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Once again, we're a far cry from PS3-Linux-easy, but those 360 kids seem rather hard to dissuade. The latest development on the XeLL bootloader front is that you no longer need a serial cable hooked up for executing the boot loader, all you need is a 360 set up for running burned DVDs, a modified version of the King Kong disc -- you'll want the original game, Windows and a DVD burner to get that together -- and of course a Live CD with XeLL and your Linux distro all prepped to go.

A function is a pre-defined calculation entered in a cell to help you analyze or manipulate data in a spreadsheet. All you have to do is add the arguments, and the calculation is automatically made for you. Beginners might be content to use Calc for lists, but, for advanced users, functions are the main reason for spreadsheets. If you understand functions, then you can start to use the real power of a spreadsheet.

The Gelato Federation (www.gelato.org) is proud to announce the technical program for the Gelato ICE: Itanium® Conference & Expo to be held on April 16-18, 2007 in San Jose California. The full program is now available online at Gelato.org.

Free Geek is a nonprofit society in Portland, Ore., dedicated to recycling computing equipment and distributing computers loaded with free software to organizations or individuals in need. Since its founding in February 2000, the group has seen sister organizations open in cities throughout North America. One of the most recently established groups is in Vancouver, Canada. We talked to David Repa, the founder and coordinator of Free Geek Vancouver, about the origins of the group and the challenges of organizing it.

With the availability of Zend's PHP products on i5/OS, PHP provides another scripting option to System i developers.

Oracle is working hard to release the next version of Oracle Enterprise Linux, which is based on the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Oracle said it has at least 25 customer wins for its Oracle Enterprise Linux, including at least one customer that it shares with arch-rival Red Hat. If recent Oracle Linux trends are any indication, there will be more.

What a day. Today has really been a blast. We had a crazy idea last week to fix up the gtk+ stock in a day. It sounded a bit easier than the usual deal as all the metaphors were set in stone and the icons only need to be done in a few sizes, but still:199 icons done.

As the release iPhone draws nearer, open source browser purveyor Mozilla has joined the throng moving to release more full featured browsers for mobile devices with a new version of its own project Minimo.

I was reading Sal Cangleso's excellent article on his Mini-ITX project, in which he builds small computers that run off of Compact Flash memory (just like the Thin Puppy!), and he mentioned that while he liked Puppy Linux, another small distribution, called Slax, was better. So I went over there and am intrigued -- I downloaded a few ISOs to burn later and try.

Wine 0.9.34 was released today, with the following main changes: Support for Xcursor, a range of fixes for various installers, new builtin xcopy tool, the usual assortment of Direct3D fixes and lots of bug fixes.

A pair of Harvard University IT staffers last week released a free virtual appliance that supports their open source network access control platform -- just one of many free NAC tools springing up to address security-hungry customers.

Acegi Security System is a formidable, easy-to-use open source framework alternative to writing endless security code for your Java enterprise applications.

Bug stamp-out list for March 30, 2007

Learn to search your XML date easier and more naturally with XQuery 1.0.

Red Hat Inc.'s fourth-quarter results reflected strong demand for the open source software maker's products and should ease concerns that competition in the space is increasing, a number of analysts said Friday.

This method uses crontab to execute a shell script that downloads an updated urchin.js file every 24 hours and saves it into your local sites directory so that it can be served by your web server instead of the google-analytics.com web server. The problem with google-analytics.com is that when google-analytics.com/urchin.js is requested by billions of web users all over the world at one time, it can cause your pages to load very slowly, especially if you are using WordPress or a similar CMS.

Interactive Web pages, long dreamed of by designers, are finally here-Web interfaces that respond instantly to user commands, with minimal page redraw. All this and more is possible via Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), which recently has come into vogue with the Web illuminati.

Oracle has demonstrated there is demand for its Unbreakable Linux program by announcing no fewer than 26 customers that have signed up to its cut-price Linux support offering.

Quaint Tech has a new post by Paul van Iterson that explains the issue around Object Oriented Programming (OOP). Traditionally (from the beginning of the computer era), programming was done by combining conditional statements with GOTO blocks to create a program flow. In the early '70s a Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijksma strongly advocated the use of procedural programming, which means abandoning GOTO statements and creating a sort of chronological program flow in your code (from top to bottom). This style has been widely adapted and for most people is the way they program PHP applications. It is however already a thing of the past.

I have a Mac laptop, which I am very fond of; and on it I use Quicksilver which I find inordinately useful (to the point that I have trouble using other people’s Macs if they don’t have it). There is a project available entitled Gnome Launchbox which claims to be an effort to do a similar thing for Linux, which I’ve been meaning to experiment with for ages.