Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

As open source fans, we tend to spend a lot of time curled up in front of our computers. Many of us we work in front of computers during the day, and some of us even work on or with open source projects, too. If you are anything like me, spending an entire day in front of a screen and then spending most of the evening there, too, is not uncommon. Today is a good example: I started work at 8:00AM, and at 8:21PM I am starting to write this article...

In June this year, Apple raised more than a few eyebrows at its WWDC conference with an announcement about Swift. Just a year before, Apple had released Swift, a new programming language. It was a big deal--a much simpler language for faster development. Swift was a major competitive advantage for the company, making it easier for teams to build new apps for Apple devices. So Apple's decision to give it away to everyone as an open-source project puzzled many attendees. Why would Apple share such an asset with the world, including its competitors? Was Apple really going to carry out its plan? Yes, on December 3rd, Apple did exactly that.

Microsoft has released Windows Live Writer, a popular blog authoring tool, as an open source project on GitHub, under the MIT licence. The original Live Writer was developed by a company called Onfolio, founded by JJ Allaire when he left Allaire Corporation, the business he founded with his brother Jeremy to create web development tools including ColdFusion and JRun.

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager. The features of ZFS include protection against data corruption, support for high storage capacities, efficient data compression, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. This tutorial will show you how to install ZFS on Debian 8.

Building a website with beautiful design and killer content is a huge undertaking. Compared to the time, money and effort put into crafting a website, people however tend to pay surprisingly little attention to "backing up" the website they have built. It is no-brainer to understand that without a proper backup, you stand to lose months or years of investments in your website should something bad happen to the website, be it accidental deletion of files, faulty software/database upgrade, website defacement by hackers, disk/filesystem failure, etc. Especially for websites like WordPress-powered blogs which get updated often with daily postings, comments and plug-in upgrades, regular backup is something you must not be lazy about as a website owner.

Releases big and small debut.

Like all of Parrot’s previous drone models, including the original Bebop, the Bebop 2 runs Parrot’s open source Linux flight stack. In San Francisco, Parrot unveiled a smaller, faster, longer lasting version of its Linux-based Bebop drone, helping to solidify its dominance in the mid-range consumer market. One of the key new features is an emergency cutoff that instantly kills the quadrotor motors when a blade hits an obstacle. The increasing focus on safety was also demonstrated this week when 3DR (Solo) and DJI (Phantom) announced similar new technology to make it easier for their customers to avoid restricted airspace (see farther below).

It is very unlikely for anyone nowadays not to own a device that is capable of shooting many consecutive pictures (burst mode). While this is useful for helping you take the perfect shot in sport events etc, you may want to use some of those successive frames to create a movie. Thankfully, you can do this very easily on Linux. In this tutorial, I will use five (not so closely successive) shots of my Cockatiel parrot bird trying to drink some of my coffee.

Google has given Windows XP and old versions of Apple OS X their marching orders. Support for the ancient (in the case of XP) / no-longer-supported (OS X Mountain Lion and older) operating systems will end in April 2016. The Chocolate Factory announced the decision here. Google's original EOL date for XP was to be April 2015, but it relented just before the hammer fell.

October was a solid traffic month for Opensource.com, with 681,334 page views and 110 articles published. We published 17 articles by first-time Opensource.com contributors, and we kicked off a new community column, My Open Source Story. We reported from All Things Open and the 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and we started speaker interview series for OpenStack Summit Tokyo and LISA15.

Intel unveiled three new Quark CPUs, including models with x86 compatibility, -40 to 85°C support, and integrated sensor hubs, plus a new IoT Platform. The three new members of Intel’s low-power, IoT-focused “Quark” processor family were announced as part of a second-generation Intel IoT Platform. The Quark D1000 is now shipping, and a more robust D2000 model is due by year’s end. The Quark SE, which is built into Intel’s Curie modules, is expected in the first half of 2016, featuring a sensor hub and integrated pattern recognition.

If you've ever dropped Mentos in a bottle of Coke with kids or grown your own rock candy in a jar with string, you know how excited children get when doing science. For some of us, that fascination never goes away, which is why things like Maker Faire exist. If you want your children (or someone else's children) to grow into awesome nerds, one of the best things you can do is get them involved with projects at http://www.makershed.com.

Linux isn't known for having many professional-grade linear drawing and engineering design tools. Dassault's DraftSight is the only choice in that part, but paying a few hundred bucks is maybe not the best option for everybody out there. Thankfully, the rich world of free software isn't leaving us alone in this sector either, and one of the most popular solutions to help you get your designs ready is the amazing LibreCAD. It may not be as sophisticated as other well-known tools, and it may not boast the time-saving features of commercial solutions, but it will certainly do the job in most cases. Here is a guide on how to get started with it and how to design a round flange with drill holes.

For the last two years, we had only lightning talks and workshops at the ownCloud Contributor Conference. As chair of the paper committee at Akademy, I introduced a single morning track of lightning talks that turned out to be an exceptionally good model for creation-type events like ours. Your event might benefit from lightning talks too—here's why and how to plan them.

One of the many talks at All Things Open 2015 this year will cover how you can contribute to open source while making a difference and have a lasting impact. The talk will be give by Guy Martin, director of open source strategy at Autodesk, and Nithya Ruff, director of open source strategy at SanDisk. Both have a wide range of experience in open source, from development to marketing, advocacy, and community. I caught up with them and asked them a few questions ahead of their talk: Many ways to move the needle in open source. In this interview, Guy and Nithya share what their first contributions to open source were, some advice they have for people starting out in open source, and more.

KDE e.V. President Lydia Pintscher explains "I believe that in today’s world where more and more of our daily life depends on technology it is crucial that people have control over that technology. You should be empowered to know what your technology does and you should be empowered to influence it. This is at the core of Free Software. Unfortunately it is not at the core of most of the technology people interact with every day – quite the opposite – walled gardens and locks wherever you look with few exceptions. "KDE is working hard to provide you with technology that you control every single day so you are empowered and the one ultimately in charge of your technology, data and life – the basis for freedom for many today. This is written down in the first sentence of our manifesto: “We are a community of technologists, designers, writers and advocates who work to ensure freedom for all people through our software.”

Even if you don't enjoy writing and have no intentions of becoming a professional tech writer, chances are you'll have to draft reports, mailing list updates, or technical articles at some point in your career. With a few practical tips in mind—along with solid writing advice from Stephen King—you can improve your writing before you start writing. And, with proper planning, you can easily repurpose your content for multiple audiences.

I don't read many management books, but I was very curious to read Jim Whitehurst's The Open Organization because there's a lot corporate America (and academia) can learn from free and open source projects. The fact that Red Hat, where Whitehurst serves as CEO, is a wildly successful business adds weight to his methodology (since presumably anyone can lose money with free software, but it's quite a trick to make money with it).

Enpass is an advanced password manager that works natively on Linux. Although its open source nature is limited in the use of a free software encryption engine called SQLCipher, the tool offers good integration with widely used online services and can serve as a central platform where a lot of different passwords, accounts, and other miscellaneous information can be added. That said, it can be useful to many Linux users out there so here's a quick guide on how to set it up.

To access to most accounts online and on computer systems, users authenticate their identity by logging in with a password. People are asked to do the Herculean task of coming up with unique long and complex passwords for each account, committing them all to memory, and then changing them frequently.