Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Modern copyright law grants copyright automatically to any creative work, including simple things like blog posts – and small pieces of code on github. This default copyright creates an assumption that for someone to do anything further with someone else's creative work requires permission from the author—what Lawrence Lessig calls "the permission culture." The open license ecosystem often takes this permission culture for granted, rather than fighting back—and that may be contributing to the proliferation of unlicensed code.

It was alarming to read in the recent article The Rise and Fall of Languages in 2012 by Dr. Dobb's editor, Andrew Binstock, that Perl was "continuing its long decline" and was in""an irretrievable tailspin," based on statistics from Google searches. Nothing in the article discussed what was lacking feature-wise in the language that might be behind this decline. While I am not an authority on programming languages, I thought it was only appropriate to reflect on the strengths of Perl that I've relied on during my 14-year affair with the language.

eScholar's only business is helping state and local education agencies get the best bang for their buck from collecting and using educational data to drive better school performance results. That sometimes involves helping its customers work with data gleaned from a variety of commercial and open source enterprise databases.

Slick, a database access library for the Scala language designed by Typesafe, has reached its 1.0 release milestone. Slick allows developers to write their database queries in Scala instead of a database native language like SQL, reaping the benefits of static checking and compile time safety afforded by the library's query compiler. The tool can be extended to interface with several different database backends and allows developers to access the data stored in it as if they were directly using Scala collections. For example, creating a table would look like:

The Cloud today seems a bit like Dawson City in 1896 when the Klondike Gold Rush was about to get underway. Everybody is talking about the Cloud, and many want a piece of the action. The Open Source world has been abuzz with OpenStack in particular, with some going so far as to call it “the new Linux”.

Printing in Linux can be a confusing territory. Many distributions don’t come with printing enabled by default, leaving it up to the user to set it up. This article will show you how to set up a standard USB printer in Linux.

Extend PostgreSQL's capabilities with PostGIS 2.0 and discover all the magic of spatial databases. Even if you're unfamiliar with GIS, I am pretty sure you know what Web mapping is. GIS stands for geographical information systems, and it originated in the early 1970s as a set of tools and techniques for scientists (cartographers, land planners and biologists). Since then, the field has been experiencing an amazing evolution, as in many other computer-related fields. One of the most revolutionary things is that now maps, and especially Web mapping, are a common experience for millions of people in everyday life. Not only in the past few years have we seen people using more and more mapping apps, there has been an explosion in personal Web mapping. Today, a lot of blogs and personal Web sites have maps.

With the publishing this morning of the article about the state of the HelenOS micro-kernel, all of my notes from this year's Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) have been published along with information on the other interesting tracks that happened during this event that brings thousands of open-source developers from around the world to Brussels, Belgium for one weekend. Here's a recap of all that happened at FOSDEM 2013.

On behalf of the Linux Foundation, kernel developer James Bottomley has released a Microsoft-signed mini bootloader whose signature is trusted by typical Windows 8 PCs and which allows such PCs to be started when Secure Boot is active. Commenting on the release, Matthew Garrett, the main developer of the Shim Secure Boot bootloader that has been available for some time, announced that he intends to integrate some of the features of the Linux Foundation's mini bootloader into Shim as well.

Aside from the GNU Hurd talk, HelenOS was the subject of another talk at FOSDEM 2013, the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting, that happened one week ago. HelenOS has been under development since 2001 and is self-described as an "open-source multiplatform microkernel multiserver general-purpose operating system written from scratch."

Users not in possession of root privileges will in future be able to set up containers in which to run software which requires them. Linux 3.8 will, under certain circumstances, use less memory and will include improvements for NUMA systems. Support for Intel 386 chips has been dropped.

While there's plenty of code pouring into the Linux world for bettering open-source graphics drivers from desktop graphics cards to ARM SoCs, in the *BSD world they are struggling with their graphics driver support. Matthieu Herrb gave a presentation on the (rather poor) state of graphics on Unix-like platforms outside of Linux.

For someone who works with, writes about and teaches cutting-edge technologies, I tend to be a bit of a laggard when adopting new ones. I upgrade my laptop and servers very conservatively. I got my first smartphone just earlier this year. I still use the Apache HTTP server, even though I know that nginx is a bit faster. And until recently, Mozilla's Firefox was my default browser.

Not satisfied with the experience on current forum software packages, Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood founded Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Inc to come up with a software package to replace them. Its open source Discourse software is built with JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL and, according to the developers, can be used whenever a mailing list or forum is needed. According to the team: "Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to re-imagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be".

Which Linux operating systems are the most popular among home and small business users? Which Linux desktop is the best choice for enterprise users? Questions like these are meaningless and unanswerable, even for Linux developers. "Measuring Linux adoption ... has always been -- and will likely always be -- a difficult task, due to the lack of empirical data," said Jeremy Garcia, founder of LinuxQuestions.org.

A new Ruby 1.9.3 implementation has appeared in the form of Topaz, announced by its creator Alex Gaynor. Topaz's design goals were simplicity and performance and it was written on top of the RPython translation toolchain, building on the work of the PyPy developers. RPython is a restricted implementation of Python that was developed by the PyPy developers as a route to translating RPython programs into LLVM code. Topaz inherits a high performance garbage collector and "state of the art" just-in-time compiler from RPython, making for a fast Ruby implementation.

The cron daemon is a core component of any Unix-like operating system. On the surface, cron is a scheduler, meant to run a command at regular intervals. However, if we dig a little deeper into the configuration options, we find that we can configure cron to be as detailed and granular as we need. If you need a script to run every seven minutes, five days a week, between the hours of 8AM and 4PM, cron has you covered.

Last weekend at FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels, Ian Romanick expressed plans to enhance the "out of the box" / automatic configuration experience for games on Linux. He wrote in his talk's abstract, "Every game for desktop PCs has the ability for the user to tune quality and performance settings. However, for the out-of-the-box experience, these games also need to detect the hardware installed in the user's system to select the initial settings. On Windows and Mac, there are a number of system interfaces provided for this purpose, but on Linux it is surprisingly difficult. This talk will cover some current best practices used by shipping Linux games. It will also introduce some interfaces under development to improve the current state of affairs."

Dot Categories: Community and EventsThe Call for Presentations for Akademy 2013 is now open. Akademy is the KDE community conference. If you are working on topics relevant to KDE or Qt, don't miss your chance to present your work and ideas at the conference from the 13th - 19th July in Bilbao. The days for the main talks are Saturday and Sunday, 13 and 14 July. The rest of the week will be unconference sessions and workshops.

Earlier this year, Google introduced its Google Drive cloud storage service. Cloud storage is a model of networked on-line storage where data is stored in virtualized pools of storage that third parties generally host. Hosting companies operate large data centers, and people who require hosting buy or lease storage capacity from them. The data-center operators, in the background, virtualize the resources according to their customers' requirements and expose them as storage pools, which the customers themselves can use to store files or data objects. Physically, the resources may span across multiple servers.