Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

fsniper lets you monitor specified directories and execute scripts on any new files that are created in them. Because fsniper uses inotify to monitor its directories, the actions you define are executed as soon as filesystem changes happen. This makes fsniper both more immediate than an hourly cron job and more efficient. One possibility that suggests itself when you think about automatically processing files as they are placed in a directory is to have some sort of classification of files that you download from the Web. In fact, this is the first example that the fsniper Web site gives.

The OpenOffice.org website was swamped today, shortly after the organisation announced the release of version 3.0 of its open source source office suite. The OpenOffice.org website returned multiple timeout errors early this afternoon as the site was presumably innundated by expectant downloaders. Today’s release was the official announcement of the new office suite version, although most of the major mirrors have had the latest version since Saturday evening.

It was a big week for our favorite technology last week, as true believers no doubt already know. Not only was Linux 2.6.27 released -- causing no small amount of discussion on Slashdot -- but the operating system itself also turned 17 years old. The Linux Journal article noting that momentous day had already received well more than a thousand Diggs by Friday.

The Sun Report Builder extension adds powerful reporting capabilities to OpenOffice.org Base, and using it to create reports is easy, as we can see with a simple example. Suppose you're a freelance writer, and you want to keep track of your submissions using a simple OpenOffice.org Base database that stores article titles, publications, submission dates, current status, and payment rates. This is a useful solution, but adding reporting capabilities turns the database into a handy analytical tool. With Sun Report Builder you can generate a list of articles grouped by publication, shows the sum of article payments, and displays a chart of payments for each publication.

A research report is throwing more fuel on the prerelease fire surrounding T-Mobile's G1 phone using Google's Android open source operating system."Success for Android has Little to Do with User Acceptance," claims the ABI Research headline, and director Kevin Burden writes that Android can help sell a lot of smartphones only if carriers and manufacturers recognize the business value of using standard platforms.

Paul Rubens describes Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop as cheap 'n' cheerful, and easy to use. But Canonical also offers a server version of the software, and this raises an obvious question: Do you really want to be running cheap and cheerful server software at the heart of your enterprise?

Mac users might less vulnerable to Internet security threats than those who take the Windows route to computing nirvana, but 'less' is not the same as 'not at all' and that's why the world's first miniature hardware Internet security devices for the Mac have been announced today with a little help from Linux.

OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is being released today, is not the great leap forward in look and feel that version 2.0 represented, but it justifies its label as a major release with dozens of changes, some major, some minor, but in all more than can be easily summarized.

Here's a very good question: why are people (including me) nasty to Mono, but nice to Samba? The PR aspect may have something to do with it, but I don't think it's the main reason. To understand the principal difference between Samba and Mono, we need to explore what they do, and how they do it.

The largest conference devoted to Linux technology is changing its name to embrace open source software on other operating systems (OSes). Next August, LinuxWorld will relaunch as the OpenSource World Conference & Expo, but will retain existing LinuxWorld features, says show organizer IDG World Expo.

The Amarok Squad is proud to announce the second beta release of Amarok 2.0. This release includes a lot of bug fixes and improvements, like the switch from SQlite to MySQL-embedded. The LibriVox service is back, as is lyrics support. We hope you enjoy this release which we have worked so hard to produce. Stay tuned for upcoming releases, and please do not forget to donate for Roktober!

Red Hat's CEO discusses the company's expansion to new platforms and markets, and the challenges around building solid business models for products that can be obtained for free. - Red Hat, which bills itself as the worlds leading open-source solutions provider, has managed to make free software pay by gathering, extending and packaging Linux and complementary open-source components into certified and supported products that are ready for enterprise consumption.

For developers who have fallen in love with .Net/C#, but aren't married to running their applications on Windows, the Mono Project aims to let Microsoft .Net-based apps run on Linux and Mac OS X, among several other platforms. Sponsored by Novell, the Mono Project has released Mono 2.0 of its cross-platform, open source .Net development framework.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin says the new Chrome Web browser is not the Web operating system many people see it as, but acknowledges it will get more robust through the open-source community under the Chromium project. Microsoft and other search engines and Web services providers must be wary about this evolution in application development. Google may be treading lightly with Chrome now, but the browser, combined with Google's search and Apps, could end up being a big threat to Microsoft Windows' market share.

I've got several machines downstairs in my basement office, of course, but in our family the others have computers too. we've set some basic rules for it. Notably, they can't just play all those flash games all the time. And sometimes, if they don't do their homework, we disallow it entirely, or - happily more commonly - we give extra time for good behaviour or for some homework that needs more googling. But I'm a geek, and I'm not at all interested in trying to do any of this manually. So I wrote a simple internet usage tracker for them, which allows me to set usage limits per kid, and which tracks how much time they use online, and forcibly logs them off if they go over the limits.

One of Facebook's two cofounders is jumping ship to start his own Internet company. Dustin Moskovitz announced he'll leave the social networking site in about a month. He and colleague Justin Rosenstein, a Facebook engineering manager who previously worked at Google, will launch a new enterprise software business.

Some time ago I had a long talk with an IBM’er about social networking. He said the first key to bringing social networking to business was a simple directory. We should all have our own page somewhere, whether as individuals, as members of a hierarchy, or as business entities. We need to be found, and have our expertise known. Then we need to use that directory to network with others. That’s a key idea behind Bluehouse, the service IBM launched in beta today.

Most free software projects produce applications for users. A minority, however, produce specifications or libraries for developers and other contributors. An example of this second type is the recently announced Manju project, whose goal is to make themes easier to create. The project's goal is to write the specifications and scripts for using scalable vector graphics (SVG) files to store widget and other theme-related information that can be used on a variety of toolkits.

A recent interview quoted an MSI executive as saying that returns of Linux netbooks were more than four times higher those of Windows XP netbooks. However, the quote may say more about MSI's Linux implementation than the suitability of Linux as a netbook OS.

FUEL (Frequently Used Entries for Localization) aims to solve the problem of inconsistency and lack of standardization in computer software translation in a new and unique way. Initiated by Red Hat, the project is trying to give a better experience to end users of a localized desktop by resolving the issues of standardization and inconsistency. It's hard for a naive user to digest five different replacements for a simple word on a computer menu like File or Save. Getting used to inconsistent terminology can be a major hindrance in path of the popularity of localized desktop. Therefore, FUEL's aim is to come up with the most appropriate and acceptable translations by collaborating with active communities and localizers who are having standardization problems in translation.