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The eighth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) continued yesterday with more tutorials, the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing, the Open Source Awards, and Larry Wall's State of the Onion report.

A recent patch posted to the lkml contained the following description, "this patch adds an efi e820 memory mapping", in response to which Andrew Morton asked, "why?". Linus Torvalds offered his views on EFI, the Extensible Firmware Interface beginning by describing it as "this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI)".

Last week in Part 1 we changed a bale of passwords. Today we'll take two more important steps to lock down our Asterisk@Home server: make sure that all Web administration traffic is encrypted, and lock down OpenSSH more tightly.

Any user that was browsing with Internet Explorer and had not installed the latest Microsoft patches was vulnerable to this attack. In January, Microsoft released a patch that prevents WMF (Windows Metafile) files, so users that had installed the patch were safe. Browsers using Firefox version 1.5 or later are also protected from WMF files.

Using Linux and the HDAPS kernel drivers, you can access the embedded accelerometers on Lenovo ThinkPads, then process the accelerometer data to read specific sequences of "knocking" events -- literally rapping on the laptop case with your knuckles -- and run commands based on those knocks. Double tap to lock the screen, and knock in your secret code to unlock. You can also download and use article Perl scripts to customize your own knocking input environment.

In this episode: voice mail update (or lack thereof) and Ogg Vorbis RSS feed link; listener feedback; this week’s Listener Tip about the alias command; the legal and philosophical issues concerning proprietary video and audio codecs; a review of Linux video players, such as MPlayer, xine and gxine, VLC, Totem, and Kaffeine, Linux video editors, including Kino, Cinelerra, Avidemux, LiVES, and Diva, Linux DVD ripping/encoding applications, such as dvd::rip, acidrip, xdvdshrink, and k9copy, and DVD authoring applications, including QDVDAuthor and DVDStyler.

The new Version 4.0 of Debian, known to date by its code name "Etch", will appear in December of this year, those responsible for the Linux distribution project state in a new status report.

Even the Emacs-enlightened are still but humble human beings who may err. We make spelling mistakes in our writing, and syntactical mistakes in our structured documents. So let's take a tour through Emacs' built-in tools for preventing, catching, and correcting mistakes.

A new report from Futurelab suggests that the open source model of peer-reviewed collaboration could radically transform educational practice for teachers and learners.

Supports kernel 2.6 versions of RedHat, SuSe and Fedora. Driver source code is available.

Strategic Test Corp has announced the release of new Linux drivers for kernel 2.6 versions of RedHat, SuSe and Fedora distributions. The kernel 2.4 drivers have also been updated. Linux kernel 2.6 gives increased stability and near to real-time operating system performance, useful for measurement and signal generation applications.

IBM has extended its portfolio of middleware and systems platforms to support Novell's new Suse Linux Enterprise 10 offerings. Particularly exciting from IBM's perspective is the Xen virtualisation feature.

Solid Information Technology, a provider of fast, always-on and affordable databases used in more than 3,000,000 mission-critical deployments worldwide, today announced the availability of the beta version of its open source product, solidDB ™ for MySQL. solidDB for MySQL is covered under GNU Public License (GPL) and is downloadable from forgemysql.com and http://dev.soliddb.com/download.

[That forgemysql.com wasn't working when I tried it. -- grouch]

Directed by Hoffman and John Levine, the organization intends to work together on best practices and technical solutions, in particular the promotion of the Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) approach being championed by Yahoo and Cisco.

Tonight on The Linux Link Tech Show, episode 150:
Chris & Bryan fromThe Linux Action Show tell us why they switched to Linux from Mac
Dan installs trixbox after our Asterisk server flakes out
Pat uses Opera for a week and likes it
Linc gets into Arch Linux
And much, much more

Be sure to check us out live every Wednesday night at 8:30 PM, EDT
Just point your favorite media player to any of the following streams:
http://www.binrev.com:8000/main
http://media.sysop.ca:8000/techshow
http://wdsmn.com:8000/techshow


You can also check out previous episodes from the download section of our home page

The Debian project confirms plans for its next release in December this year. The team also announces the new release will include support for AMD64 systems.

For consumer electronics industry, digital home is the next big pot of gold, a pot so big that it has everyone from Apple (AAPL) to Microsoft (MSFT) to Intel (INTC) licking their chops. But it is Linux could emerge as one of the biggest winners in this bonanza.

To the many oft-sung virtues of open-source software you can add this: it saves electricity.

[Well, except in the homes of geeks. 'Fess up folks: How many old computers do you keep running, without real need, just because free software helps you do it? -- grouch]

A random walk through constant values in C++I first read the lament to the capricity of programming in the title of this piece inCreative Computing, years before C was devised. But it’s still true that there is no way, not even one, of being absolutely sure that a value you set in C or C++ won’t change.…

The Zend Framework provides a new IP-certain way to build your PHP applications, aiming to improve your PHP coding experience. In this four part series, we'll use the Zend Framework to build an RSS/Atom feed reader. In Part 1 you will get a high-level view of the Zend Framework, In Part 2 see how to use the framework to create the online feed reader, and get familiar with the MVC pattern. Then in Part 3 you will implement the online feed reader portion of the application, and finally in Part 4 incorporate Web sites that do not support RSS feeds into the online feed-reader interface.

Developers and architects might be particularly interested in this discussion of Laszlo, XUL, XForms, Macromedia Flex, and Dojo