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We have all read many tutorials and articles about what programs to add to Ubuntu after installation. However I have yet to see an article or tutorial talk about installing the extras that beef up the default programs that come with Ubuntu.

Macs have always used a three-button mouse. The fact that no one has ever SEEN such a mouse is not because mac users are delusional. It is because they love their computers so much that they assume that if a three button mouse is a good thing, then there must be one attached to their box ....

Penguin Computing, a company that provides high-performance computing resources to researchers, scientists and engineers, has begun offering its services in the cloud. Penguin On Demand (POD) became available on Tuesday. The company said the service is intended for those who need HPC capabilities without having to acquire the clustered infrastructure required for that level of computing.

A whole new era for Veterans Affairs VistA has begun with Kevin Toppenberg, MD's new TMG-CPRS 1.0.26.76 (TMG v1.1) client. The new tmg-cprs client enables clinical notes to be rendered in html. This allows mixed typefaces, bold, center, right justification, left justification and italics in clinical notes while maintaining compatibility with Veterans Affairs cprs. Dr. Toppenberg announced on the Hardhats list.

The DNS servers of my ISP is always behaving erratically. The DNS look up times are abysmally large and some times I get an address not found error while browsing. On ubuntu/debian systems the DNS servers are specified in /etc/resolv.conf. I tried to edit /etc/resolv.conf and put open dns servers as default DNS servers. But, my ISP supplies their DNS server address along with IP address for the system via DHCP. Every time my system renews its DHCP lease. my /etc/resolv.conf is also rewritten with their DNS address.

Day Clipboard Utility (free) is a nice little app that takes text or an image that you've copied to the clipboard and captures it into itself upon your request. It will then save said image or text file in its own folder. This whole process can be automated, or you can approve each piece of text or image as it comes in to the clipboard.

A Dell executive said that his company's Linux netbook returns are roughly equivalent to those for Windows-based netbooks, says an industry report. The remarks were in response to Microsoft's COO Kevin Turner, who gave a speech claiming Linux netbook returns were four or five times higher.

When benchmarking development releases of Fedora in particular, they often end up being much slower than the final build and perform lower when compared against some of the other leading desktop distributions. As we have mentioned in previous articles, this is generally due to the debugging support enabled within the development builds of Fedora. To see just what the performance cost is, we have compared the Fedora 11 performance of the normal kernel against the kernel-debug package. Additionally, we also compared the performance when disabling SELinux and system auditing support.

What is the most popular programming language used by open source developers? The answer depends on how you define popularity. According to a new study from Black Duck, a software-license code analysis vendor, C represents more than 40 percent of all code written for open source software. Black Duck made its determination by counting the actual lines of code. While C is the leader by that measure, PHP and JavaScript are on the rise when you look at the broader picture of how open source projects use programming languages.

The openSUSE project, which creates the development version of Novell's SUSE Linux, is getting a handful of full-time Novell developers. You might find it hard to believe that there were not already full-time staffers dedicated to openSUSE, given the importance of Linux to Novell's future. But apparently, this has been the case since Novell formalized and opened up the openSUSE project four years ago.

The truth being they are more trouble than they are worth. Ever since the State Street case set off a gold rush to patent software, and software concepts, Microsoft has been tieing itself in knots. (Here is a fun game. Invite your favorite Microsoft employee to lunch and then show up in this snazzy t-shirt from Zazzle.com. Inspiration for Insanity indeed.)

I ate way too much pizza tonight. I know I'll be sorry tomorrow morning when I step on the scale. That darn scale tells me right off if I'm getting bloated. It should be just as easy with programs, right? If you're running on a low-memory system -- and these days, anything with less than two gigabytes qualifies as low-memory -- it would be handy to know which programs have been spending a little too much at the pizza and ice cream joints and not enough time at the gym.

The developers at the Mozilla Foundation are looking for volunteers to "test pilot" the Firefox browser as they travel the Web. A "Test Pilot" add-on for Firefox allows a user to try the newest features and enhancements for the browser before other users. The add-on collects data about the behaviour of the test pilots who are involved in the tests.

It’s official. ZaReason is launching an Ubuntu Linux netbook called the Terra A20, according to a confirmation email I just received from ZaReason CTO Earl Malmrose. ZaReason joins Dell and System76, among others, in the Ubuntu netbook market. Here are specifics about the Ubuntu netbook, plus some observations from WorksWithU.

Three recent problems with packages in the last stable release of Debian GNU/Linux (“Lenny”), brought me face-to-face with what is still a major obstacle for acceptance of free software on the desktop: contempt for the values of the people who use it. Despite all the accusations of unfair trade practices or other excuses, this remains as one solid reason why free software is still perceived as “geeks only” territory. If we want to progress further, we’ve got to improve our attitudes. Terry Hancock is really hacked off with the Debian developers. Find out why. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

If you're on a Unix/Linux system and you don't have Ruby installed (or you want to upgrade), your distribution's package system may make a Ruby package available. On debian GNU/LINUX, it's available as the package ruby-[version]: for instance, ruby-1.8 or ruby-1.9. Red Hat Linux calls it ruby; so does the DarwinParts system on Mac OS X.

So, apparently Microsoft isn't allowed to use the docx format. Another company has patent on using XML for documents. Wonderful. I would love to be rejoicing in Microsoft's ailings... but I'm not. That's a friggin' rediculous patent.

Those of you who watch our Tech Tip Videos may have seen my video on how to fetch the US National Debt at the command line. The script contained here uses the idea I developed there and expands it to fetch the debt twice, with an optional pause in between, and then display the amount that the debt has increased during the pause.

Microsoft has certainly been busy this year trying lots of new things. I decided to give them a report card on some of the moves they have made this year.

Streamlined, speedier netbook interface promised for next Ubuntu release. With the battle for netbook supremacy heating up Ubuntu is promising to roll out a much-improved interface for the ultra-portable netbook market when it releases Ubuntu 9.10 in October this year. Also known as Karmic Koala the next release of Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) will include a noticeably streamlined interface and some speed enhancements.