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Google invited developers to its London office for one of three workshops - the others being in Munich and Tel Aviv to spread the word and teach developers how to write for their new OS. Another event will be held in Boston on February 23rd (check at the blog for an announcement). Here's what they told us. The mantra for Android is that it’s "a complete and modern embedded OS, with a cutting edge mobile user experience, a world class software stack for building apps and open platform for developers users and industry". That of course breaks into lots of different specifics some of which are more solid than others. Computer people coming to mobile have a very different view of phone architecture to phone people adding features.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Heavy refactoring and work on merging translation branches in Lokalize (which is renamed from "Kaider", and moved from playground to kdesdk). Work on a question editor in KEduca. Work on real-time cloud imagery in Marble. An initial implementation of a new undo stack in KWordQuiz. The start of a KAlgebra, Rot13, KWorldClock, and Pastebin Plasma applet, with the inclusion of more functionality from KDE 3.5 (such as the multi-row taskbar panel) in Plasma. Progress in scripting support and functionality in Plasma. The "Now Playing" data engine and applet, and the fuzzy-clock Plasma applet move into kdereview. Viewports support declared "complete" on the KDE desktop.

Last night NVIDIA quietly uploaded a new Linux display driver to their FTP server. This new driver is tagged 171.05, while the latest public driver has been 169.09. Having already three releases in the 169.xx series, this is a moderate update to 171.xx, but according to NVIDIA it's not for everyone. There is no official change-log that NVIDIA has published for the 171.05 driver, and the change-log that ships with the driver hasn't been updated (whether it be intentional or not). The only word that has come out of the NVIDIA camp on this new driver is from Christian Zander and he has said that this driver is only intended for use with the Tesla S870 GPU Computing Systems. The legacy NVIDIA Linux drivers have also been updated this week.

We all know that Linux is a kernel, an operating system, maybe even a socio-political movement (it depends on whom you ask), but in a sense, Linux is about people -- those who create, use and promote it. One of those people is Orv Beach, publicity chairman for SCALE 6X -- the Southern California Linux Expo -- being held Feb. 8-10 in Los Angeles.

This is an editorial on the unfair web statistics that are used against the Linux community. Often, websites will make claims that there are less than one percent of Linux users in the world, some as low as 1/2 of one percent, when their only claim to this is the people visiting their site, which is usually geared towards Windows users.

IBM Broadband Transmission-line Characterization Using Short-pulse Propagation is a software toolkit with advanced 2D field solver and signal-processing facility for extracting broadband transmission line properties. In addition, this technology is suitable for sharing with university educators for the purpose of training future engineers.

When my Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card "just worked" with every single Linux distribution I tried, I was happy. When two el-cheapo cards from Airlink 101 didn't work with every single Linux distribution I tried, and still didn't work when I resorted to ndiswrapper and a console, I was unhappy.

Does Microsoft have an open-source strategy — beyond finding new ways to thwart Linux and other non-proprietary wares? Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s Director of Platform Technology Strategy and the company’s Open Source Software Lab, says it does. And it’s a lot less touchy-feely than this definition, which is on the Microsoft Open Source Web site: “The Microsoft open source strategy is focused on helping customers and partners be successful in today’s heterogeneous technology world.”

XMLBeans is a great XML-to-Java data-binding technology, but it lacks the ability to register observers for model changes. However, you can customize generated plain old Java object.

Free thinking and free code have two things in common: a lot of the best work has already been done, and we can re-use it. That's my second challenge to Social Graph Foo Campers. The first is getting some clarity about what the "social graph" means in the first place.

Webmasters are frequently required to serve up charts and graphs to clients. Part of the planning for such images involves a decision about whether to process the chart on the server or at the client end. Of course, it depends on the circumstances. There are costs and benefits to both approaches. The generation of a chart at the server involves the creation of an image such as a .png file and then displaying this file as part of the delivered page. Prior to the image creation a script must set up the data points and the axis labels, switch on colours, create a legend, size the picture, and send it out.

Microsoft is going out of their way to buy up keyword searches on Google. They've bought up the keyword "Linux" so that an erroneous website claiming that Windows Server 2008 is superior to Linux Servers pops up first. The site doesn't go on to backup this claim with any real evidence; in fact, it mostly argues that Windows Server 2008 is better than previous Windows Servers.

[I tried to re-create what the author did but the results page errors out on me. - Scott]

The fact that Debian Etch -- a modern, up-to-date Linux distribution -- can run so well in 233 MHz of CPU and 64 MB of RAM is something truly to behold.

When ripping CDs from my own collection or (shh) my friends', I didn't always bother to include the cover art. Personally, I never considered album art for my iPod all that important. That has changed now that we have an iPod touch in the family. If I'm missing a lot of album art, the experience of virtually flipping through my music collection, something Apple calls "cover flow," is diminished. iTunes doesn't always offer art for albums I didn't purchase from iTunes. Thankfully, a little GPL-licensed application called Album Cover Art Downloader (ACAD) solved my problem.

When is a Switch Like a Router?

Port-based VLANs are specific to their switches, and cannot cross multiple switches. However, you can make a smart switch function like a router. Let's say that three ports are not enough for VLAN East; you want to connect more hosts. You could buy a bigger smart switch. Or you can uplink a second switch to one of VLAN East's ports, like this:

..the sad truth is, an embedded engineer needs Windows. There are just too many specialized tools for programming devices, analyzing signals, and device drivers that are Windows only and no amount of Wine-ing will do.

It's possible to carry out an ARP poisoning MITM attack manually using Wireshark (Ethereal) to intercept and edit ARP requests, but actually it's very easy for anyone who can get on to your network (using Aircrack-ng to get on wirelessly, for example) to carry out such an attack using automated open source tools. The best known one of these is called Ettercap.

The rhetoric surrounding Steve Ballmer's unsolicited $44.6bn offer for Yahoo! will focus on the obvious - the potential market share growth that a Microsoft and Yahoo! tie-up would have against Google. For all the talk of saving Yahoo! shareholders, Google is uppermost in the Microsoft chief executive's mind, and Microsoft is - once more - trying to buy its way into the internet club having already spent billions to no visible effect.

Do, is an application to find things on your system and quickly perform actions, similar to Quicksilver for OSX and GNOME Launch Box. It works on a variety of different desktop environments, including GNOME and KDE. Basically, all you need to do is to press Super + Space on your keyboard, and the Do dialog will open.

This February, the team at Linuxsecurity.com has chosen NMAP as the OS Security Tool of the Month! In January, we chose GnuPG in part because it had just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Well, it wasn't alone. As of this past December Nmap ("Network Mapper"), the free and open source utility for network exploration and auditing, celebrated its 10th Anniversary as well! And because of its popularity, chances are very good that you've already used NMAP for quite some time. Even if you have, it's always good to take a look at how it all got started and what it's all about...