Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Smaller than a credit card, BITalino is a low-cost hardware and open source software toolkit, aligned with the DIY (do-it-yourself) movement. It enables anyone to create quirky and serious projects alike for wearable health tracking devices. The base kit includes sensors to measure your muscles, heart, nervous system, motion, and ambient light—and it includes a microcontroller, Bluetooth, power management module, and all the accessories needed to start working.

If you want to spark a religious war, express an unshakeable preference for a programming language, and by preference, make your favourite something relatively obscure, like Erlang. It turns out, according to a study by a bunch of UC Davis boffins, the differences in code quality between languages are pretty small.

Look beyond London, and one of the largest concentrations in Europe of all things innovative in IT is Manchester, which – despite having a quarter of London’s population, and little of the media and government attention – has a thriving tech start-up scene supported by a range of groups covering every technology or business methodology; the Lean Agile Manchester meet-up group alone has nearly 400 members.

Firefox for mobile, codenamed Fennec, is the build of the Mozilla Firefox web browser for devices such as Android smartphones and tablet computers. Fennec is available in multiple languages, and just a few months ago, was launched in the Hindi language along with others like: Assamese, Bengali (India), Gujarati, Kannada, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu.

As has become regrettably typical for the Fedora project, the first Fedora 21 beta is well behind schedule. According to the current schedule on the Fedora wiki, the final version will arrive about a month late, on 9 December. That is if nothing goes wrong during the beta testing phase that's just started.

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, says it's working on a new "virtualization experience" based on container technologies – but just how it will operate remains something of a mystery. Canonical founder and erstwhile space tourist Mark Shuttleworth announced the new effort, dubbed LXD and pronounced "lex-dee," during a keynote speech at the OpenStack Expo in Paris on Tuesday.

Diamond Systems released the EMX standard in 2011 as an industry standard supported by its EmbeddedXpress.org organization. The only EMX format SBC we’ve seen so far, however, is Diamond’s Intel Atom E680T-based Altair SBC, which is a true single-board design. Now, Diamond is offering a ruggedized, EMX-sized, sandwich-style SBC that incorporates COM Express Basic modules powered by Intel’s 3rd Generation “Ivy Bridge” Core CPUs. The “Vega” SBC is designed for rugged industrial, medical, on-vehicle, and military applications, and is also offered as part of a rugged “Raptor-Vega” embedded PC (see farther below)

Micro/sys unveiled an EPIC-sized “SBC4661? SBC that combines a Freescale i.MX6 Quad SoC with a Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA, and offers extensive camera support. The last time we heard from Micro/sys, George W. Bush was president, and Intel still had a processor architecture called XScale. Like the circa-2008, XScale-based RCB1626 single board computer, the new SBC4661 runs Linux and uses the StackableUSB expansion interface.

The concept is simple; invite geeks of varying backgrounds to a central location for a weekend, supply them with food, drink, and an interesting problem, and see what happens. Kind of like the 40 Hour Famine, but with more eating, and labour donations instead of money. ThoughtWorks, an agile developement and design company, hosted and sponsored (among other sponsors, like Red Hat) the second annual Health Hack in Melbourne, bringing researchers together with technologists at their office in Melbourne’s central business district for 48 hours to create software that solved a problem in the health sciences. All the code developed at Health Hack would be released under an open source license, and in most cases, took advantage of some form of open data.

FirefoxOS_for_press_releaseMozilla, the mission-based organization dedicated to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web, is pleased to announce that Firefox OS will soon expand to Africa. The Firefox OS ecosystem has gained support from three new key partners in the region: Airtel, MTN South Africa and Tigo, operated by Millicom, are the first carriers working with Mozilla to soon bring first Firefox OS smartphones to Africa.

Monitor Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian Wheezy Servers with Linux-Dash This document describes how to install and configure Linux-dash in Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian Wheezy for monitoring server performances easily. Linux-dash is a low-overhead monitoring web dashboard for a GNU/Linux machine. Simply drop-in the app and go! Linux-dash is a memory efficient, low resource, easy to install, server statistics monitoring script written in PHP. The web statistics page allows you to drag and drop the various widgets and rearrange the display as you desire. The script displays live statistics of your server, including RAM, CPU, Disk Space, Network Information, Installed Software’s, Running Processes and much more. The main advantage of Linux-dash is that it works on real-time basis.

Facebook has never had much of a reputation for letting users hide their identities online. But now the world’s least anonymous website has just joined the Web’s most anonymous network. In a first-of-its-kind move for a Silicon Valley giant, Facebook on Friday launched a Tor hidden service, a version of its website that runs the anonymity software Tor. That new site, which can only be accessed by users running the Tor software, bounces users’ connections through three extra encrypted hops to random computers around the Internet, making it far harder for any network spy observing that traffic to trace their origin.

According to the Open Security Foundation, three out of 10 of the all-time worst security breaches happened this year. That includes 173 million records from the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission, 145 million records at Ebay, and 104 million records from the Korea Credit Bureau.

There will be a KDE exhibit at the upcoming LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference. The full conference takes place November 9 ? 14 in Seattle; the expo is open on the 12th and 13th. There is no charge to attend the expo. Several members of the KDE Community will be in the booth—presenting various aspects of KDE; answering questions; demonstrating applications (thanks especially to Krita and ogbog); recruiting contributors, users, companies and sponsors. All members of the KDE Community are welcome to visit, to jump in & represent KDE, or to just make contact with other KDE people. These small regional gatherings are necessary until we are financially self-sustaining enough to justify a national gathering such as Akademy. The Seattle KDE group is off to a great start.

Here’s a question I was asked recently by an IT buddy: where do hackers live? Where are they from? Well, new studies and reports have been bubbling up over the last month or so, and although I don’t have a definitive answer, I can take a stab at answering his question.

The Fedora 21 beta release is here, and – as usual – is packed with amazing improvements to Fedora, as well as fantastic free and open source software, gently harvested for your enjoyment. No bits were harmed in the making of this beta.

Chris C. Kemp is the Chief Strategy Officer of Nebula, Inc., a leading cloud computing and IaaS provider which helps enterprises deploy and manage OpenStack-based private clouds. Previously to founding Nebula, Chris served as NASA's first CTO where he cofounded the OpenStack project. His experience with both the public and private sector gives Chris unique insights into the present and future of OpenStack and cloud computing in general. Today he shares his those thoughts into a variety of topics ranging from public/private collaboration in open source; how CIOs can best leverage public, private, and hybrid clouds; and some of the ways cloud computing could eventually change the way we govern ourselves worldwide.

Google’s Miško Hevery, co-inventor of the popular AngularJS framework, has announced a new project to improve JavaScript by adding type annotations and other features.

Every time I write a Bash script or schedule a cron job, I worry about the day I'll star in my very own IT version of a Folger's commercial. Instead of "secretly replacing coffee with Folger's Instant Crystals", however, I worry I'll be replaced by an automation framework and a few crafty FOR loops. If you've ever had nightmares like that, you're in the right place. The truth is, the need for system administrators isn't going down—it's just that our job function is shifting a little. If you stay current, and resolve to be a lifelong learner, system administration is as incredible as it's always been. (And far better than instant coffee! Yuck!) This month, we focus on system administration. It keeps us all relevant, all informed and most important, we should all learn a little something along the way.

If you think like a super-villain, laugh like an anti-hero, and can write code, it's time to polish off the cackle, sharpen up the brain, get extra coffee, and start working on your entry to the Underhanded C contest.