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Over the weekend a blizzard has hit Michigan causing sub-zero temperatures, inches of snow, and zealous winds. This winter weather has caused the closing of shopping centers and community activities; public transportation systems and the Gerald R. Ford International Airport have also come to a halt. However, we took this opportunity to make the best of it with natural sub-zero overclocking. With the Abit AW9D i975X motherboard, an Intel Pentium 4 processor, 2GB of OCZ's Flex XLC PC2-9200 memory, and cooling provided by Mother Nature, we set off on a spontaneous overclocking adventure. Have you ever seen a motherboard in a snow-bank? We sure have.

One Laptop Per Child project is currently working on the “Build 2″ (B2) release of their “XO” laptop. The first pieces of the B1 series have been produced in November last year. The B2 prototypes are planned to be delivered to the interested countries for practical testing this month. During this period of time, there have been some noticeable changes in the XO project. We are going to cover the essential ones here.

Many projects require different languages as either separate or integral parts of the overall project impetus. Indeed some coding projects have code that generates code for other parts of the projects. Most common among such tools is using lexical builders to create code to be compiled. In this text an example project that uses several different languages for it's components and the problems that can crop up with using several different languages in one project.

Lisp is one of the oldest and best-loved programming languages around, but it gets relatively little attention from programmers despite its flexibility and power. Now the organisers of the 2007 International Lisp Conference hope to raise the language’s profile by inviting entries for their latest programming contest.

In September 1991, when Linux Torvalds (sic), a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, released 10,000 lines of code on the Internet, nobody could have believed that it would spark off a revolution.

[I know what your thinking, but at least they are writing and talking about it. - Scott]

Companies may want a solid, for-profit vendor providing support when they embrace an open source project. One shortcut to checking on a support company's qualifications is to find how many of a project's core developers, the ones who commit code to the code base, are employed by the support firm. But the history of support for the PostgreSQL database offers a cautionary tale.

A hacker using the pseudonym Xoron (real name Mehmet Ince) has disclosed on mailing lists that there are such vulnerabilities in Omegaboard, Cerulean Portal System, phpBB Tweaked, Hailboards, EclipseBB and Xero Portal. Exploits are available for some forum systems that could permit an attacker to remotely upload and execute arbitrary malicious code on affected systems.

How could Gutenberg and Caxton have known that the invention of the printing press would be a massive force for the democratisation of knowledge and central to the transformation of a feudal society into the beginnings of a recognisably modern world via the Renaissance and the Reformation? The ability of printing presses to produce a massive volume of information, especially on religion and science, helped to break the elitist monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church.

H&R Block wanted a flexible, easy- to-use document management system to capture clients' tax documents and move them digitally to its tax preparers' offices. It considered commercial products, such as FileNet and Documentum. But H&R Block CIO Marc West eventually directed the team to focus on open source options, since the cost of putting commercial options in 13,000 fields offices wouldn't fly.

IBM has published the following new technical articles, tutorials, and downloads on its DeveloperWorks and AlphaWorks websites. They cover a range of interesting (though not necessarily embedded) technical topics, primarily related to Linux and open source system development. Some require free registration.

Mac owners and Linux users hoping to run Windows Vista using virtual machine software had better own the Business or Ultimate editions of the new operating system, according to Microsoft's licensing terms. The end-user license agreements governing both the Home Basic and Home Premium editions of the OS specifically forbid users from booting the software "within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system." The blanket prohibitions don't apply to the higher-end editions of Windows Vista.

You'll learn about how to configure DB2 databases, how locking and isolation levels work within DB2, and how to recover a corrupted database. This tutorial is designed for developers with little or no knowledge of DB2.

The KDE Project this week released version 3.5.6, a maintenance update to the popular free desktop for Linux and UNIX. KDE now supports 65 languages, making it available to more people than most non-free software.

This technology ports PHP 5.1.2 to the z/OS platform, which allows one to run PHP scripts both in command line and CGI environments. It contains the core PHP extensions as well as the PDO_ODBC extension for communication with DB2 databases.

Tollef Fog Heen has announced the third alpha release of Ubuntu 7.04, also known as "Herd CD" - now with painless multimedia codecs, new GNOME Control Centre, updated versions of most GNOME applications, and Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM): "Ubuntu 'Feisty Fawn' 7.04 has two and a half more months to go until its release date planned in April 19th, and already many exciting features have been introduced. Herd 3, the third Alpha release kicks off the most active period in the release schedule." - DistroWatch. Screenshots of Ubuntu 7.04 Alpha 3 are available at LinuxQuestions.org.

A new open source advocacy group, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), is scheduled to debut February 15 at the upcoming LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York. But unlike most open source software launches and even open source association beginnings, OSA founders are unwilling to be quoted by name about their plans before their formal launch. Instead, they are only speaking to media representatives grudgingly, "on background," without attribution. The reason for this, says an OSA insider Linux.com interviewed by telephone on Friday, February 3, is that they "don't want to ruffle feathers of people we're still talking to about joining."

It's maddening. For someone who is trying make a daily use of what is to be considered a beginner friendly distribution for the first time, most options leave a lot to be desired for the uninitiated. More often than not, new Linux users find that everything works great at first only to discover that setting up something as common as a dual-head monitor configuration requires editing your xorg.conf file. If you are coming from a non-Linux environment, this can be a fairly frightening proposition.

After years in the making -- and after some people had given up on ever seeing it -- the distribution-neutral Linux Professional Institute (LPI) and its affiliate, LPI-Japan, have finally jointly launched the LPIC-3 certification program.

Create a working Linux cluster from many separate pieces of hardware and software, including System x and IBM TotalStorage systems. This second part in a multipart series describes configuring the management server and installing the nodes in the cluster. Part 1 provided detailed instructions on setting up the hardware for the cluster.

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Second acts are rare in the computer industry but Jean Ichbiah, who died this week, managed it. Not only did he revolutionise software development for military computer systems with the Ada programming language, but he also devised a widely-used fast text-entry system for handheld computers.