Showing headlines posted by grouch

You could say Mozilla is one of the first peer-to-peer success stories of the Internet age. Pioneers of open-source development, its Internet products, like the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email utility, were created and are still being enhanced by a dedicated community of users. So it was natural for the company to extend the community concept into marketing.

Basically Mozilla isn't claiming the same number of users as downloads since some people have downloaded multiple versions of Firefox; others have cancelled the download; while yet others download but don't regularly use Firefox.

This is a very rough guide at the moment, corrections welcome. This method doesn't remove Windows in any way, similar to booting from CD-ROM on a PC

[It's not the Apache you may be thinking about. Hope someone can do a little analysis of this; the instructions appear to be complete. -- grouch]

Write a program in Haskell that translates C type declarations into English.

This is part two of a two-part series [see linuxjournal.com/article/9096 for part one]. In this article, I build upon the concept of a parse pipeline with the State monad. Then, with all the pieces in place, I show the complete Haskell program. I also take a step back and consider why Haskell isn't as popular as some other languages and whether it deserves a place in your programmer's toolbox.

Last week Google launched an open-source project hosting service for professional software developers as part of its Google Code offerings.

"Google is rooted in open source and we would like to make it easy for others to develop innovative open-source applications," says Greg Stein, the Google engineering manager who is spearheading the hosting site. Stein joined Google after a stint as director of engineering at CollabNet, where he managed the Subversion project. He is also the chairman of the Apache Software Foundation.

[Note the comments by Jay Seirmarco, general manager of SourceForge.net on the coordination with Google. -- grouch]

If you're using MySQL, there are some easy things you can do to secure your systems and significantly reduce the risk of unauthorised access to your sensitive data.

The most valuable asset for technology-based organisations is usually the customer or product information in their databases. And so, a critical part of database administration in such organisations consists of securing these databases against outside attack and hardware/software failures.

Win4Lin, which develops desktop and enterprise Windows-on-Linux virtualization software, announced Aug. 1 that its Win4Lin Pro product is now compatible with Linspire's latest distro, Five-0. It is now available in Linspire's online CNR Warehouse.

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.

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."

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]

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.

For intensive word-only writing, most of us can type on a keyboard far faster than we can scrawl with a pen, but the speed advantage is reversed for anything that requires diagramming or mathematical formulas. The open source application Xournal, which is designed to provide keyboard-less text entry and drawing features, is one solution. Taking freehand notes without that clunky, old-fashioned keyboard has never been easier.

Did you ever wish you could automate your interaction with a program, making a script that can smartly handle an interactive session? You can -- with Expect, an extension to the Tcl programming language whose purpose is to communicate with interactive applications.

An update to SeaMonkey has been released to fix the Windows Media Player plugin issue introduced in SeaMonkey 1.0.3. Like Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6, SeaMonkey 1.0.4 contains just a single bug fix to resolve this regression accidentally introduced in the previous version.

In two weeks, Linspire Inc. will release Freespire, its community Linux distribution. This new distribution isn't just another Linux distro. It will represent the first Linux to include most of the legally licensed and available, third-party proprietary codices, drivers, and software.

To say this is a bit controversial in Linux and free software circles is like saying the dog days of August are somewhat hot. Nevertheless, Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony bit the bullet in April, and the first release candidate of Freespire is now available.

The Computer History Museum is inviting LinuxWorld attendees to bring Linux-related memorabilia, for display in a booth celebrating the 15-year anniversary of the kernel. Suitable items include historical prototypes, early business plans for Linux and open source companies, and early photographs of key figures in the Linux and open source movement.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has dismissed speculation that the success of Ubuntu will result in the death of Linux stalwart Red Hat, saying the two organisations held very different positions and had distinctly different goals. He did, however, agree that they were trying to be better than the likes of Red Hat and Novell.