Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In my article about theweb site for theGeek Ranch I suggested three tools that made sense for doing the site: Drupal, Joomla and Karrigell. Well, as usual, all I have to do is say "I will pick between X, Y and Z" and good old option W shows up. This time, it is named webgen.read more

High-end project management tools and low-end to-do utilities are a dime a dozen these days. But what if you need something less complicated than a full-blown project management application, but more flexible than a simple to-do list? In that case, give jWorkSheet (JWS) a try. This tiny Java-based tool offers basic project and task management features sprinkled with worksheet-like capabilities. The result is a simple yet functional tool for keeping track of your projects and tasks and the time you spend on them. It's especially useful if you bill per hour and a need a simple utility to track your time.

The first thing we can say about the Linux desktop in 2007 is that there are more users than ever. The Linux Foundation 2006 survey had fewer than 10,000 people signing in. This year more than 20,000 Linux desktop users reported in. Who are these users? Most of them, 69.4 percent, work in small companies with one to 100 workers. To no surprise, many of them, 43.3 percent, are IT professionals or software developers, and most of them, 64.1 percent, have already deployed desktop Linux in the office.

Whether you refer to online maps occasionally or on a daily basis, you can add several extensions to your Firefox browser to make Web-based mapping services even more useful.

Red Hat has launched a regionwide campaign in hopes of raising awareness of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5's virtualization capabilities. The campaign, Integrated Virtualization Inside, kicked off in Beijing Thursday, and will introduce RHEL 5's virtualization capabilities to customers through methods such as training courses.

While recently talking with a fellow network admin, I learned about Nipper. While there are many tools available to perform security audits of network devices, Nipper is unique. Let me show you why.

A streaming version of the British Broadcasting Corporation's iPlayer online TV on-demand service has been launched for the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. This is the first time a U.K. broadcaster has provided an on-demand streaming service for all three platforms.

LXer Feature: 16-Dec-2007

In this weeks roundup Andy Updegrove continues his series on ODF vs. OOXML, Open Source Fonts, a new version of Picasa for Linux, our own Hans Kwint asks "Do Linux filesystems need defragmentation?", KDE takes a stand on OOXML and Carla Schroder gives her advice to those brave enough to run Debian Volatile. Also, Microsoft decides to stay quiet on what Unix code it may own, someone figures out how to get a OLPC laptop to run XP, why the NYSE using Linux is important and Richard Stallman finally goes off the deep end.

At the end of November, LWN posted a pointer to Novell's announcement for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Realtime offering. The resulting comments were surprisingly negative. Some readers took exception to the language of the release - though it really is just the standard tortured English which is seemingly required for press releases. But others question the need for realtime response in "enterprise" settings. Anybody who is still wondering about the value of that product will be doubly confused now that Red Hat has announced a realtime distribution service of its own. Clearly somebody sees a need for deterministic response in big corporate deployments.

The OS has made little headway into phones so far, but that is set to change due to Google's push for open-source platform for mobile devices.

The IT skills shortage is like global warming - you either believe it exists or you don't. Either way, one thing's for certain - the debate refuses to lay down and die. For those who believe there is a shortage, there is plenty of evidence to support their argument. And for those who believe the shortage is a myth that's perpetrated by businesses to justify sending skilled jobs to less-expensive regions or hire in inexpensive immigrant labour, then there appears to be plenty of supporting evidence, too.

Arena Solutions produces and sells a hosted, subscription-based product lifecycle management (PLM) tool for manufacturing companies. Arena founder and CTO Eric Larkin uses open source tools to develop, secure, and maintain the software-as-a-service product. He believes that open source is the path to success for subscription software. "It's a more cost-effective way to build and scale a SAAS business," he says.

ABC news has a video and transcript : "Socialized medicine may sound un-American, but in fact, it's exactly what we provide to our American heroes -- the more than 5 million armed forces veterans and their families. They get health care that the government both pays for and delivers. It's the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, and according to health care experts such as Phil Longman -- it's become one of the best health care systems in the country. So how did the once-maligned VA transform itself? "First and foremost, by pioneering electronic medical records," Longman said. "Which is a much bigger deal than it might sound." Experts generally agree that electronic records are absolutely essential to significant health care reform. However, only about 5 percent of the nation's hospitals now have them. That means, for example, that in most private hospitals 20 percent of lab tests are repeated simply because doctors can't find a patient's results. But in the VA system, every patient's records are as close as a computer. It saves millions of dollars. And it's not just good business, it's good medicine..."

After an unexpected delay of eight days, Novell finally announced its financial results for its fourth fiscal quarter and 2007 fiscal year, which ended Oct. 31, 2007. Novell reported net revenue for the overall year of $932 million, a loss of $26 million or 8 cents per share, although the company also reported 69% growth in its core Linux products.

Red Hat yesterday announced that it had appointed TSI-Systems as a JBoss Certified Systems Integrator for South Africa. This follows Red Hat's August announcement of Obsidian Training as JBoss' first official training partner in South Africa.

If you’ve ever gone looking for legitimately free fonts, you’ve probably found that there are a lot of really bad ones. But there’s also a lot of discussion out there about “open source fonts.” Some who post about open source fonts are really just talking about free-as-in-beer typefaces. Some, however, have embraced the open source philosophy as applied to typography.

PacketProtector is an embedded Linux distribution based on OpenWRT, the first popular distribution designed to run on a number of wireless routers commonly found in SOHO settings. Like X-Wrt, which we reviewed earlier this year, PacketProtector extends OpenWrt by offering additional functionality to enhance network security right out of the box. PacketProtector's forte is the ability to use properly prepared USB drives for swap and storage. At present, the only routers supported are the Linksys WRTSL54GS and the Asus WL-500g, in either the Deluxe or Premium models. PacketProtector.org provided me with a loaner Linksys WRTSL54GS on which to do the review. I used both an external USB IDE drive and a USB key flash drive with the router.

Open-source projects often face the problem of keeping track of a project's code, while avoiding stifling developers' creativity. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, claims it has a solution to that problem: Bazaar 1.0, its new version control system.

With IT budgets getting tighter, managers need to trim costs. Service contracts are expensive for any technology; firewalls are no exception. Netfilter, the project that provides the packet filtering program iptables, is a free firewall alternative. While it lacks the service contract of commercial solutions and a pretty interfaces to make firewall modification easy, it has solid performance, performs effectively at firewalling, and allows for add-on functionality to enhance its reporting and response functions.

In a Ministry of Justice report, which can be found on the New Zealand Open Source Society Web site, the ministry addresses traditional concerns about open source, and concludes that although "open source software [OSS] was once an extraordinary way of thinking, limited to academia and small guerrilla projects in a community of hackers...[it] can lead to a more stable, supportable and cost-effective IT environment, and should be pursued for pragmatic reasons".