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Addictive simulation and farming game Family Farm is now available for Linux. The game which focuses on building and maintaining your own farm has RPG elements to it as you can control your character with many RPG attributes like skills etc.Players can create and put themselves in control of a small Family Farm inhabited by various characters, each with different skills and needs. As the family grows, the house can be upgraded and the farm expanded into the surrounding area.

While following some links that I had received from a conversation on Diaspora* Alpha, I ran across the Smart Book, a great product from Always Innovating. While they offer them for sale, they do not yet have a shipping date. Reading their press release, it does not look like they plan to sell them in mass quantities. Imaging having a hand held Internet device, a tablet, a netbook, and screen that can be plugged into another computer, all in one device. Along with all of those features it runs multiple operating systems all at the same time. On top of everything else it is Open Hardware and Open Software. The complete package is listed at $549. I would love to get my hands on one.

Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" is set to be released on Thursday and while there are a number of new features to talk about in this latest release, the Phoronix Test Suite software has been busy analyzing the performance of this latest release. There is open-source graphics driver improvements leading to some performance improvements (such as Radeon KMS page-flipping), the famous ~200 line Linux kernel patch to improve responsiveness, and various other enhancements that catch our fancy in Ubuntu 11.04. However, one area where there is a frightening regression in Ubuntu 11.04 is with its power consumption. For mobile devices in many workloads, Ubuntu 11.04 is consuming noticeably more power than in any of the past Ubuntu Linux releases. Sadly, no one seems to have noticed in time since continuous integration testing on Linux seems to happen so haphazardly right now.

If you've ever missed an important IRC discussion because you happened to be between home and the office at just the wrong time, or if you regularly log on from a number of different locations and don't like juggling multiple IRC nicks, then you need an IRC proxy. The leading open source IRC proxy is Bip, a GPLv2 utility that is provided as a standard offering by most Linux distributions. This weekend, let's set up Bip and stop missing important discussions!

As I mentioned at the end of my last entry, I wanted to install OpenBSD to a bootable USB drive. Did that. It's as easy as installing to any other drive. You just need to look in the dmesg for what the system is calling your preferred target drive (sd2 in my case).

The KDM code for KDE SC 4.7 has just gained one small but noteworthy feature: GRUB2 support. While the KDE Display Manager gaining support for the GRUB2 boot-loader may seem nonchalant, it's actually quite useful. Now from the KDE Display Manager, users are able to select another GRUB boot entry without affecting the default choice or having to wait for the boot-loader to appear when rebooting...

In a move it describes as "maximising its investment in Linux", Yahoo! has become a silver level member of the Linux Foundation. This sees Yahoo! pay the Linux Foundation fees of between $5,000 and $20,000 per year, though closer to the latter as the rate is dependent on the number of employees. The Foundation describes Yahoo! as a major enterprise Linux user, using Linux as an integral part of its technical and developer infrastructure.

A very interesting article in Undeadly — the OpenBSD Journal tells the story of m:tier, a London consultancy that works with Fortune 500 companies to equip them with OpenBSD firewalls, servers and desktops.

Ultimate Windows Guy Ed Bott, based on a tip from a Silverlight developer, "discovers" that Google can serve up links that deliver social engineering attacks to Chrome-on-Windows users.

The best games are a learning experience, an exercise in strategic thinking, memory retention, what-if scenarios and problem solving – not unlike programming itself. Each piece in a game like chess has a limited number of moves, yet the game itself is a world of possibilities, and like a chess player, a programmer has to think ahead, so it isn't really surprising that many coders approach programming as if it was a game of chess, and are also gamers.

After a bit of searching I found a new-to-me OpenBSD Live project called MarBSD. I downloaded the X image, burned it to a CD and fired it up on the Lenovo G555.

For those that follow my personal Twitter feed will know that for the past week I've been closely testing Ubuntu 11.04 and all Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu 8.04 on many mobile devices in the office. The overall system performance, power consumption, and boot performance have been the principal targets. However, late this week I discovered a glaring regression: Ubuntu 11.04 is viciously going through power. Compared to Ubuntu 10.10, the power consumption on Ubuntu 11.04 for mobile devices is up about 10% on average but under some workloads, I am seeing the power consumption up by nearly 30%. This is happening on many mobile systems spanning multiple generations of Intel CPUs and with Intel / ATI / NVIDIA graphics. This issue has been tracked down to a frightening kernel regression in the mainline tree that is still not addressed.

It’s very rare for me to write a blog entry directed solely at what someone else has written, but there’s an exception to every rule. This one is directed at a posting by Alex Brown (of ODF/OOXML fame), entitled UK Open Standards *Sigh*. 

This week, we explore the link between Monty Python and software development, the sorry state of software security and if lazy developers really fear Agile and Scrum

"I would like to take this opportunity to point out a rather disturbing nature of the principle at play in such law suits; that a company can effectively own something as intangible and dependent on individuals other than Apple (and other plaintiffs in similar lawsuits) as product perception and reputation.."

A long time ago, in a college far far away, some nerds were playing with UNIX. At that time, UNIX shipped with ed. Some rather clever programmers made a replacement for ed called em. Em became en. En became ex. Ex is Vi. Why is this important? Understanding where Vi comes from, helps you to understand its rationale. Why does Vi matter? It's an editor that has become part of the UNIX specification. Knowing Vi means that you know at least one text editor that is present on nearly all UNIX-like operating systems (ones like: most Linux distributions, *BSD, AIX, HPUX, Solaris, OSX, etc...). This makes Vi the defacto UNIX editor. Also, while it may take time to familiarize yourself with Vi, once you know it you can be insanely efficient.

A medical industry acclaimed open source distro, Debain-Med is pioneering Open Source Bioinformatics software that brings enriched medical software for licensed or free use.

Audacious 2.5.0 was released a few days ago, getting some very interesting new features like: option to dock some of the plugins (like album art, visualisation, lyrics) into the GTK interface, configurable playlist columns, support for GTK 3.0 [...]

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is considered to be the fundamental protocol of the web. This simple request/response protocol is used for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. The web consumes a large portion of internet traffic.

Many users are already familiar with the advantages that Screenlets can offer, so I decided to seek out which ones were essential to the productivity and aesthetics of any desktop.