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Linux 2.6.34 has been released. This version includes the distributed filesystem Ceph and LogFS, a filesystem for flash devices. Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance, the VMware ballon driver, the "kprobes jump" optimization for dynamic probes, new perf features (the "perf lock" tool, cross-platform analysis support), support for GPU switching, several Btrfs improvements, RCU lockdep, asynchronous suspend/resume, several new drivers and many other small improvements. You can peruse the full changelog as well.

The folks at WineHQ are gearing up for the second release of Wine. "The 64-bit support is now more or less complete, and we have most of the fancy new icons, so it's time to think about the next stable release. Unless some major problems come up, 1.1.44 will be the last of the 1.1.x series. The next release will be 1.2-rc1, which will mark the beginning of the code freeze. This should result in a 1.2 final sometime in June."

FreeBSD developer Robert Watson has announced an Apache GCD MPM that uses Apple's Grand Central Dispatch concurrent programming framework, and cites 1/4 the number of lines of code for threaded MPMs to accomplish the same goals. Currently, the MPM is being distributed on Mac OS X Forge, and runs on FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Apache developer Paul Querna has proposed merging it to the Apache trunk. There are also ongoing efforts to port libdispatch to Solaris and Linux, so hopefully it will work there soon as well!

The LLVM developers seem to be driven to replace all parts of the GCC toolchain and libraries with home-grown alternatives under BSD-style licenses. The latest addition to the project is libc++, an implementation of the C++ standard library which is faster and uses less memory than the GCC libstdc++. The developers also intend to support standard library debugging which is ABI compatible to the release version, which should help developers cut down on lengthy recompile-and-debug cycles. The project is still in an early state but it already implements 85% of the C++0x standard library. As with the rest of the LLVM project, the development of libc++ is being supported by Apple.

It annoys me that Flash is required for most video sites. Especially when Flash isn't available on a lot of devices or at least not the latest, required version. Whenever I try to use my Internet Tablet to watch shows on sites like Hulu, Veoh, Crackle, Joost, etc., I can't, because they require a newer version of Flash, and I'm stuck with what I have. Thankfully not every site uses the latest version. At least not yet anyways.

Google announced today that they'll stop selling the famed superphone, the Nexus One, directly to the public. Instead, Google will continue to sell the phone through carriers in the US.

When computers--evolutive machines which may be reprogrammed at will--became widely available, it generated a well-deserved buzz. Some (scientists, banks, insurance companies) felt like they were dreaming, others (like some SF writers) rather thought of it as a nightmare. Today, like it or not, they're everywhere However, part of the individual-oriented computers are going rather far from the original programmable machine model. They rather look like usual tools, with a fixed use. Their customizable internals are only accessible to the people who engineered them. Is there no market anymore for general-purpose personal programmable machines, able to do about anything? I'll try to answer this question, taking into account two major trends in the personal computing market : touchscreen-powered devices and cloud computing.

Today Jeff Roberson committed his patches to FreeBSD 9 for adding journaling to UFS. No more background fsck after unclean shutdowns! This is a major landmark in the history of UFS, with 11000 new lines of code (and about 2000 removed). Much of the work was done in collaboration with Kirk McKusick, the original author of FFS and Softupdates, under sponsorship form Yahoo!, Juniper and iXsystems. Jeff's blog contains quite a lot of technical information of his work. There's also information on the FreeBSD mailing lists.

The PCLinuxOS distribution is the popular brain child of a man best known as Texstar. PCLinuxOS's website, which carries a pleasant blue theme with ads bordering the pages, claims the distro is "radically simple" and easy to use. If we stopped there, it would probably give the impression PCLinuxOS is aimed at newcomers to the Linux community, but that does not appear to be the case.

Ms. Z. Arsenault is an IT consultant working in the depths of a large North American energy company. She's one of those brave souls who works away in the background, keeping the servers running, making sure all the pieces fall properly into place so when the employees wander in each morning their applications run as expected. It's often a busy job just keeping things on a steady path. But Ms. Arsenault and her team aren't just maintaining the status quo, they're also trying to improve performance and cut costs while maintaining a stable environment for the end user. This week I had the opportunity to talk with Ms. Arsenault about what's she's been up to in the depths of corporate IT.

A developer from the Qumranet team, developers of the KVM virtual machine and Spice Protocol has written about the team's experience in porting the RHEV-M software from C# to Java as a means of making the application cross platform and open sourcing it. The team considered several options including Mono which they discarded as too immature for the job, and Grasshopper technology was discarded as an option since the goal was to open source it and eventually settled on a semi-automated workflow using Java. Red Hat is well on its way towards the goal of making a cross-platform and open source management tool for managing virtual machines in the servers and desktops.

Websites for over a decade have been transitioning to the Model-View-Controller paradigm, separating data from formatting and user interaction in their code bases. Unfortunately, this has meant not only the end of ugly early 90's vintage Geocities pages, but also of the era of digital, or more specifically computeral craftsmanship. The future of computers will depend on those artists, scholars, and programmers who can reunify content with format and remake programming as an art.

Mandriva recently released an update to their Enterprise Server product line. This new version, 5.1, is focused on improving virtualization and providing easy-to-use administrative tools. According to Mandriva's website, the new Enterprise Server is compliant with Linux Standard Base 4.0 and comes with five years of support. The company has provided trial versions in the form of installation discs and VirtualBox images. For my journey into the Enterprise side of Mandriva, I downloaded an image for VirtualBox.

In line with the current torrent of articles on the H.264 and Theora debate, I feel that is it unfair for the "pragmatists" to talk about Theora as if it is a stupid ideal that is useless to consumers. This article will focus on defining the terms of the debate used and make the case that Theora has a reason, if not a chance.