tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-199608662010-03-09T21:03:03.838-08:00an open discussion of free and open source software and operating systemsLittle Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.comBlogger48125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-36310132820382578182010-03-03T11:06:00.000-08:002010-03-03T11:16:42.260-08:00

http://www.us-cert.gov/current/index.html#u_s_census_bureau_2010Please follow the link above to view the official notice from the US Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team.At the time of writing, the US Census Bureau website is offline and does not appear in DNS lookups... and in the space of five minutes, it is back online. Curious, to say the least! It also looks

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-66863699676872117322010-02-25T14:48:00.001-08:002010-02-25T14:49:46.204-08:00

I am reposting a US-CERT Cybersecurity Tip that defines web browsers, hoping to give users the advantage of understanding their systems in order to better protect themselves online.Please view the original article.Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-68540363208202355322010-02-14T17:25:00.000-08:002010-02-14T17:39:41.659-08:00

Wolfram|AlphaIt is the computational knowledge engine, released in the Summer of 2009 by Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica and maintainers of the MathWorld reference library. I followed the project loosely from buzz to release. It was rumored to be a Google rival, also having strong mathematical underpinnings. While it may take some traffic from Google, Wolfram|Alpha was not designed to be

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-73434458205038736942010-02-11T13:25:00.000-08:002010-02-11T13:28:42.711-08:00

I just received an email on the general security tips mailer from the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team that describes operating systems in general, and then with examples of the most popular consumer operating systems on the market.Check out tip ST04-021 now.The US-CERT mailing lists are very informative, including these tips, as well as Cybersecurity threats and remedies.Registered Linux

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-4071142520435839412010-01-01T11:59:00.001-08:002010-01-01T12:04:19.453-08:00

The Moodle project, in which I participated this past semester, was a success, though not complete.The reality is that, in Open Source, each contribution, though perhaps partial, helps the community at large. It is important that each code, technical, or design contribution be accompanied by appropriate documentation that explains its foundations and motivation, as well as sufficient technical

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-35650504642613336472009-11-12T21:45:00.001-08:002009-12-30T15:24:36.960-08:00

My apologies to the anonymous visitor whose off-topic comment I initially rejected. Let me answer your question.By social media, let me define it by example to be services like Google Wave, Facebook, Orkut, Linkedin, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, and others. Let me consider blogs separately from these.By SEO, we mean Search Engine Optimization, or the art and science (yes, both) of crafting

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-1144182276357721512009-10-15T23:11:00.000-07:002009-10-15T23:23:12.381-07:00

This weekend is the Society of Women Engineers National Conference. It happens to be in my hometown. It is shockingly different to attend an incredibly technical event and be completely surrounded by women - we are talking a 95% constitution of those human beings producing more estrogen than testosterone. This is the complementary circumstance to that which I experience daily - namely, a vast

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-69110753262025876382009-09-24T11:51:00.000-07:002009-09-24T11:56:53.202-07:00

This semester, I attack my senior project in Computer Science. We have been given the opportunity to contribute to Open Source as our senior project; of course, our experience will be well documented.My team of four has taken on an altogether greater opportunity to work with IBM to encourage compatibility for Moodle with IBM's DB2 relational database management system (RDBMS). Moodle is an online

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-11873665882519355352009-09-04T15:42:00.000-07:002009-09-04T16:07:27.356-07:00

This article from MIT's Technology Review gives a succinct overview of the WikiTrust project, an effort at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) to add accountability to open knowledge bases, like Wikipedia, in order to make the content contained therein more useful. The project takes into consideration several aspects of each author's credentials and how their contributions are

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-84785280004606653102009-08-02T20:55:00.000-07:002009-08-02T21:16:35.641-07:00

I was surprised to see that I have not posted about revision control systems yet. I began using Subversion about a year ago for personal projects; it was a nice start, and I had my beloved server under my bed hosting my repositories for local access.Since then, I have switched to Mercurial, which is so much more painless than Subversion, being distributed in nature, and the TortoiseHg Windows

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-40835669648809966982009-07-30T22:59:00.001-07:002009-07-30T23:04:22.501-07:00

I cannot believe I did not jump into these communities earlier - StackOverflow and ServerFault are two amazing community websites in question-answer forum fashion about programming and software development, and IT administration, respectively. I have occasionally landed on StackOverflow doing Google searches for programming-related problems, but from now on, I will be starting there and moving

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-26620700447898063892009-07-21T20:59:00.000-07:002009-07-21T21:25:26.445-07:00

Today, the California State University Board of Trustees voted to institute an additional 20% fee increase, over and above the standard 10% fee increase approved in May. This is to counter the gaping $584 million hole that the California legislature left for us. During today's meeting of the Committee on Finance, to which the fee proposal was referred, the Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-3207460545916998392009-06-22T21:26:00.000-07:002009-06-22T21:37:15.536-07:00

Microsoft did it again! I pulled up the Windows Task Manager on my slow laptop to diagnose its problem, only to find that even after several seconds of waiting, it was still not showing its status bar, menu bar, or title bar. I let it go. Then today I was on it again, and saw the same thing, even after rebooting the system (something that Microsoft Windows seems to be addicted to). That led me to

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-72898820876634125802009-06-19T10:58:00.000-07:002009-06-19T22:43:21.201-07:00

Things are getting quite heated with IE8 being tested by the community since being released through Windows Update, the imminent release of Firefox 3.5, and the whole Bing vs. Google hype. Tech news is littered with arguments for and against, studies conducted under very close scrutiny of the vendors themselves, and propaganda released by each vendor, desperately trying to get a leg up over the

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-62602045546753736402009-05-25T10:49:00.001-07:002009-05-25T10:53:45.272-07:00

Facebook members have been hard-hit recently by hackers and spammers who send messages through someone's Facebook account to all their friends - the message typically contains a single link, which generally points to a phishing attack with a page that looks like the Facebook login page that you get when you follow an internal Facebook link before logging in, like the ones that are sent in

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-45076941032029323282009-05-21T13:47:00.001-07:002009-05-21T13:52:47.901-07:00

Several news agencies recently published articles including Pope Calls for Internet Evangelists and Bearing Witness to the Faith through the Digital World, both referring to Wednesday's General Audience, at which the Pope did, indeed, speak on these matters.It seems only appropriate that Open Source technologies be employed to meet this need - they are easy for the public to obtain, and therefore

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-68755096268786624432009-04-26T21:14:00.001-07:002009-04-26T21:20:25.753-07:00

Everybody is talking about it. The top-of-the-line enterprise database vendor is acquiring the leader in portable application development, dynamic web applications, and, by transitivity, the top-of-the-line open source database. Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems, which recently acquired MySQL.Java, Sun's software platform, has always had a good MySQL interface, and the open source

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-18026920189739979542009-04-26T21:06:00.000-07:002009-04-26T21:08:19.631-07:00

I was browsing my own blog the other day and really started to feel that itch - time for a new theme! I chose one that was not too far from the previous one, except for the decline in the obviousness of the RED color. This theme still uses red for highlights, but has a more modern, cleaner finish than the previous one. This is still a system theme - I have not broken down to write my own theme

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-6782702653048541072009-02-24T14:15:00.000-08:002009-02-24T14:23:33.823-08:00

Just celebrated my 21st birthday yesterday. I had changed my Facebook status to include 21 in the three alternate number systems used in computing: hexadecimal, binary, and octal. My only problem is that I frequently use the hex representation of 23, the date on which I was born; I mistakenly put down 21 = 0x17 = 0001 0111 = 027. Later in the day I was thinking about it and so changed it to the

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-85950374926273224922009-01-31T10:26:00.000-08:002009-01-31T10:48:22.602-08:00

The United Nations proposed 8 Millennium Development Goals, toward which they challenged the world to work. Microsoft's Imagine Cup student competition requires entries to contribute a tech solution that works toward achieving one or more of these goals, at least partially. Numerous charities try to make assisting the neediest in the world an easy part of our daily lives, such as practicing

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-83740406822163948742009-01-01T20:40:00.000-08:002009-01-01T20:57:36.323-08:00

I recently read about the FireGPG extension for Firefox. This extension allows one to interact with encrypted or digitally-signed data included on web pages, using a separately-installed GnuPG installation on the local machine. It also provides tight integration with Gmail, adding a drop-down box that provides digital signature and encryption options for email messages and automatically verifying

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-89274292549233966602008-12-26T08:37:00.000-08:002008-12-26T08:52:16.871-08:00

It's a Slackware user's style to compile from source. The only hitch is satisfying dependencies (hmm, not unlike registering for classes). Unfortunately this can be much more than "a hitch" and consume entire days grabbing dependencies. There should be some sort of open project that maps the dependencies of projects upon one another, because as nice as the GTK is for building graphical

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-59906493610568209122008-11-18T20:46:00.000-08:002008-11-18T21:07:21.388-08:00

Well, folks, it's about time I posted again. This time I would like to cover the Dvorak Keyboard layout. This layout is a re-mapping of the keys on the keyboard that was designed to improve typing efficiency. It accomplishes this in several ways, the primary way being the strategic placement of letters of high occurrence in the home row and under the strongest fingers and furthermore increased

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-37204063771959998402008-10-16T19:23:00.000-07:002008-10-16T19:40:26.303-07:00

So the day we have been waiting for has finally come! OpenOffice.org 3.0 was just released this week, taking down their website with a staggering number of hits. Having jumped into the picture and downloaded the Linux, Mac, and Windows versions to deploy in my very diverse home lab, I can say that OpenOffice has provided the much-anticipated 3.0 release right on target. The most useful feature

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-34295706925266547712008-10-15T11:38:00.000-07:002008-10-15T12:06:14.115-07:00

Today is a day in which bloggers everywhere are invited to blog about poverty. Poverty is a global humanitarian issue, affecting over a billion people. In my recent coursework, I studied globalization and its effects on various components of society, including poverty. One problem with globalization, as practiced in many countries, is that the influx of money is not distributed evenly or fairly

Little Maxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03758063351651613446noreply@blogger.com0