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Firefox developer Mozilla has claimed its decision to reinvent the command line to make mashups easier has received an overwhelming response from developers. Mozilla Labs last week released an experimental plug-in called Ubiquity, which lets users call up a command line entry box and type in commands to carry out additional functions beyond those defined in the Firefox graphical user interface (GUI). Mozilla project leader Aza Raskin said developers have already contributed thousands of new commands to Ubiquity. "In under a week, we have a roughly comparable number of Ubiquity commands as there are Firefox extensions," Raskin said.

I move from computer to computer constantly -- desktops, laptops, testing machines -- and rather than worry about synchronizing the assorted hard disks content, I prefer to keep one central copy of my documents that I can access anywhere. I do that using wdfs, the WebDAV file system for FUSE. Keeping one set of files means never worrying about synchronization and merging. Changes never get unknowingly overwritten, and I have a single, simple backup strategy. WebDAV is the Distributed Authoring and Versioning extension to HTTP. On Apache systems it is usually implemented with mod_dav, and many Web hosting companies provide it as an option, giving you a simple "flip a switch" path to run your own WebDAV server.

Phoronix Media has announced the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 (codenamed "Malvik"), an update to its leading and award-winning benchmarking software, during the 2008 X Developers' Summit. This update incorporates support for new operating systems and features to better aid ISVs, IHVs, ODMs, and OEMs in profiling their hardware and software for optimal performance and compatibility. In total there are more than 250 official changes with many new test profiles and suites since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 in June of 2008.

Google took a direct shot at the bow of Microsoft and Apple yesterday and the battle for world domination continues unabated. Whether the market will bear yet another browser is an open question, but it seems that for Google, this is more than a browser war, it's a fight for the soul of the desktop (and the hand-held for that matter).

After last week's update to the KDE 3.5 series, today's KDE release updates the stable KDE 4.1 branch to KDE 4.1.1. It bears the codename "Cebidae" referring to an in-joke often made during Akademy 2008. With only a good month of development time -- and Akademy in between -- the changelog is still impressively long. Pretty much all applications have received the developers' attention, resulting in a long list of bugfixes and improvements.

phpLogCon provides a user-friendly Web interface to your system logs. It can handle logs from both Linux and Windows systems, so an administrator can log in to a single phpLogCon site to see what is happening on all the machines on a network. phpLogCon is not available in the Ubuntu, openSUSE 11, or Fedora 9 repositories. It will be in Fedora 10 and is packaged in the Fedora development repository. I'll download and build phpLogCon version 2.3.9 from source using an i386 Fedora 9 machine.

MySQLTuner is a Perl script that analyzes your MySQL performance and, based on the statistics it gathers, gives recommendations which variables you should adjust in order to increase performance. That way, you can tune your my.cnf file to tease out the last bit of performance from your MySQL server and make it work more efficiently.

The initial beta product is available in 122 countries and 40 languages but for Window (XP and Vista). Google says Mac and Linux versions are now high priority but these are still months away. However Google's vice president product development, Sundar Pichai, said that, with the launch of the Windows beta, development resources had been redeployed to accelerate the Mac and Linux versions. Chrome is completely open source and Google says it will remain that way. Its rationale being that, because every one of Google's services is delivered through a browser it is in its interest to engender competition and innovation in the browser market to ensure users' experience of Google services is optimal.

A decision to dismiss appeals against the controversial fast-track approval of a Microsoft document format has provoked six members of global standards-setting body ISO to question ISO's relevance. Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela -- countries with fast-growing IT markets -- had appealed against ISO's stamp of approval for Microsoft Office Open XML,

Another front may be opening in the battle for mobile platform supremacy. Microsoft is rumored to be planning to launch its own mobile application store. If the buzz is true, Microsoft may not be as late to the party as some would think. Android hasn't yet debuted. Apple, for its part, is facing push-back on many fronts.

I've noted before that writing to MPs/MEPs seems to be remarkably effective in terms of generating a response. The naïve among us might even assume that democracy is almost functional in these cases. I'm not sure whether that applies to something as large and inscrutable as the European Commission, but it's certainly worth a try, especially in the context of open source and open standards.

Google launched an open-source web browser claimed to feature "enhanced stability and security." Downloadable now for Windows and expected soon for Linux and MacOS, Google Chrome features a new JavaScript engine, a private browsing mode, and tabs whose memory areas are protected from one another.

Open-source middleware maker Continuent has launched a database scale-out stack called Tungsten, which supports open-source databases like MySQL and proprietary wares from the likes of Oracle Corp. Last week, the company published code for Tungsten Replicator, a master-slave replication tool for MySQL, wrote Robert Hodges, chief technology officer at Continuent, in a blog post. Master-slave replication allows a "master" database to sync up with a number of "slaves," allowing a workload to be scaled out.

Sam Ramji is a busy man. As Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy, his job is a big one: overseeing the company's initiatives in Linux and open source. Wait a second – Microsoft’s strategy in open source? Yes, that’s right. The planet’s largest software company, whose relationship with open source has been, at best, hypercompetitive – Linux partisans might describe it less diplomatically – is reaching across the divide to the (formerly) enemy camp.

The Debian project will continue to its tradition of naming releases for characters in Pixar's classic animated movie, Toy Story. With "Lenny" in the final stages of preparation, Project Maintainer Luk Claes has announced that Lenny's successor will be named for "squeeze," a three-eyed space alien.

The open source software project, to be detailed later Tuesday at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., should dispel any lingering thoughts that the browser wars are over. To be sure, it is less cutthroat now than in the 1990s, but one of technology's most powerful companies is now on the battlefield. So how does Chrome change the competitive landscape?

Intel Corp. has snapped up British Linux house OpenedHand Ltd. in another sign of the growing interest in the use of the operating system on mobile devices. In a statement posted on OpenedHand's Web site, the company said that it is looking forward to working with the chip giant. "The OpenedHand team will join the Intel Open Source Technology Centre and will focus on the development of the Moblin Software Platform, the optimized software stack for Intel Atom processors," according to the statement.

September 24 is probably not going to be the best day to work at a patent office, considering that geeks the world over are being called upon to gather outside and protest against software patents. But do we need, and what else will be happening on, the World Day Against Software Patents?

I think I promised yesterday that all posts having to deal with Number Pools And Guaranteed Combinations Within Fixed Lists would have that string in their title, but, upon further reflection, it seems like it would make every title waaaay too long, and none of the parts would get indexed correctly, since Google might discard them as duplicate content based on the title tag

Money Manager Ex is a free, open-source, cross-platform, easy-to-use personal finance software. It primarily helps organize one’s finances and keeps track of where, when and how the money goes. It is also a great tool to get a bird’s eye view of your financial worth.