Monthly Archive:: May 2008

AWK is one of the most common UNIX tools to process text-based data in either files or datastreams. Written by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan, AWK "extensively uses the string datatype, associative arrays (that is, arrays indexed by key strings), and regular expressions." ComputerWorld interviewed Alfred Aho.

Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell have released a new version of a real-time process monitor for Windows (tentatively called 'Process Monitor') that combines the features of Regmon and Filemon. There is a whole set of new features too, of course.

Ivan Krstic' critique of the One Laptop Per Child Project has made its ripples around the pond of the intertubes. Apart from the obvious part where it criticises a major project from an insider's point of view, it also had a few other remarks that caught people's attention - most notably the admission that despite his ability to do Linux kernel hacking, his main development laptop is a Macintosh running Mac OS X.

The serious tech journalists at XKCD have uncovered some major new security holes in some popular Linux distributions. Note: Coincidentally, after fixing some major hardware issues, Focus Shift is back.

"The new version of F-Script provides syntax for dynamically creating Cocoa classes. This is great for quickly experimenting, prototyping and using Cocoa interactively. You can type a class definition in the F-script console, hit return and immediately start playing with your new class. This article provides a quick introduction to this easy-to-use and powerful feature. You can experiment with it right now by downloading F-Script 2.0 alpha 3 ."

"FreeBSD 7.0 has already been released. If you are a real hacker, the best way to jump in and learn it is hacking together an introductory kernel module. In this article I'll implement a very basic module that prints a message when it is loaded, and another when it is unloaded. I'll also cover the mechanics of compiling our module using standard tools and rebuilding the stock FreeBSD kernel. Let's do it!"

The Equinox Desktop Environment is a small memory footprint desktop environment built on top of the extended FLTK toolkit ('Fast Light Tool Kit'). EDE features a desktop, a Windows-like panel with 'start' menu, taskbar, and system tray, support for theming, and graphical front-ends for software installation, xscreensaver configuration, and much more. Linux.com took a look at EDE version 1.2.

More often than not, the question arises on OSNews why certain projects or pieces of abandonware aren't released as open source software. Supposedly, this would speed up development, facilitate the growth of a community, all that jazz associated with open source development. Here are four projects I'd like to see released under a MIT license.

Cnet reports: "Fedora is the operating system of choice for AllemaniACs' winning robot in the RoboCup, a soccer tournament played between robots. Fedora has fueled AllemaniACs' victories in 2006 and 2007, and appears to be poised to raise the cup again in 2008." For anyone interested in using Fedora in robotics, a special interest group for robotics has been started within the Fedora Project to support such efforts.

You'll find flash file systems used in personal digital assistants (PDAs), cellphones, MP3 players, digital cameras, USB flash drives (UFDs), and even laptop computers. This article looks at a couple of the read-only file systems and also reviews the various read/write file systems available today and how they work. Explore what the flash devices are all about and the challenges that they introduce.

Infoworld takes a look at Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor-based virtualization system, and finds: "In a nutshell, one of Hyper-V's advertised strengths -- the host partition's ability to work with generic Windows device drivers -- is also its greatest weakness. That's because the quality level of Windows device drivers, especially those from third-party developers, is notoriously inconsistent."

"The Fedora distribution has a reputation for innovation, and the new Fedora 9, released today, is no exception. With features that range from easy filesystem encryption to support for the ext4 format, it includes a wide range of features that are likely to become standard in other distributions in the next six months. But for Paul W. Frields, who became Fedora project leader in February, what distinguishes the release is less the technology than the community that supports it, and how the technology contributes to the larger free software world."

A report on PC World says that Linux vendors Red Hat and Novell's SUSE division have unveiled updates for their enterprise Linux operating systems, adding new capabilities and hardware support in between the next major releases of their products.

Slowly but surely, Haiku is moving towards their very first alpha release. It 'self-hosted' for the first time in February of this year, but it did require a few hacks to work properly. The need for hacks was removed April 1st (what's in a date) by Bruno G. Albuquerque. Recently, some more progress has been made.