TimburyDotOrg

If you saw yesterday’s Tech Tip and were looking for more
on using TCP/IP with bash’s built-in /dev/tcp device file then read on.
Here, we’ll both read from, and write to a socket.

read more

My ambition was to implement a small (better tiny) appliance for monitoring network health and network resources, short and longtime trends, running under VMware Server or VMware ESX. So I had an eye upon all components which are implemented on the system, to be as leightweight as possible. This was also the reason why no SQL DBMS based software was used. The appliance is based on Ubuntu Jeos LTS (8.04.3 at the time of this writing). Almost all used components are from the related repositories. This tutorial shows how the appliance was implemented.

Microsoft has received support from an unexpected quarter in the dispute over Chrome Frame, an extension which embeds Google’s Chrome browser in Internet Explorer. Mike Shaver, Vice President Engineering for Mozilla Corporation, gives his views in a blog posting in which he criticises the plug-in.

Google Summer of Code has again been a huge success for KDE this year. 37 out of 38 projects were finished successfully. Much of the work done during these projects is already merged into trunk and will be available for the users with the KDE 4.4 release in January 2010. Thanks to all students and mentors for their great work! Below you will find a short interview with each of the students, asking them about the cool things they have been working on for the past few months.

I loved Amarok 1.4 and even used it in Gnome. Then, I really hated all the 2.x series until this 2.2 RC1. It’s kind of slow, but it finally looks like a real music player and reminds me why I liked Amarok so much. I’m currently using it in Ubuntu Jaunty and since there are only .deb files for Ubuntu Karmic posted on the announcement download link (actually those are for version 2.2 beta), I thought I’d let you know how to install it in Ubuntu Jaunty (and Fedora, thanks to Fedora-ES).

Bletchley Park, the top secret code breaking hub that played a pivotal role in the outcome of World War Two, has finally been awarded development funding of some £460,500 ($735,500) from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

In a posting on his FSF blog, Richard Stallman has apologised for “repeating a criticism of Mac OS which I cannot substantiate and must presume is false”. The claim, that Mac OS X has a backdoor which could install changes without the user’s permission, is one that Stallman has repeated, but he now says there “is no basis to claim there is one”.

Plymouth, the nifty boot splash program developed by Red Hat to replace RHGB and leverages kernel-based mode-setting to provide a flicker-free experience, is in the process of picking up more features. Committed to the Plymouth repository is now a DRM plug-in.

“With the up coming release of GIMP 3.0, I think that GIMP should be renamed to simply “Wilber.” Though it would no longer be an acronym for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, but it would totally eliminate any possibly offensive terminology in exchange for a name everyone can love, especially the young, and it would give GIMP a chance at the big times.”

In an interview with TechCrunch this week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer goes out of his way to avoid naming Google instead calling them “the incumbent.”