A little less than a year ago, the Linux Foundation launched a program to provide a variety of training opportunities for Linux professionals. Just a few months later, the Foundation moved the program online, offering web-based sessions of select courses to reach a wider audience. On Tuesday, they took it one step further, announcing the free — as in beer — Linux Training Webinar Series.
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Hi. We’re back. Well, not back exactly. We’d just like to take a minute to introduce you to somebody. Somebody that’s important to us.
We promised we’d let you know when we had news–and now we do. Opensource.com is our new adventure. It’s still sponsored by Red Hat, and still shining a bright light on the open source stories we’ve always sought out.
At opensource.com, we’ll be doing some things a little differently than we used to. We won’t be addressing as many technical topics–but we do hope to address more topics more often. We welcome contributions in the areas of Business, Law, Education, Government, and Life. We welcome new (and old) contributors.
You can bookmark us, or add us to your RSS feed reader. Register with the site and you can post and track comments, give a bit of a biography, and network with other contributors.
Like it? Share it. Help us spread the word through identi.ca, facebook, or twitter.
And for those of you that were fond of our video contributions? Never fear. Our crack video team is fully involved.
So give it a click. Check out the articles. Sure, it’s not the same comfy digs you’d gotten used to, but pretty soon, it’ll feel just as homey. And that’s where we’ll be, for the next while.
Red Hat Magazine enjoyed a fantastic run. It’s launched careers, ideas, and helped publish–and promote–writers we dearly know and love. It gave us experience–and information–we can take to this newer, bigger venture. And now we’ve got a new venue–and a new name–to keep doing the kind of work we love. That kind of work and more.
One thing that has changed and–we think–for the better: It’s not just Red Hat’s magazine anymore. Opensource.com belongs to everyone. It’s a conversation-starter, a place for debate, and we hope you’ll come be a part of it.
And thank you. For subscribing, for contributing, and for reading–at RHM and beyond.
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Here is an interesting blog post by Bradley Kuhn about Ubuntu, Debian, and (warning: my interpretation ahead) the culture of freedom. More here
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The LTSP-Cluster project is proud to announce that its website is now on-line.
LTSP-Cluster is a project to extend LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) with the required components for a large scale deployment. It makes it easy to deploy and manage thousands of thin clients connecting to a cluster of Linux or Windows application servers.
The LTSP-Cluster team works very closely with the main LTSP project so the required hooks are included directly in stock LTSP. On top of that, the required load-balancing components, various daemons and a web interface have been developped to add the clustering functionalities.
The LTSP-Cluster packages have been included in Ubuntu in the Karmic development cycle by Jonathan and have already been used for a few large LTSP deployments.
All of these components have been developed by Revolution Linux and integrated with the help of upstream LTSP developers. They are all freely available under a GPLv3+ license.
Existing LTSP users considering to extend their current setup and wanting an easier way to manage it should definitely have a look at it.
People looking for a way to migrate from desktops to a thin client solution for a large network, be that with a Linux desktop or Windows desktop should also check it out.
You can learn more on: https://www.ltsp-cluster.org
If you like it, please Digg it!
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Installing mod_geoip for Apache2 On Ubuntu 9.10
This guide explains how to set up mod_geoip
with Apache2 on an Ubuntu 9.10 system. mod_geoip looks up the IP
address of the client end user. This allows you to redirect or block
users based on their country. You can also use this technology for your
OpenX (formerly known as OpenAds or phpAdsNew) ad server to allow geo targeting.
The organisation said today it would issue press releases about the Windows 7 Sins campaign in eight languages, with several more on the way.
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Jeffrey Hammond is a research analyst focusing on software development for Forrester Research.
When it comes to the technologies that software developers use to do their jobs, IT managers and executives don't always have a clear picture of what's going on at the ground level in their development shops. A series of Forrester Research surveys over the past three years have shown that.
We attribute this knowledge gap, which exists regardless of company size or industry, to "technology populism" -- the growing trend where tech-savvy workers such as developers make their own decisions about what technologies to use. They help themselves to the software, collaborative tools, and information sources that best fit their needs, with minimal or no support from central IT. Much of this activity flies under management radar.
Developers were among the first users to bring consumer technologies -- like instant messaging, mashups, wikis, and mobile devices -- to their jobs. They're often the first IT staffers to evaluate and use new software technologies. So it's valuable to track what they're doing.
To better understand what's going on in development shops, Forrester conducted a survey for Dr. Dobb's of more than 1,000 platform-agnostic, programming-language-independent Dr. Dobb's readers. Collectively, they best represent the software development community. We asked them what types of applications they're writing, how they're writing them, and what they think about the state of application development. Our survey turned up seven trends that could have major implications for your IT strategy.
While client-server and server-based applications are the most common types of software projects that our survey respondents are involved in, there's a third technology to keep an eye on: rich Internet applications (see Figure 1).
RIAs are slowly replacing HTML when it comes to Web site development, because they combine the more-interactive user experience of rich client applications with the location-independence and reduced deployment costs of traditional Web applications. Industry stalwarts such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun are doing well with this transition, but other vendors, including Adobe and Google, are gaining mind-share as developers opt for their tools and frameworks, and push to get these vendors added to their companies' stables of platform suppliers.
Nearly four out of five developers use open source software for development or application deployment (see Figure 2). That's much higher than the 40% of IT managers and executives who say their companies use open source software.
Developers are incorporating open source software into their application platform infrastructure in various ways, including:
The majority of developers still write code on Windows PCs, but when they deploy apps, almost one in four targets Linux as their primary deployment operating system. And while 5% of developers have moved to a Mac as their primary development machine, most of them are targeting Linux or Windows as a primary deployment operating system, not OS X.
Linux's popularity has grown as more developers build Web applications and shift their focus to the server components, especially in the Java/Web space. The economies of scale when deploying to a LAMP stack, or Linux/Apache/Tomcat or Linux/Apache/JBoss combinations, make Linux on the server an attractive proposition. This is especially true in environments making heavy use of virtualization, since developers don't have to stop and ask, "Do I have a license for that image I just created?"
The implication of all this is clear: If you don't have an open source strategy in place, you need one -- now!
Developers appear to understand the benefits of virtualization and are getting rid of the testing server under the desk that used to be a development machine. More than a third (36%) of respondents develop applications on a virtual image that IT manages, and almost as many (28%) deploy to virtual server instances.
But cloud computing is just gaining traction among developers. About 4% of respondents are deploying applications to the cloud. Of those, Amazon's EC2 is the preferred target. That means if you're just getting started on a cloud strategy, relax -- you still have time to develop one that builds on the idea of a virtual private cloud, combining the best of your own data center resources with those found in the public cloud.
Developers used to identify themselves by the languages that they used -- "I'm a COBOL programmer," "she's a Java developer." But that's changing -- less than 15% of the developers we surveyed spend all their time writing in a single language.
The Web has brought about a new type of developer, one who identifies with platforms and runtimes that are tuned to building particular types of applications such as CRUD-style ("Create, Read, Update, Delete") Web applications that use tools such as Ruby on Rails and media-centric applications that use Adobe Flash. Multilingual developers create applications for these fit-to-purpose platforms, using no one language more than half the time. They're comfortable working in environments where mixing servers written in Java, .NET, and PHP with clients written in JavaScript and Adobe Flex is practically second nature. One implication of this is that when hiring developers, it's just as important to assess how quickly they can learn a new language as it is to look at the languages they already know.
When we looked at age demographics, we weren't surprised to see that COBOL developers tended to be the oldest respondents -- after all, the language turned 50 last year. It's also no surprise to see that dynamic languages such as Ruby, Python, PHP, and JavaScript are proving most popular with developers in the 45-and-under cohort. Dynamic languages are useful when it comes to assembling components into composite Web applications, especially if runtime composition is important.
The implications? As the development staff at a shop turns over, the new generation will push to adopt these dynamic languages. IT managers must ensure that processes and application life-cycle management tools can handle the changes that these new languages bring to the development shop.
Agile processes are growing ever more popular with developers. Of the 900 developers we surveyed who say they're using a formal methodology, 45% are using an Agile process, with Scrum being the most popular.
Twenty percent of developers using Agile say it's a key part of the success of their projects, compared with only 12% of those using iterative methodologies and 8% of those doing waterfall development. And only 2% of Agile developers feel that their methodology creates significant busywork, compared with 27% of developers doing waterfall development.
Embracing Agile development isn't easy; developers need to change their thinking, processes, and tools to implement practices such as continuous integration and test-driven development. But a fair number of development shops are well along in their transition, and that means IT managers will need to start thinking about how to apply Agile more broadly and measure the results relative to the other development processes they use.
When we asked participants to indicate if several statements described them personally, what jumped out was that 60% of respondents don't view their craft as a 9-to-5 job -- something that they leave at behind at the end of the workday. These developers continue to apply their development skills outside their jobs on side projects and in other businesses and organizations they work with.
Whether it's writing the next great iPhone application, helping out a church or local charity, or working on a startup, these developers are extending the use of their creative powers beyond the confines of their companies. In particular, we're surprised to see that one in five contributes to at least one open source project. This augers well for the future evolution of open source.
Wise development managers should recognize the creative potential of these entrepreneurial developers and think about how it can be redirected to the benefit of their organizations.
The picture that emerges from our survey is one of developers in transition. Software developers are adopting new technologies or techniques including RIAs, virtualization, and Agile development. They're using and contributing to open source projects, and challenging the conventions that underpin the way enterprise software and tools are built and sold. This transition will accelerate as developer tech populism takes hold and drives the adoption of new development approaches related to cloud computing, scale-out architectures that can accommodate change, and mobile Web applications.
Here's the ultimate call to action for people who manage developers: Spend more time understanding what your developers are doing both at work and outside of it, and solicit their ideas about how these technologies could speed up development and cut costs for the organization. Above all, understand how your organization is changing, and that you can't hold back tech populism among your developers -- they're going to use of all the technology that's available, whether or not it's approved for use inside the firewall. It's best to embrace this phenomenon and channel it in a positive direction.
Copyright © 2009 United Business Media LLC
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Monday night, Microsoft released a slew of updates for Windows, the majority of which were targeted for the latest versions of the client and server operating systems. None of these are security updates: this wasn't Patch Tuesday and Microsoft is not yet ready to address the 17-year-old Windows flaw. The most important update is just like the first stability and reliability update for the OSes, but smaller: Windows 7 32-bit (1.2MB), Windows 7 64-bit (1.7MB), Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit (1.7MB), and Windows Server 2008 R2 Itanium (2.1MB).
The patch resolves issues that affect some computers that use the Error Reporting service or Microsoft Customer Support Services. Microsoft plans to regularly release Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 stability and reliability updates, and this one builds on those that preceded it, adding the following fixes:
If you're experiencing the issues described, you can download the updates from the Microsoft Download Center. Otherwise you can just wait till they trickle down via Windows Update—or until Service Pack 1 arrives.
The next update is for an issue that occurs in a very specific scenario: your Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 computer has an NVIDIA USB Enhanced Host Controller Interface (EHCI) chipset, at least 4GB of RAM, and while performing general I/O operations on an external USB device, such as copying data from the computer, either your computer stops responding or the copy operation stops abruptly. The fix is available for Windows 7 32-bit (449KB) and Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit (516KB). Microsoft plans on including this update in SP1.
Microsoft also released updated versions of the System Update Readiness Tool for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 32-bit (104.1MB), Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 64-bit (142.0MB), Windows Server 2008 Itanium (32.2MB), Windows 7 32-bit (28.9MB), Windows 64-bit (93.8MB), Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit (93.8MB), and Windows Server 2008 R2 Itanium (16.3MB). The tool was originally released in September 2009 to resolve certain conditions that could cause installing updates and other software not to work. Typically you do not have to manually run this tool (it is offered automatically through Windows Update to computers that have a condition that the tool could resolve). It runs a one-time scan for inconsistencies that might prevent future servicing operations and usually takes less than 15 minutes (though it has been known to appear as if it's stopped at 60 percent when run from Windows Update).
The Windows NT Backup Restore Utility has also been updated for Windows 7 32-bit (599KB), Windows 7 64-bit (669KB), Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit (669KB), and Windows Server 2008 R2 Itanium (1000KB). The tool was originally released in November 2009 and notably no longer included Removable Storage Manager (RSM), used for restoring backups from tape devices. Microsoft has no plans to include this update in SP1.
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You may recall that Google Social Search is a standard search results page add-on that displays socially relevant content from people in your online social circle, as determined by your Google Profile.
With the beta release, Google’s also integrating social search into Google Image searches, which means you can scroll down to view pictures matching your query that contacts from your circle — friends and friends of friends — have shared online.
With the beta release Google is also introducing new UI elements to tie the social search experience together. So two additional links will appear next to the “Results from your social circle” heading, with “My social circle” and “My social content” taking you to pages that display your social circle in address book format and the content for your own results, respectively. The experience seems focused on information over design, so don’t expect any frills here.
We think the beta rollout to all English searchers is more significant than the initial labs feature, as it exposes the contextual search results to a mainstream search audience. While it’s officially a beta product today, the Google Social Search rollout will occur over the next few days. If you don’t have Social Search already, you can expect to start seeing the social results fairly soon.
For a demonstration of Google Social Search check out the video below:
Tags: Google, Search, social search
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