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Matthew Dillon posted on update on his evolving HAMMER filesystem, noting that it "passes all standard filesystem stress tests and buildworld will run with a HAMMER /usr/obj". He also noted, "pruning and reblocking code is in and partially tested, but now needs more stringent testing; full historical access appears to be working but needs testing." He added, "there are two big-ticket and several little-ticket items left. HAMMER will officially go Alpha when the big-ticket items are done, and beta when we get a few of the little-ticket items done." The two "big-ticket" items left to be completed are UNDO crash recovery code, and handling for full filesystems.

Here's a two-part "Eclipse at eBay" series, that first looks at eBay's architecture and how eBay has tailored Eclipse to suit it, then at some of the organizational needs of eBay and how it has used Eclipse to fill those needs. These articles concentrate on how eBay has used Eclipse, but the beauty is that you can employ similar tactics for your organization.

Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google today announced they have agreed to form the OpenSocial Foundation to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web. Yahoo!'s support of OpenSocial and role as a founding member of the new foundation are landmarks for the rapidly growing specification which will now offer developers the potential to connect with more than 500 million people worldwide.

The BSD Certification Group, (BSDCG) held its first in-person BSDA certification exam session for systems administrators during SCALE last month in Los Angeles. Subsequent tests were then held held during FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium, and Linux-Tage Chemnitzer in Chemnitz, Germany. During the events, we were able to catch up with several people involved in the testing. Here's what they had to say about the exam development process, the events themselves, and reasons for becoming certified.

The editor of the Open Document Format (ODF) standard has written a letter that strongly supports recognizing Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) file format as a standard, arguing that if it fails, ODF will suffer. As the editor of OpenDocument, I want to promote OpenDocument, extol its features, urge the widest use of it as possible, none of which is accomplished by the anti-OpenXML position in ISO," Patrick Durusau wrote. "The bottom line is that OpenDocument, among others, will lose if OpenXML loses. ... Passage of OpenXML in ISO is going to benefit OpenDocument as much as anyone else."

[More FUD from Patrick. How did he become an ODF editor? - Sander]

The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the first beta of Debian Lenny's Installer. This is the first release since Etch and the whole team has been hard at work during the past 11 months to make this release full of new features and bug fixes. Screenshots at The Coding Studio

Open Source empowers business. This article describes some of the facts, outlines how EnQii, the Digital Signage company where the author is Chief Technology Officer, is benefiting from FOSS, and outlines how in the future, FOSS will be increasingly used.

While we're continuing to see new Linux-native games introduced (such as the recent Shadowgrounds announcement) and the continued work by Linux Game Publishing with different games, the Linux gaming market is still far from being saturated and it keeps many gamers from even trying out Linux because of the limited choices. As they near version 1.0, WINE has been making strides at allowing gamers to run their Windows game binaries on Linux and last year Transgaming had introduced Cedega 6.0 with expanded game support -- among other improvements. Today though another option has been introduced and that is using CrossOver Games to run your favorite Windows games on Linux.

Producing a video podcast entirely on Linux is not only possible but fairly easy to do. This article outlines the steps you can take to make a video podcast entirely on Linux, as I do.

The latest version of Tickets has been released, and this version is a major upgrade over previous editions. Tickets has been growing and maturing into a full fledged Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system. For those agencies that currently do not have a CAD solution, Tickets offers a free and powerful solution.

What have you heard about Linux? An operating system which is hard to learn with a shell for typing complex commands? Anyway, Linux was popular to be popular among geeks for decades and the general users were left aside when it comes to Linux. But amazingly, there are increasing number of layman computer users converting themselves from Windows to Linux nowadays. Most of the honor for this new trend should go to a few new developments of the area of desktop visualization such as Compiz and Beryl.

Sometimes I get the feeling that Web 2.0 is just too fancy for Linux, loads of tools, websites, and apps are being developed without taking Linux users into consideration. Despite the fact that the number of people using Linux is comparable to the people using Mac OSX if not more. Mac has the “fancy” factor playing for it. But we got the “hacking and modding” factor playing for us ;) ! Here I will take you through some of the best tools and apps out there and how to get them up and running on your Ubuntu (assume 7.10).

Odds are, if you design Web sites with a database back end, you've worked with MySQL. You can manage this database from the command line, but it's not very user-friendly. Using the graphical tool phpMyAdmin helps, but not all Web hosting providers offer it or allow you to install it on the server. Fortunately, you can install it on your own box and manage several MySQL databases remotely at the same time, without having to install anything anywhere else.

MySQL is the open source database to beat. But another option — EnterpriseDB — has caught the attention of several investors — including IBM. Here’s the scoop for potential partners.

This guide explains how to set up software RAID1 on an already running LVM system (Debian Etch). The GRUB bootloader will be configured in such a way that the system will still be able to boot if one of the hard drives fails (no matter which one).

By corrupting XML string values in the way that it does, DIS 29500 breaks the ability to have loosely coupled systems. Once the value space is polluted by these aberrant control characters, every application, every process that touches this data must be aware of their non-standard idiosyncrasies lest they crash or return incorrect answers.

The “What’s the difference between UNIX and Linux?” question can be answered similar to the analogy section that many of us had to complete on the SAT test; UNIX is to DOS as Linux is to Windows. That’s a grossly oversimplified answer to a complex question and I’ll no doubt get flamed by some of the more advanced UNIX and/or Linux users out there but in the interest of keeping things simple, let’s go with the above italicized sentence.

Cuba and India are the latest countries to vote against Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) file format being adopted by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Meanwhile Germany and the US confirmed that they won't be backing down on their call for the format to be ISO/IEC-approved. The decisions from national delegates from 33 countries who took part in the DIS29500 ballot resolution meeting in Geneva in late February have been trickling in ahead of this Saturday’s crucial deadline.

Perhaps the greatest single productivity-boosting feature in Linux is the ability to open several virtual desktops at one time. This allows you to create separate work environments for various simultaneous tasks, such as one with a word processor, image editor, and spreadsheet open for creating a report, and another with e-mail and browser windows active for keeping in touch with co-workers. The multiple desktops let you focus on the task at hand without interruption, but switch to your other active workspace with a single click.

Although Mozilla says Firefox 3 beta 4 still isn’t intended for the general public, its performance so far has given them the confidence to announce the final version is nearly ready to be unleashed on the world.