Posts published in “Software”

SELF Saturday: Linux Under a ‘Carolina Blue’ Sky

By Christine Hall on June 14, 2015 |

Community, News, Operating Systems and Software

SELF Saturday: Linux Under a ‘Carolina Blue’ Sky

The SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) was packed on Saturday, meaning that Jeremy Sands (who told me that day two is always much busier than opening day) knows SELF. Maybe I should’ve asked his advice when I was booking my room in Charlotte. Here’s what I learned on my own: There’s a big difference between a Red Roof and a Red Hat. The later is dependable. The former took three tries to get me into a room that was kinda/sorta what I’d reserved — with Wi-Fi that didn’t work more often than it did.

Back at SELF, the place was hoppin’ when I arrived at 8:30 in the morning, and the first presentation was still a half hour away.

Francois Dion’s keynote, “Team Near Space Circus: Computing at 80,000 Feet” was nothing if not fascinating, and I was happy to get filled in on the details of a story I knew a little about because it happened in my backyard, meaning the Winston-Salem, N.C. area (in Mocksville, if you’re planning to take the test).

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com

SourceForge Not Making A Graceful Exit

By Christine Hall on June 11, 2015 |

Business, Community, Internet, Software and Web Apps

If SourceForge were a person and I were the New York Times, I’d make certain I had an obituary on file right about now. It’s obvious that the once essential code repository for open source projects is terminally ill, although it’s just as obvious that Dice Holdings, which took over ownership of the site nearly three years ago, has no plans of letting SourceForge go gently into the good night, so we’ll probably see more kicking and noise-making until the lights are inevitably extinguished.

Newer converts to open source probably don’t know much about the site, but it wasn’t long ago when Linux users were very aware of SourceForge and how to use the service, at least well enough to download software — perhaps more aware than they wanted to be. It was the go-to site when looking for a program not available in a particular distro’s repository. Not anymore. Not for a while. These days, the more important projects have either migrated to GitHub or are hosting their own.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Windows New Clothes

By Christine Hall on May 20, 2015 |

Operating Systems and Software

I can’t remember when an upcoming release of Windows was more boring, at least not since the 3.X days. Essentially, Microsoft is downplaying this release — just as it did with Windows 7 after the Vista fiasco. While the Windows 8s haven’t been as much of a public relations nightmare as Vista (at least they work), they’ve been a big disappointment for the marketing department.

Maybe there’s another reason for downplaying this release.

Perhaps Microsoft isn’t making as much noise as usual because it’s afraid that if people look too closely, they’ll find that its latest and greatest is like an operating system put together at a Goodwill, with parts borrowed from Android, Chrome OS, GNU/Linux and iOS.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Linux Mint Going systemd, Foresight Closes Shop & More…

By Larry Cafiero on May 15, 2015 |

Distros, Operating Systems and Software

FOSS Week in Review

An active week — both here at FOSS Force around the Fossosphere — is coming to an end, and by “active,” I completely mean that in a good way. Special tip of the hat to Ken Starks and his interview on FOSS Force yesterday, which you should check out if you haven’t already.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the FOSS realm…

Linux Mint to go with systemd: While Linux Mint did not join the systemd derby when the green flag dropped, Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre expects the next releases of Linux Mint to use systemd by default, according to an article this week in PC World.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Portrait of an Everyday Computer Programmer

Portrait of an Everyday Computer Programmer

By Ken Starks on May 14, 2015 |

Community, Interview, Operating Systems and Software

The FOSS Force Interview

Software.

The majority of us in today’s work force rely on it to earn our livings. Whether we use it directly while sitting in front of a computer or by tallying a daily quota for auditors to further calculate, in one way or another, software is the key to getting our jobs done.

Most people rarely give a thought about how the software they use came to be or even what it is. To most, it’s voodoo, magic conjured by wizards on mountaintops, their staffs held high, with bolts of energy breathing life into the encased boxes referred to as computers. But behind the wizard’s benefaction are real living and breathing carbon-based units: People who have the talent, and often times the personality, to make ones and zeros, along with a healthy supply of squiggly things, actually do something.

Many of us operate under the assumption that writing software demands a particular personality and skill set. We imagine people who skulk and pace between sittings, swilling Red Bull and muttering to themselves before a frenzy of creative genius leaps from the IDE. Certainly, the mad genius sometimes lurks in front of and often within the code — but mostly not. In real life, people who create software are pretty much the same as you and me: average people, but with the ability to write good and needed software.

Neil Munro is one of those people.

I met Neil while recruiting software people to help clean up the horrid mess that is text to speech (TTS) software in Linux. Actually, he approached me, and in an almost apologetic manner, offered to assist in any way he could. Humbleness is often a trait of software engineers. They severely understate their abilities and will brush off compliments of their skills as “something they picked up” along the way in their time at the terminal.

Calculating beam vectors? From where do you “pick that up?”

While several coders were considering either forking a current but under-supported TTS application or writing one from scratch, Neil went in a different direction. He decided that the actual platform should be the Chrome browser. He would build an extension that worked inside of Chrome. And yes, the platform of choice these days is quickly becoming the browser environment.

So I thought it would be a good idea to check in on him and spend some time talking about who he is, with a bit of in depth discussion about the things he is working on, to include the Chrome extension for text to speech. As a fun thing to do, I often start by asking the people I am interviewing to give me some bullet points about themselves that normally wouldn’t make it into an interview, maybe a bit of the odd or funny. Neil didn’t disappoint:

Ken Starks

Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue

linuxlock.blogspot.com/

Coders With Bad Attitudes

Coders With Bad Attitudes

By Ken Starks on May 5, 2015 |

Software

Editor’s note: Be sure to check our home page tomorrow morning for a special bonus column by Ken Starks.

Is it Tuesday already?

I don’t think most of you know just how much I enjoy talking to you every Tuesday. See…I don’t think of this as an article. This is my way of starting a conversation with my friends. There are times when I write a particular sentence, knowing that someone reading it is the only person other than me who knows what I am talking about. There’s a certain inner-warmth in being able to write like that. Whether it be to just one person or to everyone.

It’s nice to envision the faces of those I am talking to as I write. I think that drives my personal style of writing. I’ve been told that it could be worse.

Speaking of worse…

Two weeks ago I signed off with a promise to get back to you on a series of articles I am writing, outlining the process of getting an easy-to-use FOSS application written in the realm of text to speech. And yeah, I most certainly am going to pick that subject up again now…just not the way I’d planned.

Ken Starks

linuxlock.blogspot.com/

LinuxFest Northwest in the Books for 2015

By Larry Cafiero on April 27, 2015 |

Community, News, Operating Systems and Software

Feast or famine: This is the typical modus operandi for FOSS shows, where Saturdays (or the “first days,” whatever they are) are a literal beehive of activity on the expo floor while talks are standing-room only. Sundays (or “second days”) — ah, those second days — the activity drops off a bit.

LinuxFest Northwest was no exception to this rule, but that said, it is not a bad thing that things quiet down on a Sunday.

First things first: a correction. Bill Wright aptly and politely pointed out that I wrote last week that this year’s event is the 15th. When I was choosing a career path all those years ago, I got into journalism because, well, I suck at mathematics. LFNW started in 2000 which, as Bill points out, makes this the 16th year of the show.

Meanwhile, back to Sunday…

Larry Cafiero

Grass Roots Development: This Is How It Works

Grass Roots Development: This Is How It Works

By Ken Starks on April 21, 2015 |

Community and Software

The title? Oh, This Is How It Works? Yeah, because this is how it works. Working together in collaboration. Leaving your ego and your bias at the door. Kicking off your shoes and joining a group already assembled. Opening your mind to new and possibly better things that you bring to the table. This is how it works.

Changing someone’s world.

Changing a lot of someone’s world for that matter. Changing lives for a great and a new day…a great and new day for just them. A change that allows them to do things that physical inability restricted them from doing before now.

Not doing it for the few minutes your name and face will be on some website, or for a mention on the front page of a big city newspaper. Also, not doing it for money.

No, what you are doing is joining others with many of the same values, talents and dreams. People who are working not for their own but for someone else’s future…someone you and they will probably never know or even meet. They are half a world away and not dreaming that in just a few hours someone else is going to fix something broken within them. And they’re doing this fixing simply because they have the ability to do it.

Ken Starks

linuxlock.blogspot.com/

WordPress Plugin ‘Simple Ads Manager’ Exploit

By Christine Hall on April 13, 2015 |

Internet, Software and Web Apps

Anyone who runs sites using the WordPress platform and the plugin Simple Ads Manager will want to read this and learn from our mistake. Even those not using this particular plugin, but who have deactivated plugins not being used but still residing on their servers might find this useful. Luckily, in our case no harm was done, but that’s only because the incident occurred on a test site, so we were able to just take the site down. Lucky for us, it wasn’t FOSS Force or one of our other active sites.

Early Saturday evening we began receiving numerous email notices with two worrisome subject lines from our server. One subject was “LOCALRELAY Alert for sitename,” being sent to us at the rate of about every five minutes, with each showing info on the “first ten of 101 emails” that had been sent by the server since the last email notification. The other subject, “Script Alert for /path/to/script” was coming with the same frequency. To make a long story short, someone had hacked into a site we use to evaluate and test WordPress plugins before possibly deploying them on active sites, and was using it to send spam. Our test site had been turned into a spambot in other words.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Animals Set FOSS Apart

Animals Set FOSS Apart

By Larry Cafiero on April 8, 2015 |

Media, Potpourri and Software

We’re going to take the scenic route in getting to the point today. If you don’t want to wait, you can go down to the bottom where it says, “The moral of the story…” But the point of today’s exercise is that we in the decentralized FOSS realm are a creative bunch, and in that creativity is our strength.

I’ll take FOSS logos for $500, Alex: The PostgreSQL elephant’s name is this…

Here’s why.

The Starbucks in San Jose near James Lick High School seems to always be abuzz — kids from the school come in for coffee and other Starbucks treats, all the while being served by a quick and helpful staff, one of whom couldn’t stop talking in loud tones about his new opportunity in a nearby, more prestigious Starbucks.

The after-school high school crowd seems to be supplanted, eventually, by moms picking up their elementary school-aged children and bringing them to Starbucks. While I’m sitting in a way-too-comfortable chair, two girls walk up to me.

They stare. I look up, smile, and go back to work. I can still feel them staring at me.

One points and says, “elefante,” which is Spanish for “elephant.”

Larry Cafiero

An In-Depth Look at Text-to-Speech in Linux

An In-Depth Look at Text-to-Speech in Linux

By Ken Starks on April 7, 2015 |

Operating Systems and Software

It’s been an interesting two weeks, talking about and looking into why text-to-speech (TTS) is such a mess in Linux. I’ve spoken with seventeen of you; seventeen who know a bit about software programming. “A bit” is a purposeful understatement. Some of you have forgotten more about software programming than I will ever know. That being the case, I have learned a bit about why TTS in Linux is next to worthless. For those who are just joining into the conversation, let me catch you up quickly.

Late last year, I was told that the area treated for throat cancer in 2012 was exhibiting pre-cancerous activity. I was told that it could remain “pre-cancerous” for twenty years, or it could again form into the cancer that tried to kill me in 2012. If that happened and it remained unattended, it would kill me in a matter of months. My options ranged from doing nothing and taking my chances, all the way to having my larynx removed to be done with this throat cancer monster once and for all. I picked door number two.

I began researching my options as a soon-to-be voiceless person. In preparing for a life without voice, there were several scenarios in which I failed to consider:

Ken Starks

linuxlock.blogspot.com/