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Tools like phpMyEdit allow you to create a quick-and-dirty front end to a database, but what if you need to publish a spreadsheet or BibTeX file on your Web site and give your visitors the ability to dynamically sort, filter, group, and visualize the published data? For that, you can turn to SIMILE Exhibit, an impressive data publishing framework that uses plain old HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript to create Web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and data visualization. Exhibit requires neither database nor server-side coding wizardry, and you can master the tool in no time, even if you don't have any programming experience.

This tutorial shows how to install Sun Java JDK and NetBeans IDE on a fresh Fedora 7 installation. The readers I had in mind when assembling this are the people who are anxious to start using NetBeans and Sun's Java SE on their newly installed Fedora systems. Some of the bits and pieces on the topics I found on the Internet are assembled into this tutorial in order to make it as comprehensive as possible.

This is o3magazine's first feature issue. It focuses on Agile Product Management with a couple of articles on Agile practices and concepts and how you can set up Yoxel, a web-based Agile Product Management solution.

Users regularly cite lack of compatibility with Microsoft Office files as a reason for not using OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org does include Microsoft Office export filters, as well as a number of settings for increased compatibility, but these features provide only good, not complete, compatibility. For this reason, Sun Microsystems' ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office, released earlier this year, sounded like good news. Promising export and import filters for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the free download appeared to tackle compatibility from a new but promising angle by giving Microsoft Office users the ability to open and save files in Open Document Format, the default format for OpenOffice.org 2.0 and higher. Unfortunately, the plugin is designed for older versions of Windows and Microsoft Office. If you're using the increasingly ubiquitous Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, the plugin delivers only a fraction of what it promises.

Kim Hart, of the Washington Post writes: Wal-Mart today announced it would sell digital music downloads with no anticopying software. Is this another golden opportunity for the anti-DRM movement?

I called into the Midnight Rider hosted by Mike Chambers. Read on and find out what I learned thus far in doing this

I use some common Linux tools to remotely support my Grandparents’ PC. These tools are SSH and X11vnc. X11vnc lets me take over the display, and the VNC traffic is tunneled with SSH. They can be a bit of work to set up, but work beautifully.

This is the third article in a series highlighting lesser known applications for Linux. These articles will be a bit Ubuntu-centric, but these applications should run nicely on your distribution of choice. This installment will review applications that aid in writing screenplays, plays, and novels. It varies somewhat from the previous two articles in that it does reference a couple of better known applications for Linux, although it discusses some of the lesser known ways to use them.

September 1, 2007 will see the official launch ofOpenEMR HQ, a solutions provider offering several"enterprise level" EMR solutions to small to mid-sized clinics. The service will offer both hosted and on-site installations of theOpenEMR electronic medical records software package and a pre-configured, semi-managed appliance called"EMR-RACK" which promises to offer clinics an easy and affordable way to implement OpenEMR. They will also provide customization, development, installation, support, and training services to clinics worldwide.

Is this a joke? I only recently started paying attention to Windows Home Server, since I tend to focus more on desktop operating systems and enterprise server systems. So I didn't realize until now that WHS is really just a vanilla file server. There's nothing wrong with being an ordinary file server for the home. After all, with many home users having multiple computers and gigabytes of music, photos and movies, it's well past time for homes to start having simple-to-use file servers. But, why pay extra for it?

If your UNIX system lacks a tool you need, chances are you can find an apt solution in the enormous inventory of software available online. This month, learn how to build software from source code. There are instances where the software you need is available but is not (yet) part of any repository. Given the predominance of package management, most software comes bundled in a form you can download and install using the package manager. However, because any number of versions and flavors of UNIX are available, it can be difficult to offer every application in each package manager format for each particular variation. If your UNIX installation is mainstream and enjoys a large, popular following, chances are better that you'll find the software prebuilt and ready to use. Otherwise, it's time to roll up your sleeves and prepare to build the software yourself.

Gentoo uses a unique package manager to distribute source code that is "compatible" with Gentoo. That is, it's optimized to work with Gentoo's basic system and correctly installs any needed components in the system that a vanilla version may not offer. It tracks dependencies for the packages, and will install all the needed packages when installing a package. When this system works, it's great. Oh, and it's called Portage.

I hear the argument everyday. That somehow, any open source project must not be very good because it does not cost anything to use it. Well, allow me to poke some holes into that theory, generally made by people who have yet to ween themselves from closed source dependency. First off, not everything in the open source world is without a profit making system. Google and Mozilla for instance, have manged to do fairly well using open source licenses. They ‘give away’ their product or service, yet seem to manage to pay the bills somehow…

Cheese is a relatively new open source webcam application for Linux that supports image and video capture and allows users to apply visual effects. Created by Daniel Siegel for Google's Summer of Code program, Cheese closely resembles a Mac OS X program called Photobooth. Cheese 0.2.1 was released yesterday with some nice new features like a countdown timer and support for saving pictures to Flickr.

It created a bit of a stir at the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing on Open Source a few weeks ago when Eben Moglen, who'd been invited to speak with me about free software licensing in the era of Web 2.0, chose instead to take me to task for talking about open source rather than free software for the past ten years, and for "wasting time promoting commercial products." A number of people asked to see the video from the session. Even though we hadn't planned to release the video from the executive briefing, we were able to get a copy.

Yesterday I installed Debian Lenny on one of my workstations to give it a try. Ever since I tried Ubuntu I've been in love with it, but you all know how love can be blinding ;) So trying a new distribution every now and then is a good idea. Ubuntu is based on Debian, so I wanted to see where the latest version of Debian differed from the latest Ubuntu release. The second part of this posting is about initng, the next generation init system.

Several colleagues of mine now also use Linux as their primary work desktop. In fact, we now have about a 50/50 split between (K)Ubuntu and XP users in our office. I wanted to get their views on why they use Linux and if they are happy with it. Hopefully the answers will be useful to others considering Linux. I asked everyone the same set of questions. So without further ado, here are their thoughts.

We know our video editing applications for Windows (read Adobe Premiere, AVID, Ulead Video studio etc) and Mac (Final Cut Pro!), but what about video editing on a Linux powered system? Well here's a list of video editing applications for your Linux PC. A look at Kdenlive, Open Movie Editor, Blender, Cinelerra and PiTIVi.

This may not be as absurd a claim as you may think, especially when you take into consideration the minor backlash that Ubuntu has experienced. So is PCLinuxOS the next poster-child of usable Linux? It's only natural that something that gains a massive amount of popularity in a relatively short period of time receives some criticism.

Somebody toss me a Che Guevara T-shirt. Google and Microsoft have gone to war over open source software. On Aug. 10, Redmond submitted the Microsoft Permissive License to the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Should the license be approved, Microsoft would receive the "open source" seal of approval that only the OSI – by self-proclamation – can okay. Of course, one could argue that Microsoft – once blessed with the open source label – will only abuse its status. The company could claim to be a huge open source supporter, derailing critics' arguments by displaying nothing more than the OSI logo when needed. Chris DiBona, Google's open source manager, seems to fall into this cynical camp.