|
JavaScript VirtualKeyboard provides a virtual keyboard entirely written in JavaScript with more than 130 supported keyboard layouts allowing you to enter text in a variety of languages. Two uses for JavaScript VirtualKeyboard suggest themselves immediately: integrate it into your Web site to allow clients to enter internationalized text, and run it directly using the online demo when you have to enter internationalized text yourself from an Internet café.
Link Email item
Let's get the first Bdale question out of the way right now: no, he didn't sell half the vowels in his name. His birth name was Barksdale, later shortened to B'dale, then to Bdale. The next thing you notice (in person) about Bdale Garbee is his size. He's a very large person. But all that aside, look at his personal home page and Wikipedia entry and you'll realize that this man is one of the most prolific contributors to Linux and open source in the world. Besides all that, he's nice (and often funny), too.
Link Email item
In the swarming Indian metropolis Mumbai, it can be a gymnastic exercise just to fish in your pocket on the packed city buses and stretch out your paying hand to the conductor. Many commuters have opted instead for a 'smart' and cashless way to pay, provided, in part, by Linux. Named Go Mumbai, it is a prepaid smart card for BEST (Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport) bus journeys.
Link Email item
In a sense, the desktop is the best thing that ever happened to the command line. Because a virtual terminal runs in a graphical environment, it boasts all sorts of enhancements that the unadorned shell lacks -- everything from multiple tabs to easy selection of display fonts and background and foreground colors. Perhaps the resulting power and convenience explains why, even at a time when the emphasis is on giving every application a graphical interface -- no matter how inappropriately -- people still write useful utilities for virtual terminals. A good example is Terminator, a program designed to perform one simple function: displaying multiple instances of the GNOME terminal within the same window.
Link Email item
Soothsayer is a predictive text input system. Many folks reading that sentence will think of the word completion offered by mobile phones. Soothsayer is different from such mobile phone systems in that it tries to use context and other statistical information to offer predictions instead of just presenting a list of words that might match the first few letters you type.
Link Email item
Ever since Laura Thomson wrote her first program in the fourth grade, coding has been a major part of her life. Over the years, she has been a lecturer in computer science at RMIT University in Australia, a principal at OmnTI, a consulting company that designs Internet systems, a trainer of other programmers, the co-writer of PHP and MySQL Web Development and MySQL Tutorial, and a frequent speaker at free and open source conferences. She is currently a senior software engineer at the Mozilla Corporation, where her recent work includes the API for the Add-ons Manager on Firefox 3. With this background, Thomson has strong views on coding, its future, and its place in business, especially...
Link Email item
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.
Link Email item
Linspire, the San Diego, Calif.-based Linux distributor, is continuing to build up its CNR (Click-N-Run) software installation system with partnerships with Ubuntu parent Canonical and the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint distribution. Linspire recently announced that its beta CNR service now supports the Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron release and Linux Mint versions 4.0 and 5.
Link Email item
Are you looking for a free and open source music player that you can use no matter which operating system you boot or switch to during the day? Meet aTunes, a small competitor to both Amarok and Apple's iTunes. Its name sounds like a hybrid of the two, and it tries to have a unique combination of the best of both user experiences.
Link Email item
"I like to make browsers do things that they weren't supposed to do," Brad Neuberg likes to say. As a developer advocate for Google Gears, Neuberg has a wide scope for pursuing this interest, not only as an active developer, but also as a frequent speaker at conferences. His message is that Gears is not a means of working offline with Internet content -- which, so far has been its main function in applications like Google Reader and Google Calendar -- but also a potential universal update mechanism for browsers that could help to keep the Web free.
Link Email item
After I reviewed Alien Arena last year, some readers criticized my choice of that first-person shooter (FPS) as the best free software game I had played. Several suggested Nexuiz would have been a better choice. At the time, I had not played it. Now that I have tried Nexuiz 2.4, it has become my favorite free software FPS.
Link Email item
I'm on the go all the time, and sometimes that makes it hard to stay connected. I could carry my laptop with me everywhere, but that can be a pain, especially when I am on my bike. To meet the demands of my daily life I have constructed a lightweight, ultra-portable, Linux-based computing solution. I use a Nokia 770 tethered to a Nokia N75 mobile phone (when Wi-Fi is not available) and a Bluetooth PDA keyboard. This video explains the how and why of the solution.
Link Email item
Do you fancy Web-based word processors but aren't ready to leave OpenOffice.org? You can work with your Zoho Writer and Google Docs files from the convenience of OpenOffice.org Writer, courtesy of the OoGdocsIntegrator extension.
Link Email item
In this week's peek inside the Linux.com discussion forums, we find some advice on safely updating your Linux distribution, and how the GRUB and LILO bootloaders differ, along with a primer on the built-in tools that you can use to get more out of forum participation (hint: look in the top right corner of each page).
Link Email item
Karl Paetzel is quoted frequently about Hewlett-Packard's ever-increasing Linux and open source efforts, which now include open source licensing detection and governance tools. Here's a chance to see and hear him a little more "up close and personal" than in a traditional text interview.
Link Email item
I have to disclose that I have never been a real fan of Ubuntu. I've tried it about every release and had more than my share of issues with it. Ubuntu 8.04 was released last month, and the first reviews mostly spoke of how nice this version was, so I downloaded the i386 version to test. Sigh -- it's rough when you have to change a long-standing opinion.
Link Email item
What's the next best thing for Linux users who can't attend an open source community conference in person? Online workshops like last week's Ubuntu Open Week, where upwards of 300 participants per session showed up to learn more about the popular Linux distribution, the community, and its teams.
Link Email item
For a lot of programmers, writing an application is fun, but writing its manual is not. Adding new features, refining the product, and responding to users' input are all more rewarding than writing instructions on how to use the software. However, good documentation is necessary to have happy, informed users who can contribute meaningfully to future development. A few months ago, Gilbert Ashley, the author of src2pkg (Slackware's "magic package maker") invited me and two other people to help him manage the user documentation for his program. The process we used to create the src2pkg wiki may be a useful example for other free and open source software (FOSS) application developers.
Link Email item
Clay Shirky's book on what information technology is doing to our world, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, has important things to say to anyone interested in open source software (OSS). His thoughts on the evolving effects of the technological revolution we are all living in make for a fun way to spend a few hours.
Link Email item
Which path should you follow? Should you take advantage of Ubuntu's package manager and use it to upgrade your system to the latest 8.04 Hardy Heron release, or should you download a CD or DVD ISO image and do a clean install? Common wisdom says that doing a clean install is the better, safer course of action. There may be a little extra work involved configuring everything once the latest and greatest is installed, but that's nothing compared to the pain of an update gone wrong, according to traditional thinking. But that cautious approach may no longer be necessary.
Link Email item
Website
| 
