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IBM counted noses and says there are now nearly 1,000 Linux applications that run on its mainframes, a 100% jump over this time last year, a fact it attributes to virtualization and basic mainframe performance.

A dictionary attack is a technique for defeating a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase by searching a large number of possibilities. You can be configured to verify that passwords cannot be guessed easily using Linux PAM module called pam_cracklib.so. This article describes this configuration.

In the beginning, there was C and C++, as well as hosts of other computer programming languages. All are based on ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which, as the name implies, is based on the English alphabet. This wouldn't be an issue except there are many humans in the world, and they don't all use the English alphabet.

When I first received Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design and took it out of the shipping box, I thought I had gotten a hold of a book on fine art by mistake. Actually, I wasn't far from the truth, and it's no mistake. Andy Clarke's book goes way beyond the traditional technical text on CSS for web designers and virtually redefines (at least for me) the term "web designer" to be equivalent to "artist".

The 'Expires' HTTP header can be a webmaster's secret weapon, potentially reducing bandwidth and increasing performance for content that changes infrequently. This article explains why 'Expires' is often better than 'Last-Modified' for caching.

The Executive Summary: The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history

[While the paper is obviously about Windows Vista, there are some important implications for the FOSS community, especially with respect to FOSS hardware drivers. - dcparris]

Linux in 2006: June is Busting Out All Over. I apologize for sounding like a typical lame pundit, but 2006 was the Year of Linux. I never said that before—I was waiting until it became true.

New Year's is traditionally a time of resolutions: maybe you're thinking that this year, you'll try Linux for the first time? If so, DesktopLinux.com editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has prepared a brief beginner's orientation for picking and trying a Linux distribution.

A hard to swallow conclusion from the table of cluster. In the first two installments of this series I have pushing a sales pitch of sorts. If you believe some of the things I talked about, large clusters will break, applications will need to tolerate failure and be easy to write, then you may agree that dynamic programming algorithms are one method to solve these problem. The next question is, how do implement these ideas?

I liked Fisher's Introduction to Java Phrasebook in that he very clearly explained what a phrasebook is and what it isn't. That's pretty much key when deciding to buy a phrasebook or not. He used the analogy of a foreign language phrasebook (from which the technical phrasebook gets its origins). Let's say you want to vacation in Germany but don't speak the language. With a German phrasebook, you could look up any number of common phrases to help you get by ("Where's the bathroom?" is a must). The phrasebook in no way shape or form is able to actually teach you the German language nor does it contain all of the phrases you might imagine wanting to say (such as "Do you come here often?"). Phrasebooks contain just enough to get you by. With that in mind, I proceeded through the pages of Fisher's text.

This article demonstrate how you can start to implement Atom-enabled applications using a new open-source project, called Abdera, currently under incubation at the Apache Software Foundation. Its a good article showing you some tricks with its Feed Object Model, XPath and XSLT support, extension handling and incremental parsing model.

Debian Weekly News - December 26th, 2006

A few readers may recall that after my disappointing visit to Microsoft in early December, I promised to pass the Zune music player they gave me on to a worthy developer who would either modify it to run Linux or work on making the thing usable with Linux. Entries ranged from amusing to serious.

Mozilla, Adobe, and Novell made some major news in desktop Linux this year, and smaller developers introduced interesting innovations. But on the whole, 2006 was just about as memorable for what didn't happen on the Linux desktop as what did happen, with interoperability issues of various sorts playing big roles on both sides of that stage.

For those of you who've just unboxed (or already snagged) a Nintendo Wii, and are more interested in casing out the innards or hacking it up, we've got yet another challenge for you and your console. While we've seen how to control the functions of your home with a PSP, there's just something special about flinging your Wiimote up and down to lower and raise the lighting conditions around your crib. Aside from a Wii, Wiimote, and a good bit of spare time, you'll also need the Smarthome Insteon lights w/ ControlLinc, an Aurora Multimedia WACI NX, a Linux-based PC, and if you wish, an optional AXIS PTZ IP Security Camera and Proliphix IP Thermostat.

Synapse EMR port to Linux has now gone beta. Download from http://www.compkarori.com/emr/linux/ Almost all of the non-Windows specific functionality is now available for the Linux client.

SIMchronise is a mobile synchronization provider based in Dublin, Ireland. Users of the company's products can synchronize contacts, calendars, appointments, tasks, and notes across a wide range of devices, including mobile phones, PCs, Palm PDAs, and even iPods. After using proprietary software and finding it lacking, all of its products are now based on Funambol's open source data synchronization software.

Examine key parts of the Z shell (zsh) and how to use its features to ease your UNIX system administration tasks. zsh is a popular alternative to the original Bourne and Korn shells.

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz published Scrooge and intellectual property rights in the British Medical Journal. In it he attacks the fundamental justification for drug patents, the supposed encouragement of private investment in high risk drugs. It is enough to say that his arguments go double for medical software patents which have all of the drawbacks of drug patents, except that they do not require a significant investment at all, so there is no justification whatsoever. The next time you hear a medical software company talk about an "innovation" they have patented you should cringe at the theft of a simple idea from the FOSS world.

Fine Tune your battery usage. Using the GNOME Power Management options will provide better use of your laptop battery life. Knowing the difference between suspend and hibernate may save you a loss of data. This article will explore your best use of power on a lapto