All Things Open Source

"Acquiring, using and defending software patents has become big business — sometimes playing a vital role in a company’s success — but that could all change if the Supreme Court decides software can no longer be patented. If the justices make that decision, following oral arguments that begin Nov. 9, the ruling could drastically alter the competitive landscape of the Washington area’s software industry and other sectors of the local economy as well. The case, Bilski v. Kappos, marks the first time in more than 25 years that the Supreme Court will look at the criteria used to determine whether a business method or process — such as the series of actions that software performs — can be patented. Lawyers say the court case means change is inevitable and probably won’t favor software developers seeking the security of patents." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"This is a feature unique to the Mandriva installation. Once you have partitioned the hard drive the installation will compare the available hardware against the installable packages. Any packages that would not be used by the available hardware are not installed. This ensures your kernel will not be loading unused modules which will only slow down boot process, take up space, and use battery. Figure 2 shows the this screen. Just click Next and allow this process to happen. This will take some time (depending upon the speed of your hardware and the amount of packages that will not be installed)." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"This script doesn't completely block Flash elements in a page. Rather it "hides" them and substitutes a "button" that you may "press" to make individual Flash elements visible if you like. It's simple, quick, and much less sophisticated than FlashBlock. For most folks, this does most of the job they want done most of the time: it stops noxious, moving, distracting flash ads while letting you choose to see useful flash content." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Vladimir Vukićević was working at the Mozilla office when Firefox was first released into the wild. “All of our servers melted instantly,” Vukićević says. “We spent an hour trying to get the downloads back up.” Indeed, the anticipation around the release of Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004 — five years ago Monday — was electric. Mozilla had already produced its own eponymous browser based on open source code in 2002, but it was largely considered a failure. Firefox was the organization’s great re-do, and its second attempt to unseat its biggest nemesis, Microsoft Internet Explorer. A half-decade later, Firefox is no longer a scrappy upstart but a dominant player. Old rival IE still commands around 60 percent of the market share, but close to a quarter of the web now uses Firefox — a formidable number which speaks to its success as an open source project. At a time when nobody wanted to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, thousands of disparate programmers rose to... more... - sofarsoShawn

"Diigolet Diigolet is not as feature-rich as the Diigo toolbar, but it can be set-up by simple drag-and-drop - no download or installation needed, and it works for all major browsers. Much more powerful than bookmarklets offered by other social bookmarking sites, Diigolet is a "super bookmarklet" that allows you to highlight and add sticky-notes, in addition to simple bookmarking." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"After ABI Research projected that Linux represents a 32 percent share of netbooks in 2009 and will overtake Windows in 2013, we spoke with ABI analyst Jeffrey Orr. Orr notes the rise of international consumers and ARM-based netbooks, and discusses Ubuntu, Moblin, Android, and Chrome OS." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"Yet, as Orr noted in a ComputerWorld story, and repeats below, the perceptions of U.S. based observers are skewed by the local computing scene and its domination by Microsoft. Sales of low-cost netbooks are being increasingly driven by sales outside of the U.S. where Windows is not as prevalent, and especially in developing countries where PCs in general are still something of a novelty. In many of these markets, the $15 to $25 price differential compared to Windows XP makes all the difference." - ovigia

"There are many (millions?) users that open their browsers every day and browse sites using outdated versions of Adobe Flash. I suspect that most of those users don't have a clue that they are using vulnerable software. Mozilla is about to change that for Firefox users. In the next round of updates due out this month, Firefox will check the Flash version number and advise users to update if they've got an out-of-date version." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"An open source self-contained training environment for Web Application Security penetration testing. Tools + Targets = Dojo. For learning and practicing web app security testing techniques. It does not need a network connection since it contains tools, targets, and documentation. Thus making it ideal for training classes and conferences." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

You can visit their project page - http://sourceforge.net/project... - imabonehead

""Instead of spending the next 10 years trying to find a Flash implementation for Linux or OS X that doesn't drain CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow, NeoSmart Technologies has made an HTML5 viewer for YouTube videos. It loads YouTube videos in an HTML5 video container and streams (with skip/skim/pause/resume) against an MP4 resource, and an (optional) userscript file can update YouTube pages with the HTML5 viewer. The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported. Personally, I can't wait until the major video sites default to HTML5 and we can finally say goodbye to Flash."" - ovigia from Bookmarklet

http://neosmart.net/blog... - ovigia

"Maemo is a software platform that is mostly based on open source code and powers mobile devices such as the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. Maemo platform has been developed by Nokia in collaboration with many open source projects such as the Linux kernel , Debian , GNOME , and many more." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"Truman can be used to build a "sandnet", a tool for analyzing malware in an environment that is isolated, yet provides a virtual Internet for the malware to interact with. It runs on native hardware, therefore it is not stymied by malware which can detect VMWare and other VMs." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"This mini Linux implementation contains tools like partimage, NTFSresize, and fdisk and is based around the fantastic busybox. It enables you to PXE boot a PC into a Linux client which can create an NTFS partition, grab a Windows disk image from the network, write it to a local disk and then resize that partation. I developed this client whilst working at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"This column is a bit premature because I haven't had time to set things up and test them yet. But I'm excited about getting started, so here are some preliminary notes on multi-track recording in Linux using a Firewire device." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"Extracting all frames from a video file is easily achieved with FFmpeg. Here's a simple command line that will create 25 PNG images from every second of footage in the input DV file. The images will be saved in the current directory." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"This page contains some presets from ffmpeg. It will help you finding the right H264 encoding parameters for your needs." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"One of the few utility programs that are used every day on mobile devices is a wireless networking tool, but somehow this is one of the last applications to appear for KDE 4. With the autumn 2009 crop of Linux distributions, a usable client for the widely used NetworkManager system finally makes its debut." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"This guide maps most of x264's options to FFmpeg's options along with detailed descriptions by x264 developer Dark_Shikari." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

http://sites.google.com/site... - ovigia

"Transmageddon is a video transcoder for Linux and Unix systems built using GStreamer. It supports almost any format as its input and can generate a very large host of output files. The goal of the application was to help people to create the files they need to be able to play on their mobile devices and for people not hugely experienced with multimedia to generate a multimedia file without having to resort to command line tools with ungainly syntaxes." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

great! I love that interface :) - Alessio ~ Bl@ster

i also use handbrake and dvd::rip - ovigia

"Transferring tapes and records to computer or CD" - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"Nmap has a plenty of features. It can perform simple scans like ICMP pings, rapidly scan very large networks, providing information like reverse DNS names, operating system guesses, device types, MAC addresses etc. It can also log information to a number of formats including XML format, greppable format, s|<rIpt kIddi3 (Script Kiddie) format etc. Though Nmap is a command line based tool, there are GUI versions of Nmap like Zenmap." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"Magic Lantern is an open platform for developing enhancements to the amazing Canon 5D Mark II full frame digital SLR." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"Linux.com has an interesting How-To article regarding digitising records and tapes with Audacity. If you're not aware of the software, Audacity is an open source, cross platform, recording and sound editing tool. The Linux.com article goes through the basic process of digitising old records and tapes, although only touches on some of the technical mountains to climb when connecting a turntable to your sound card line-in. If you require more details about how to connect a turntable to your computer, in conjunction with a phono pre-amp, then the Audacity tutorial for transferring tapes and records to a computer is what you need to read." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"This Howto is for Debian Lenny but should work equally well in any version of Debian from Etch onwards. The howto is aimed at Debian users of any level who like to use the terminal, appreciate automation and like to hear the music the way it was on the original CD. I'm assuming you've used various CD rippers and know why you don't like them and are at least vaguely familiar with CDDB/freedb and audio tagging." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"We decided to test which of the FLAC compression settings provided the best trade-off between final file size and encoding time. Higher compression will require more time, but should produce smaller file sizes." - ovigia from Bookmarklet

"Harald Welte has issued a scathing opinion of Android on his blog. He bases it on Matt Porter's presentation at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, called "Android Mythbusters" [PDF]. Porter outlined what he learned while porting Android to PowerPC and MIPS architectures. Welte characterizes Android as Google having "thrown 5-10 years of Linux userspace evolution into the trashcan and re-implemented it partially for no reason. [...] Executive summary: Android is a screwed, hard-coded, non-portable abomination." " -- I do _not_ necessarily share all Harald's opinions but thought it might make sense to read them anyway - A.T. from Bookmarklet

vm-starter, sounds like Minesweeper starter, hehe :) yes I know what they do is TiVo-alike-only-mobile path... whether it is good or bad - for end-users, developers, non-Google business, public institutions and other NGOs -- this is still big bold question mark *???* - A.T.

"On November 9, The Supreme Court of the United States will hear opening arguments in the most high stakes patent law case on its docket in more than two decades, Bilski v. Kappos. Opponents of software patents, like the SFLC, hope that the court will not only reject Bilski’s application, but reaffirm that software is not patentable. The SFLC has compiled the following background material to Bilski." - ovigia from Bookmarklet