Internet Archive

The process to establish the next-generation Wi-Fi standard, which promises to quadruple transmission speeds, has stalled as members of the working group developing the standard failed to pass the main proposal onto the next stage.

This paper will provide an overview of grid computing including its history, current development, terminology, and use. The scope of this project is geared towards the implementation of Apple's Xgrid technology in a university environment, or in a home environment for power users such as architects. Later in this paper we will implement an Xgrid, and will demonstrate its cross platform abilities, while exploring its revolutionary take on grid computing. Benchmarks of this grid will be done using light ray tracing software called Pov-Ray in combination with Architectural CAD software called Sketchup, and will produce a series of complex graphical scenes. Each computer on the grid will be responsible for rendering at least one scene, and rendering times will be recorded.

OpenVPN, the versatile multi-platform SSL VPN has reached the 2.0 milestone. The new release features many improvements, most noteably it allows multiple clients to connect to a single OpenVPN server process over a single TCP or UDP port.

Adam Dunkels, author of Contiki and the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack, held a talk at NUCCC 2005 this weekend about writing really small TCP/IP stacks and making them withstand slashdottings. Adam's various TCP/IP stacks have been both slashdotted and osnewsed several times. Nice quote from the talk: "Great hacks are the diamonds of computer science: 'Useless', yet priceless!".

Workload management is critically important for an on-demand business. IBM LoadLeveler is a job-management system that allows users to run more jobs in less time by matching the jobs' processing needs with the available resources. Maintaining maximum system uptime of the job management system is increasingly important.

BitTorrent 4.0.0 is released for Windows and Linux. The Mac OS X version is pending.

Following my earlier article about creating a Bluetooth access point with your OS, here is my quick guide how to do just that with Arch Linux. You will need two Bluetooth-enabled devices to start with, and some patience as setting up Bluetooth is problematic on all OSes (each one with its own quirks).

StanaPhone is the first free telephone with real US phone numbers, and a Skype competitor.

This paper introduces basic clustering components and software tools that can be used to build a Linux cluster on IBM eServer OpenPower 710 by utilizing its 64-bit POWER5 architecture. This paper is intended as an introduction for someone interested in building a new Linux cluster running on OpenPower 710 servers or converting an existing cluster to OpenPower 710 servers.

1.0 versions of Voice over IP application Skype have been released for Linux and OS X. They've been in Beta for several months. These versions seem to have feature parity with the Windows versions, and cross-platform communication is possible.

A push mechanism is the delivery of unsolicited information to a mobile device. Learn how to set up a PPG on your own, configure the settings to your own taste, develop push content, and test it with a mobile handset simulator over a TCP/IP network on a LAN.

What happens when the corporation anybody seems to love to hate, namely Microsoft, release a killer app and of makes it free (as in dollars), but, of course, keeps its source jealously closed? And worse than that, use it to maintain a strong lock-in to the Windows platform?

The third in a three-part series on how to leverage Linux to get the most from your network, this tutorial shows how to use Samba to integrate your Linux and Windows networks (reg. req.). Sample code and configuration files are provided throughout to aid understanding.

Microsoft and Sun Microsystems last week issued a progress report on the technical truce the companies called this year but gave little indication of what specific fixes they would devise to address customers' problems.