Free Software Linux

Packt Publishing has launched a new series of Beginner's Guide books designed to make open source tools and other advanced software accessible and usable for Beginners. "There are thousands of tremendous software tools out there," says series editor David Barnes. "The way they are designed, built and documented means they can often feel like they are created by experts, for experts. Newcomers often don't know what the software can even do, let alone how to do it." Packt Beginner's Guides aim to overcome this problem. They teach newcomers a technology by presenting realistic, useful examples with clear step-by-step instructions.

It's time to thank those great companies and individuals who help keep Ruby Inside (and often other Ruby sites) going. Note: All descriptions and notes are written by Ruby Inside and are not directly influenced by the sponsors. As such, any opinions stated are those of Ruby Inside and not necessarily shared by the sponsor! New Relic - Rails Performance Monitoring Systems

As previously announced, we’re running a questionnaire on understanding “NonCommercial” use. The questionnaire runs through December 7. It takes 15-25 minutes to complete. Click here to start the questionnaire.

Sitecore has been around for awhile now. And during that time they have established themselves as a quality option for web CMS and intranet portal software. Now they have made the news in a way that even further solidifies their place in the industry.

Latam Commons 2008: The Public Domain, Creative Commons, and Open Education in Latin America, held Nov 19-21 in Santiago, Chile, was a great success. The event was co-hosted and excellently managed by NGO Derechos Digitales, and representatives from all over Latin America were present and actively participated in the meeting. Project Leads of Creative Commons jurisdictions first held a one-day meeting to discuss their projects, possible strategic initiatives and collaborations across the region, and shared challenges.

Change.gov, the website of US president-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, has undergone some important and exciting changes over the past few days. Among them is the site’s new copyright notice, which expresses that the bulk of Change.gov is published under the most permissive of Creative Commons copyright licenses - CC BY.

… by my reckoning at least. Take a look at this chart (click for a bigger image): That looks to be a rough average of about 300,000 downloads of the free and open source OpenOffice.org application suite every day for the last 28 days, which means about 8.5Million downloads this month. So to me, that works out something like this: If MS Office is worth about £100 (I guess that’s a reasonable average price) then that’s about £30Million pounds worth of software being downloaded for free every day.

"The party that’s looting and cracking down on businesses seems to be either Microsoft or its BSA equivalents, which do all the legwork and distance Microsoft from any distasteful action"

HarperStudio, an imprint of the world renown publishers Harper Collins, has an interview with Joi Ito, our CEO. In his answers, Joi tackles some of the more complex implications of Creative Commons licensing for media like books: 2) Does Creative Commons have different implications for different forms of media? Would books be affected differently than music, for example?

When Jeremy Keith, a web developer living and working in England took a photo of Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral and posted it to Flickr under our Attribution license (which seems to be the flavor of the month around here), he had no idea it was eventually going to end up in the blockbuster feature film Iron Man.

Mozilla Thunderbird logo Here comes another great Open Source program from Mozilla. Mozilla Thunderbird is an Open Source email client for your desktop. It is just as cool and as great as the famous Mozilla Firefox. It is fast. It is sleek. And it is useful. Very useful.

Mozilla Songbird is the best answer I have found so far, this program is very much an iTunes clone, it searches media and organizes it by ID3 meta tags, and it can sync playlists, albums and songs to your iPOD with drag and drop ease.

Ars tests the first beta release of KDE 4.2. The new version of the popular Linux desktop environment has lots of new features, including significant improvements to the panel and other Plasma components.

DotNetNuke Corporation, trusted creator & steward of the most successful open source web application framework for the Microsoft technology platform, today announced that it has secured Series A financing from top tier Silicon Valley venture firms, August Capital and Sierra Ventures. The new funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand marketing, sales and support infrastructure to meet the growing enterprise demand for DotNetNuke® products and services.

All good things must come to end. Over and over and over again ;)

After receiving invitations since Jerry's first retreat, I finally attended Jerry's weekend this year at the Marconi Center just north of San Francisco. I met some truly amazing folks there, and I drew this maze for Jerry in my 'off-time'. I began drawing mazes like this one for my two boys years ago... read more

"WeakNet Linux is an Ubuntu-based live DVD containing a variety of security tools. It is designed primarily for penetration testing, forensic analysis and other security tasks. The default GUI is Gnome. [...] The tools i have selected are tools we use all the time here, as i said, If you find some that you want in it, please let me know. The image is about 1GB meaning; It will have to be on DVD, meaning; I can't host it here without risk of bandwidth dying! I need a place to upload it to. Some code written by WeakNet Labs Assistants from this site that are preinstalled:

Simple keyword or text search is not always effective for quickly finding what you need. IBM has gone beyond keywords by inventing a fast and accurate semantic search system for personal e-mail. IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search enables semantic searching by extracting and organizing concepts and relationships from personal e-mail.

Unlike other charity evaluators, SmartCause.org is a community-driven site that allows users to contribute research for nearly any of the more than 600,000 charities in its database.

2008-11-26: The XML Core Working Group has published the W3C Recommendation of Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition). This fifth edition of the widely deployed standard XML incorporates corrections to errata found in previous versions. In particular, one correction relaxes the restrictions on element and attribute names, thereby providing in XML 1.0 the major end user benefit currently achievable only by using XML 1.1. As a consequence, many possible documents that were not well-formed according to previous editions of this specification are now well-formed, and previously invalid documents using the newly-allowed name characters in, for example, ID attributes, are now valid. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.