Thom Holwerda Archive

"Since Apple announced Leopard last year during WWDC, MacOSXRumors obtained reports on two major features in the next release of Mac OS X. The first is a redesigned Finder making extensive use of Spotlight and the second is the inclusion of virtualization software. Recently sources have been indicating that Leopard will feature easy collaborative work throughout the OS. The main idea is that it will be possible to declare a document as available for collaborative use over a network or Internet. Users who want to work on this document will be able to connect and work simultaneously on it. Modifications made by each user will be updated in real time for all connected users." Authenticity up for debate, obviously.

"You might be surprised to know that you can connect Excel to a database, and this isn't limited to databases running Microsoft's SQL. Excel can connect to practically any mainstream database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and others), provided that the database offers an ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) driver. In this article, you'll learn how to connect MySQL to Excel."

The European mandatory access control solution, RSBAC 1.2.7 has been released, featuring the usual bugfixes, new kthread notification code, and GCC-4 support. It is interesting to note that there is an Apache module available now for RSBAC, replacing SuExec functionality, with a higher security level and more important, no performance loss.

"1.7 gigabytes in 12 minutes. That's 1,700MB in under 15 minutes from the Internet to my PC. Glorious, spectacular, almost breathtaking speed, brought to me courtesy of Verizon FiOS. Yes, it's true, I finally got it installed and it's good. Devoted readers know the long road I took to get here, but for those new to me or to FiOS, here's a brief recap."

At an event put on to honor the top technology innovations from Massachusetts companies, a technology designed for users far from the halls of MIT and Harvard stole all the thunder. At the MITX in Boston, Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, was inducted into the MITX Innovation Hall of Fame. But Negroponte used his time at the podium to talk about his current job as chairman of the One Laptop per Child association and its goal of putting what is commonly referred to as the $100 laptop into the hands of children in developing countries. Negroponte didn't just talk about the association and its goals; he also brought the first working model of the $100 laptop.

SourceForge has announced the SourceForge Enterprise Edition Download. This is a free, 15 user download version of SFEE. It's packaged together with Subversion and CVS in a VMware image. SFEE is a corporate version of SourceForge.net that lets development teams work together on internal software projects. It's an integrated toolset that lets you monitor project status, find out what your offsite developers are doing, access project information and documentation in a central repository, manage software changes efficiently, and search across your software projects. Check it out and download it from SourceForge.net . There's also a community support site with documentation, discussion forums, add-ons, and sample projects.

Analysts cover everything. They are quoted in stories about the PS3 launch date, the impending death of the iPod Shuffle, and the earnings of search behemoth Google, but reading quote after quote from faceless 'analysts' does little to answer the burning question: who are these people, and what do they do all day?

"DebConf is best known as an annual gathering of Debian developers. But the Debian project likes the name so much that it uses it - give or take a capital 'C' - for the system used to configure Debian packages. Just as the conference is central to the social aspects of Debian, so the program is central to the package management system that is one of Debian's main technical advantages. Debconf gives users as fine a degree of control during configuration as they choose."

Microsoft continues to gain share in the web server market, chipping away at Apache's commanding lead. The number of hostnames on Windows servers grew by 4.5 million, giving Microsoft 29.7% market share, a gain of 4.25% for the month. Apache had a decline of 429K hostnames, and loses 3.5% to 61.25%. Apache's lead over Microsoft, which stood at 48.2% in March, has been narrowed to 31.5%, a shift of 16.7% in just three months.

At a Computex event today, Intel officially unveiled its 965 Express chipset (the P965, codenamed 'Broadwater') for use with its forthcoming line of Core 2 Duo processors. The company confirmed the accelerated launch schedule for the Core 2 rollout: Woodcrest (a Xeon replacement) in June, Conroe (for desktops) in July, and Merom (for laptops) in August. There's also an ultra low voltage Merom in the works for use in very thin portables from Dell and HP.

KOffice is working on its future, one based on KDE4. KOffice is starting new initiatives with libraries like Flake and Pigment that are going to be used for all KOffice applications. For the users of KOffice those changes are invisible until the 2.0 previews actually start to appear some months from now. Therefore the KOffice crew wants to show you their goals of what KOffice 2 is going to look like.

"Linux users who are looking for an alternative to the ultra-mobile PC may want to take a look at the new Pepper Pad. Yesterday Pepper Computer announced that it has updated the Pepper Pad to its third revision. The product is slated to be released on August 15th with a suggested retail price of $699. Though it is just 11.4"x5.9"x0.9"/290x149x23mm and 2.2 lbs/985 grams the Pepper Pad is touted as a full featured handheld device which is capable of surfing the internet, music/video playback, photo viewing, emailing, and more. This device is controlled with a split QWERTY keyboard and 7" (800x480) touch screen and also houses a 20 GB hard drive and built-in speakers."

Frenzy LiveCD 1.0, based on FreeBSD 6.1, has been released. This is a 'system administrator's portable instrument'; a LiveCD based on FreeBSD, which allows the administrator to boot from it and get a fully functional system with a wide variety of software for tuning, testing, and analyzing the network, testing computer hardware, and much more. Frenzy contains its own configuration center, can be installed on a hard drive as a fully functional operating system (USB Flash install is also supported).

"Any Linux system will generate many log files by default, containing various information about the operation of the system. If no rotation would occur on the various log files, then they will just grow bigger and bigger, filling up the space. This little how-to will show you how the default log rotation works, based on syslog and logrotate."