.5 beta 2. Opera Dragonfly includes a JavaScript Debugger, DOM and CSS Inspectors, Error Console and Command Line, among other features.

Another month, another update to the KDE 4.0 series. This time, we arepresenting KDE 4.0.4, dubbedFile-Not-Found to the audience. KDE 4.0.4 brings improvements to KHTML, Okular and various other components. We recommend that people who are already running KDE 4.0 releases update to 4.0.4. The emphasis of this release lies, as usual in stabilising, bugfixing, performance improvements and updated translations -- no new features. The developers have again squashed quite some bugs which you can find some of in thechangelog. With this release, the KDE community continues to support the KDE 4.0 series that has been released for brave users earlier this year. KDE 4.1, to be released this summer (in the northern-hemisphere) will bring new features and applications.

Every major operating system has more than one media center solution for users who can't spend a day without watching a movie or listening to music. In Linux we're all familiar with MythTV and Freevo, two media center applications that are so appreciated they even have got their own distributions. Freevo is highly configurable, and Freevo 2 SNV builds look promising. MythTV has everything a personal video recorder needs, from scheduled recordings to weather plugins. The thing is, many people need a media center application just to watch Xvid files, listen to their favorite music, and watch family pictures on their television. If this is the case for you, give Entertainer a try.

Any task you perform on the Web can be automated by writing a script. But you don't have to know how to use Javascript or some other scripting language to create your own custom scripts. The Chickenfoot add-on for Firefox makes it easy for nonprogrammers to devise scripts that do their bidding. Chickenfoot was developed by MIT's User Interface Design Group. It's similar to the Greasemonkey scripting extension for Firefox, but its scripts tend to be simpler and easier for nonprogrammers to customize.

It's quite characteristic of the cultural cringe that prevails in Australia that a man who works in America, Barry Vercoe, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is coming to the country next week to lobby for the local branch of the One Laptop Per Child project.

Politically, that is. We still do not enjoy certain freedoms that we deserve. A new wave of freedom movements, to achieve these freedoms, is now sweeping the world – a movement that is bound to change the way we think, the way we do things and the way we interact. It started in the United States and aims to free people from the clutches of monopoly corporations. And the role of Gandhiji is being played by an extraordinary person with long hair and a long beard; a man called Richard Mathew Stallman, who vehemently rejects any comparison with Gandhiji or Nelson Mandela.

Broadband deprivation, Vista, Linux, Telstra, Microsoft, Yahoo, iPhone, spambots, phishing, climate change ... It's all getting too much for me. Won't these technology issues ever go away! Australians are rather well-known for taking a dim opinion on people and organisations that take things too seriously. One of the best-known Australian cartoons is that penned in Smiths Weekly, 1933, by US expatriate Stan Cross: "For gorsake, stop laughing, this is serious!"

James Maguire, Datamation's managing editor, claims he has no interest in software whose source code is available for editing. "I'm not a software engineer," he says. "If I can't grab it off the shelf, I can't use it." He's half-joking, of course. But he echoes the opinion of many people outside the free and open source software (FOSS) community about what its efforts are about. Ask average computer users what FOSS is about, and, if they've even heard of it, they'll probably say something about the source code being publicly available.

NVIDIA has long supported their CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology on Linux for allowing general-purpose code algorithms to be executed on the graphics processor, while AMD and their Stream Computing support has been absent on Linux. AMD has only been supporting their Stream SDK on Windows XP, but this morning we have confirmation that the Software Development Kit will be released for Linux in the coming days. According to AMD's Michael Chu on the AMD Developer Forums, an SDK v1.1 Beta is expected within the next two weeks (this message appeared a week ago) and that testing has been done with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Enterprise. This SDK will make it possible to use CAL and Brook+ on Linux, permitting of course you're using an R600 GPU.