Patrick E. Bennett, Jr., Computer Consultant ... computing support for small business

As browser competition continues to heat up, 2010 looks like the year when the market was repeatedly disrupted. Internet Explorer has not managed to gain share for a third month in a row. Firefox is leveling out while Chrome and Safari continue to grow. Opera? It's hanging on to relevance. Between July and August, Internet Explorer dropped 0.34 percent, a drop smaller than June's or July's gain. Firefox, meanwhile, went up 0.02 percent, Chrome gained 0.36 percent, Safari was up 0.07, and Opera dipped 0.08 percent.

In the last couple months I have posted my disgust about two different online education systems that are being used at various colleges around the United States. My dislike for these systems stems from the fact that even though they are web based, they do not adhere to Web Standards. Today I would like to talk about an online education system that is accessible to all students, not just those running Microsoft Windows.

Tech Source: "You may find our Python alarm clock too geeky or complicated, so I thought I should share with you an easier way to use your Linux desktop (particularly Ubuntu and other GNOME-based distributions) as alarm clock."

When I first started with graphics - I plotted pixels onto the screen by calculating a memory address and then poking the corresponding value. Times have changed since then. My murky history contains gwbasic, STOS, HiSoft Basic (compiled!), VisualBasic (numerous versions) until I found C and AES (on the Atari ST), Win16 (that is Windows 3.1) and even Presentation Manager on OS/2 (in the pre-Warp days).

Serverwatch: "Microsoft used to be known as the Great Satan when it came to enterprise operating systems. Now it seems Oracle has taken over software hell."

Organizers of the Southern California Linux Expo 9x have announced that the Call for Papers for SCALE 9x opens Wednesday, Sept. 1, with five speaker tracks. With the continued growth of Open Source software in business, SCALE will address the need for system management knowledge by adding a speaker track focused on system administration. Combined with the two specialized tracks -- Beginners and Developers -- and the two general interest tracks, SCALE 9x will have content for every attendee.

In the first installment of this article we looked at getting Google's Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) downloaded and installed on your Android phone. We examined the basics of writing scripts using Python and even included a short script to set a few of the profile settings. This time we'll take a look at some of the sample scripts found on the SL4A website and talk about how you might write a script of your own.

Linux Devices: " Samsung Electronics announced its much-anticipated Android consumer tablet, due to ship in Europe in mid-September. The Samsung Galaxy Tab runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, and offers a seven-inch, 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, a three-megapixel camera..."

As of Red Hat's news last week, there are now four competing standards for building so-called open source clouds. It's shaping up to be quite a battle of the titans. Contenders are: Amazon Web Services via Eucalyptus Systems; Rackspace and OpenStack, Cloud.com and Cloudstack; Red Hat's DeltaCloud. Companies like Intel, Dell, Citrix, HP, IBM, Cisco are all lining up behind one or more. But some experts says that the ultimate standard may not even have shown itself yet.

Standalone Sysadmin: "The other day, I caught a message that KSplice was available for Fedora. I thought I'd be a wiseguy and I replied �Yeah, great. Call me in 20 years when it's available for for RHEL�. Well, as several people pointed out, it turns out the joke is on me."

A new survey by management consultants Accenture has shown that Open Source Software (OSS) has reached what the firm describes as a ‘turning point’ in the corporate sector.

Dell’s 17-inch Studio 1747 laptop is a beefy desktop replacement that ships with Windows 7. But how does it fare with Linux instead? A few days hands-on with the laptop shows that the machine is almost perfect, save for one fatal flaw.

Linux Planet: "Ubuntu's use of sudo to simplify Linux administration is ingenious, but barely scratches the surface of what sudo can do. Follow along as Yvo Van Doorn of Likewise Software unlocks the powers of sudo."

Easy Linux CDs: "ArtistX is an Ubuntu GNU/Linux-based live DVD that includes a pretty big lineup of free multimedia applications. The most recent version, ArtistX 0.9 is based on Ubuntu 9.10 and features the 2.6.31 Linux kernel, GNOME 2.28, KDE 4.3.5, Compiz Fusion, Ubiquity Installer, and more."

Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source collaboration software, announced the availability of data migration tools for users of Microsoft Outlook to easily move e-mails, contacts, appointments and tasks to Open-Xchange Server.

IBM Developerworks: "Summary: Security always requires a multi-layered scheme. SSH is a good example of this. Methods range from simple sshd configuration through the use of PAM to specify who can use SSH, to application of port-knocking techniques, or to hide the fact that SSH access even exists."

Das U-Blog: "My last review of KDE 4.X was a bitter disappointment, as KDE 4.4 refused to work. Period. Follow the jump to see if this version of KDE works out any better."

The concept of activities is a new feature introduced with KDE 4. In the old desktop model of KDE 3, the desktop was a program called “kdesktop”, which gave users the ability to have a number of virtual desktops. Although other tools like Superkaramba could be used to add more features, the essential KDE desktop ended there. When activities were introduced into KDE 4, they did not make much sense in isolation. In addition to having virtual desktops, there were activities, which the user could create and configure to have different wallpapers and different widgets. Much of the virtual desktop functionality of KDE 3 was absent and not directly connected to Plasma activities.

Linux Journal: "When I first started with graphics - I plotted pixels onto the screen by calculating a memory address and then poking the corresponding value. Times have changed since then."

Phoronix: "Two years ago we compiled a list of the top contributors to the X Server over the years and that was followed by compiling a similar list of the developers behind Mesa. Tiago Vignatti has now compiled some statistics surrounding the top contributors to X.Org Server 1.9..."