Open Source Pixels

According to their entry on GNOME Live, Project Hamster is “time tracking for [the] masses.” It aims to be a tool which enables users to quickly and accurately keep track of the amount of time they spend on their activities over time. Project Hamster is a relatively new module for GNOME, having been brought into GNOME officially for the 2.24 release. Now that GNOME 2.26 is upon us, it is an ideal time to take a closer look at this interesting project.

The elusive *nix. Nobody knows about it yet it is one of the most widely used server operating systems. The wikipedia entry mentions it as the unknown giant of the internet. Huge internet portals like Yahoo! run on it. Why is it that no one knows about this widely used OS?

The PostgreSQL project has released version 8.4 of the open source database management software, with more than 290 additions and changes to features. The most numerous updates are for administrators, with new or tweaked administration and monitoring tools and commands, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group said in its launch statement on Tuesday. The project spent 16 months working on the new version of the database software.

While I’m still chipping away at my AmigaOS 4.1/sam440ep review (try writing a thesis and a large review at the same time), Cloanto released AmigaForever 2009. AmigaForever is a very full-featured AmigaOS emulation tool, packed with various different ROMs and AmigaOS versions (1.3-3.x), as well as tons and tons of included games, software, and demos. This new version comes with even more stuff.

There haven’t been too many iPhone exploits, it seems, despite the popularity of said devices. However, Charlie Miller, a security researcher, recently uncovered a vulnerability in the iPhone OS that could possibly “allow an attacker to run software code on the phone that is sent by SMS over a mobile operator’s network. The malicious code could include commands to monitor the location of the phone using GPS, turn on the phone’s microphone to eavesdrop on conversations, or make the phone join a distributed denial of service attack or a botnet.” Scary, isn’t it? They say it’s not very likely that others will exploit it even on a small scale before Apple issues the patch, but having a hole like that just sitting there makes me glad right now that I don’t own an iPhone.

The folks over at Phoronix had an interesting interview with Linux game porter, Frank Earl. Despite the apparent decline in PC gaming, Earl has worked for Linux Game Publishing for several years and was seeking input from the community at large for game suggestions at Phoronix. He’s also done work independently on porting various software over from Windows. The interview covers work that Earl has done, difficulties that arise in porting commercial games to Linux, successes they’ve had, his views on Linux in general, and his thoughts on the future of gaming in Linux.

Click here for the joke of the month.

Chances are that you’ve already heard of and even visited Bing, Microsoft’s new search offering
launched earlier in June, replacing the Live search of yesterday. It’s
new, shiny, and has pretty pictures, but does it really have much
effect on the market? There have been those headlines claiming it’s
“taken a bite out of Google,” but, looking
at the statistics, it hasn’t really affected the search industry
at all.

I’m not embarrassed to have ideals, I am proud. Ideals elevate us above situational ethics. Ideals guide us into trying to be better people, and give us strong bases for making difficult decisions. (Such as No, little Bill, it is not OK to do anything in the name of making a buck.)

flvlib is a Python library for manipulating FLV files.

The library comes with a script that can identify the content of the file, including the codecs used to encode its content, the audio rate, keyframe density, etc. It also prints out the file’s metadata if present.