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On January 20, a new show opened in Washington D.C. After eight years under one administration, the curtain cascaded down on one set of policies, and a moment later rose to unveil a new administration, with new ideas, new priorities, and a new agenda. Included in that agenda is a commitment to embark on a five year quest to dramatically decrease the cost of healthcare — by investing as much as $50 billion dollars of public funds in the design and deployment of something called "electronic health records," or EHRs. Readers of this Blog, but not the public at large, will be immediately aware that the foundation for the EHR vision is standards.

Even though I specifically requested this book from No Starch for review, I never really expected it to be a...comic book. OK, that's not quite right, as purists will no doubt remind me. Manga isn't quite the same thing as an American comic book, but it's close enough from my point of view. I rather had expected the book to work along the lines of O'Reilly's Head First series, where technical topics are presented in text but with lots of "hyperactive" photos, graphics, arrows, and the like. The Databases book is presented as a straight manga publication and was originally published as part of a Manga Guide series in Japan in 2004. To clarify my perceptions, I actually emailed Bill Pollock at No Starch to get a clearer understanding of how this book and book series is supposed to work. Once Bill straightened me out, I was ready to proceed.

The old plan: Ring in the new year by switching over to Linux for a week, documenting each day of the transition. The new plan: Keep using Linux for the rest of the year, giving periodic updates on my experiences! February 3: Installation Recipes!

There are various reasons to set up quick "sandbox" instances of MySQL. You can use them to test different types of replication (such as master-master or various slave topologies), to test your code against different versions of MySQL, or to setup instances of MySQL on a per developer basis where each person has their own database running on a different port so they can breakdown/setup the DB easily or make schema changes without affecting other team members. A perfect tool to do all of these things easily is MySQL Sandbox.

This week Novell announced they've signed a deal that will see Dell using SUSE Linux Enterprise on their new OptiPlex FX160 thin clients. This move means corporate IT departments will be able to simplify IT at a lower cost than ever before.

With Linux traditionally coming in many, many flavours, a common call among some Linux fans - but mostly among people who actually do not use Linux - is to standardise all the various distributions, and work from a single "one-distribution-to-rule-them-all". In a recent interview, Linus Tovalds discarded the idea, stating that he thinks "it's something absolutely required!"

I had an interesting realization on Sunday, and it took me a bit to wrap my head around it. Imagine this conversation taking place in 1993:

With Microsoft readying itself for the release of a fast, streamlined operating system in Windows 7, the Linux community needs to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat if the free and open-source operating system is to stay relevant on desktop computers. Microsoft last month released a “beta” or test version of Windows 7, its newest operating system for desktop PCs. Unlike Vista, which was derided by consumers and the technology press for being bloated, slow and problematic for many users, Windows 7 is winning plaudits from those who have installed it.

Battered by a crash in its stock price, the replacement of its CEO last year and an aggressive virtualisation market, VMWare has done the only thing it could do: release an open source virtualisation client.

Thought that Windows 7 would avoid the complicated marketing mess that was Vista by coming in an easy to understand single version like OS X? Think again, Microsoft has confirmed no less than six versions of the new operating system.

A new version of the quick-firing Linux keyboard launcher GNOME Do landed last week, bringing with it a "theme" that acts as a whole new desktop interface. Let's check out how it works. If you're just getting started with GNOME Do, head to the release page and check out how to download the latest version for your distribution. Using the Docky "theme" requires a 3D compositing manager like Compiz Fusion, or GNOME's built-in 3D effects.

Just like open source, right? Cloud computing is the new open-source for Sun Microsystems, which has promised to next month reveal more about a cloud platform it's building.…Free Download - A practical guide to disaster recovery planning

One of the advantages Mac and Windows have is that it is very easy to tell someone to buy a computer with Windows or OS X and know that it will work. Unfortunately, it is not as easy to tell someone to start using Linux.

Following the announcement of plans to set up an international committee encompassing Mandriva and its Community, here is the first update concerning the policies for this working group. We aim to define roles, targets and missions for this committee in order to motivate members wishing to take part in this adventure.

There are numerous little things that a new user should learn and remember when it comes to Linux. Now don't let these scare you, but rather, remember them to ensure that you have a proper user experience. These will also save you from a lot of trouble as you learn Linux.

Let's take a look at Sun Microsystems, the once mighty Unix vendor and maker of servers that powered the Internet, circa 1982. And Red Hat, a company that's been purveying Linux software since 1995. Sun sells more than $13 billion of goods and services per year, while Red Hat sells a little over $600 million. So which is worth more?

LXer Feature: 04-Feb-2009

I interview Jesse Trucks a Director of LOPSA, who along with Chris St. Pierre will be teaching several classes guaranteed to make you a better System Admin at their SCALE University for the second year in a row at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 20th to 22nd of February in Los Angeles.

How to, maybe, keep your own compulsions from getting you fired today. This post's trick (actually it's more of a gimmick - or a way any one of us has probably screwed up at some point in time ;) is fairly simple and, as is generally the case, inversely proportionate in complexity to the work I'm currently getting paid to do so my wife, kids and 5 animals don't go hungry.

As promised in my last article, here is the JavaScript solution to correct mismatched footer column heights [1.]. One change, you will not find the strenuous complaints pertaining the basic inscrutability of all things JavaScript. I must admit my distaste for this scripting language has not lessened, just that my complaints would be less well grounded were I to sound off too much. Hence, let's accentuate the positive. This time my treatment of column height differences is more generalized. Moreover, I even suggest a more abstract approach at the end, albeit, one I neither tested nor verified. Nonetheless, I am confident that even the latter code could be made to work.

The fact that Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client has no built-in way to export the whole of a user's mail from one installation to another is as close to a fatal flaw as can be for a class of application — the stand-alone mail client — as can be.