● 08.11.11

● Links 11/8/2011: Wineskin 2.4, QEMU 0.15

Posted in News Roundup at 1:17 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• “I see Linux going into a smaller, simpler OS, with a good base of apps integrated to the web,” predicted Mobile Raptor blogger Roberto Lim. “The standard for ease of use won’t be how close it is to MS Windows and Office, but how similar it is to the iPhone or Android.” The home desktop is “soon to be extinct,” Lim concluded. “So, Linux in a decade: ‘Android’ on a laptop. Somewhere between Chrome OS and Windows.”

• You may remember that Google recently added “badges” to Google News. While some blogs poked fun at that (“We Don’t Need No Stinking Google News Badges”), these things are probably just part of Google’s “Reputation” efforts.

• [...]

• * Google: 326 * Apple: 220 * Android: 173

Audiocasts/Shows

• We chat about Delta3D, a giant simulation engine that’s used by the military but is available to civilians as well.

Kernel Space

• While EXT4 and Btrfs are the most talked about file-systems on Phoronix, there are certainly many more out there, especially when it comes to distributed file-systems and those largely only targeting enterprise environments. One example is XtreemFS, which is an open-source file-system that is distributed with support for clients and servers from any location and connected together using the Internet. This GPLv2-licensed file-system is also meant to easily replicate data across data-centers to reduce latency and network traffic.

Applications

• Most Linux system administrators are familiar with sar for collecting system status data. However, there’s a few ways that sar shows its age and doesn’t quite live up to expectations. If you’re looking for a newer utility that also handles NFS, Slab data and sub-second intervals, collectl may better fit the bill.

• Dragon Player is a multimedia player where the focus is on simplicity, instead of features. Dragon Player does one thing, and only one thing, which is playing multimedia files. It’s simple interface is designed not to get in your way and instead empower you to simply play multimedia files.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• Wineskin 2.4 update is available. You should see it available in Wineskin Winery, as well as the manual install version at the MediaFire download location

Games

• Following Atom Zombie Smasher’s inclusion in the Humble Indie Bundle #3 and recent selection for thePAX 10 indie showcase,

• First off, i’d like to award BEEP the prestigious award of “The only game that I haven’t had to go digging for dependencies and that works right off the bat”. After downloading the game from Gameolith (more on that later), BEEP ran flawlessly, and rather smoothly on my laptop also. This being said, the graphics are totally 2D, and theres no complexity to them either, but in a good way.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Sorry, I haven’t blogged for a while, but rest assured that I’m still alive and coding. I passed the midterm evaluation, and the final evaluation is approaching. So what do we have in the store?

• MeegoExperts has done an interview here at the Desktop Summit in Berlin with Fania and Marco. The video explains concepts and user experience in Plasma Active‘s Contour Shell. Have a look yourself to learn about this next-generation user experience for consumer devices, based on our beloved Free Software stack.

GNOME Desktop

• the adjustment wasn’t as painful as i imagined. i used xfce for a while before jumping into gnome 3. i even toyed around with fluxbox as an alternative. in the end, i gave it a shot. i mean, c’mon! it’s not like it’s kde or os x.

Distributions

Gentoo Family

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• * Improved my spam filtering in Thunderbird, saves me quite a bit of time * More research into Fedora branded keyboard possibilities * Finished xmedcon review (bz714328)

Debian Family

• This means that the current Debian Testing release, which is Wheezy, is set to be frozen at that time (no new versions of packages, just bug fixes) in preparation for the next stable release.

• Debian finally takes the plunge to offer multi architecture support with its to-be release Wheezy. This means that Debian users can now run the software of theirchoice, in a machine and version of their choice. This is a feature that is already supported by most open source distros and there is high expectation from what Wheezy can offer. However, since it is most likely to be released only by 2013, doubts of its relevance then are being raised.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Changes to the way the Unity Dash looks and behaves in Ubuntu 11.10 are on the way. In the Unity 2D development branch some of the reworking is already available to see.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Samsung announced its first Android smartphone based on the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. Available now in Sweden and heading for Europe and Asia “soon,” the 4.2-inch Samsung Galaxy R offers Android 2.3, the TouchWiz UI, 8GB of flash storage, and both five- and two-megapixel cameras.

Free Software/Open Source

• The trend toward open source software has many benefits when creating applications. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for example retains the benefits of enterprise application level components such as security and web services without the prohibitive license costs.

• A new survey says open source solutions are being considered for the majority of enterprise IT projects. The survey, by FuseSource Corp., an open source integration firm, outlines deciding factors leading organizations to chose and open source solution.

• Twitter has announced that it will be open sourcing Storm, its stream processing framework, in September, at the Strange Loop conference. Storm was developed by BackType, a company that Twitter acquired in July. At the time, Nathan Marz, BackType’s lead engineer, said that the company’s plans to open source the technology had not changed. Now Twitter has put a date on those plans in a blog posting.

Mozilla

• The Firefox extension HTTPS Everywhere, designed to automatically navigate users to HTTPS-secured versions of sites by rewriting requests, has reached version 1.0. The project was started in June 2010 with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and The Tor Project collaborating on creating the extension which has been refined and tuned over the past year with an improved UI and better performance.

• Mozilla’s mission is to bring openness, interoperability and user sovereignty to Internet life. We should do this in the apps world. We should embrace some aspects of the current app model as a complement to the browser model. We should also provide an alternative to aspects of the current app model that aren’t so open to interoperability and user sovereignty.

SaaS

• So you wanted to play with hadoop to crunch on some big-data problems, except that, well getting a hadoop cluster up and running in not exactly a one minute thing! Let me show you how to make it “a one minute thing” using Ensemble! Since Ensemble now has formulas for creating hadoop master and slave nodes, thanks to the great work of Juan Negron. Spinning up a hadoop cluster could not be easier! Check this video out

• Distributed infrastructures for enterprise search and indexing are becoming the norm, but what can small businesses do?

• Hadoop, HDFS and the MapReduce algorithm are becoming as popular as searching for celebrity gossip, and this surge in interest says a lot about the changing nature of enterprise infrastructure and data and application requirements.

• We all know that search engines and databases have completely different requirements. With most databases, you have a single persistent copy of the data that is backed up and can be restored. With search engines – Google’s MapReduce technology is the basis of Hadoop – much of the data is often transient and can be re-collected.

Databases

• Percona, a MySQL consulting and support company, has announced that it will run a MySQL conference in the traditional location, Santa Clara, and at the traditional time, 10-12 April 2012. There had been a lack of clarity, according to Percona, as to whether anyone was planning a MySQL conference, so, after several months of planning, it has announced the “Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo”.

BSD

• I have already written about BSD-based systems several times. I reviewed FreeSBIE and PCBSD.

• They were system based on XFCE and KDE. These are more or less modern looking operating systems. Could I imaging myself back into 1990s when I was downloading another BSD-based system?

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Here are photos taken at some of the many speeches Richard Stallman has given this year.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• The NHS technology environment could be described as a giant hairball – a Gordian knot of past policies, established practices, new initiatives and government objectives and an ever changing landscape of opportunity from new technology.* Openness, in all its many forms, offers a way to escape from the hairball.

• Openness comes in many forms: open source, open standards, open data, open publishing – the list goes on. Openness is growing. Open source and open standards are in the ICT strategy documents of the Cabinet Office, the Welsh Government and in some form in the NHS IT Strategy too.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Coincidentally, a few days before my dad’s diagnosis, I published a study which found that cancer datasets are less likely to be widely available for further research than similar datasets outside cancer.

Programming

• Server-side developers have long experienced the benefits of automated testing solutions, taking advantage of testing frameworks such as RSpec for Ruby, PHPUnit for PHP, and JUnit for Java. If you fall into this crowd but are starting to spend more time with JavaScript, chances are you’re fretting over how to apply similar techniques on the client (or or server!) side. Not to worry, as several interesting JavaScript testing frameworks exist, perhaps chief among them Jasmine, a popular open source behavior-driven development framework.

Standards/Consortia

• With Google, Pandora, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Vudu, and even Microsoft embracing HTML5, these are exciting times for vendors, developers and consumers

Leftovers

• Apple and a group of book publishers were accused in a lawsuit today of illegally fixing e-book prices to “boost profits and force e-book rival Amazon to abandon its pro-consumer discount pricing.”

• The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed today in U.S. District Court in Northern California, alleges Apple, HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster “colluded to increase prices” on popular books. (Simon & Schuster is owned by CBS. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)

Science

• By combining a clever physical interface with computer-vision algorithms, researchers in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences have created a simple, portable imaging system that can achieve resolutions previously possible only with large and expensive lab equipment. The device could provide manufacturers with a way to inspect products too large to fit under a microscope and could also have applications in medicine, forensics and biometrics.

• The heart of the system, dubbed GelSight, is a slab of transparent, synthetic rubber, one of whose sides is coated with a paint containing tiny flecks of metal. When pressed against the surface of an object, the paint-coated side of the slab deforms. Cameras mounted on the other side of the slab photograph the results, and computer-vision algorithms analyze the images.

Security

• Officially, Adobe’s current update for Flash Player has closed only 13 holes, but unofficially it is said to have closed several hundred. Security specialist Tavis Ormandy, who works for Google, claims that he discovered 400 holes and notified Adobe of them. The specialist has now complained that, while the holes have been closed, they haven’t been mentioned in the official advisory, and he hasn’t been given credit for their discovery.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• I hate broken links, so I try to avoid linking to The Globe and Mail, for instance, because they started locking older articles behind a paywall. That deliberately breaks links that work when I post the article [unless the reader pays ransom].

• I am quite certain that I’ve linked to Wikipedia more than any other website, and so I worry because deleted Wikipedia articles will result in broken links.

• Broken links are bad for blogs, and while online news outlets often don’t understand this, Wikipedia ought to. As a blogger, when I link to something, I expect it to stay there. As an Internet user, it is annoying to follow a link to get more information, only to discover that the original article has been removed. The only time any Wikipedia entry should be deleted is if it is fraudulent.

• The Wikipedia page Death of Mark Duggan is flagged for deletion. There is a huge argument raging about whether or not Mark Duggan’s death is notable.

Cablegate

Censorship

• The group is reacting to the networking firm’s earlier announcement that it would help the Chinese government build up an extensive camera surveillance network in Chongqing. This, as well as its assistance in building the Great Firewall of China, should give it enough leverage to convince its new friend to stop abusing its citizens’ human rights.

• “This is the same company that sold equipment to China to build the Great Firewall, which prevents Chinese Internet users from accessing much of the Internet, including online references to the Tiananmen Square protests, information on China’s human rights abuses, and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter,” wrote the EFF’s Jillian York in a blog post.

Privacy

• One of the two houses of the Indian Parliament, Rajya Sabha, has decided go for the paperless office. The house is adopting tablet PCs instead of papers. The members will be using either the iPad 2 or the Samsung Galaxy Tab, according to reports.

• Should Indian parliament even consider Apple’s iPad? No. Apple is an American company and the iPad uses proprietary technologies to which Indians will not have any access. The ministers will have to use Apple’s iTunes software to transfer data to the iPad – which means Apple will have access to all the ministerial and governmental data, without informing the Indian government.

• Chances are that these ministers may also use the iCloud, and as we know since Apple is an American company, all the data on the cloud will be accessible by the US authorities. Apple will hand over that data if the US government demands so.

DRM

• In an age where business dominates our governments and writes our laws, every technological advance offers business an opportunity to impose new restrictions on the public. Technologies that could have empowered us are used to chain us instead.

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