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Extra compensation for specialized IT-related skills continued to gain steam in the U.S. and Canada during the second quarter of 2006, and is becoming a standard practice in IT employee retention and recruiting, according to Foote Partners' Hot Technical Skills and Certifications Pay Index covering 242 IT skills. The analysts report that -- as in the first quarter -- noncertified IT skills compensation had the higher overall growth rate.

Don’t let disaster happen to you. Lewin Edwards presents five engineering tips that are crucially important to successful product engineering, but which are rarely brought up in discussions of engineering practices. He will cover the absurd, the annoying, and the physically dangerous, and give you hints for avoiding all sorts of these situations.

Rachel Werner writes: "Mozilla is now recruiting for the Firefox User Panel, which is an initiative to learn more about how end-users interact with the Web. Firefox User Panel members will complete a series of short online surveys on a variety of Web-related topics, with the aggregate results made available to the Mozilla community. "To create a diverse user panel, Mozilla is looking to reach people from all walks of life and skill sets — from students to retirees, novice users to power users, Firefox users but also people who use Internet Explorer or other browsers."

“Why should organizations consider a hosted collaborative environment rather than hosting it themselves?”

Although I rarely run Windows these days, it seems I can't break the habit of using one or two Windows applications instead of their open source equivalents. However, instead of having a full-blown Windows desktop, I prefer to run these programs on my GNU/Linux system with Wine. The problem is that I'm tired of having to enter cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program FilesMy Windows App; wine My Windows App.exe every time I want to launch one of these programs. Having shell scripts for each program is not a great solution either. Wouldn't it be better to simply run My Windows App.exe directly on an XTerm? Fortunately the Linux kernel already lets you do that with a feature called binfmt_misc.

I recently picked up an old discarded laptop... straight out of a corporate garbage bin, as a matter of fact. Could it be useful? What could it do? As an IT professional, I thought I'd find out.

[The author did considerable research to do a dual-boot installation. I think it's significant that he states, "The installs went like clockwork. I had all the software in hand, and had read everything I could beforehand. I did have trouble getting the modem to work under Windows." -- grouch]

LXer Feature: 5-Aug-2006

Bill MacArthur is a general IT guy for an On-Line Shopping Mall. He chose PostgreSQL running on Red Hat Linux to drive the business.

Despite the involvement of big businesses in free and open source software, the movement continues to be dominated by individuals. In the first of two features, Matthew Aslett identifies the open source VIPs.

[I don't know how this excellent piece got by us when it came out. In my opinion, this is an historical tribute. Larry Augustin, Miguel de Icaza, John/Jane Doe, Matthias Ettrich, Bill Hilf, Ron Hovsepian, Pamela Jones, Judge Dale Kimball, Neelie Kroes, Marten Mickos are honored in this part. -- grouch]

take a look at how automated inspectors like CheckStyle, JavaNCSS, and CPD enhance the development process and when you should use them.

Rip your DVDs to a nice portable .avi the easy way with Acidrip, a very competent front-end for Mencoder.

Plenty of loud argument has ensued over whether binary-only drivers belong in an operating system based on open source philosophies. David Chisnall examines the reasoning on both sides.

The first Colombian Mini-DebConf will be held at Popayan, Cauca, on August 19th-20th. It will be a space where the people of the Debian community of Colombia could meet together and work around the project. We'll have talks, hacklabs, some "free"-time for BSP, packaging or any other debian-related activity, and of course, recreation time, like a trip around the city in Chiva, a typical bus of the country.

Wanna get involved in producing something cool, like the next Debian Linux distribution? Afraid of not being able to do so, because you are no programmer? Try to help out with artwork for Etch!

Finally. For years, the holy grail of the Linux desktop has been to get a major computer vendor to commit to preloading a Linux desktop. It finally happened.

[Yeah, it's old hat to some - news to others. Congrats to Novell. - dcparris]

The Linux kernel development model changed a couple of years ago at the 2004 Kernel Summit [story]. At that time it was decided that as a team Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton [interview] were doing a great job together maintaining the 2.6 kernel, using Andrew's -mm kernel [story] as a staging area with new features being allowed into the mainline kernel and ultimate stabilization left up to Linux distributions. In March of 2005, Greg KH and Chris Wright began maintaining a -stable patchset [story], accepting small, focused patches fixing real bugs or security issues. The -stable patchsets have been maintained since for the latest kernel and the previously released kernel.

In December of 2005, Adrian Bunk announced his intention to maintain the 2.6.16 kernel indefinitely, maintaining it much the same as the 2.4 kernel is maintained for as long as it is used and patches are contributed. Greg KH recently announced that Adrian is now taking over the 2.6.16-stable branch, "he will still be following the same -stable rules that are documented in the Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt file, but just doing this for the 2.6.16 kernel tree for a much longer time than the current stable team is willing to do (we have moved on to the 2.6.17 kernel now.)" He went on to caution, "and I'd like to offer my best wishes to Adrian for doing this work. Personally I don't think it can be done for all that long of an amount of time, and I will be very happy to see him prove me wrong :)"

It's not surprising that some open-source software companies consider closing their source code, said Dennis Cox, chief technical officer at BreakingPoint Systems. Closing the code and selling future versions or becoming the official supplier of support services can be profitable, Cox said.

[Interesting title, weird article. - dcparris]

This article explains how one can benefit by hosting a Wordpress blog on ones personal computer. It gives a detailed overview of the features of Wordpress and ways in which one can use it such as using it as a personal diary to jot down ones thoughts. It also gives the steps in detail about how to set up wordpress which makes it an informative read.

Firefox doing well

UK colleges and universities routinely consider open source solutions to IT problems - even when official policy might not support it.

The Free Software Foundation has released a second draft of version 3 of the GPL. This draft incorporates comments made in the first draft, filtered, of course, by the FSF's goals. The resulting changes tweak some terms, clarify others, and generally increase the international applicability of the license. The fundamental nature of the license and its goals has not changed, however, and quite a few people who disliked the first draft will have reason to be displeased with this version as well.

Aug 04 (LBO) – Popular Internet search engine Google has given the Lanka Software Foundation 25,000 dollars to drive open source software projects locally.