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Some months back I developed some pyuno code for converting spreadsheets into CSV files from the command line. Pyuno being the Python interface to the OpenOffice runtime. One of the enhancement suggestions I got was to add the ability to extract all the sheets and/or a specific sheet rather than always extracting the first sheet. The following update to the code does just that.

Well, so she wasn't a Trooper , she was a Rodeo... But she's gone now and she will be missed. From February 2004 to July 20th, 2009, she served daily and without complaint, picking up hardware parts, delivering computers and attending to the business of what would eventually become The HeliOS Project. In all, she gave The HeliOS Project right over one hundred and eighty eight thousand miles of service. She was out picking up a small computer donation for Linux Against Poverty when age and the demands of her business became more than she was capable of giving.

Over the last few years KDE has seen increased involvement of students and university researchers. While many universities still feel uneasy about working with Free Software, the open and welcoming attitude in the KDE community has already brought several scientific research projects to life. A prime example is of course the Nepomuk project, officially finished but still very much alive within the Free Software- and scientific communities. Furthermore, many involved contributors make use of scientific research papers while looking for inspiration to solve the more complex problems involved in writing software. The Free Software community also contributes in a practical way to science: the Avogadro project, grown out of the KDE educational application Kalzium develops an advanced molecular editor designed for use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. Last Akademy, an initiative was developed by Celeste Lyn Paul to bring KDE and science even closer.

Today's low-end PC hardware is like the supercomputers of yesteryear, and yet it can feel like you're still struggling with an old 386. Akkana Peck shows how to use the ps and top commands to find CPU and memory hogs on your Linux computer.

Turns out Yahoo! is more than just a Microsoft plaything. Today they will unveil a revamped interface that among other things enables users to update social media sites directly from the Yahoo! search Home page.

Making the best use of available memory is one of the biggest challenges for any operating system. Throwing virtualization into the mix adds both new challenges (balancing memory use between guests, for example) and opportunities (sharing pages between guests). Developers have responded with technologies like hot-plug memory and KSM, but nobody seems to think that the problem is fully solved. Transcendent memory is a new memory-management technique which, it is hoped, will improve the system's use of scarce RAM, regardless of whether virtualization is being used.

A recently discovered root exploit attacked the newest Linux versions and circumvented protection systems such as SELinux and AppArmor. A solution has been found.

The Gnome user interface used by Ubuntu and Linux Mint allows a huge amount of graphical customization, but these features are rarely used. Part of the problem is that to make an aesthetically appealing theme you need to blend various elements: windows decorations, widgets, icons, backgrounds. Although many of these are available online, it is not easy to find sets that work well together to deliver a consistent look.

After rumors of an OpenSSH exploit vulnerability got out, an anonymous hacker group intends to release the exploit code and an accompanying worm "within 48 hours."

Here is a collection of short videos starring Linux: from IBM, Novell, and random creative people doing random creative acts like taking Tux skydiving, running 165 Linux applications at once, and making movies with Blender. Enjoy!

As most people reading here already know, I work for Microsoft as a technology evangelist. However, writing this blog, as well as whatever else I do online in the social media space is entirely my own choice, and not Microsoft’s. Keep that in mind as you sit down, relax, and listen as I tell you a story…

An emerging app store could help Ubuntu and Debian push deeper into the consumer and corporate markets, where Linux novices and curious VARs are seeking simple ways to track down, install and evaluate applications. But here’s the twist: The emerging app store, which offers Ubuntu Linux and Debian applications, wasn’t built by Canonical. Here’s the scoop.

London July 21, 2009: Canonical, the founder of the Ubuntu project, announced today that it has open-sourced the code that runs Launchpad, the software development and collaboration platform used by tens of thousands of developers.

A security researcher has released zero-day code for a flaw in the Linux kernel, saying that it bypasses security protections in the operating system. The source code for the exploit was made available last week by researcher Brad Spengler on the Dailydave mailing list. According to the researcher, the code exploits a vulnerability in Linux version 2.6.30, and 2.6.18, and affects both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The 2.6.18 kernel is used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

This tutorial shows how you can install Sun VirtualBox 3.0 (released on June 30, 2009) on a Fedora 11 desktop. With VirtualBox you can create and run guest operating systems ("virtual machines") such as Linux and Windows under a host operating system. There are two ways of installing VirtualBox: from precompiled binaries that are available for some distributions and come under the PUEL license, and from the sources that are released under the GPL. This article will show how to set up VirtualBox 3.0 from the precompiled binaries.

The Renaissance Project team, part of the User Experience Project (UX) at OpenOffice.org, have announced that the Renaissance prototyping phase that began on the 12nd of June, will end on the 24th of July. The goal of the prototyping is to build "a flexible framework for mid-fidelity prototyping to test promising UI designs with real users".

A software company based in Redmond, Wash. has released 20,000 lines of code under GPLv2 for three Linux device drivers. Microsoft says its first open source Linux code contribution is designed to speed the performance of the operating system when it's run in a Hyper-V virtual machine.

The mobile industry is becoming interesting. We have finally reached a point where the smartphone is actually smart and the average user can gain serious benefits from using one. How did this come about? In a word: competition. When the iPhone arrived on the scene, users scrambled to get their hands on it, and competitors scrambled to make a device that would have the same appeal. It has taken a while, but the competition has arrived. Android phones, Palm Pre, BlackBerry Bold--they are all outstanding entries into this market. But two of those entries will, in my opinion, outshine the rest for one simple reason--open source. Why is open source going to help raise these phones above the competition? Here are 10 reasons.

Last week VIA re-released their Chrome 9 DRM in hopes of pushing it into the mainline Linux kernel. However, the only user of this DRM code at present is their Linux binary graphics driver and VIA Technologies has no intentions of providing an open-source Chrome 9 3D driver. However, within a month or so, VIA claims to be releasing a new 2D driver that can use this DRM to some extent. This whole situation with VIA has reignited the discussion over what to do when a company is interested in pushing an open-source DRM driver into the mainline Linux tree, but it's really only used by closed-source user-space drivers.

Microsoft dropped a mini-bombshell on Monday, announcing that it is contributing thousands of lines of code for inclusion in Linux. But lest anyone think Microsoft suffered a massive head trauma over the weekend, the code it is releasing isn't really about helping Linux compete better with Microsoft. The drivers are really geared at making Windows a better host for Linux.