Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Okay, I'm not seriously suggesting Microsoft is paying off Netcraft to produce positive survey results (although this is certainly a standard operating procedure for Microsoft). But something is odd, if not rotten, in the state of Netcraft. I have often cited Netcraft web server surveys as evidence that open source beats closed source. The Netcraft surveys almost always showed Apache leading Microsoft IIS by a wide margin, and showed Apache growing as Microsoft IIS market share was shrinking. Lately, however, Netcraft began to claim that Apache market share has been shrinking rapidly while Microsoft IIS has been gaining the market share lost by Apache.

If you use Google or any other search engine, you already are a user of full text searching: the capability to search for a word or group of words within many texts for the best matches for your query. Sphinx is a full text search engine for database content, which you can integrate with other applications. (You can test it or use it with a command-line tool, but Sphinx is most useful as part of a Web site, not as a standalone utility.)

Sure, it’s probably too early to dance on the grave of DRM, but we can certainly continue pounding nails in its coffin after Wal-Mart drove a stake through its heart this week. And that’s not counting all the garlic, silver bullets, and hemlock showered on DRM recently by Apple, EMI, Amazon, and Universal. It’s still twitching and gasping, and we may have some zombification ahead of us, but the tipping point is nigh. You can smell it.

LightScribe technology, which allows users to etch labels directly onto CDs and DVDs, finally arrived on GNU/Linux in late 2006. LaCie LightScribe Labeler for Linux (4L) was released in October 2006, with Hewlett-Packard's LightScribe business unit releasing its own Simple Labeler a month later. Both are free downloads with proprietary licenses, but they are currently the only tools available for using LightScribe on GNU/Linux. Both offer basic labeling, but each is limited in its own way.

Installing Fedora 5 on Toshiba Satellite A135-S2246 laptop. Includes Atheros WiFi. Interesting stuff is around getting Mobile Broadband Wireless Card via PCMCIA Slot to work including a solution for "NO CARRIER" error for Sprint Pantech PX-500 mobile broadband card.

This guest whitepaper offers suggestions on creating Linux stacks that are fully compatible with proprietary software. It was written by three Access employees, and at times uses the Access Linux Platform (ALP) as an example of such a stack.

Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, gave a keynote speech at the Govtech conference in Cape Town where he spoke about how the broader landscape is shifting and what sort of strategies different countries are adopting to position themselves for success.

Merakka have announced that the next round of Linux Professional Institute exams will be held in both Pretoria and Cape Town.

Tools like phpMyEdit allow you to create a quick-and-dirty front end to a database, but what if you need to publish a spreadsheet or BibTeX file on your Web site and give your visitors the ability to dynamically sort, filter, group, and visualize the published data? For that, you can turn to SIMILE Exhibit, an impressive data publishing framework that uses plain old HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript to create Web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and data visualization. Exhibit requires neither database nor server-side coding wizardry, and you can master the tool in no time, even if you don't have any programming experience.

Users regularly cite lack of compatibility with Microsoft Office files as a reason for not using OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org does include Microsoft Office export filters, as well as a number of settings for increased compatibility, but these features provide only good, not complete, compatibility. For this reason, Sun Microsystems' ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office, released earlier this year, sounded like good news. Promising export and import filters for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the free download appeared to tackle compatibility from a new but promising angle by giving Microsoft Office users the ability to open and save files in Open Document Format, the default format for OpenOffice.org 2.0 and higher. Unfortunately, the plugin is designed for older versions of Windows and Microsoft Office. If you're using the increasingly ubiquitous Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, the plugin delivers only a fraction of what it promises.

Is this a joke? I only recently started paying attention to Windows Home Server, since I tend to focus more on desktop operating systems and enterprise server systems. So I didn't realize until now that WHS is really just a vanilla file server. There's nothing wrong with being an ordinary file server for the home. After all, with many home users having multiple computers and gigabytes of music, photos and movies, it's well past time for homes to start having simple-to-use file servers. But, why pay extra for it?

Most Web publishing systems on the market can automatically generate RSS feeds, but there are situations where you might want to have fine-grained control over your RSS feeds. For example, you might want to provide alternative RSS item descriptions, or to manually select which RSS items to publish. While you can code an RSS feed by hand, you'd be better off using a dedicated tool like ListGarden. It can help you to not only create and manage RSS feeds, but also to do more advanced tasks like publish the feeds on a remote server, back up the feeds, generate an HTML page, and much more.

Who’s afraid of SELinux? Well, if you are, you shouldn’t be! Thanks to the introduction of new GUI tools, customizing your system’s protection by creating new policy modules is easier than ever. In this article, Dan Walsh gently walks you through the policy module creation process. A lot of people think that building a new SELinux policy is magic, but magic tricks never seem quite as difficult once you know how they’re done. This article explains how I build a policy module and gives you the step-by-step process for using the tools to build your own.

Durban's official municipal website, which runs on Plone, recently underwent a facelift and has plans to integrate some interesting open source software features which will encourage greater citizen participation.

Jungseung Lee announced the first public release ofgitstat,"a GPL'd, web-based git statistics/monitoring system." He explains,"it retrieves a specified git tree, analyzes changesets, and shows graphical information like the number of changesets per day, the number of people who submitted changesets for a specific version(tag), etc." The link above offers a graphical view of Linus' mainline 2.6 kernel tree, with daily commit statistics, monthly commit statistics, kernel release frequency, and per-author statistics. Jungseung noted:"Gitstat was derived from kfm (kernel feature monitor) which was originally developed by Keun-Sik Lim and Sang-Bae Lee of Samsung Electronics and currently maintained and developed by Jeong-Seung Lee and Soon-Son Kwon(Shawn) of Samsung Electronics. Kfm was inspired from Jon Corbet of lwn.net when he analyzed the git tree and Greg KH when he presented similar status report at OLS2007. We thought it would be interesting information every day."read more |rsync.net - Secure Offsite Data

The year is 1993, and I'm at the Spencer Katt party at Fall Comdex, back when Comdex was "the" technology show of technology shows. There, I, a freelance technology journalist, meet Jim Louderback, then the director of PC Weeks Labs. We end up talking about operating systems. He rather liked Windows for Workgroups for the desktop; I sang the praises of SCO Open Desktop 2.0. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, even though we completely disagree about operating systems.

As a former course designer and academic, I used to be experienced in talking in front of people. However, one thing I hadn't done until now is appear on television. That, more than anything, is why I agreed to appear on the computer show Lab with Leo Laporte in a five-minute spot about the GNU/Linux desktop. The show is scheduled to appear October 11 on G4TechTV in Canada and the How-To Channel in Australia, with my spot being posted to Google Video on the same day. I won't know if I look savvy or imbecilic until I see how the segment is edited, but the experience taught me several points about appearing on TV in general, and evangelizing for GNU/Linux in the studio in particular.

Technalign, developers of both the community and commercial Pioneer Linux operating systems, recently announced the release of Pioneer Explorer 1.0 and the Programs folder. In the past, Technalign built its Linux distributions from Ubuntu, Debian and MEPIS codebases. While this new distribution still shows its Ubuntu/Debian roots, it's now going in its own direction.

Not too long ago I treated myself to a HP 3050 multi-function laser printer with fax, scanner, and copier. I almost went with Samsung because it makes good machines, and all of its monochrome printers have Linux drivers. But they are closed, proprietary binary drivers which are bad enough on their own: big fat pains to install and upgrade. And then the news broke about the ingenious security holes and inexplicable permissions changes on key directories introduced by the amusingly awful installer for the Samsung drivers, and that was all she wrote. HP, on the other hand, supports good-quality, well-supported genuine FOSS drivers, HPLIP, which we introduced ourselves to last week.

In my last blog post, I mentioned the work on rubinius (then at a 0.7 release and now at 0.8) and JRuby. I also promised I’d follow up on them. Here’s what’s been going on so far.