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In our last article we discussed the benefits of leveraging the services of other applications before attempting to duplicate existing functionality in our own applications. Built-in applications such as Maps, Email, Phone (yes that is an application too), SMS, Media Player, Camera and others are all at our disposal and may be called upon to bring sought-after functionality to our applications.

Has Facebook stolen your privacy? Take back the logs, take control of your data and make Facebook irrelevant. Richard Smedley explores two worlds of social networking - one good, one evil…

Last summer, a new organization was announced with the goal of promoting the uptake of open source software by the U.S. federal government. Now that organization has completed its first quite successful year of operations, and its celebrating by announcing an awards program to recognize those that have been most influential in advancing its goals. Maybe you know someone who's contributions to open source should be recognized.

Free software is a different beast from gratis software. Free software activist, Richard Stallman, discusses the importance of freedom across all modes of computing. The software developer and political activist is best known for his creation during the early 1980's of the GNU Project, which combined with Linus Torvalds' kernel programming efforts in the early 1990's to form what we today refer to as the Linux operating system.

This guide explains how to integrate XCache into PHP5 and lighttpd on an OpenSUSE 11.2 system. From the XCache project page: "XCache is a fast, stable PHP opcode cacher that has been tested and is now running on production servers under high load." It's similar to other PHP opcode cachers, such as eAccelerator and APC.

Researchers at Russian security company Kaspersky Lab say they've discovered the first malicious software program to target Google's Android mobile operating system. The application masquerades as a media player, according to a Kaspersky blog post. But if it is installed, the rogue application begins secretly sending SMSes (Short Message Service) to a premium rate number presumably belonging to the hackers who created it.

A plug computer sounds like such a good idea, until you realize that before you can actually put it to some practical use, you need to install and configure some software and applications -- a task that requires time and technical skills. Fortunately, the recently announced Amahi Plug Edition solution provides a better and easier way to turn a plug computer into a useful device.

The Free Technology Academy (FTA) is an international institution based in Europe, whose goal is to provide online education, at master level, about Free Software. I interviewed FTA director Wouter Tebben to know how the FTA works and what are its plans for the next year.

The opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM has released version 1.5M1. This new version is designed to allow users to get up and running on opentaps quickly and help developers with customizing opentaps.

Canonical developer Rick Spencer has blogged about the recent discovery of a canonical-census package in the Ubuntu repositories. Although initial speculation suggested Canonical was tracking the users of pre-installed systems with Ubuntu, Spencer points out that the idea of the census package is actually to count the number of OEM installed Ubuntu system without identifying the users of those systems.

Organizations that are interested in using open source in their own products but are wary of intellectual property issues might want to examine a new, mostly free, assistance program just launched by the non-profit Linux Foundation.

Here it is time for new q4wine release tagged by the 0.119 version.

GNOME Shell is a new completely revamped user interface for GNOME. GNOME Shell brings a new window manager called Mutter which is a combination of Metacity and Clutter. This reportedly makes Compiz unnecessary(and incompatible too).

Google's Android has won partial re-admission to the Linux kernel, but much work lies ahead for a full re-entry. Code written by Linux kernel maintainer Rafael Wysocki has been adopted in the kernel tree that re-implements Android's wake locks feature — to stop a device from completely shutting down — in what has been called a "socially acceptable way".

Even the nearly-defunct XGI Technology Inc is able to produce open-source graphics driver code for Linux while VIA continues on with their Linux mess, even with XGI developers working from Windows. In preparations for the X.Org 7.6 Katamari and this month's release of X Server 1.9, a new release of the XGI DDX driver has been made available.

I’ll get back to my coverage of R real soon, but I wanted to continue my thoughts on Cloud HPC. In addition, one of the reasons I need to postpone this article again is my small personal Limulus cluster had to be been taken apart, measured, checked, and reassembled. I use this cluster to try things (like R) and develop software. I am working with a sheet metal fabricator on the next (and final) revision of case modifications. I also installed a new kernel that caused some USB issues. I resolved the issue by using a different cable, but the old kernel still works fine with both cables, go figure. Without USB I cannot control the power to the nodes (unless I rewire some things), so it was slow going for a while. In any case, I had more thoughts about Cloud HPC as well.

At the end of last month I wrote a brief guide for getting Starcraft 2 working under Linux using Wine. In the last ten days that guide has gotten nearly nine thousand views and currently has ninety comments.

Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president for Linux and virtualization engineering at Oracle, came to LinuxCon with a message: The open source operating system will remain a priority at Oracle even now that it owns Sun Microsystems and its competing Solaris OS.

Martin-Éric Racine has just announced the release candidate of the X.Org Geode 2.11.9 driver in preparations for the X.Org 7.6 Katamari. The AMD Geode driver is not to be confused with the AMD/ATI Radeon drivers for Linux, but rather this is the driver Geode GX and Geode LX embedded SoC such as what's used by the One-Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. When announcing this driver, Martin-Éric has shared that AMD engineers are back to actually contributing work towards this driver.

Those who are in favor of open source frequently become near apoplectic at the thought that open source software can be, and in fact should be, patented. The reality is that forward thinking companies that operate in the open source space do make use of the patent system. A quick search of Freepatentsonline.com shows that Red Hat, Inc., one of the preeminent open source companies in the world, is named as the assignee on some 263 US patents or US patent applications. So if you are about to make an enormous mistake and listen to the “open source means free” community, ask yourself why a highly successful company like Red Hat uses the patent system and acquires patents. If patents are good for Red Hat, an open source company not at all enamored with the existence of software patents, then why are software patents bad for you? Shouldn’t you model your business off successful companies?