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On Christmas Eve I suggested what "Jingle Bells" may look like if it were a Linux shell script. Here it is for those who missed out, and some interpretation for those who didn't.

Reminds Me Of The Good Ole Dot Com Days ;)

Almost every year end, most blogs - magazines - publications and so called “Linux gurus” makes mostly positive predictions about the future of Linux and it’s market share. Following this tradition, it’s only fair that I too share with you my Linux predictions for 2009.

The Free Software Foundation have announced that they are to start shipping new, bootable, membership cards in January. The cards resemble a credit card and feature a USB connector and memory loaded with the gNewsense Live! Linux distribution and advocacy tools, such as speeches by Richard Stallman and videos about free software. The FSF online announcement page shows a picture of Richard Stallman's card, member number 0. Associate membership of the FSF, which entitles a member to one of these new membership cards, is $120 per year.

Logitech MX Air promises to let you control your computer from your couch, just by pointing it at your screen. The question is: does it work and does it work with Linux?

How to use SSH Via HTTP Proxy using Corkscrew in Ubuntu. If you want to ssh your vps server or your home computer from your work place (assuming you are using http proxy).You need to use Corkscrew.corkscrew is a simple tool to tunnel TCP connections through an HTTP proxy supporting the CONNECT method. It reads stdin and writes to stdout during the connection, just like netcat.

One of the big journalistic trends of 2008 was to call every new Internet paradigm open source. Blogging was open source journalism. Social networks were open source crowdsourcing. This was both a compliment and a warning. Even journalists who wouldn’t know a Linux penguin from a Disney one (above) were giving open source its props. But as with e a decade ago (and perhaps i today) it’s the sign of a market top.

Whatever you do, 2009 is looking to be a big year. That no exception when it comes to Linux. Applications and large projects continue to develop and make major releases multiple times per year. And while every year people predict that the next might be “The Year” for Linux adoption, here’s a list of some major products and trends that will play a part in attracting new attention to Linux in 2009.

High bit depth support, non-destructive editing (so called "effect layers") and colour management. Three hot topics in photography editing - that users have been waiting for for a long time now to appear in GIMP. Today Linux & Photography blog features an exclusive interview with Martin Nordholts, one of the core contributors to GIMP. Nordholts speaks about the current state of affairs, explains what is going on deep inside the GIMP (and GEGL) and also lifts a corner of the veil about what is to come.

I have compiled a list of what I believe to be the best web resources for the Linux operating system. I have used all of these sites, or projects from these sites, over the years in my Linux ventures and continue to use some of them on daily basis.

[What? No "Best Linux News Site"? ;-) - Scott]

This article explains how you can set up a caching reverse proxy with Squid 2.6 in front of your web server on Debian Etch. If you have a high-traffic dynamic web site that generates lots of database queries on each request, you can decrease the server load dramatically by caching your content for a few minutes or more (that depends on how often you update your content).

Is success measured in downloads, or up-loads? are bugs filed as good as bugs fixed? are volunteer marketers as valuable as volunteer developers? If we have lots of bugs filed and lots of volunteer management material is that success? is the pace of change important? Does successful QA exist to create process to slow and reject changes, or by accelerating inclusion of fixes improve quality? Is success having complete, up-to-date and detailed specifications for every feature? Is success getting everyone to slavishly obey laborious multi-step processes, before every commit? Alternatively does success come through attracting and empowering developers, who have such fun writing the code that they volunteer their life, allegiance and dreams to improve it?

The Linux kernel does not lack for low-level memory managers. The venerable slab allocator has been the engine behind functions like kmalloc() and kmem_cache_alloc() for many years. More recently, SLOB was added as a pared-down allocator suitable for systems which do not have a whole lot of memory to manage in the first place. Even more recently, SLUB went in as a proposed replacement for slab which, while being designed with very large systems in mind, was meant to be applicable to smaller systems as well. The consensus for the last year or so has been that at least one of these allocators is surplus to requirements and should go. Typically, slab is seen as the odd allocator out, but nagging doubts about SLUB (and some performance regressions in specific situations) have kept slab in the game.

Open Source Software is about more than just the Linux operating system, and 2008 brought advances in the form of OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, Firefox and Android. But Linux is still the heart of the FOSS movement, and this year brought key developments in the operating system as well. Here's a look at the coolest open source products to come across the transom in 2008.

MySQL, the lovable little database engine that could - for reasonable values of could - is starting to feel the pain of being an open source project distributed by a large company. With a slower release cycle, community contributions are having a hard time making it into the mainline codebase, and an illicit market for patches and forks is emerging.

KDE 4 saw the introduction of NEPOMUK, the foundations for the "Social Semantic Desktop". The idea behind Semantic desktops is to make it possible for computers to identify meaningful relations between files and real-world people and relationships. These relations can then be exploited to help the user find their data.

There are several Web sites which seek to bring out the truth other than ourselves. There are other domains like slated.org, edge-op.org and even this Russian site, gotthefacts.org, which all expose the same type of illegal Microsoft tactics. Most of them just provide Web hosting (mirrors) for the evidence stamped by a United States court.

Creative Commons is becoming a web force to be reckoned with. I recently switched to a Firefox browser from Internet Explorer (a revelation in many ways, but that’s another article) and didn’t even have to modify my toolbar to create a Creative Commons search shortcut. CC is one of the default directories; it was already there, alongside big names Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Answers.com, eBay and Wikipedia. The site is growing in leaps and bounds. As the tentacles of the Creative Commons organization lengthen and curl, and its presence is felt in every corner of the web (who hasn’t read a plethora of blogs with the disclaimer ‘licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 by-nd license’, or some such) it’s time to explore how online users can get the most out of this newfangled intellectual copyright phenomenon.

Easy does it GPS applications on the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. Learn how to configure a development environment targeted at the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, including setting up Eclipse on a target development machine for the Python language.

We have just had the 40th anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos, the day when Doug showed the mouse that everybody knows about in public for the first time as part of the oN-Line System (NLS). It is not so widely known how much more Doug demonstrated that day. He started out with windows, graphics, structured text editing, hypertext, video chat, and much more that became the foundation of all Graphical User Interfaces by way of Alan Kay's Smalltalk at Xerox, and the Apple Lisa and Macintosh.