Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Well, that's easy to answer but, more important what is he doing? And why? Well, here is a not so quick update.

[Geek Ranch?, sounds cool to me. -Scott]

What do you do if you forget the password to your OpenOffice.org files? The simplest solution is to download OOo Password Cracker, a macro for opening protected documents in any OpenOffice.org application. Using a brute force dictionary attack, OOo Password Cracker provides a slow but reliable method of document recovery. However, the macro requires some preparation if you want to use it effectively.

In 2004, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. In 2007, Dell, a top computer manufacturer, is introducing pre-installed Ubuntu Linux on its main PC lines. The worlds of baseball and the desktop will never be the same. In both cases, people worked long and hard to reach the top. In Linux's case, the top is the recognition that it is not just a hobby operating system, and that it is not an operating system that's only for servers. With its arrival on Dell's desktops, Linux has proven that it can compete in the same league with Mac OS and Windows.

Functional Languages seem to be pushing for the title of the next cool thing. Talks and tutorials about them are starting to show up in conferences and conventions, books about them are hitting the shelves, people are even asking about talking about them in blogs and mailing lists devoted to some of the current hot languages.

The director of software for the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project believes there is a big market for the self-powered machines in the U.S., provided the user wants to perform basic computer functions. "The XO machine is quite sweet," the OLPC's Walter Bender wrote in an email to DesktopLinux.com today. "I guess the question boils down to what you want to do with the machine.

Theodore Ts'o posted an update on the ext4 filesystem [story], "I've respun the ext4 development patchset, with Amit's updated fallocate patches. I've added Dave's patch to add ia64 support to the fallocate system call, but *not* the XFS fallocate support patches. (Probably better for them to live in an xfs tree, where they can more easily tested and updated.) Yes, we haven't reached complete closure on the fallocate system call calling convention, but it's enough for us to get more testing in -mm." Jeff Garzik noted that none of this development was happening in the kernel as originally planned, "why isn't this stuff going upstream rapidly? AFAICT nothing much at all has happened upstream besides a mass renaming? The whole point of having ext4 in the kernel is to do development upstream, in the public view, getting new stuff in ASAP (even if that means changing or pulling some stuff later)."

The Recoll project team on April 26 announced the release of version 1.8.1 of its free, open-source, full text search tool for Linux desktops. Recoll is based on the "very strong" Xapian backend, which provides an easy-to-use, feature-rich, QT-based graphical interface, a team member said.

O'Brien Automotive Team is a large car dealership conglomerate based in Peoria, Ill. When the company built new headquarters recently, it needed a phone system flexible and cost-effective enough to satisfy the needs of 200 employees at the home office, and hundreds more staff at nine local dealerships in four states. After evaluating options and wrangling with incompetent vendors, O'Brien went with an open source Asterisk solution.

Toshiba's Italian channel sales and marketing operation reportedly is considering offering pre-loaded Linux in its Tecra, Satellite, Portege, and Qosmio notebook lines, according to a story published online last week in the Il Sole newspaper.

It's a relaxed entry this time, an update on some recent happenings in the Linux audio world. Without further preamble, let's take a look at some of the good things going on there.

During FISL 8.0 I caught up with PostgreSQL contributor Josh Berkus who was there to present on PostgreSQL and meet up with the local PostgreSQL community. Josh is a member of the PostgreSQL core team and works at Sun Microsystems as part of their open source database team. Over lunch, Josh shared how KDE plays an important role in the release coordination process which Josh oversees.

Open source document management application KnowledgeTree has released SOAP Web Services interfaces for the application, opening up opportunities for third party developers to integrate with the document management system.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 85 for the week of April 22nd through April 28th, 2007.

After yesterday's blog about the relevance of feature bloat, I figured that I would follow up with some quantitative analysis on the performance characteristics to measure resource bloat. This isn't the first time I've measured Office CPU and memory consumption of Microsoft Office and Open Office. I have a whole series on it dating back to 2005. This time, I'm pitting Microsoft-backed OOXML (Office Open XML) versus the OASIS-backed ODF (OpenDocument) format with Microsoft Office 2007 and Open Office 2.2.

According tothis announcement, WorldVistA EHR/VOE 1.0 is now CCHIT certified. Formerly VistA Office EHR (VOE) there has been a name change due to entanglements. It is now known as WorldVistA EHR.

Many people have embraced Google's Gmail service due to its slick interface and ample storage -- but like any application, Gmail leaves a few things to be desired. To trick Gmail out to your specifications, take a look at Lifehacker's Better Gmail, a Firefox extension that brings all sorts of extra goodness to Gmail.

Sam Hocevar recently became the next Debian Project Leader (DPL), defeating seven other candidates while running on a platform that emphasized ways to improve how project members interact. Hocevar's election comes at a time when Debian may be losing mindshare among both users and developers to Ubuntu, and looking for ways to improve its efficiencies and to mend internal divisions. Recently, Linux.com discussed these challenges with Hocevar via email in his first interview since his election.

LXer Feature: 29-Apr-2007

A weekly recap of the big stories concerning Linux and Open Source.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Continued work across kdegames, with the kbattleship-rewrite merged back into trunk/. Start of scalable interface support in Kanagram. Further functionality enhancements implemented in the Konsole refactoring effort. Small refinements in KSysGuard. More work on the KDevelop Subversion plugin. Preparations for RSYNC support in the icecream distributed compilation utility. Progress made in the Amarok-on-Windows porting and generic music store intergration for Amarok 2. Initial milestones reached in the Music Notation Flake shape Summer of Code project in KOffice...

If you have followed my articles on LDAP, you know we began looking at objectClasses in the last installment back in March. Since that time, I haven't written much more about directory servers. I began contemplating whether or not to continue the LDAP series because things have changed. Let me explain: