Thom Holwerda Archive

It is no secret that the competition for global domination in the operating system market has moved from the desktop to the living room couch. The Olive Symphony, a Linux-powered hi-fi wi-fi stereo hub, stands a decent chance for a prime position before the living room throne.

"BlueIllusion 0.06 is out for downloading and testing. The OS sports various programs and commands, its own editor, an XML-Library, which I'm gonna use for loading and parsing settings, a 32 bit GUI, RTC Support, IDE/ATAPI-Driver (big thanks go to Andy McLaughlin from Visopsys Project- I've ported his IDE/ATAPI driver), ISO9660-FS support and finally functional and usable pipes."

Between December 2004 and July 2005, the "defect density" in the Linux kernel has fallen from 0.17 to 0.16 and all serious defects have been corrected, a new report out from code analysis firm Coverity asserts. Defect density declined by 2.2 percent.

"I am proud to announce the official release of Symphony OS Alpha 4. Alpha 4 includes the KNOPPIX version of the 2.6.11 Linux Kernel and an updated base based on Knoppix 3.9, numerous improvements to the Mezzo Desktop environment, includes synaptic for package management, beagle for local searching, supports freedesktop.org .desktop files in the Programs target, and much more."

Web content syndication is an area of growing importance on the Internet. Atom 1.0 provides a simple, well-defined, and unambiguous format for content syndication on the Web. This article shows you how this popular Web content syndication format stacks up to RSS, discusses Atom's technical strengths relative to other syndication formats, and offers several compelling use case examples that illustrate those strengths.

Some interesting newsbits from the RISC OS world in the last few days. First of all, "Drobe webmaster Ian Hawkins has unveiled The RISC OS File Repository, an online software database for RISC OS software." Secondly, "Castle has updated their range of RISC OS 5, XScale powered Iyonix computers, with the addition of a Aria Cube and X300 series of cases." And lastly, the A9 takes priority.

Novell will be launching a community-based Linux distribution, OpenSuSE, at next week's LinuxWorld in San Francisco, according to sources close to the company. Following in the footsteps of Red Hat Inc. with its successful Fedora Project Linux distribution, Novell Inc. will be opening up its Linux development efforts with OpenSuSE, sources said.

The Mozilla Foundation, developer of the Firefox Web browser, plans to announce Wednesday that it has created a for-profit subsidiary to pursue wider potential for the software.

Andrew Morton is the lead maintainer for the Linux public production kernel. In this 90-minute podcast he describes the Linux kernel development process and compares open-source and commercial processes and motivations.

Why go through the hassle of figuring out how to integrate and connect J2EE components to add Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) connectivity when someone else has done the work for you? This article shows you how to build ESB connectivity and to use a model-driven approach to develop service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions.

It seems that PC-BSD has set a trend. "DesktopBSD aims at being a stable and powerful operating system for desktop users. DesktopBSD combines the stability of FreeBSD, the usability and functionality of KDE and the simplicity of specially developed software to provide a system that's easy to use and install." How this new BSD distribution stacks up against PC-BSD remains to be seen.

Head of all things Windows at Microsoft, Jim Allchin provides a heads up on the operating system formerly known as Longhorn: "Most of the stuff that we would expect that tech enthusiasts and consumers will be interested in will happen at Beta 2. Beta 1 is not what I would call deeply interesting unless you are a real bithead".

The release of the IBM PC proved revolutionary for the then tiny microcomputer industry, and for IBM itself. Read about the birth of the IBM PC 5150 at Braeburn.

The advent of JUnit has been a boon to developers. Unfortunately, many think it's enough to learn the JUnit API and write a few tests in order to have a well-tested application. This idea is worse than not testing at all because it leads to a false sense of code health. Learning JUnit is the easiest part of testing. Writing good tests is the hard part. This article presents some common JUnit antipatterns and shows how to resolve them.