Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Loop-based music composition is the practice of sequencing audio samples to create the various parts of a musical work. A sample may contain only a single event such as a bass note or cymbal crash or it may contain a measured pattern of events such as a drum beat, a guitar chord progression, or even an entire piece of music. The former type is sometimes referred to as a"one-shot" sample, while a longer sampled pattern is often simply called a loop.A loop is usually created at a specific tempo in a precise time period (musical beats and measures) for exact concatenation with other loops. Sequencing a series of timed loops creates realistic tracks that can convince a listener that he or she is listening to a part specifically performed for the piece.

Admit it. You enjoy using the command line in Linux. You only have a graphical interface so people in the office don't look at you strangely. So why not embed a command line in your desktop?

The Journaled File System (JFS) is a little-known filesystem open sourced by IBM in 1999 and available in the Linux kernel sources since 2002. It originated inside IBM as the standard filesystem on the AIX line of Unix servers, and was later ported to OS/2. Despite its pedigree, JFS has not received the publicity or widespread usage of Linux filesystems like ext2/3 and ReiserFS. To learn more about JFS, I installed it as my root filesystem. I found it to be a worthy alternative to the bigger names.

According to an anonymous source working at the Geotechnical & Structures Lab of the US Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Miss., a committee of government employees and contractors at Vicksburg is considering a new IT policy which will force everyone to move to Windows XP if they are not already running it, and to port all applications save one currently running on Linux to Windows. The lone exception would be moved to Solaris.

The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) allows you to encrypt, decrypt, sign, and verify communications and data, as well as create and manage the keys needed for these tasks. It is a full, open source implementation of the OpenPGP Standard (RFC2440) and is integrated into many Linux applications ranging from clipboard applets to instant messaging clients. These applications make it easy to use GnuPG for digital security in the GNOME desktop environment.

"It turns out that USB devices suck when it comes to powermanagement issues :(" lamented Greg KH in posting some patches to handle USB autosuspend problems. He noted that the patches were intended for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel, "a number of patches have been submitted near the end of this kernel release cycle that add new device ids to the quirk table in the kernel to disable autosuspend for specific devices. However, a number of developers are very worried that even with the testing that has been done, once 2.6.23 is released, we are going to get a whole raft of angry users when their devices break in nasty ways." He proved an example, "it seems that almost 2/3 of all USB printers just can not handle autosuspend. And there's a _lot_ of USB printers out there..."

A community developer has ported Linux's KDE desktop environment to Nokia's Internet tablets. The port appears to run on both the N800 and -- with the addition of an RS-MMC card upgrade -- the older 770 tablet. The port actually was released back in March for the N800. However, it got a new round of attention this week, when a blogger posted instructions on installing it on the older 770. "It purrs like a kitten, believe it or not," the post enthused.

IBM Corp.'s decision to offer a Linux-only mainframe -- at 90% less than the cost of its flagship box has had the intended effect, research now shows. "Linux is a key to the IBM mainframe new-workload strategy," said Charlie Burns, a vice president of Westport, Conn.-based Saugatuck Technology Inc.

As its ship date nears, the price is rising and the specs dropping on Asus's ultra-low-cost, flash-based Linux notebook, according to reports. The EEE PC (3ePC), introduced at Computex, Taipei in June, is now expected to start at about $250, rather than the $190 originally targeted.

"With 2.6.24 probably opening in the not-too-distant future, it's probably a good time to review what my plans are for when the merge window opens," began Roland Dreier on the Linux Kernel mailing list. He reflected on the recent decision to phase in usage of reviewed-by tags noting that he was a little behind on reviews, "unfortunately, due to the length of the backlog and the fact that 2.6.23 seems fairly close, some of the things listed below are going to miss the 2.6.24 merge window."

Sun Microsystems, a longtime participant in the Xen open-source hypervisor project, has named its Solaris-based offshoot xVM, short for x86 Virtual Machine.

Bad things can happen even to good computers. If something bad happens to a Dell PC with pre-installed Ubuntu, Dell is now providing a customized Ubuntu to make certain that everything returns to turn to tiptop shape.

"This version has a lot of corrections, and is stable at least on my machine," noted Linus Torvalds in the 0.11 Linux kernel release announcment, "I /hope/ every known bug is fixed, but no promises (and all unknown bugs are still there, probably with reinforcements ;-)". The 0.11 kernel was released on December 8th, 1991, gaining demand loading, the mkfs, fsck and fdisk utilities, improved floppy drivers, a console that could generate beeps, support for US, German, French and Finnish keyboards, and settable line-speeds for the com ports (instead of having them hard-coded to 2400bps).

Get to know a little about stack exploits in the first of two films featuring Uli Drepper. Find out how stack buffer overflows work, the vulnerabilities abused by such attacks, and a security implementation that can stop the attack before it even begins. We’re also offering up an extended version of the talk–available as a podcast–for those of you on the go. And join us next time, where we’ll hear from Uli about more exotic attacks and other types of security measures.

Runtime Revolution has released a beta version of its Hypercard-like cross-platform development tool with upgraded Linux support. Version 2.9 of the tool is the first version to offer full Linux support since version 2.6.1 was released in October 2005.

Every time you launch Thunderbird, you are greeted by a generic start page (unless you've turned that option off). Most of us don't pay much attention to it and navigate straight to the Inbox without giving it a second thought. The start screen is just a simple HTML page, which Thunderbird fetches from the address specified in the application's preferences. Knowing that, you can replace it with something more useful, such as the URL of your Web site or blog -- or you can take it a step further and turn the start screen into a tool that can help to manage your ideas, notes, to-do lists, and more.

I saw this article today about rebooting a frozen system without having to hit the power button, which looks like it might be useful. We do have this happen once in a while - usually for no readily apparent reason, and since I tend to go by the “once is an anomaly, twice in quick succession is time to investigate” rule, I confess I don’t look too hard.

Modern Health care isreporting that the Oregon RHIO planning has come to a halt:"The health plans were willing to pay, but the hospitals thought it was a more challenging venture," Gibson said. The project did not get funded because"it lacked a sustainable business model. If you look carefully at his (Witter's) business plan, sustainable operation was way off in the future. He just said in year five or beyond, there would be services that might be salable. You still had the first few years that might not be sustainable." Gibson also said that there were some concerns about what he called"adoption risk" with a system designed to find patient information using a record-locator service and a Web-based interface with participants' IT systems."You're asking doctors to break out of whatever work flow they're in and going out to a Web site," Gibson said."You have a risk that doctors might not use it. Once everybody has an EMR and once that data comes automatically into an EMR, that’s different. But that’s not what we proposed."

Downloads of Bastille Linux have always been offered through SourceForge, with Bastille-linux.org serving more as a store-front than as a primary download location. The change of ownership of the site came to light only after duty staff at the Internet Storm Centre followed up a tip that something was amiss.

It's all about updating the updater. Microsoft officials are seeking to dispel rumors the company is performing stealth updates on Windows machines. They are also pledging to be more transparent in the future to prevent such misunderstandings from happing again.