Open Source Pixels

One of the biggest selling points for Linux is its scalability. At one end of the scale, Embedded Linux is everywhere from the vehicle management system in your car to the smartphone in your shirt pocket. At the other end of the scale, 439 of the top 500 supercomputers run on Linux. A Linux distribution can be seen as modular, and most of the parts that comprise a distribution can be separated into high level building blocks that can be arranged to make up the components of a specialised subset. For instance, that can be a dedicated server system, or a desktop arrangement that fulfills a specific set of user requirements for graphical or office work or a developer workstation.

With over 180,000 open source projects in its repository, SourceForge.net has a lot of files it needs to track and serve. It can become a challenge to manage all those downloads. For the most part, Sourceforge relies on a system of globally distributed mirror sites that help to deliver open source application files and programs to users.

PureWave Networks is using Linux, a Freescale processor, and an off-the-shelf middleware package from Enea to create its next generation of WiMAX base stations. Due later this year, the base stations will aim to bridge the gap between macro and pico WiMAX stations, says the company.

Earlier this morning, you may have been surprised to see that every Google search you performed resulted in links to sites which were, according to Google, potentially harmful to your computer. As it turns out, Google’s malware detection system got a little trigger-happy – due to a human error.

From the announcement email: “On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, I am proud to announce that the first release candidate of NetBSD 5.0 is now available for download. Those of you who have been paying close attention will have noticed that
RC1 was tagged on Sunday. A few hiccups delayed the availability of binaries, but they can now be downloaded from here.”

The next two releases of Silverlight will take Microsoft’s media player in completely new directions, the technical executive in charge has promised. The corporate vice president of Microsoft’s developer division Scott Guthrie told the company’s Channel 9 “whole new areas you can’t do today will start to open up” with Silverlight 3 and 4.

Don’t be alarmed if it looked like the entire internet was infected with something earlier this morning—Google apparently tagged every search result, including its own sites, as something that “may harm your computer.” The glitch seems to be fixed now (11:50 a.m., EST), and the tips we received from watchful readers came in between 9:52 and 10:20 a.m. EST. We’ll update if any official word on what happened comes out of Mountain View.

[Apparently I missed the whole thing.. - Scott]

The Wine development release 1.1.14 is now available. What’s new in this release: Various bug fixes for Internet Explorer 7. Many crypt32 improvements, including new export wizard. Better support for windowless Richedit. Improvements to the print dialog. Many fixes to the regression tests on Windows. Various bug fixes.

FCKeditor is an HTML/DHTML editor for ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, PHP, and JavaScript that brings to the Web much of the powerful functionality of known desktop editors like Word. It’s very lightweight, and doesn’t require any kind of installation on the client computer.

NakenBot is a bot for Naken Chat servers. It
written in PHP and runs from the command line,
with no Web server needed. It is a little
information bot support for stocks, weather, word
translation using Google translate, an 8-ball
game, an uptime feature, the ability to add and
search bookmarks, show the time by timezone, list
users, and see who is online, and an admin
password option that allows the admin to use the
say command.