Tja ?

Winderig varken lokt gasalarm uit


Een winderig varken heeft in Australië 15 brandweerlieden laten opdraven. Een landbouwer had de brandweer gealarmeerd omdat hij wegens de stank een lek in de gasleiding vermoedde.

"Het werd al snel duidelijk wat er aan de hand was", zei brandweerman Peter Harkins in een radio-interview.
De 120 kilogram zware zeug werd door de boerenfamilie uit Axedop op slechts een twintigtal meter van huis gehouden. "Ik heb geen weet van wat dat varken gegeten heeft, maar we hebben het duidelijk gehoord", zei de brandweerman.

Voor de landbouwer was de hele affaire hoogst onaangenaam. Hij heeft zich herhaaldelijk verontschuldigd. "Het duurde een tijdje vooraleer we terug onszelf waren en we met hem konden praten", zei Harkins. "Maar we hebben het zeer professioneel aangepakt. Maar eens terug in de brandweerkazerne, hebben we heel wat afgelachen."

Netherlands publishes open source tools to help start EU business

Netherlands publishes open source tools to help start EU business: "The Dutch government is about to publish as open source OS Toolbox PSC, a set of software tools that EU member states can use to offer a single point of contact for entrepreneurs that want to start business anywhere in the EU. The software will be made available on the OSOR Forge, the open source software repository and development platform of the European Commission."

BE: Walloon government to start using OSOR repository

BE: Walloon government to start using OSOR repository: "The Walloon government wants to use the European Commission's open source software repository and development platform (OSOR Forge), announced Béatrice van Bastelaer, Commissioner of Administration and Simplification Agency of the Walloon Region, at a workshop in the Belgian city of Charleroi on 26 November."

KDE 4.4 dev: What’s new?

KDE 4.4 dev: What’s new?: "

I have managed to find some time to cover the recent changes in the development version of KDE 4.4. The number of changes is not impressive but they are interesting enough to write an article.



kde44-1055000-desktop




Adding applets


There was a time when I complained about the convoluted process of adding new Plasma applets. Not anymore! Today I can say it’s easy and much more intuitive, although still not flawless. For instance, scrolling between the available applets horizontally is not very user-friendly.


The changes made here were cosmetic. The scrolling looks nicer and the information about the applets being displayed is more detailed.


kde44-1055000-add-applet


KRunner like YaKuake


A very nice change in KRunnera! Now we can configure it in the way that it’s displayed not in the centre of the screen but shows up in an elegant way at the top of the screen.


kde44-1055000-krunner-top


Animated Oxygen


Now the window decoration of Oxygen has all the items animated, making it seem more lively. The effects are delicate and it a good taste.


kde44-1055000-animated-oxygen


I was too lazy this time to make my own video, so I’ll use the one prepared by Nuno to illustrate what I’m talking about.



Direct link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5Cv0z0dqfk


Grouping windows


The best change ever is the window grouping feature. Now we can put together many windows into one and switch between them using the tabs located in the window title. Have you seen something like that before? Very useful!


kde44-1055000-group


kde44-1055000-grouped


Other changes


The module responsible for configuring the mouse actions have been finally cleared up, and the window with System settings got the tooltips.


kde44-1055000-ma


kde44-1055000-ss-toltip


Stability


To my great surprise, the whole thing works fast and the system is responsive. I haven’t encountered a single crash when playing with KDE 4.4 r1055000. This makes my hope that the next release of my favorite desktop envoronment will be a great success.


The original text was published on official Polish KDE blog: KDE 4.4 r1055000


» Post Purchase: Text Link
"

Microsoft's Top Devs Don't Seem To Like Own Tools

Microsoft's Top Devs Don't Seem To Like Own Tools: "ericatcw writes 'Through tools such as Visual Basic and Visual Studio, Microsoft may have done more than any other vendor to make drag and drop-style programming mainstream. But its superstar developers seem to prefer old-school modes of crafting code. During the panel at the Professional Developers Conference earlier this month, the devs also revealed why they think writing tight, bare-metal code will come back into fashion, and why parallel programming hasn't caught up with the processors yet.' These guys are senior enough that they don't seem to need to watch what they say and how it aligns with Microsoft's product roadmap. They are also dead funny. Here's Jeffrey Snover on managed code (being pushed by Microsoft through its Common Language Runtime tech): 'Managed code is like antilock brakes. You used to have to be a good driver on ice or you would die. Now you don't have to pump your brakes anymore.' Snover also joked that programming is getting so abstract, developers will soon have to use Natal to 'write programs through interpretative dance.'

Microsoft Sued for Deliberately Making Competitor’s Product “Become Incompatible”

Microsoft Sued for Deliberately Making Competitor’s Product “Become Incompatible”: "

Microsoft kicks another company out of its own property, so it is taken to court

"

Black Friday Film: What the Bill Gates-Backed Monsanto Does to Animals, Farmers, Food, and Patent Systems

Black Friday Film: What the Bill Gates-Backed Monsanto Does to Animals, Farmers, Food, and Patent Systems: "


Stallman at protest

Richard Stallman at 2009 Munich protests against patents on pigs


Summary: Monsanto Patent for a Pig — the full programme


WE wrote about Monsanto’s patents before [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and here is a 1-hour programme about the subject.



Monsanto Patent for a Pig (Pt.1 of 5)



Monsanto Patent for a Pig (Pt.2 of 5)



Monsanto Patent for a Pig (Pt.3 of 5)



Monsanto Patent for a Pig (Pt.4 of 5)



Monsanto Patent for a Pig (Pt.5 of 5. End)


We have more coming soon because wallclimber works on something.

"

Googsystray: Unified Google Services Notifier [Windows, Linux]

Googsystray: Unified Google Services Notifier [Windows, Linux]: "
Googsystray is a Google Voice, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader and Google Wave checker application for Windows and Linux. The idea is to be able to keep track of all that stuff without having to keep a bunch of browser tabs open, or constantly checking them.

Googsystray

It notifies on new messages, alerts, etc., and provides basic services quickly (Reading or sending a new SMS message, or marking an email read, for example.)


Installing it in Windows is as easy as any other application, just download the installer.

To install Googsystray in Linux, firstly make sure you have Python and pygtk installed, then download the .tar.gz archive and extract it. Open a terminal, navigate to the folder where you have extracted Googsystray, and run the following command:
sudo python ./setup.py install

Then, go to the bin subfolder from your googsystray folder, and double click the googsystray file.

To configure Googsystray, right click it's icon on your systray and select 'Preferences':

Googsystray preferences

To open an unread message, left click the service icon (Gmail, etc) in your systray (notification area). And finally, to quickly see what's new, right click a service icon.

[via gulp]

© www.webupd8.org 2009. | What's New on the World Wide Web



"

EU About To Grant US Unlimited Access To Banking Data

EU About To Grant US Unlimited Access To Banking Data: "An anonymous reader points out a blog post reporting that on Monday The EU Council is set to give US intelligence services full access to SWIFT banking data, despite a unanimous call by the European Parliament not to do so. "The move of SWIFT the data server to Switzerland would be an excellent opportunity to stop the nearly unlimited access of US authorities on EU bank transactions. But EU justice and interior ministers are apparently keen [on agreeing to] a deal as soon as possible, on 30 November. Why 30 November? Because one day later, on 1 December 2009, the EU’s Lisbon Treaty will be in force and would allow the European Parliament to play a major role in the negotiations of the deal with the US. A deal one day before will be a slap in the face to democracy in the EU. ... [W]hile the US will be able to access EU banking data, no access to US banking data by EU [authorities] is being foreseen."

Great Links to Open Textbooks

Great Links to Open Textbooks: "

Open Textbooks



The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is a combined effort to develop and use open educational resources (OER) and in particular open textbooks in community college courses. An open textbook is defined as:


a body of educational content that is openly available over the web, by mail, or in a book store with a copyright that allows copying and distribution or, with the most open copyrights, allows modification of the content and even sale.


CCCOER Open Textbooks provides a growing list of links, covering a wide range of subject areas, to “OPEN and free textbooks that may be suitable for use in community college courses“. In some cases, the links also lead to useful podcasts and videos.


This is a great resource. On my first quick look, I found a comprehensive guide to using OpenOffice 3.o!




"

Create & Deploy Servers & Sites In A Snap With Turnkey Linux

Create & Deploy Servers & Sites In A Snap With Turnkey Linux: "

Hardcore work on the computer requires a serious dedicated setup. You can of course run your programming stack on your gaming machine, but that hardcore gaming or hardcore development would suffer. You need a dedicated setup for thorough work of any kind.


Usually such situations involve setting up a server or using virtualization. Both of these processes involve some technical know how and most of all – a considerable amount of time.


We previously covered how you can create a Virtual Machine from the operating system you are currently running, so that you can easily carry along the installed software and settings from your computer to any other computer or vice versa. Today let’s look at another alternative that spares you a lot of trouble of messing around with configuration files.


It is called TurnKey Linux.


TurnKey Linux is different from your regular Linux distributions. Unlike most distributions, Turnkey Linux offers a turnkey solution and lets you download TurnKey Linux appliances according to your needs that are ready to run. The components are called appliances.




There are tons of really good open source software and we have previously shown you plenty of them here on MakeUseOf. However beyond regular day to day use, many open source software power the backbone of plenty of commercial establishments. Apache Web server is a great example, which is used on the majority of servers on the Internet today. Turnkey Linux gathers many such Open Source software and makes them available as turnkey appliances.


So what exactly is a Turnkey Linux appliance you might wonder? Well, let’s put it this way, an appliance is a combination of a base operating system and software, serving a specialized purpose. As an example, let’s say you want to start an online community site. phpBB is an excellent php application that you can use for the said purpose. You would start by getting the hardware, then install PHP, MySQL, set them up to work together and then finally install phpBB.


However, using Turnkey Linux’s phpBB appliance, all you need to worry about is getting some hard disk space that you can put on the World Wide Web! You can just as easily use your own computer, provided it would stay online.


turnkey linux appliances


In Turnkey Linux’s case, the appliances are created using Ubuntu 8.04 as the base system and bundling all the required software along with it. There are plenty of appliances to choose from. Almost all of the popular commercially used open source applications have been covered and are available as separate appliances. There are appliances for web development, issue tracking, content management systems (excellent for creating your sites), others for setting up a variety of servers and a whole lots of others.


turnkey linux appliances


The appliances are available as bootable ISO images as well as VMDK file to use with your Virtualization software. There is also a “Launch to Cloud” option which uses Amazon EC2 and lets you launch your server in a snap. You can also find a Amazon EC2 tutorial in Turnkey Linux’s documentation, if you would like some help with EC2. The details page also lists the various software that you will get with the appliance, so you can easily see if it is what you are looking for before downloading.


turnkey linux appliances


Using the turnkey Linux appliance is as simple as it can get. Depending upon the method you choose to download the appliance you can either burn the ISO image to a disk and then boot from it, or use the VMDK image with VMware or Virtualbox. The appliance and bundled software are preconfigured and ready to use, you wouldn’t have to do anything other than to boot the system and use it!


Take Turnkey Linux for a spin if you are thinking to setup a Linux server of any kind, or perhaps a dedicated development environment or site. Let us know what you think of it? Which appliance did you use?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!


New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.



Related posts


"

A function to output a man page as a pdf file

A function to output a man page as a pdf file: "$ function man2pdf(){ man -t ${1:?Specify man as arg} | ps2pdf -dCompatibility=1.3 - - > ${1}.pdf; }

Tested on Fedora 12. This function will take a man page and convert it to pdf, saving the output to the current working directory. In Gnome, you can then view the output with 'gnome-open file.pdf', or your favorite pdf viewer.



commandlinefu.com


by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

"

Pedobear is older than I thought

Pedobear is older than I thought: "



epic fail pictures


Captcha fail


Picture by: buzzboyz198302 Submitted by: buzzboyz198302 via Fail Uploader







"

Issue 31 is out and about

Issue 31 is out and about: "


The 31st issue of everybody’s favorite Ubuntu magazine is out! With 9.10 Karmic Koala just about a month old and the next release, Lucid Lynx, already on the horizon and in the news, take a look at what else is going on.


This month, we’ve got:



  • Command and Conquer.

  • How-To: Program in Python – Part 5, The Perfect Server – Part 1, and Universe of Sound.

  • My Story – The Conversion.

  • My Opinion – Windows 7.

  • Review – Linux Mint 7.

  • MOTU Interview – Andreas Wenning.

  • Top 5 – Subversion Clients.

  • Ubuntu Women, Ubuntu Games and all the usual goodness!


Download it here: http://fullcirclemagazine.org/issue-31

"

Openness as the Foundation for Global Change

Openness as the Foundation for Global Change: "
What do you do after Inventing the Web? That's not a question most of us have to face, but it is for Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Heading up the World Wide Web Consortium to oversee the Web's development was a natural move, but valuable as its work has been, there's no denying that it has been sidelined somewhat by the rather more vigorous commercial Web activity that's taken place over the last decade.

Moreover, the kind of standards-setting that the W3C is mostly involved with is not exactly game-changing stuff – unlike the Web itself. So the recent announcement of the World Wide Web Foundation, also created by Sir Tim, has a certain logic to it.

Here's that new organisation's “vision”:

On Open Enterprise blog.
"

30,000 UK ISP Users Face Threat Letters For Suspected Illegal File Sharing

30,000 UK ISP Users Face Threat Letters For Suspected Illegal File Sharing: "Mark.JUK writes with this excerpt from ISP Review: 'Solicitors at ACS:Law have been granted approval by the Royal Courts of Justice in London to demand the private personal details of some 30,000 customers suspected of involvement with illegal file sharing from UK broadband ISPs. The customers concerned are 'suspected' of illegally file sharing (P2P) approximately 291 movie titles, they now face threatening demands for money (settlement) or risk the prospect of court action. It's noted that 25,000 of the IP addresses that have been collected belong to BT users.'

"