Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Aaron Swartz had many causes, some of which he all but invented himself. Now he has himself become a cause — or a number of them. Sitting through a long series of previews at a movie theater last night, I realized that a movie on Aaron's life is probably inevitable. Books too. He was that interesting and important.

No server, desktop, or laptop install is complete without Vim, and yet, there are times when I still see questions pop up on IRC about how to do basic editing of config files with vi. I remember, years ago, asking some of the same questions of an older Unix guru, and asking why I should bother learning such an eccentric and “outdated” text editor. His answer has stuck with me, he said “Because it is the only text editor guaranteed to be on every server, and some day you will need it, and have no other alternatives.” Vim, short for “vi improved” is ubiquitous, but it is also so much more, and the time you spend learning it will be repaid to you tenfold in productivity.

Pick up most items, from the soup can, to the library book, and you will find a data tag. In most cases, that tag is the simple, ubiquitous bar code that seems to have been around forever. They are the lineal representation of numbers in a machine readable format that most people do not even pay attention to any more (although some of us are old enough to remember a time before they were so common place). More recently, the shippers UPS and FedEx have moved to more complex data tags to help expedite the automated sorting and shipping of the thousands of products that they handle every day.

Microsoft has released a summary of the study compiled by HP on the Linux migration in Munich. In an article, German magazine Focus Money Online had last week quoted figures from an unpublished study that Microsoft had commissioned from HP. The study concludes that at €60.6 million (approximately £51 million), the City of Munich's Linux migration was considerably more expensive than reported by its council last November. However, last week, Microsoft Germany had emphasized that the study was compiled for internal purposes.

Their findings were released today in celebration of an internationally recognized holiday that we at Mozilla look forward to as much as any bank holiday: Data Privacy Day. The study surveyed more than 100,000 consumers in the U.S., and after all the number crunching, Mozilla ranked highest in the Internet & Social Media industry. We also made it onto the top 20 list for all companies.

According to a report on the EC's open source portal, Joinup, Sweden is following the example of Norway in using the "Fix My Street" open source software that was developed in the UK. The software enables citizens to easily report problems and helps authorities identify and prioritise them. A pilot version of the national service, "Fixa Min Gata", is expected to become operational in March or April and will allow citizens to report such things as potholes, broken pavements, graffiti or non-functional street lighting.

This year I made a New Year resolution to foster a more open education at home by joining a growing subculture of society. To start, I began replacing some commercial household products, such as toothpaste, with 'open source' ones. After all, there is no patent on or trademark for baking soda (2/3 cup), salt (4 teaspoons), mint oil (1 tablespoon), or melted coconut oil (2-3 tablespoons)—what you need to make homemade toothpaste. They are readily available and accessible, except for the mint oil perhaps (but you can substitute it with cinnamon or vanilla extract, or other possibilities if you just use your creative, open mind).

LXer Feature: 27-Jan-2013

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

We had a chance to sit down with Matthew Garrett, SCALE 11x keynote speaker, to discuss his upcoming keynote "The Secure Boot Journey" as well as a host of other topics including the future directions of Linux.

Less than one month after the release of the Rekonq 2.0 web-browser for the KDE desktop as an alternative to Konqueror, Rekonq 2.1 has surfaced and it brings more features to this open-source WebKit-powered project.

The WordPress developers have announced a maintenance update to the popular open source blogging software. WordPress 3.5.1 fixes 37 bugs and addresses three security issues, including two cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Users running WordPress on IIS might run into a problem that prevents the upgrade; the developers have prepared documentation to help users work around this problem.

Normally, I shy away from reviewing elementary-stage distros. Alpha releases are often too nonfunctional to offer any real work usability. They are simply proof-of-concept versions. This is not the case with the openArtist distro, however. After hearing a few colleagues rave about openArtist, I threw caution to the wind and checked it out.

The openSUSE community has announced that the openSUSE Conference 2013 will take place from 18 to 22 July at the Olympic Museum in Thessaloniki in Greece. The conference, themed with the slogan "Power to the Geeko", aims to spotlight the grass-roots nature of the open source project. The fifth annual event of its kind, this year's incarnation of the conference is the first time that the organisation lies entirely in the hand of volunteers, with SUSE employees supporting the event mostly in their free time.

Ever since it became clear that GNOME 2 would have an ongoing future in the desktop Linux world after all, flowers have been blooming unseasonably early throughout the Linux blogosphere. It all started with the appearance of MATE and Cinnamon; then it was SolusOS. Since then, Fuduntu made its official debut, as did Consort," SolusOS's brand-new GNOME Classic fork.

There's a new situation concerning another high-priority Free Software Foundation project and the unwillingness by Richard Stallman and the FSF to cooperate with real-world free software developers. For those not familiar with the Free Software Foundation's "high priority" projects list, see The Sad State Of FSF's High Priority Projects and Many FSF Priority Projects Still Not Progressing.

Top Linux kernel contributor Alan Cox has announced that he is stepping down from his position at Intel and will no longer be involved with Linux development, citing family reasons. The British-born Cox, who makes his home in Swansea, Wales, has been one of the most active developers of the Linux kernel since the early days of the project, and at one time was often described as Linus Torvalds' "second in command."

The project hosting site GitHub is currently inaccessible from China, cutting off the country's developers from the valuable resource. A ViewDNS.info check shows that the service cannot be looked up throughout China. The blocking is frustrating many Chinese developers who cannot access one of the world's major repositories of open source software. As the country's firewall controllers rarely give any information on why sites are blocked, it is suggested by some that github.com is being blocked because of a dispute over a train ticket booking plugin.

Keeping track of airport information can be a challenge even for a nonstop, there-and-back trip. Multiple legs increase the number of things that can go wrong geometrically, but I recently took the risk, in a week-long loop from Los Angeles to Los Cabos, Mexico, then to New York City (Newark, to be precise) and back to LA. In other words, I had an ideal test environment for Mobiata's FlightTrack app.

A newly proposed Fedora 19 feature is to do away with MySQL and drop in MariaDB instead, per this official proposal from Red Hat's Jaroslav Reznik. In Fedora 19, MariaDB would become the default SQL database package. MySQL would still be available in the Fedora repository for at least one release as the more conservative users make the migration from MySQL to MariaDB. "We would like to replace MySQL with MariaDB in early development cycle for Fedora 19. MySQL will continue to be available for at least one release, but MariaDB will become the default."

Great things for open government happened last year on November 15-16 at the 4th annual Capitol Camp event, organized and hosted by the New York State Senate and the New York State Office of Information Technology Services, in collaboration with the Center for Technology in Government. I have discussed recently the NY State Senate progressive stance on open government and its embrace of open source. Capitol Camp 2012 was another display of the powerful benefits the adoption of open practices in government can bring to the public. The event involved an unconference-day and a hackathon-day, both of them fully open to the public.