Canton Linux Enthusiasts

Linux Today Blog: "Some folks, like the MAFIAA, see it only as a den of thieves, stealing the bread from their children's mouths. But to me it's a fantastic showcase for anyone with minimal tools-- a computer, a camera, a bit of editing software-- to create and share."

The Linux and Unix Menagerie: "Today's going to be a "fun with awk" day. I figure we should have one now because we never had them in school when I was a kid... The topic, as the title suggests, has to do with columnar arithmetic or, less pompously put, performing arithmetic operations on columns or, even more accessibly, adding stuff up ;) It's somewhat like our older post on doing simple cumulative math with awk, but slightly more confusing."

tracheopterix writes "Oblong Industries, a startup based in LA has unveiled g-speak, an operational version of the notable interface from Minority Report. One of Oblong's founders served as science and technology adviser for the film; the interface was an extension of his doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab. Oblong calls g-speak a 'spatial operating environment' and adds that 'the SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984.'" The video shown on Oblong's front page is an impressive demo.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IBM Developerworks: "Each article in this "30 game scripts you can write in PHP" series will cover 10 scripts in 300 words or less (3d10 stands for "roll three 10-sided dice") simple enough for even a beginning developer, but useful enough for a seasoned game player. The goal is to give you something you can modify to suit your needs, so you can impress your friends and players by busting out your laptop at your next gaming session."

Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Scientific American is reporting that 'data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter point to vast glaciers buried beneath thin layers of crustal debris.' Data from the surface-penetrating radar on MRO revealed that two well-known mid-latitude features are composed of solid water ice. One is about three times the size of the City of Los Angeles. This certainly makes the idea of establishing a station on Mars far more plausible."

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WFTL Bytes!: "Your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Thursday, November 20, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagne. Today you'll discover how low open source company stock has gone, you'll find out that Mozilla is doing okay, that Moonlight is coming (real soon now), that your old computers are going places you don't care to know, and that Jurassic Part may be just around the corner. Or not."

OStatic: "The Ubuntu project says that the initial alpha release of Ubuntu 9.04 (the "Jaunty Jackalope") could be available for testing in less than twenty-four hours. Yes, that's a little less than a month after the current, stable version, "Intrepid Ibex" was finalized and formally released."

Raiden's Realm: "If you're happy with the level of functionality you receive from your current router, then you can stop reading now if you like. However, if you want to crank up your gateway's functionality and security by astronomic proportions, then this tutorial is for you."

n01 writes "In the last few months of my spare time, I've been implementing an abstract strategy board game (that I invented) along with a decent AI. The game resembles TwixT in that it is also a connection game, and could be played without the need for a cellphone or computer. The implementation on the Java 2 Mobile Edition platform will soon be finished, with only some minor usability and sound issues to fix. While I enjoyed working on the game (actually more than on my day job as a programmer) I would still like to earn some money from selling the game, so I can work more on such projects in the future. What experiences have Slashdot readers had with selling their applications/games for mobile phones? With which publisher will I have the broadest audience and achieve the highest earnings? Would you try to publish the game both as a mobile game and a traditional board game?"

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Linux.com: "With diff-ext, GNOME users can compare and merge files from within Nautilus. If, instead, you use KDE 3, try out kdiff-ext from the same site, which works with Konqueror. Each utility handles paths to files and directories and invokes an external diff tool to perform the grunt work. With diff-ext you can easily compare two files with different names, from different directories, or whole directory trees."

Enterprise IT Planet: "If you are an average internet user, then you interact with daemons every day. This article will describe what daemons do, how to create them in Python, and what you can use them for."

somanyrobots writes with an interesting followup in the New York Times to the earlier-reported substantial reconstruction of the woolly mammoth genome: "Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million. The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years, the effective age limit for DNA." (The Washington Post article linked from the earlier post was much more skeptical, calling such an attempt "still firmly the domain of science fiction." The New York Times article, while describing the process in similar terms, also calls attention to recent advances in sequencing DNA, as well as recoding DNA for cloning.)

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LinuxDevices: "Via announced a fanless panel PC that runs Linux, and resists both liquids and dust. The "VIPRO VP7710" includes Via's Eden or C7 processors, a 10.4-inch touchscreen display, gigabit Ethernet, three serial ports, and two USB 2.0 ports, the company says."

Open Enterprise: "Even more outrageously, those doors are nonetheless being opened for representatives of trade organisations who wish to see their own agendas pushed through, but not for ordinary citizens, who seem to have no rights in this arena."

destinyland writes "For decades, people have been asking this brain teaser: 'What's the longest word you can type with only the left-hand letters on a keyboard?' The answer is supposed to be 'stewardesses,' but grepping the standard dictionary that ships with Unix reveals a much better answer. There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand — including one word that's even longer. (The article also quotes a failed novel attempt using nothing but words typed on the keyboard's left side.)"

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CNet Digital Media: "Truth be told, the state of Tennessee didn't need a lot of prodding from the recording industry to pass a law that requires universities and colleges to filter for unauthorized music downloads."

Linux.com: "Bandwidth limitation is still a problem for a lot of people who connect to the Internet. You can improve your available bandwidth by installing Squid caching proxy server on your network with configuration parameters that will increase your byte hit rate, giving you about 30-60% more bandwidth."

netbuzz writes "Meeting in Minneapolis this week, the Internet engineering community is debating whether to aggressively fashion and apply fixes for the so-called Kaminsky bug in the DNS discovered this summer, or to simply let its threat stand as motivation for all to move with greater speed toward DNSSEC, which is considered the best long-term security solution. Problem with the latter approach is that DNSSEC has been in the works for a decade already, no one is confident it will be universally embraced, and the Kaminsky flaw is causing real problems today.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LinuxPlanet: "Firefox is cram-full of hidden treasures, as we have learned in this series. Today Akkana Peck exposes Firefox's expertise at handling those ridiculously long URLs that plague the Web-- email clients mangle them, copy and paste is a nightmare-- but Firefox has some special tricks that make them easy."

Linux Magazine: "If you've ordered the DVD, you're probably already busy throwing sheep and beating up rats in a lovely virtual countryside."