Time for another installment of our look at the book Learning the bash Shell (In a Nutshell (O’Reilly)). Today’s foray into Linux Land: Unix Command Substitution.

I started this discussion a while back, and not it is time to continue it.
The Bourne Again Shell, bash, is the default command-line shell in Ubuntu and many *nix (Unix, Linux, etc.) systems. You can think of the shell as the most direct way to get into your operating system, and you […]

Randall Hyde’s book is now out in it’s second edition.

Google’s OpenSocial
Google is developing a thing called “OpenSocial. It will be an “API” (Application Programming Interface) for social network websites. Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING are implementing the software.
OpenSocial is built upon Google Gadget technology, so you can build […]

From Thomas Claburn at Information Week:
The new look has been made available to about 1% of all Gmail users and is being rolled out to the rest on an ongoing basis.
Google…on Tuesday confirmed it is giving Gmail a new look.
…
They’re calling it “Gmail 2.0,” …
“Google during the recent Analyst Day announced they want to release […]

“According to long-time OpenDocument Fellowship member Russell Ossendryver, it appears that GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza’s widely-publicized praise for OOXML as a ’superb standard’ is being followed up with on-going support by the GNOME Foundation in ‘resolving’ the thousands of criticisms leveled against Microsoft’s proposed standard. In an open letter in his blog, Ossendryver urges […]

The sales rate of Microsoft’s Windows Vista is gradually slowing down as the operating system reaches the one-year anniversary of its release to businesses, according to the company’s latest financial results. The Redmond, Washington-based company shipped approximately 28 million copies of Vista in the latest quarter ended September, or 9.3 million copies per month. Though […]

The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its low-cost XO laptops: cows.
“We plan to drive a dynamo (taken from an old Fiat) through a system of belts and pulleys using cows/cattle,” wrote OLPC’s Arjun Sarwal, in an e-mail dated October 21 and posted to one of […]

The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices.
The government agency has complained to the Office of Fair Trading.
It says talks with Microsoft have not resolved “fundamental concerns” about academic licensing and about Office 2007 and the Vista operating system.
…
Becta’s advice to schools […]

As you know, there is an effort to develop a very inexpensive laptop, and to give one to each of the several billion children living in non-industrialized countries around the world. (One Laptop Per Child Foundation.)
Naturally, since a very efficient, reliable and inexpensive operating system is need to run these laptops, they will run […]

A Mac Blue Screen of Death
October 27, 2007 (Computerworld) A significant number of Mac owners upgrading to Leopard on Friday reported that after installing the new operating system, their machines locked up, showing only an interminable — and very Windows-like — “blue screen of death.”
Easily the heaviest-trafficked thread on the Leopard support forums as […]

From the New York Time Technology Section:

Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for Stake in Facebook
Microsoft has won a high-profile technology industry battle with Google and Yahoo to invest in the social networking upstart Facebook.
The two companies said on Wednesday that Microsoft would invest $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. The […]

mySQL is the number one database in use on servers. It is an OpenSource project, and it is the database “back end” for your typical LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server. What this means is that if you are reading a web site, you are probably using MySQL.
Google uses LAMP servers, […]

What I love about African Bureaucracy is that it rarely respects Western hierarchical structures. I remember trying to arrange to get on a plane in Kenya, as were dozens of other people, and one guy kept waving around a small card he had pulled out of his wallet. “I’m a VIP … See, […]

Stop Interrupting Me
Your computer is, at its most basic level, a clock that runs very quickly, but as it cycles, it considers interacting with the electronic machinery around it. These moments of consideration are called “Interrupts” and it is only at the moment of an interrupt that something may … or may not happen.
Since […]