Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Knowledge of a secondary language has long been a coveted skill, whether it be for academics, business, or travel, but learning another language can be a challenging task. While many Western languages at least offer a level of familiarity by sharing the Roman alphabet, Japanese and other Eastern languages offer no such comfort. Here are three applications that can help you overcome some learning roadblocks.

There is always myths that surround the Veterans Affairs (VA) VistA Electronic Health Record. I have not found a compendium of these myths and the facts so I wrote this list. As well I was partially inspired by Fred Trotter's recent 'Antiquated or Proven?'response to a detractor of VistA. Please feel free to add to this list by replying below.

The second annual "Open Source in Mobile" (OSiM) conference has announced its sponsors and program of events. Set for Sep. 18-19 in Madrid, Spain, the event features keynotes from representatives of Nokia, Access, Red Hat, Motorola, Telecom Italia, and HP.

A group of developers from free software digital video recorder (DVR) related projects announced the first step towards a solution for obtaining free television listing information this week. The search for such a free guide data source has been on since June, when Zap2it Labs announced it would shut down its free, XML-based service as of September 1.

You can stop computer-based slacking -- like the compulsive reloading of Digg or Reddit at the expense of productivity -- with a few changes to your computer's DNS profile, and enforce the changes using Lockout, a tool designed to enforce discipline and increase productivity.

After a short break, we return to the next interview in the People Behind KDE series, travelling back to Germany to talk to a developer who wants to make things as simple as possible - for both users and developers. The recent winner of an aKademy Award for Best Non-Application for his work on Phonon - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Matthias Kretz.

Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 was released on Thursday 14th June. This update to the Mozilla Corporation's mail client includes bug fixes but no new features. For the first time, this release of Thunderbird is available in Korean.

Offering a potential alternative to the existing suspend and restore implementations in the Linux Kernel, Ying Huang posted a patch utilizing kexec, "kexec based hibernation has some potential advantages over uswsusp and suspend2. " He listed two such potential advantages, "the hibernation image size can exceed half of memory size easily," and, "the hibernation image can be written to and read from almost anywhere, such as a USB disk [or] NFS."

We are currently reviewing the debian.org account database and checking a list of developer accounts that *appear* to be inactive. The purpose of this review is simply to minimize the number of live but unused debian.org accounts since they (in sufficient numbers) are an active security concern. It's _not_ intended as a judgment or criticism of contributions to Debian made by those who may end up on our radar.

If the command line is your preferred management interface, smooth out your keyboarding with these handy utilities.

What many may describe as a ludicrous decision by a US federal court of appeal has threatened the immediate future of Internet radio, with many smaller net broadcasters saying they will not be able to afford new fees imposed by the US Government's Copyright Royalty Board. The new fee structure has resulted from intense lobbying from SoundExchange, a group representing artists and record companies.

[Isn't it nice to know that when they really want something, they get it? - Scott]

The OpenTaal project (Dutch for"OpenLanguage") has published the first open source word list to be certified by the Dutch Language Union as corresponding to official spelling. Simon Brouwer, project leader of OpenTaal, says,"This is a milestone. Users of open source software can trust their Dutch spell checker now. They have the guarantee that their word list is consistent with the official spelling."

Nokia's Navigation Kit for the N800 Internet Tablet works great when used in a car in metropolitan outskirts. However, the unit seems a bit pricey for what you get, is ill-suited to outdoor use, and seems to struggle holding a fix when the battery gets low.

The 2007 [Ottawa] Linux Symposium has run its course. All of the casualties from the closing party (perhaps made more numerous by the new practice of sending around waiters with trays full of shots of tequila) should have found their way home by now. Your editor has returned from this year's event; here's his summary of what took place.

Included in Andrew Morton's potential 2.6.23 merge list were a series of patches to make the x86-64 architecture tickless. Andi Kleen, the x86-64 maintainer replied, "I'm sceptical about the dynticks code. It just rips out the x86-64 timing code completely, which needs a lot more review and testing. Probably not .23." Linus Torvalds agreed, "we are *not* going to do another 'rip everything out, and replace it with new code' again. Over my dead body. We're going to do this thing gradually, or not at all."

Thanks to everyone who commented on my last post, about Jabber servers. Quite a few of them seem to play nicely with LDAP; the trouble with the setup here is that we have LDAP + Kerberos, and it’s the Kerberos part that seems problematic.

I stumbled across an interesting and useful tool recently called dzen, a"general purpose messaging and notification program" written by Rob Manea. Basically, dzen provides an instant-on/instant-off pop-up terminal window, along with a multitude of options that allow you to run just about any command.

MEPIS on July 9 announced the "Spartacus" release of antiX, a community-built, ultralight derivative of the MEPIS Linux distribution. AntiX (pronounced "Antics") is the personal project of MEPIS community member "anticapitalista," who engineered it as a free version of MEPIS aimed at old 32-bit PC hardware. AntiX is built using the MEPIS Linux 6.5 core, but mostly it has a different set of default user applications.

Dell Ubuntu Linux buyers were recently outraged when a price comparison between identical Inspiron 1420 laptops showed that instead of the Ubuntu system being cheaper, it actually ended up costing $225 more than the same laptop with Vista Home Basic Edition. "Bottom line this was an oversight, pure and simple," a Dell spokesperson told DesktopLinux.com. The prices have been reset to the appropriate prices.

Lenovo seems to have a love/hate relationship with Linux. Last year, it began offering its high-end T60p ThinkPad laptop with SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). This year, the company is releasing its newest high-end laptop, the T61p ThinkPad, and once more, while it runs desktop Linux, the company isn't overly eager to let the world know about it.