Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A lot of photos tagged with "HDR" turn up on Flickr and similar photo sharing sites these days. They're unnatural, surreal, sometimes crazy-looking images with the bright areas darkened, the dark areas brightened, and lots of saturation. You can get in on the craze under Linux using Qtpfsgui.

Reminiscing aboutmy days at Progeny has me thinking back even further to Stormix Technologies. As a commercial venture, Stormix was a disaster, with an especially virulent strain of dot-com fever infecting everyone. Still, I'll always remember it as my first professional introduction both to free software and general management practices, as well as a snapshot of a surreal time in technology history.

Let's see how long have I used Linux as a desktop? Hmmm. Over 10 years? That's right. And the first issue I had at that time was finding an easy way to get to my ISP. The second issue at the time was the lack of a graphical web browser. Then Netscape produced an unsupported one that worked fine.

Stung by criticism of its patent pact with Microsoft, Novell agrees to support Electronic Frontier Foundation's patent-busting work.

Printing in Linux gets better all the time, especially when you find the right drivers.

Again, after a delay brought on by a bout Real Life (tm), we return to bring you updates on the state of Konsole, KDE's UNIX terminal program. Konsole has been a staple of KDE since KDE 2.0, as has been showing signs of a little bit of clutter and wear. So, Robert Knight has stepped in to clean up the program's code, and more than anything else, fix a cluttered and difficult interface.

Two of the most popular open source instant messaging clients, Pidgin (formerly Gaim) and Kopete, can work with multiple protocols, but neither is a great option when it comes to sharing files with friends. For that, try Qnext, a multi-protocol IM client with which you can share files with not only IM buddies but also contacts in your address book.

Miklos Szeredi posted a patch to allow files to be accessed as directories, offering the example of accessing the contents of a compressed tarball as you would any other directory. He noted that this is not the only application of the patch, "others might suggest accessing streams, resource forks or extended attributes through such an interface. However this patch only deals with the non-directory case, so directories would be excluded from that interface. But otherwise this patch doesn't limit the uses of the 'file as directory' concept in any way. It just adds the infrastructure to support these whacky beasts." Al Viro took an interest in the patch noting, "I'll look through the patch tonight; it sounds interesting, assuming that we don't run into serious crap with locking and revalidation logics." This was followed by an interesting discussion between Miklos and Al regarding the implementation of the patch.

IBM is kicking off an experiment to open up its software development process in a way that mirrors the creation of open source applications. "The reward of getting our information out there is going to be amazing and critical to the future of IBM's software," Jerry Cuomo, chief technology officer of IBM's WebSphere middleware suite, told vnunet.com in an interview at the IBM Impact 2007 conference in Orlando.

PCLinuxOS is a live CD distribution that enables users to test Linux without actually having to install it. The highly anticipated new version, PCLinuxOS 2007, was released on Monday. Its intuitive selection of software, high level of stability and functionality, and the quality of the graphics make this the distribution's best release ever.

Open source has generated revenue and brought positive changes in the way H&R Block services its customers.

Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik today told startups to forget the "romance" of open source and build businesses that compete with proprietary vendors on services and value.

FreeMED version 0.8.4 andREMITT version 0.3.3 have been formally released on Tuesday, May 22, 2007. They include support for CMS's mandatedNPI standard, as well as many other improvements and community contributed bugfixes and features. FreeMED is an GPL-licensed opensource EMR/PM suite which is browser-based, and is developed by theFreeMED Software Foundation, Inc, a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation.

A U.S. government- and industry-led coalition aiming to equip every car and roadside in America with wirelessly connected computers has tapped Linux for a prototype design.

Looking for a way to limit users' functionality on a publicly available machine, such as a kiosk machine for conference attendees? No one wants people trying to alter their systems for fun or malice. If you're running the GNOME environment, you can turn to a tool called Pessulus -- a lockdown manager for the GNOME desktop.

May has been a busy month in the Ruby world, and while I’ve been busy with work, Erlang, and other commitments I’ve tried hard not to lose track of things. Here are some of the things that have caught my eye.

The KDE project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.7, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. This release brings a renewed focus to KDE-PIM applications. KAddressBook, KOrganizer and KAlarm received attention with bugfixes, while KMail additionally witnessed the addition of new features and improvements with both interface work and IMAP handling: it can manage IMAP quotas, and copy and move all folders.

Two Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks that are used heavily by free and open source software projects, freenode and the Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC), are building bridges by swapping staff and observing each other's operations. The rapprochement brings together two organizations that sprang from a single project, and may be a precursor for more intimate ties.

Split Browser is a Firefox extension that lets you take the versatility of tabbed browsing even further than usual.

Moxiecode's LGPL-licensed TinyMCE (Tiny Moxiecode Editor) is a JavaScript program that lets users enter formatted text in HTML forms without having to know HTML tags. It's bundled in many blogging and content management systems. If you want to use TinyMCE in your own Web applications, you'll find basic setup to be quick and easy, but advanced configuration can become complex as you sort out dependencies and conflicts. Here are some tips and advice on integrating TinyMCE with your Web pages.