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"When I came in, my assessment was that we had run out of gas in a variety of fashions," Helle said. "We were having system failures, machines would crash, SQL Server would crash, the application would crash, and it was a production-critical application so it had a lot of impact on our revenues if the crash was significant."

Swiki is a wiki written in the Squeak SmallTalk dialect. It's easy to install, easy to maintain, and a great tool for maintaining documentation.

The Free Standards Group (FSG), a nonprofit organization, today announced it is strengthening its activities in Asia.

DistroWatch reports - The Elive project has released the first beta build of the upcoming Elive 0.5 Enlightenment live CD. What's new? New live CD system - Elive has moved from Morphix to DSS; new kernel 2.6.15 with a lot more hardware support, also for wireless networking, make a look to the list of new drivers added; new installer features; Elive has new system of elive-skel, you can select 'night look' or 'elive look' in the boot of the live CD system; introductory tutorial to Enlightenment hot keys on E16... OSDir has some sweet shots of this Elive beta in the Elive 0.5 Beta Screenshot Tour.

Flow control is usually straightforward: sequence, selection, iteration. And many programmers, having been raised on these primary control structures, have a difficult time seeing what other kinds of flow control might be necessary. This article introduces continuations and teaches you to think about flow control in radically new ways.

As anyone who has used Linux systems for production systems knows all too well, there's an art to arriving at a stable configuration with all dependencies met. Linux distributors do an excellent job of delivering systems that meet this criteria, and keeping them there through their update processes as functionality updates, bug fixes, and security updates get laid on top of the out-of-the-box system. The amount of work and the success that they have in delivering both the base distribution and the stream of updates that follow is widely unappreciated.

FreeNAS, an open source NAS server, can convert a PC into a network-attached storage server. The software, which is based on FreeBSD, Samba, and PHP, includes an operating system that supports various software RAID models and a Web user interface. The server supports access from Windows machines, Apple Macs, FTP, SSH, and Network File System (NFS), and it takes up less than 16MB of disk space on a hard drive or removable media.

Though the obvious benefits of OSS over proprietary software in terms of cost and usability are well documented and widely discussed among software engineers, the use in office and home environment remains low even in an IT-savvy country like India.

We're seeking papers on Open Source languages, technologies, projects and tools as well as topics of interest to Open Source developers.

It is the institution that is arguably the home of free software, as well as so many other important technologies. So it comes as no surprise that the IT infrastructure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology depends on Linux. Rob Reilly takes a tourist's look at the nuts and bolts of MIT information systems.

Deconstructing databases

Most companies have a tame "guru" - someone presented as a world authority on the subject in question and so amazingly intelligent that they are above the tacky world of commercialism.

Some people like to work in Linux distributions that are at the cutting edge of technology. Other prefers stability at any cost. I want both, and Debian Testing, codenamed Etch, gives me that. The Debian project's testing tree has up-to-date software along with good stability, since packages are highly tested in the Unstable branch before they move to Testing.

Ruby is a relative latecomer among scripting languages but it has developed a distinct niche for itself. In an increasing number of job adverts it is part of an either/or pair with Python. Like Python, Perl, PHP and Tcl, it is downloadable, and there are plenty of free online resources to help you learn it.

The name of the conference says it all: JavaOne. For developers, the idea that there is one Java is a guarantee of consistency. But when Sun announced that it would open-source Java, developers offered a range of reactions, from applause at the initial announcement to later concerns over whether Sun can keep Java from taking different paths.

Ubuntu Project Founder's Comments, Analysis and Insight From 451 Analysts, Available Online

Canonical to support Sun's T1000 and T2000 servers on upcoming release of Ubuntu, as Sun's embrace of Linux gains a key supporter.

I still see people arguing about whether GNU/Linux is “ready for the desktop”. The truth is, it really depends... For me, I switched almost “cold turkey” from Windows 3.1 to Debian “Slink” in about 1999 or 2000 (at the time, I liked to say I “upgraded from Win 3.1 to GNU/Linux”).

Before there was Linux, before there was open source, there was (and still is) an operating system called Unix that was robust, stable and widely admired. It was also available under license to anyone that wanted to use it, and partly for that reason many variants grew up and lost interoperability - and the Unix wars began. The same thing could happen to Linux.

In one corner, we have the champ -- Windows. Come January, it will come out swinging with what Microsoft tells us is the latest and greatest version ever -- Vista.

In the other corner, we have the challenger -- OpenSUSE 10.1, the latest shipping version of Novell/SUSE's community Linux. Sometime this summer, its commercial version, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, will come out looking to KO the champ.

Before this epic battle begins, let's take a look at their training camps.

Version 1.3.0 of the Linux Brochure Project (LBP) has been released. LBP is a GPL'd Linux advocacy and publicity project which documents key Linux information in a standard-sized brochure .