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It's been about a year since I wrote a program. I've written snippets of code since then but have mostly focused on managing other developers. This is partly because, as a business owner, my spare time is scarce; I have many tasks to juggle. It's also because programming stopped being fun for me. I have been fascinated with computers and telecom systems since I was a child, but in the past several years, coding has become more of a chore, in large part because the task of actually designing something useful is a small one compared with the much less interesting work that's now required.

There is a fascinating article on Groklaw calledSearching for Openness in Microsoft's OOXML and Finding Contradictions. One of the most relevant comments in the article is"So, they plan to be the only one in the Linux world that can actually interoperate with Microsoft. How do you think they will achieve that? By sharing? On the contrary, they already market themselves as uniquely interoperable, which means they get to interoperate and you don't, unless you are their paying customer." There is also the Novell comment,"Only Novell has Microsoft’s endorsement as its partner to drive Linux-Windows interoperability."

Last month, Toronto-based civic activists at The Citizen Lab released a new open source secure Web browsing tool designed to let people in repressive countries tunnel through government Internet filters. Known as Psiphon, the program allows users with unfiltered Internet access to provide a private, SSL-encrypted Web proxy for use by individuals in firewalled countries.

A new e-learning and collaborative training portal was announced by the President of India. What makes the portal unique is that one core phase of the development of India's educational e-learning will be explicitly based on Open Source tools...

Learn how PHP-based server programs can convert XML-formatted enterprise application data into JSON format before sending it to browser applications.

The new year has brought a new release of the Knoppix live CD. Along with the usual updates to application software, the most noticeable change in version 5.1.1 is the inclusion of the Beryl 3-D desktop with the Emerald theming engine.

Obviously, using XML from Java applications is nothing new as the first two editions of this book attest. However, numerous changes have occurred which required a third edition of this book. From the Preface: "Quite a bit has changed since the second edition appeared. Specifications that were drafts have been finalized, new APIs have been introduced, and new uses for XML have emerged. Perhaps most significantly, two APIs discussed in the second edition--JDOM and JAXB--saw important changes...". Having established the necessity for a third edition, let's see what it's got under the hood.

The initial version of OVIS -- a software tool developed by Sandia National Laboratories that provides intelligent, real-time monitoring of computational computer clusters -- is now available for free download from the Sandia Web site.

By its own developers' admissions, Linux supports more hardware devices out-of-the-box than any other operating system but that won't stop a slew of new drivers being added in upcoming releases. Two years after his 2005 Kernel Report, Colorado-based Linux developer Jonathan Corbet returned to Australia's linux.conf.au conference in Sydney this week to discuss recent enhancements to the open source operating system.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a venerable protocol which allows people to type messages at each other across the net. Your editor remembers a fascinating day in 1991, when observers in Moscow used an IRC channel to report on the Soviet coup attempt; it was an early example of the power the net would come to have. In subsequent years, however, your editor has had little time for IRC. Getting LWN together every week requires a strong focus on getting things done, and IRC can be a real productivity killer. Pretending that IRC does not exist has been most helpful in getting the Real Work done.

It's the time of the year for the annual fortune-telling ritual, where soothsayers get their say on the upcoming trends for the year. In my few years as a technology journalist, I've been asked--every now and then--when the Linux desktop will really take off among consumers.

Linus fans, get your diaries ready. The annual developers' conference of the Debian Project is to be held on 17-23 June in Edinburgh. Debian is one of the largest volunteer-supported Linux distributions, with over 15,000 software packages available for it, which can be used on a total of 14 different computer architectures, ranging from IBM's s390 mainframe and PowerPC through to the ARM processor at the other end. In the middle, of course, is the x86 architecture.

"Sun have been looking into re-licensing Solaris under dual license; the current CDDL and GPLv3. The idea behind this is not to scare away the current users of Solaris who use it under the CDDL, and to attract people the huge pool of Free Software users and contributors who are out there."

OOXML, the Microsoft Office XML-based formats, are now in the adoption queue at ISO/IEC.  That process takes six months -  the same amount of time that the PAS process takes (the route used by OASIS to submit ODF to ISO/IEC) – but has two steps rather than one, although the practical result is much the same. During the first one-month step, any member may submit "contradictions," which, loosely defined, means aspects in which a proposed standard conflicts with already adopted ISO/IEC standards and Directives. 

The next issue of the weekly Amarok newsletter is out. This issue covers the fine tuning of the scoring algorithm, new fadeout options, configurable playlist color, as well as new handy tool for editing filters. Traditionally, with tips included.

There is much work to be done to bring the Firefox and Opera communities closer, there’s no need for the trolling and bickering among our fans. We both make fantastic browsers, strive for standards compliance, and have security as our number one goal. Hopefully this interview will show the best of what our communities have to offer. I’d like to personally ask to keep the trolling away – let’s set an example here.

Builder AU, the official media organ for the Australian Linux conference, which is underway in Sydney, has released video clips of Linux creator Linus Torvalds talking about kernel development. But GNU/Linux users, the intended target audience, are finding it difficult to view the same.

Microsoft is crowing on its own blog that IE7 has just passed its 100 millionth download. What the blog doesn't say, according to an Information Week article, is that most of the downloads are upgrades from IE6 and that the Mozilla Firefox browser continues to gain ground.

So, you got the new iPod that you wanted for Christmas, but you're no fan of iTunes. No problem -- you can cast off your iTunes chains and manage your music entirely with Linux using Amarok. Amarok gives you everything you need to manage your music, from playing to burning music CDs to managing your portable music player.

This guide covers the installation of XenExpress and the creation of virtual machines with the XenServer Administrator Console. XenExpress is the free virtualization platform from XenSource, the company behind the well known Xen virtualization engine. XenExpress makes it easy to create, run and manage Xen virtual machines with the XenServer Administrator Console. XenExpress can run up to 4 virtual machines at the same time with a max. total amount of 4GB RAM. The XenExpress installation CD contains a full Linux distribution which is customized to run XenExpress.