Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

After more than two years of development, Free Pascal 2.2.0 was released this week and has sparked a resurgence in interest in a programming language many had forgotten about.

New features include, a connector for LegalCase and updated connectors for ClearHealth, OpenEMR and osCommerce, facilities to convert sales order to purchase order and/or material/service requisition so as to procure the required material/service after a sale is concluded, addition of a sample law office chart of accounts and a sample medical practice chart of accounts, addition of Australian GST tax rate and updating of Canadian GST tax rate, addition of narrow/wide display option for the various case handling screens, addition of customer, vendor, employee contact lists, and, addition of German translation for the Quotation module.

I do development work, and I require access to a console to run programs, check output, or monitor transmission packets. Up until now, I've used a terminal program in a different desktop, and use the mouse to change to that terminal. Now I've found a quicker way, by using any of three Quake-style consoles that pop up just by pressing a key.

At a mere 50MB, Damn Small Linux seems like it would be more at home in the realm of rescue disks instead of Desktop OSs. After booting up into full graphical mode, you may be hooked on this tiny distribution forever.

Individual developers can use sites like SourceForge.net to host multiple projects, but such sites are not well suited to college environments that have many student programming projects to host. DrProject is a multiple project hosting application designed for schools. It gives each project a wiki, bug tracker, and source code repository. DrProject is a fork of the Trac project, which can only host project at a time. DrProject has a different look and feel but the navigation menu is very similar to Trac's.

Viva software freedom viva! Software Freedom Day takes place this Saturday. A worldwide celebration, there are several events taking place around the country.

Hothead Games will soon be launching a new title based on the popular online Penny Arcade comic strip. Even better, the new game will be available for several platforms at its launch, including Linux. The dearth of new, popular, commercial games for Linux has long been a sore point for Linux users. For the most part, Linux gamers have been overlooked, forgotten, or ignored. What drove Hothead to include Linux as a supported platform? Joel DeYoung, Hothead Game's COO and also a founder and producer of the upcoming "Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness," said, "At Hothead we have a philosophy that gamers should choose the platform they want to play a game on, rather than the publisher dictating that to them. So in general we're always going to try to get our titles on as many platforms as possible.

Developers looking to build Ajax-style rich internet applications (RIA) are pretty much spoilt for choice at the moment. There are dozens of RIA tools and frameworks littering the development landscape, from those providing minimal sets of JavaScript libraries to heavyweight contenders such as Adobe’s Flex, Microsoft’s Silverlight and Google’s Web Toolkit (GWT). The Google offering, released under an Open Source licence, has quickly picked up a following by combining a wide range of useful and functional browser widgets and by using Java to drive the whole thing. Yep, that’s Java, not Javascript…

This guest column by Kim Brebach, a consultant with an Australian technology marketing group, examines the Linux phenomenon from the perspective of a marketeer wondering why it hasn't caught on more, and what it would take to move it forward.

The big names in open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, such as Compiere, get most of the publicity, but you have another choice: Nseer ERP, from the first Chinese company to open the source code to its ERP software. It offers a basic solution for small businesses. Like many other open source ERP applications, Nseer ERP is developed under Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and is based on a client-server architecture. It runs on Linux, Windows, and Unix, and supports databases such as MySQL, Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server; multiple languages (for the time being, only English and Chinese); and the IE, Firefox, and Netscape Web browsers. The latest version is v6.0.

Chris Bailey, UK ICT Hub FOSS in the VCS project, writes: As part of the work for the UK ICT Hub's FOSS in the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) project we are developing a new certification for FOSS use by not for profits, Free and Open Source Knowledge (FOSK). We are doing this in partnership with the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) whose certification for Linux system administrators has world wide recognition.

East African cellphone company, Simba Telecoms, has introduced an innovative local money transfer service in Uganda. Tectonic speaks to Cape Town-based Jeshurun Consulting's development manager to find out what was used to build the system.

Achievement Awards Group, a South African motivational organisation, has implemented the open source voice over IP solution, Asterisk, to upgrade the capability of its specialist call centre and to react quickly to the needs of clients.

When it comes to anonymous Web access, Tor is not the only fish in the sea. If you are looking for a lightweight utility that allows you to navigate the Web anonymously, JAP is more user-friendly. Similar to Tor, JAP sends a user's Web page request through multiple intermediary servers called mixes. Unlike Tor, however, JAP uses a predetermined sequence of mixes called a mix cascade. According to JAP's documentation, because each mix cascade handles multiple connections, it's virtually impossible to trace a particular connection to its user. If you are interested in a more detailed description of JAP's inner workings, take a look at the Architecture of the Anonymization Service article on JAP's Web site.

Assembled open source enthusiasts last night heard the programme manager for SITA's open source migration project, Arno Webb, speak about his role in directing the migration of government's many departments to open source.

Canonical hopes its Jeos--"just enough operating system"--will be used as a foundation to package software for virtual machines.

Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com and Linspire, a Linux distributor, thinks the world is ready for a 'virtual' desktop on the Web. Is he right? Whatever else you can say about multimillionaire technology entrepreneur Michael Robertson—the founder of MP3.com; Linspire, a Linux distributor; and SIPhone, a VOIP company, to name but a few—he has chutzpah. In each of his business ventures, he's taken on giants, such as the music industry, Microsoft and Vonage. Now, with AjaxWindows, he's at it again, with Microsoft once more in his sights.

Sun Microsystems upgraded the Solaris 10 operating system today, most notably enabling its OS to run Linux and its applications on x86 systems.

Michael Kerrisk, the Linux man page maintainer since 2004, gave a talk on the value of documentation during the first day of LinuxConf Europe 2007. While documents are useful for end users trying to get their job done, this use was not Michael's focus; instead, he talked about how documentation can help in the creation of a better kernel in the first place. The writing of documents, he says, reveals bugs and bad interface designs before they become part of a released kernel. And that can help to prevent a great deal of pain for both kernel and user-space developers.

The first public Pseudo (alpha) release of Vector Linux 5.9 is now available. Normally a release like this wouldn’t be worth blogging about. It’s early development code. If you’re used to Ubuntu then think Tribe 1. It’s at that level. OK, it seems to be usable at this point but it’s not something I’d recommend for a system that has to do real work.