Showing all newswire headlines

Last week we made a music CD from a live digital recording the easy and simple way. Today we're going to fix volume levels and do graceful fades and transitions using Audacity and normalize. Give yourself a lot of disk space, make copies of your original sound files before you start, and remember that Audacity has Undo and Redo commands, so don't stress out over making mistakes.

Microsoft is working on a project that would essentially bring the functionality of the Emacs text editor to .Net. Microsoft software architect Don Box on Dec. 29 posted a blog entry stating that his colleague, Douglas Purdy, was hiring people to work on a new extensible text editor. Box's post pointed to a Purdy blog post from Dec. 26, where Purdy said: "We are looking for developers/testers to build a tool that I will roughly describe as 'Emacs.Net.'"

This started out as part of a longer essay called "On not kissing the pig". But that essay grew into an epic. Rather than dump it on the list all at once, I think it will be useful if I start by giving everybody a clear idea of the potential benefits of changing our practices. I'm going to describe the collaboration toolkit on another project where I happen to be a senior dev, called Battle For Wesnoth.

Glyn Moody takes Dave Weinberger's Harvard Business Review article on the difficulties singular organizations have with scale and runs with it, arguing: "It is deeply ironic that once upon a time Linux - and Linus - was taxed with an inability to scale. Today, though, when Linux is running everything from most of the world's supercomputers to the new class of sub-laptops like the Asus EEE PC and increasing numbers of mobile phones, it is Microsoft that finds itself unable to scale its development methodology to handle this range." This flies in the face of Jaron Lanier's ill-advised attempt to discredit open source as an innovative force.

I'm sure everybody remembers facts on Chuck Norris, and here are Linus Torvalds facts!

[A bit older, but I had to laugh a lot reading this - Sander]

According to one of 451 CAOS Theory's invaluable roundups: "The raw data indicates open source funding fell more than slightly in 2007. Disclosed funding deals were down 40.7% to $323.87m for the full year, compared to $546.3m in 2006." Is this serious – a sign of some deeper malaise? I don't think so. VCs are notoriously fickle fashionistas: open source was flavour of the month for a while, and maybe now it isn't.

I've been using Linux, more specifically Ubuntu, now for about six months. It's my third or fourth attempt at using Linux or BSD (Apple's OS X not withstanding). I have tried various distributions of Linux , including Suse, Mandrake, Yellow Dog. But I always gave up after a little while. Sometimes, I never got past the installer. With distros that I got to install, I was flummoxed by how the distros handled file dependencies. Ubuntu has changed that, and I now feel confident enough to use it for a lot of day to day tasks as well as using it as a media server at home. But, six months hasn't turned me into a evangelist but rather a Linux pragmatist.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of Open Source Market Forecast: Linux to their offering. This report analyses and forecasts Linux software and service revenue opportunities in enterprises and public sector organisations, as well as among individual consumers. We look at both the server and client markets, but exclude the embedded Linux market. The market for Linux products and services will grow from $2.4 billion in 2007 to $7.7 billion in 2012.

Linux Firewalls, authored by Michael Rash and published by No Starch Press, covers five main topics: traditional packet filtering with iptables, port scan detection, snort rule translation, port knocking, and log visualization. At first I considered only skimming the chapters regarding iptables packet filtering. I have a good amount of experience with iptables, and have been running it for several years. Thankfully I decided to give the first chapter a good read. Right from the start, the book presented valuable information and pulled me in.

The new year is less than a week old but the talk has already begun. Yes, we are hearing that hackneyed old saw again - this will be the year of the Linux desktop. Some so-called pundits say it directly, some in an indirect manner but they aren't holding back. Those with a stake in something like this coming to fruition - the biztech media, several so-called pundits and businesses which stand to gain monetarily - are the ones behind this rash of articles.

Jim Laurent at Sun Microsystems composed a chart comparing Solaris 10 to Linux for his boss, Bill Vass, chief operating officer of Sun's federal business unit. When Vass posted the chart for public viewing, Laurent commented on it in his personal blog in late December. Laurent said Solaris has certain advanced technical features, such as Dynamic Tracing, which give it an advantage over Linux, along with its ability to run on more versions of hardware. He acknowledged his partisanship in a posting to his blog.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once called Linux a cancer. Now, thanks to his company's alliance wit, he's probably labeling the open source OS as something much more benign. Like, say, "Cash Cow!" Evidence is emerging that Microsoft is making money, lots of it, from selling 'certificates' for Novell's SUSE Linux. Microsoft gained the right to distribute the certificates a little more than a year ago under a marketing and technical alliance with Novell.

A crisis call comes in from on high to inform me that we'll have four people in a porta-cabin on a client site and they'll need access to their e-mail, Internet & need the ability to share files - Oh and sorry about the short notice but could you sort it out before close of business tomorrow? A rummage in the basement junkyard of Bitsmith towers turns up a retired Dell Poweredge 2650 which appears to be in perfect working order. Lacking a spare licensed copy of any flavour of Windows Server, and needing to get the box live in short order, I used SME Server 7.2 from Contribs.org which I'd downloaded but never really got around to playing with.

The blurb on the back cover starts out, 'Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by participatory Internet applications'. That's fine and dandy, but what's the inside story? If you happen across this book at your local bookstore, do you wonder just what 'Collective Intelligence' is in this context? Let's find out a little about the concept, the practice, and this book.

Joomla! is a well-known content management system, mature enough to be used by thousands of amateur and professional Web portals. Installation is a breeze and consists of six click-next steps. However, a default Joomla! installation is not necessarily a secure one, so let's see how we can protect our portal from potential attackers.

Open-source advocacy groups have been gaining traction in arranging presentations in Polish schools to educate people about the benefits of Linux and open-source software. Originally started by a 15-year-old student, the event is turning into a big deal with presentations in many schools around Poland.

The Asterisk.org development team has released Asterisk version 1.4.17. This release contains a fix for a SIP security issue, as well as a number of other bug fixes. The security issue is documented in the published security advisory, AST-2008-001.

In the Linux world new users are often scared away by horror stories of having to compile their own programs. With todays distributions where there are, in the case of *buntu, over 20,000 pre-compiled programs to choose from and the need to compile your own programs is very rare. In fact about the only time you will compile your own programs is if you wish to use a different version than what the distributions repository supplies. Many people, when faced with a situation requiring a program compile, will shy away from this mystical seeming process. But it's pretty easy.

A significant amount of skill with a soldering iron and some custom firmware has revealed a number of interesting features Amazon.com hid within its Kindle e-book reader. Among the ones that hardware hacker Igor Skochinsky uncovered and described on his blog are a basic photo viewer, a minesweeper game, and most interesting, location technology that uses the Kindle's CDMA networking to pinpoint its position. There also are some basic location-based services that call up a Google Maps view to show where you are and nearby gas stations and restaurants.

Even though my Debian upgrade from Etch to Lenny on the test box went very well, I was a little bit wary of plunging right into it on the $0 Laptop because the Gateway Solo 1450 -- which I did get for $0 -- is a computer I actually rely on (i.e. I don't swap drives in and out of it like I do with the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client I use for distro testing).