Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A stability and security update to SeaMonkey, the community-driven continuation of the all-in-one Mozilla Application Suite, has been released. As detailed in the SeaMonkey 1.1.7 section of the Mozilla Foundation Security Advisories page, the upgrade includes the same security patches as Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.10, which was also made available this week.

Neil Wilson, a recently laid-off Sun Microsystems employee and a former owner of the OpenDS project, has accused his ex-boss of using strong-arm tactics to keep control of his project. In an open letter Wilson said he's finally gone public to "clear the air" having kept quit for fear of potential retaliation from Sun. Retaliation in this case meant lost severance.

The Mozilla Corporation today released Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11, the second minor update to the browser delivered this week. This upgrade has been rushed out to fix a regression introduced in Firefox 2.0.0.10, which broke the drawImage method of the canvas element.

At one point in time and not too very long ago, I fancied myself a decent system administrator with a decent resume and work history. When I finished a series of writing tasks working on technology subjects that included system administration, I thought the time had come for me to work in a shop with Linux and MS. I put my resume up on Dice and Monster and waited for the phone to ring. When it didn't ring, I went up to see the hits. I saw six on Monster and eight on Dice. Only one company saved my data.

IPCop is a specialized Linux distribution whose sole purpose is to safeguard the computers and networks it is installed on. The distro proudly claims, "The Bad Packets Stop Here!" I recently installed IPCop 1.4.16 on my SOHO LAN, and found that it accomplishes what it sets out to do. My LAN is constantly in a state of flux, but at a minimum it contains at least two computers and a wireless access point. I use the wireless router both for Internet access from my laptop and to provide access to a Hewlett-Packard network printer that's located in a spot where a cable would be inconvenient. I add and remove the odd computer from the mix on an ongoing basis.

SoX is a power-packed command-line tool for various types of audio processing. It's very useful as an audio format converter, and it can be used for resampling audio files, converting between endianness, audio encoding and modifying other attributes of common audio file formats. Its main power, however, is its effect plugins. It can apply various effects to audio in the same way a digital audio workstation does. You can add echoes, filter frequencies, reduce or increase volume, remove noise and do various other advanced digital signal processing on sound samples.

A recent conference on open source in education at Seneca College generated interesting thoughts, published in Frank Hecker’s blog. (Hecker works for Mozilla.) This piece isn’t really about technology, but about how open source practices impact career and educational opportunities. A good read for big thinkers.

Even if you work only in Linux, you'll likely have to use Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files at one time or another. Several open source projects use this common format, including Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, and PHP. Microsoft developed CHM as a proprietary format for Windows 98, leaving behind the previous WinHelp (HLP) format. CHM is still alive and kicking in XP and Vista, though some applications use the newer Microsoft Help 2 format.

Creating a high-quality chart for the Web can be a challenging task, but open source software like Open Flash Chart (OFC) makes it a cinch. As you might guess from its name, the core engine of OFC is written in Adobe Flash. Although this means that users need a Flash browser plugin to view charts created with OFC, this approach has a significant advantage: it allows you to produce professional-quality graphs with minimum effort, because the core engine does all the heavy lifting, and all you need to do is to specify configuration options for your chart and feed data into it.

Issue #7 of Full Circle, the community-driven Ubuntu Linux magazine, is out with features on Ubuntu Studio, Wabi the Windows Ubuntu installer, and the best audio and video apps.

Slackware Linux today features a powerful and easy-to-use package management system, but making Slackware packages has not always been straightforward. Now Slackware application developers have a tool for easily making Slackware packages from source code and precompiled binaries. Src2pkg, now in version 1.6, very nearly lives up to its author's tag of being Slackware's "magic package maker."

Free-wheeling Linux was an improbable enough operating system to be used on IBM's mainframe line, but now an even more unlikely operating system is making an appearance there: Sun Microsystems' Solaris. Sun and IBM have been arch-enemies for decades, but through the combination of open-source flexibility and something of a detente between the companies, the operating system has arrived.

Bitter adversaries IBM and Sun Microsystems have been adding a little sugar to their parley. Their corporate fisticuffs have even recently given way to hand-holding. In August, the two companies revealed that IBM will offer Solaris x86 as an option to some Xeon- and Opteron-based servers. IBM's systems chief Bill Zeitler also hinted at seeing Solaris on the System Z mainframes.

I opened the morning paper and turned to the front page of Business - Section D. Right in the middle of front page at the top, four columns wide and headlined with major graphics a story line asked "Mind if we share?" The lower headline read, "BitTorrent pours out movies, TV shows - and controversy".

On the face of it, it's hardly news worth noting. On Nov. 27, Eaton announced that its Personal Solution Pac for Linux and Network Shutdown Module v3 are the first UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) power management solutions to receive Ubuntu's IHV (independent hardware vendor) Certification.

Dell agreed to ship PCs and laptops with the Ubuntu operating system after more than 130,000 people promoted the notion on the company's IdeaStorm web site. It would seem, however, that only a fraction of these zealots were willing to back their votes with cash. Dell has shipped close to 40,000 systems pre-installed with the Ubuntu flavor of Linux, according to multiple sources. By most accounts, that's a heck of a total for what remains more or less a fringe operating system.

As things start quietening down for the year, we may just get a chance to while away a few hours with games. Slipping into the holiday spirit, Tectonic has put together a list of some of the better free Linux games out there, but we want your input to decide which are the best.

Try to describe Hotwire, and you'll eventually wind up saying something that sounds like an oxymoron, like "command-line GUI," "graphical shell" or "GUI xterm." Well, that's pretty much what Hotwire is: something halfway between a text-based shell and a modern graphical user interface. In part, the confusion stems from the fuzzy definition the typical desktop user has of the Unix shell. For the most part, it is transparent to us. We probably know that some commands (like ls and chown) are separate binaries, while others (like cd and umask) are actually internal functions provided by the shell. But unless we do a lot of scripting, it can be hard to remember which is which; we type whichever we need at the prompt and get back to business.

Tim Bray recently posted the results of his Developer Tool Survey (although, I think it was really an editor/IDE survey). He asked Ruby and Rails developers about what kind of development they do (primarily Ruby or primarily Rails), and which editor/IDE they use.

Building on the success of the its last three Summer of Code programmes, Google has announced the Google Highly Open Participation Contest geared for pre-university students.