Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Over the past few years the use of JavaScript has grown from a form validation helper to a field-leveler as the user experience of web applications has begun to rival traditional “smart client” applications in some arenas. Clever CSS skinning has not done this alone — another key ingredient is event handling. JQuery Mobile introduces mobile-oriented events to browser based programming. Let’s have a look.

Wednesday opened with Geoff Huston from APNIC presenting on Internet Address Exhaustion, and how it presents a real and present threat to the openness of today’s Internet. Geoff walked the audience through the history of the internet, and covered some of the barriers to IPv6 adoption. Geoff then discussed how without open addressing there’s no open network, and detailed how the current environment provides little incentive for the very big internet players who have benefited from the initial openess of the Internet to maintain that openness when it levels the playing field for their competition. Geoff’s vision of the IP apocolypse was a bleak one, with only one viable solution left - to alter our environment to favour the rapid adoption of IPv6.

Government agencies in Australia should actively participate in open source communities and will be required to consider open source options equally when going to tender, under new policy announced Wednesday.

So let's take a look at what a good IT manager does. Because there are such persons, and they make all the difference between satisfaction and pain, between feelings of accomplishment and feelings of time-killing soul-sucking despair.

KDE is delighted to announce its latest set of releases, providing major updates to the KDE Plasma workspaces, KDE Applications and KDE Platform. These releases, versioned 4.6, provide many new features in each of KDE's three product lines.

For years its been said that Blizzard has developed a Linux client for its very popular World of Warcraft MMORPG game but that it's never been publicly released. It turns out that this appears to still be the case that internally they have a Linux build of World of Warcraft but as of yet they have decided against releasing it to the public.

The second day of Linux.conf.au in Brisbane, Australia, opened with keynote speaker Vinton Cerf, vice president of Google. Vint Cerf is often spoken of as one of the 'fathers of the internet', having been one of the co-designers of the tcp/ip protocol.

Kernel version 2.6.38 supports AMD's new Fusion CPUs and offers 2D and 3D acceleration with many current GeForce and Radeon graphics cards. Power economy for the graphics cores in Intel processors and chip-sets has been improved; new page flipping features aim to eradicate image flickering, tearing and incomplete rendering issues.

LXer Feature: 26-Jan-2011

In this extension of his two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) goes into detail comparing the functions of Konquerer and Dolphin and along the way discovers that he might actually keep Dolphin as his file manager.

The Document Foundation launched the first stable version of its open source LibreOffice productivity suite, following a breakaway from OpenOffice.org and Oracle's control. Due for inclusion in Ubuntu 10.04, among other Linux distros, LibreOffice 3.3 is a bit leaner than OpenOffice, and aims to get more so in the future to support mobile devices, says the group.

A popular Oracle-controlled open-source project faces a forking after the software giant reiterated that it will restrict what coders can change. Oracle has said that open sourcers are free to extend Project Hudson, the software-build and monitoring service it inherited from Sun Microsystems. They can add as many plug-ins as they like to the core code, and they don't have to contribute the plug-ins back to the community. But if they build such plug-ins, they'll have to give their code another name.

The Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) architecture is one of the most popular choices for web server architectures in use today. Author John Mertic examines five things every LAMP application should take advantage of for optimum performance.

Gray beard Bell Labs scientists and Unix operating system co-creators Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded the 2011 Japan Prize for information and communications. Ritchie worked at Bell Labs (in its many incarnations) until he retired in 2007. Thompson held positions at Bell Labs as well as at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Sydney and is currently a distinguished engineer at search engine behemoth Google. Ritchie was the primary creator of the C programming language, arguably the most popular and cursed-at programming language in the history of the world.

“Against all odds, Linux.conf.au is here!” This week more than 500 people from around the world are arriving in Brisbane for Linux.conf.au 2011. As last month Brisbane and indeed much of Queensland was devastated by severe flooding, it’s an incredible effort by the conference organizers that the conference is able to continue at all.

While NVIDIA puts out beta Linux graphics drivers quite often as a means of soliciting testing prior to declaring a new stable GPU driver update, AMD does not but rather they rely upon their NDA-covered select beta testers to put each Catalyst release through its paces before declaring a stable update in their timed monthly manner. Today though it seems AMD has put out a Catalyst Beta driver that's targeting their workstation customers (those with the FirePro / FireGL / FireMV hardware) but as in their usual unified manner, it will work with any supported Radeon (R600+ GPU) as well.

Let me start with a short story about a situation I dealt with this past summer. I flew out to a client site where I found a broken architecture, management with no idea what was wrong while pointing fingers, and a completely dispirited team. After two weeks of taking a look at what was running (and what wasn't) we'd isolated a dozen specific problems with specific workable solutions, and did so using that dispirited team getting excited about fixing stuff and showing up for meetings. Other teams at the client - testing and environment groups - were shocked with the speed we moved as well as how informed and on top of things we were. The two real bad employees were corralled and worked around - the rest lined up and rocked through.

The 3D powerhouse Blender is arguably the most complicated piece of desktop software in the open source world. It handles every part of the workflow used to create a CGI film or a 3D game: creating objects, rigging them to move, animating them, controlling lighting, rendering scenes, and even editing the resulting video. Each release packs in more new features than most people can understand without consulting a textbook (or two). One of the down sides, though, is that over the years Blender has developed the reputation of being difficult to learn. Fortunately, the latest release takes on that challenge head-first, and makes some major improvements.

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A few times each month, I tire of the complexities of GNOME and KDE. Then I turn to a simpler, faster desktop for a couple of days or a week -- and that desktop, more often than not, is Xfce. No other desktop I’m aware of balances convenience and speed half so well.

Three well-known BSD clones are in their latest developmental cycles and have recently released test versions. FreeBSD is closing in on version 7.4 with a RC2, GhostBSD just released their 2.0 Beta 2, and PC-BSD 8.2 has seen its second release candidate as well.