Category: Technology

Here is a tutorial on how to make native KWin Window decorations for KDE (ya know.. the border part of all computer windows.) It looks like a great beginner app howto for making KDE C++ apps.

There has been a great deal of frustration in the Fedora community sense its inception with the lack of community input on this “community distribution.” It has lead many of us wondering exactly what Red Hat plans to do with Fedora. The whole process only became more confusing with the recent announcement that Red Hat Linux is back

This post does a pretty good job of summing up the feelings of many us in the community. One has to wonder how long can Red Hat continue to take advantage of its core supporters and still remain a main-line distribution?

Phrack.org is a security website thats fairly popular out on the web. Their old editions are wonderful for learning all kinds of security tricks, computer hacking, and lock picking. While on the subject of security I found this publication on the dangers and limitation of IMAP security.

Finally a good resource my instructor pointed me to rootvg. Its kinda a mainframe thing but if you check out the “AIX compared (UX, Linux, …)” section you get a great rundown of different *nix setups. Useful for Linux people who wonder how to setup other Unix’ies.

Nice tutorial on getting Samba and SWAT working on Fedora Core 1.  Too bad they don’t cover RPMing them.  Samba already works on Fedora Core 1 but SWAT would make a very nice addition.

OpenGroupWare is a groupware server that uses open standards for communication (LDAP, WebDAV, XML-RPC.)  This means that its perfect for using with mulitple clients on multiple platforms.  Currently working Clients are Mozilla address, Outlook, Evolution, and Kontact.  It has a built-in web interface for use also.  It looks like the Exchange replacement of the future may very well be Kontact and OpenGroupWare.

Kolab is the KDE groupware server designed for kontact.  Kontact can be used with OpenGroupware, Kolab, Exchange, support in development for eGroupWare, phpGroupWare.

Article from flexbeta.net with a quick walk-through of setting-up a Fedora Linux box and some of the tools found in Fedora for everyday computer tasks.  Looks like a nice template for a how-to Fedora manual.

Found a outstanding article on setting up Chkrootkit, Portsentry, and Logcheck.  Chkrootkit is a popular root kit checker (a tool for gaining root access to system.)  Portsentry watches unused ports for inappropriate activity, and Logcheck monitors your logs looking for suspicious activity.  For those of you not familiar with *nix OSes, these are common tools to protect your system for specific focused attacks.  Because *nix doesn’t generally get viruses their is generally not a need for anti-virus software; but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a great number of tools for protecting your system.

Just a quick addition the the previous article.  Here is a great rant by Larry McVoy on the Linux Kernel Mailing list talking about the pure difficulty of developing a distributed version control system (aka: dcvs).  Larry is the founder of BitMover, the company that makes BitKeeper (aka: BK). One sentence that really stands out to me is his explanation of how to perceive a dcvs:

BitKeeper is possibly the best revision control system ever created (unfortunately it costs money that I don’t have.)  Larry started BitKeeper to help out Linus’s work on the Linux kernel.  There are many people who really don’t like BK because it is not under a GPL license.  Its so good at revision control that its worth it anyway to Linus because of the time it saves him (its not unusual to have Linus merge 3000+ pushes a day into the mainline kernel.) Linux kernel developers get to use BK for free.

I have recently been looking very seriously at the issued of software version control.  This is probably the least interesting topic on the face of the earth to anyone but developers, but if you are a software developer, your version control system is almost more important to you than your computer.  I currently use CVS at home and at work.  Like most CVS users I am starting to see how it could be improved.  Reality is that the only serious advantage of CVS is that it works… and it works with just about anything.  There are literally hundreds of scripts, programs, UI’s, and toolkits that work with CVS. 

Here is feature comparison between ten or so of the most popular version control systems.  Another article on CVS and its two main successors can be found here.  One of the biggest debates concerning version control is the use of distributed vs centralized models.  Diagnosing svn is an article by Tom Lord, one of the gnuArch developers (a distributed version control system.) Un-diagnosing svn is a response to the previous article by Greg Hudson, one of the Subversion developers (a centralized version control system.)

I am still working out an opinion and making a decision on which version control system I will be moving too in the future.   At this junction I am leaning toward gnuArch.  I don’t generally like the BSD license (which is what Subversion is distributed under) and it doesn’t seem like more than a minor improvement over CVS.  In addition Subversion feels “overweight” for what it does and really lacks the simplicity of design that is common of Unix type applications.

Great article by Doc Searls and David Weinberger discussing what the Internet is and what it is not.  Many, many people have a very very confused understanding of what exactly the Internet is and this article clears that up well.  To give you an understanding of exactly how mis-understood the Internet is by lawmakers let me tell you a little story:

I work and live in Oklahoma (go Sooners).  A couple of years ago big news was made when a local state representative wanted to pass a law that would ban any pornography, viewed via the Internet, within state limits.  Seriously!  Now regardless of your particular views on pornography, freedom of speech, or social moral obligation; this idea was simply ludicrous.  All the proposed law did was show that the lawmaker had no conceptual idea of what the Internet was.  If you are gonna pass the Oklahoma anti-porn law; why not simply ban all tornadoes from Oklahoma while you are at it… from now on tornadoes are not allowed within state limits.   And these are the people who we count on to make sound judgments about the future of technology in America?

Fundamentally the Internet is simply a new communication standard. The Internet is not simply a communications mediem (for example a telephone, or fax machine) but a language for communication between things.   In the same way that writen language allows me to communicate in many different ways (books, stop signs, love letters, posters, etc..), about an infinate amount of topics.  And as such the only requirement to be part of the writen world is to know how to write.  Looking at it that way it is fairly easy to see why the internet cannot be owned, everyone can use it, and anyone can add/improve it.