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We have written about the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project many times, but we have yet to explain how to get started with it as a contributor. Since it is the vacation high season in the Northern Hemisphere and many more people will be hitting the maps, this is the perfect time. You can contribute a lot to the project even if you don't own a Global Positioning System (GPS) device -- or even a compass. This is not meant to be an authoritative guide to the project; OSM maintains a detailed wiki with extensive documentation for newbies and experts alike, in multiple languages.

Networking is a must-have on all levels of computing. Be it home or corporate, networking is the one aspect of computing that is, without a shadow of a doubt, a deal breaker. And with some help, the Linux operating system can be the king of networking, in both ease of use and security. But that doesn’t mean the average (and sometimes even the above-average) user can’t use some help. These tips should help make Linux networking go a little more smoothly.

Kernel wireless maintainer John Linville outlined the past, present, and future of the Linux wireless stack on the first day of this year's Ottawa Linux Symposium. In his presentation, he ranged from early efforts, which were "a sore spot for Linux" to the future where it is likely that Linux will have support for some features before "that other OS". Along the way, he looked at various issues that wireless support in Linux faces, including vendor participation, suspend and resume, and regulatory issues.

Great video, and actual website, of another BOFH :) This weekend's comedic gold is quite a bit older than I would have thought. I feel like I've missed out, although I'm glad that someone finally mailed this link to me :) This is a simple (although a bit long at around 10 minutes) video that is absolutely hilarious. If you've ever done any kind of computer administration (and maybe if you've been on the other end of this debacle) it's entertaining stuff. The voices have been "chipmunked," but not to protect the innocent/guilty, since there's a cast list during the credits at the end. I'm thinking this thing was probably twice as long and the distorted voices are from a speedup of the entire video. No matter how it plays, this is a killer humor :)

Earlier this year prior to the release of GNOME 2.22 we had shared eight interesting improvements in GNOME 2.22. Some of these improvements included Epiphany with the WebKit back-end (if built with the proper argument), Evince Document Viewing improvements, Cheese web-camera software, Mousetweaks, the Vinagre VNC client, and Totem enhancements. Now with the official GNOME 2.24 release due out next month, this time around we're sharing a few of the interesting highlights for this GNOME update.

It's not every day that the New York Times writes articles about the Domain Name System, but then again this DNS bug is anything but normal. It's been over five weeks now since Dan Kaminsky first announced the major flaw that he found in the DNS protocol. Although most of the details of the bug have been public for a few weeks now, it wasn't until last week at the Black Hat and Defcon conferences in Las Vegas that Kaminsky explained the depth of the issue. As I listened to him describe the ways this bug can be exploited my heart dropped down into my stomach and I felt a little sick. My friend was only half joking when he whispered to me "I'm thinking about transferring to accounting."

Multimodal technology provides multiple methods of communication between the user and a device. These methods include keypad, touch or tap screen, handwriting recognition, and voice recognition. Add multimodal capability to your applications using the Multimodal Tools Project for Eclipse, an entry-level, lightweight package for Web developers.

Since the Chinese government began supporting domestic open source communities in 2005, hundreds of thousands of young people in the world's most populous country have become a part of the open source world. With the help of the government-supported Leadership of Open Source University Promotion Alliance (LUPA), Zhejiang Technology Institute of Economy (ZJTIE) founded its Linux Training & Examination Center in 2006. The center started out offering a simple 48-hour course; upon completion, students received a Linux operator certificate or a Linux network administrator certificate or both. According to ZJTIE, 1,500 students in the last two years have passed the examination. However, those students who wanted to learn more had to learn by themselves.

Maximum Transmission Unit(MTU), the largest physical packet size, measured in bytes, that a network can transmit. Any messages larger than the MTU are divided into smaller packets before being sent.By optimizing the MTU setting you can gain substantial network performance increases, especially when using dial-up modem connections.

clive is an open source command line tool to extract videos and to bypass the need to use Adobe Flash in order to view user-generated content available on video-sharing websites. Clive supports Youtube, GoogleVideo, Dailymotion, metacafe, Guba, Sevenload, Myvideo. Clive converts the downloaded Flash Video into a MP4 file avoiding the need of having a Flash Video Player.

T-Mobile may be partnering with cell phone handset manufacturer HTC to deliver the first smartphone running Google's Android platform, according to reports. Unnamed sources briefed on T-Mobile's plans have said the carrier could announce the phone as early as September -- and would almost certainly have an offering out in the wild as early as October, in time for the holiday selling season.

Digital video recorders (DVR) are becoming more and more mainstream. TiVo, in fact, has passed the truest test of any popular technology -- having its name transformed into a verb. MythTV, a free and open source application that lets you turn a computer into a DVR, burst on the scene a few years ago, and has found fans among Linux users. However, with a little effort, it's possible to run MythTV front ends on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Xbox, and even an Apple iPod Classic.

Sun has released a new development kit aimed at mobile software developers. The toolkit will allow developers to create user interfaces for Java-based mobile phone applications. The package is being made available for download by the company under the title"Light-Weight UI Toolkit" or LWUIT.

The VAR Guy isn’t making any guarantees, but he hopes Sun Microsystems articulates its MySQL partner strategy next week at the Avnet New Frontiers Conference in Colorado. Here’s why.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he's fed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they're hyped by security people. Torvalds explained his position in an e-mail exchange with Network World this week. He also expanded on critical comments he made last month that caused a stir in the IT industry.

I first heard of gOS when it was chosen to power the $199 Wal-Mart gPC. The third iteration of the OS, gOS 3.0 "Gadgets" Beta, was released last week. It's a great Web-focused desktop, but it doesn't offer much to experienced or current Ubuntu users. I downloaded the ISO image of gOS 3.0, burned it to a CD, and installed it on one of my test systems. I used a basic PC with a 1.7GHz AMD Duron processor and 512MB of RAM, to see how well gOS fared on an unimpressive machine.

This year Akademy held a dedicated day for mobile and embedded talks. With Trolltech being owned by Nokia, mobile is suddenly a hot topic for KDE and several variants of Qt and KDE on mobiles were in progress at Akademy. Read on for an overview of the talks. The day opened with Kate Alhola from Nokia showing off the Nokia N810. As already reported, the talk was followed by handing out the devices to the audience. Her blog says she hopes to see lots of Qt and KDE applications in Maemo Garage soon.

ISO and IEC have announced the rejection of the four appeals submitted by the National Bodies of Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela, as earlier recommended by the Secretaries General of each of the two standards organizations. to their respective management boards not to give the appeals further consideration.

With DrasticGrid, you can easily put a MySQL database table or view on a Web page, complete with editing, sorting, and pagination capabilities, and support for adding and deleting records. DrasticGrid is one of three controls from DrasticData -- the others are a tag cloud and Google Maps controller, both of which also get their data from a MySQL database.

Shooting in RAW format is great for the photography buff. However, when it is time to share with others, post on your photo gallery, or print at the local photo printing shop, you want something more portable. Here we'll look at converting RAW photos (specifically Canon's CRW format) into JPEGs using a batch command-line approach in BASH.