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Back to the short-line code. A bit on the lighter side.

For every person who has said, "Let's network these two computers" there are many more asking "Why is the network running so slow?" Yet, the ethereal nature of Ethernet has long made computer networks hard to decipher and many a business or home user has longed to peek into the data stream to see just what is going on. You could pay tens of thousands of dollars for the answer - but we'll do it using freely available tools for Linux.

For the past few days I have been looking for a proper i18n (internationalisation) and l10n (localisation) method for PHP. PHP has quite a few locale aware functions such as strftime and sprintf. In combination with gettext this can work quite well. The major downside is that you need to install all the locales that you want to support on your server. PHP6 is promising to solve that problem with the intl functions. Even better, the intl functions are also available as a PECL extension and works on PHP 5.2.4 and newer. There is no package (yet) for php5-intl in Debian Lenny but building and installing the extension yourself is really easy. Here's a short tutorial.

While the beta testing seems never to end at Google -- Gmail is still in beta well past age 4 -- the world's largest search engine and advertising machine has released to the public a new knowledge base called"Knol." A"knol," according to Google, is a unit of knowledge. More specifically, Google says Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects

Dell is now selling selected systems with Ubuntu 8.0.4, Hardy Heron, pre-installed in the United Kingdom . Ubuntu has been an option some Dell systems in the past, but only in the United States. Dell is pre-installing Ubuntu on the XPS M3110 and Inspiron 1525n laptops and the Inspiron 530n desktop system.

Since 2004, GovTrack.us has housed information about the United States Congress, including 10 years of bills, voting records, and contact information for individual members of Congress. Visitors can also find out who represents them and search the database for committee assignments, legislative statistics, and the Congressional Record, which is the official record of daily proceedings in Congress. All the code that makes GovTrack run is open source, and all the information stored there is freely available to everyone.

Squid is a caching proxy server that can provide enhanced performance for your internal network users.. Squid will cache commonly accessed sites so that it can improve performance by 10-20% for Internet connections. Squid also provides security for the internal network by acting in behalf of the clients on your network.

South Africa’s award-winning multilingual software developer, Translate.org.za, has been awarded a grant by the Mozilla Corporation to extend its translation tools. The US-based Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, co-ordinates the development of popular Internet software projects such as the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client.

A few short weeks since his former employer Microsoft officially released Hyper-V, newly installed VMware Inc. CEO Paul Maritz told investors on a second-quarter earnings call that the next version of ESXi will be available for free, a decrease from its current price of $495 per dual-CPU server. The updated ESXi will be available for download from VMware's website this coming Monday, a VMware spokesperson confirmed.

Mark Shuttleworth said he doubts Microsoft would file suit against a free software developer unless the software giant wants "war." At the end of a session at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, where Shuttleworth discussed the emerging practice of mixing agile development methods in with community development efforts, Shuttleworth responded to a question about the possibility of Microsoft making patent claims against open source code by saying: "I don't believe Microsoft will file suit against free software developers. It would be tantamount to declaring nuclear war... And I can afford it."

Black Duck Software and Intel are the latest vendors to make substantial improvements to their open-source development tools, the latest indicators of the open-source movement's growing presence in the application development field. Black Duck, which offers products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open-source software, announced July 22 the expansion to the volume of open-source software managed in the Koders.com code search engine.

The tenth annual Ottawa Linux Symposium kicked off Wednesday in Canada's capital, just a few blocks from the country's parliament building, in a conference centre in the midst of being torn down. The symposium started with the traditional State of the Kernel address, this year by Matthew Wilcox. Among the dozens of talks and plenaries held the first day was kernel wireless maintainer John Linville's Tux on the Air: the State of Linux Wireless Networking.

The NimbleX 2008 Linux distribution has been finally released with a lot of significant improvements since the Release Candidate even though a couple of months ago RC was considered good enough.

What happens when customers try to share and manage data between multiple SaaS (storage as a service) applications? Often, they simply can't do it. But SnapLogic, an open source startup, is striving to solve that integration problem. Here are the details from MSPmentor.

64-bit computing is as prevalent today as multicore computing. Almost any new processor from Intel or AMD has the AMD long mode extensions, allowing the processor to use 64-bit registers. While 32-bit processors can address 4 gigabytes of RAM, a 64-bit processor can address 16 exabytes, or almost 17.2 billion gigabytes, of RAM. Most 64-bit-capable computers aren't making use of these capabilities, but instead are put to work running 32-bit operating systems, usually because of a lack of applications for 64-bit operating systems, since applications must be recompiled and in some cases rewritten for 64-bit operation. It is possible, however, to run 32-bit Linux binaries natively under 64-bit Linux kernels.

A new global standard for the enforcement of intellectual monopolies is currently being discussed by representatives of the United States, the European Commission, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Korea, Mexico and New Zealand. This new agreement is so important that it must be drawn up in secret, safe from the prying eyes of little people like you and me. Thanks, however, to the indispensable Wikileaks, a discussion paper outlining some of its possible proposals hassurfaced, and from this it is clear that it represents a serious threat to online liberty in general, and to the practice of free software in particular.

Is Microsoft irrelevant? That's what Brian Aker, director of architecture at Sun Microsystems' MySQL, called the software giant in an onstage Q&A during the opening day of keynotes and sessions at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention here July 23. Aker's response came to a question from O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly, who asked Aker and Michael "Monty" Widenius, founder of MySQL AB and author of the MySQL server, a series of questions, including their views on several leading companies in the computer industry. When it came to Microsoft, Aker replied that "Microsoft is irrelevant."

This tutorial explains how to install Django on a Debian Etch server. Django is a web framework that allows to develop Python web applications quickly with as much automation as possible. I will use it with Apache2 and mod_python in this guide.

MindTouch announced on Wednesday the latest version of its open source collaboration and collective intelligence platform, MindTouch Deki. Dubbed"Kilen Woods," it features new workflow capabilities, enterprise adapters and usability improvements. The release targets information workers, IT professionals, and developers looking to collaborate and connect enterprise systems and data sources.

A year after creating an online open-source software development community to take on SourceForge.net and other rivals, the development team at Ubuntu Linux will be the first to admit that it still has a long way to go to achieve the popularity of its competitors. Ubuntu's beta community, called Launchpad, was unveiled last July and has seen a huge increase in the number of open-source projects under development, from 1,500 projects at the start to about 7,000 today.