Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Over the last few columns, we’ve looked at some fundamental concepts in Python, concerning objects, object- oriented programming and how objects are stored in memory. This issue, let’s take a look at the Raspberry Pi and one of the unique features not usually offered on single-board computers. Of course, I’m speaking of the GPIO pins. GPIO stands for general-purpose input/ output. The pins provide an interface between the Raspberry Pi and the outside world. They can act as either inputs into the computer, or outputs to the world. With the addition of these pins, the possibilities for the Raspberry Pi explode. It goes from being simply a single-board computer to a project platform.

The KDE Applications 4.13 announcement highlighted the delightful new capabilities of Palapeli, the KDE jigsaw puzzle application. What the announcement did not mention is that the Palapeli maintainer, Ian Wadham, is celebrating 50 years of software experience. He’s ready to hand off Palapeli and his other KDE software development responsibilities. Albert Astals Cid called attention to Ian’s achievements and suggested a Dot interview.

The Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) was established in May 2012, by a group of public plant breeders, small seed company plant breeders, farmer-breeders, and advocates for seed sovereignty. OSSI was formed in order to enhance vigorous innovation in plant breeding by the creation of a licensing framework for germplasm exchange that would preserve the right to unencumbered use of shared seeds and their progeny in subsequent use. We had hoped that we could develop a legally defensible license for germplasm in the way that the free and open source software movement developed its licenses.

Samsung finally lifted the veil on the world’s first Tizen smartphone, the “Samsung Z,” and is showcasing it at this week’s Tizen Developer Conference. In its announcement of the Tizen Z, Samsung described it as being “built on top of unparalleled quality and the cutting-edge technology of Samsung’s latest premium smartphone.” Despite the rhetoric, the Z’s specs aren’t particularly spectacular — yet it still earns high marks for chutzpah, being the first mobile handset to venture down the untrodden Tizen smartphone path.

The only way to truly beat Hack 'n' Slash, a new video game from Double Fine Productions, is to reprogram it. But playing the game—a sendup to traditional adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, which place players on quests that involve battling monsters, collecting artifacts, and solving puzzles—requires no programming knowledge whatsoever. Nor does it demand familiarity with coding tools. Instead, Hack 'n' Slash makes manipulating the game's source code part of the game itself. To play it is to hack it.

I’ve been watching HBO’s tech-startup spoof Silicon Valley. One of the reoccurring background jokes is that every software company, large and small, purports to be making the world a better place — usually as a sort of reflexive afterthought with no real meaning. In Fedora, we’re a little more modest with our claims, but we back them with both sincerity and action. We sometimes debate the relative positioning of our “Freedom, Friends, Features, First” foundations (of course we do — we’re a community-driven open source project, and so everything is always up for discussion), but our collective goal of leading the advancement of the free and open source world together is never in doubt.

The way Linux development has worked for the last several years has been relatively straight forward. Every six to 10 weeks there is a new Linux kernel, with each kernel requiring six to eight release candidates. At the end of the release cycle, Linus Torvalds opens up the 'merge' window during which new code is pulled in from the various sub-system maintainer developer trees.

If you code a little, you know how handy an Integrated Development Environment (IE) can be. Java, C, Python, they all become a lot more accessible when the IDE software is checking the syntax for you, compiling in the background, or importing the libraries you need. On the other hand, if you are on Linux, […]Continue reading... The post How to turn Vim into a full-fledged IDE appeared first on Xmodulo. Related FAQs: How to open a large text file on Linux How to edit a remote file over ssh How to install Adobe Flash Player on Linux How to take a full-length screenshot of a web page in Linux How to set up C/C++ development environment in Eclipse

The open-source SPARK 2014 language can prove that code correctly matches specs. This capability closes off vulnerabilities and illuminates logic errors in code. It seems like every week or so, we are reading about some new software disaster (often described as a "glitch" in the press) caused by a bug in a program. Recently publicized incidents include recalls of cars due to a significant error in the control software, and shortly before that, the security hole in many Apple operating systems. The "glitch du jour" is a little more spectacular: the Heartbleed bug has caused a security hole in literally tens of millions of devices from dozens of manufacturers. This is a particularly disturbing defect because there is no way to tell if some malevolent intruder has taken advantage of it.

Google has quietly begun rolling out a new version of Android to its flagship Nexus devices, but so far it has remained shtum on just what has changed. Support pages from US wireless player T-Mobile reveal that the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 handsets and the 2013 version of the Nexus 7 tablet all began receiving over-the-air updates to Android 4.4.3 on Monday.

The Aaeon “AIOT-X1000? IoT gateway supports the Gateway Solutions for IoT architecture (aka “Moon Island”) unveiled by Intel in April. Aaeon’s product joins other “Moon Island capable” gateway systems previously announced by ADI, Adlink, Advantech, Eurotech, and Portwell, not to mention Intel’s own Gateway Solutions for IoT reference design. Although Intel’s reference design supports a choice of either Atom or Quark processors, Aaeon’s device, introduced this week at Computex in Taipei, casts its lot squarely with Quark.

It’s very rare when repetitive tasks are a welcome addition to any part of our life, personal or professional. More often than not, during our development cycles and processes we encounter more than one task that is performed with glaring regularity. With so much to develop, control and manage, it can be a little daunting if you add up the time spent on such tasks – time that could arguably be better spent elsewhere.

We find ourselves in interesting times. We're facing huge socio-economic challenges while at the same time we need to look ahead and design a society that meets our future needs. For this, we need a renewed understanding of craftsmanship in relation to the design and production principles of the 21st century. In the province of Fryslân, the northern part of the Netherlands, we're using a mobile lab facility called FryskLab (a former library bus) to bring making and 21st century skills to primary and secondary education. We're also hoping to find solutions for local socio-economic challenges.

This guide explains how to configure samba server in Opensuse 13.1 with anonymous & secured samba servers. Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients. Samba is freely available, unlike other SMB/CIFS implementations, and allows for interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients.

The OSS Watch blog has been on our radar for a while now as a great resource for open source commentary. We've looked to their team, including development manager Mark Johnson, for thought leadership on how open source software is being used and to gauge the pulse of the open source movement. I wanted to find out more about what Mark does day-to-day to promote better understanding of open source. He's got a knack for communication: concise with impact.

Once Nginx web server is up and running in a production environment, you will want to monitor its activity in real time. In fact, general network monitoring software such as Nagios, Zabbix, Munin provide support for real-time Nginx monitoring. However, if you do not need comprehensive reporting capabilities or long-term statistics offered by such tools, […]Continue reading... The post How to monitor Nginx web server from the command line in real time appeared first on Xmodulo. Related FAQs: How to compile and install Nginx web server from source on Linux How to monitor a Linux server and desktop remotely from web browser How to speed up Nginx web server with PageSpeed How to monitor disk I/O in Linux from command line How to check Internet speed from the command line on Linux

Get used to Mint 17, the latest release of this popular Linux distro. All versions of Mint until 2016 will use exactly the same base as this version, released on Saturday, 31 May. “The [Mint] development team won't start working on a new base and will be fully focused on this one," according to the Mint page here.

The autonomous Raspberry Pi-powered robot yacht built by British students that competes worldwide

Open government is great. At least, it was a few election cycles ago. FOIA requests, open data, seeing how your government works—it's arguably brought light to a lot of not-so-great practices, and in many cases, has spurred citizen-centric innovation not otherwise imagined before the information's release.

LXer Feature: 01-Jun-2014

In the LXWR this week we have LynuxWorks reverting to its original LynxOS name, just what is a good terminal emulator for Linux, Why the porting method doesn't matter, Glyn Moody calls out Makerbot and the five most popular end-user Linux distributions. Enjoy!