Simple Backups

One of the Google's 2005 summer code products, sbackup, is a simple backup tool that will allow any newbie to backup its own data with simple steps. Read about it here.

Very interesting, but of course quite limited. If you are interested in full featured backup solutions for Linux, UNIX and Windows(!), I suggest bacula.

A simple coincidence?!

Recently, Peter J. Quinn, director of the state's Informational Technology Division, is at the center of the decision to require that all documents produced by the state of Massachussets executive branch are to be stored in a new open standard format, called Open Document.

Some days ago, the administration has launched a review of several trips by Mr. Quinn to conferences out-of-state.

Nothing to be worried about in a democratic state that struggles everyday to fight it's own corruption.

All plain normal.

Nothing to see here. Move on ... Move on... Just a routine investigation ...

Pure coincidence?

Read this article.

On virtualization and the x86 arch

"Forget the OS, it's x86 that's important" is an interesting article about virtualization and a new Sun's approach: Containers.

Read it at TechWorld.com

Some security principles

Newsforge as published an interesting article about security.

The words of the Prophet...

You may find the words of the prophet Stallman here.

Read them so you may FREE yourself...

K3DSurf - Because Mathematics can be so fun!

K3DSurf is a program to visualize and manipulate Mathematical models in three, four, five and six dimensions. Theses Mathematical Objects, described with implicit/explicit parametric equations, can be either surfaces or curves.

kpolynome

kpolynome is a KDE program that calculates polynomes based on given data coordinates.

rpcalc - reverse polish notation calculator

rpcalc is a reverse polish notation calculator for KDE.

ConvertAll - A unit converter tool

With ConvertAll you can combine the units any way you want. If you want to convert from inches per decade, that's fine. Or from meter-pounds. Or from cubic nautical miles.

QOscC - a software osciloscope

QOscC is a highly flexible and configurable software Oscilloscope with a large number of features. This includes support for any number of audio devices (ALSA, OSS, JACK and a number of Serial Multimeters), each with any number of channels that the hardware supports. Each scope display can be configured individually to different display types and variants. e.g. you can chose from standard y-t mode (as on an usual oscilloscope), xy mode (e.g. for measuring the phase shift between two signals) of the FFT mode (to view a spectrum plot of the signal).

Flat images of planets

flatplanet provides flat maps of planets that can be used for various purposes...

Xplanet

Xplanet renders an image of the earth or other space objects into the X root window. All of the major planets and most satellites can be drawn, similar to the Solar System Simulator. A number of different map projections are also supported, including azimuthal, Lambert, Mercator, Mollweide, orthographic, and rectangular.

SkyChart - night sky mapper for amateur astronomers

SkyChart is software to draw a map of the night sky for the amateur astronomer from a bunch of stars and nebulae catalogs. It shows the position of the planets, simulates an eclipse, and shows artificial satellites. It can also drive telescopes.

G.System - The evolving universe

G.System

An evolving Universe
Ever dreamed of a nice piece of software that actually tries to simulate the evolution of an universe? Ever thought it would be possible?
The G System tries to do exactly this. It is both a free framework for simulation as well as a virtual reality itself which is growing to an universe in which life's evolution takes place.

KBibTeX

KBibTeX is a BibTeX editor for KDE.

LabPlot - 2D/3D plotting tool

LabPlot is a KDE application for data plotting and function analysis. It support both 2D and 3D plots and tries to emulate most of the functions supported by programs like Microcal Origin or SPSS Sigmaplot.

Qalculate!

Qalculate! is a multi-purpose desktop calculator for GNU/Linux. It is small and simple to use but with much power and versatility underneath. Features include customizable functions, units, arbitrary precision, plotting, and a user-friendly interface.

It has an incredible feature list.

gaiw - Grace ASCII Import Wizard

The Grace ASCII Import Wizard ("gaiw") is a cross-platform, Qt-based GUI allowing Grace users to create 2D XY plots from ASCII data files very easily.
Grace is a very powerful, cross-platform, open-source 2D-plotting program which enjoys an excellent reputation of quality. However, few people actually create their data sets manually and the import functionality delivered with Grace makes the creation of complex plots (many graphs with many curves in each graph, with data coming from different files) somewhat tedious.

SCons - software construction tool

SCons is an Open Source software construction tool.
It aims to be the next-generation build tool. The website pictures SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons should be an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.

J2Bin - Java binary generator

j2Bin is an application that helps Java developers distribute their Java programs (.jar's) as Linux executables, making the programs easy to run and use for the end user.

FacturaLUX - Enterprise Resource Planning

FacturaLUX

The main objective of FacturaLux is to create a application in order to facilitate the management (finance and administration) of the small and medium enterprise (EMS), as well as those particularities to answer the demands related to the management enterprises, based on the free software model. It pretents to be an ERP software (Enterprise Resource Planning), which offers a solid, estable and optimized working framework to a quick development of any kind of solution oriented towards the administration, management, finances and, in general, to any kind of application where large databases and administrative processes are dealt with.

prokyon3 music manager and tag editor

prokyon3 is a multithreaded music manager.

It uses the Qt3 libs and the MySQL database and can access files on harddisk, CDROM, SMB and NFS. Files can be played using XMMS (default) or other players. prokyon3 also offers an editor for ID3 and Ogg tags and has been designed to support tagging for large quantities of files.

Lightweight video recording tool

Kalva is a simple to use and simple to setup videorecorder for the KDE desktop. It uses the fantastic console tool MEncoder from the MPlayer package to do the real work. You can schedule a movie recording by choosing the date from a calender (it will be passed to at) and a serial recording by choosing the days of the week (feeds your crontab).

Kalzium

Kalzium is an application which will show you some information about the periodic system of the elements. It also features a calculator for chemical formulas.

It is part of the KDE Edutainment project.

Subversion clients

rapidsvn is THE client for subversion.

kdesvn is yet an another subversion client, but it uses native subversion API instead of parsing the output. The c++ interface was taken from rapidsvn.

Umbrello UML Modeller

Umbrello UML Modeller is a Unified Modelling Language diagram programme for KDE. UML allows you to create diagrams of software and other systems in a standard format.

Konzept - a static structure diagram editor

Konzept is a small class diagram editor.

I Hear U

IHU stands for "I Hear U" and it is a Voice over IP application for Linux, based on QT, that creates an audio stream connecting two computers in an easy way, and using minimal traffic.

It features Peer-to-Peer and crypted streams. It has command line support so you dont need to have the GUI.

Password managers

I use the Ked Password Manager but I find that some features are missing, like moving the entries from category. I recently found out that it has a console application too, so I will try it and hopefully it will be more feature rich.

I have also recently notice Keepass, which is based on Qt3 and seems very promessing.

SVG Browsers

While we still wait for a true free svg-enabled browser, you can visit the list at W3C of the browsers and or plugin's that enable svg vieweing.

Although I don't think flash is going to disapper any day soon, SVG is really a contender, and backed with the power of the Open Source community and the force of an open standard, it might just come to stay.

Promesing implementations in my opinion are:

Apache Squiggle

Mozilla SVG Project

Gentoo and Fedora new faces

Gentoo redesign site! Very COOL!

and

... the Fedora path to a new logo.

Krita - painting and image editing

Krita is a painting and image editing application for KOffice.

It supports guided painting (airbrush across a straight line), 16 bit images, CMYK, OpenEXR HDR images, etc...

Scribus - Open Source Desktop Publishing tool

Scribus brings professional DTP to Linux and *nix desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.

Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management, versatile PDF creation, PDF Import, EPS import/export, Unicode text including right to left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Scribus also has support for useful vector drawing tools, SVG import/export and for OpenType Fonts.

Vector Graphics Editor

Inkscape is an vector graphics editor similar to Illustrator supporting the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

It can work with clipart gotten from the amazing OpenClipart project.

Portable bandwidth monitor and rate estimator

bmon is a portable bandwidth monitor and rate estimator running on various operating systems.

Remote Desktop tools for Linux

rdesktop is a very good tool to connect to windows servers remotly. Kind like Citrix but wihtout the need for server extensions.

grdesktop is the frontend for rdesktop. It features saving the connections and browsing the network for terminal servers.

But the truly amazing tool is tsclient because not only it supports windows terminal server protocol, BUT also supports XDMCP (via Xnest) and VNC protocols.

Translator for Developers

If you plan to help developing Open Source projects, one way you can participate is helping the huge task of translating into diferent locales each program. This is usually accomplished by editing some .Po files which have each of the strings to place into the menus, buttons and widgets in general of the different applications. Gtranslator is a tool that eases the effort of editing these .Po files.

Fetch it and start helping out!

Valgrind, the amazing profiler

Valgrind was already some versions ago a very good memory leak checker, but it is fastly becoming the most amazing tool for profiling, freely available for all the developers out there...

It is now composed of a myriad of tools:

Memcheck to check memory-management problems
Addrcheck whihc is a lightweight version of Memcheck, that just checks for bounds.
Cachegring which is a cache profiler to help you reduce cache-misses.
Massif which is a memory heap profiler, to help you reduce memory consumption.
Helgrind which is a thread debugger which helps finding non-locked accesses to shared data.
Callgrind is an external tool that enhances Cachegrind to include a call trace and timing and comes with a very good GUI: KCachegrind

Free XML Editors

Conglomerate is a promessing XML editor, that has yet to reach stable release but is fastly approaching it.

KXML Editor is based on the KDE libraries and seems more stable...

I am still deciding which on to stick with...

Concept: Tensegrity

From the Wikipedia:

In mechanics and biomechanics, tensegrity or tensional integrity is a property of objects with components that use tension and compression in a combination that yields strength and resilience beyond the sum of their components. Animals and other biological structures are made strong by their tensioned and compressed parts. Muscles and bones act in unison to strengthen the other. This kind of strength exists also at the cellular level, and it is a somewhat new understanding of biological structures.

Tensegrity is the pattern that results when push and pull have a win-win relationship with each other. The pull is continuous and the push is discontinuous. The continuous pull is balanced by the discontinuous push producing an integrity of tension and compression.

Comparison of CMS engines

Here you'll find an exaustive comparison of CMS engines. CMS engines allow easy publishing and maintaining of online contents. These can be as diverse as weblogs, forums, wiki pages, atom/rss news aggregators or photo galleries.

Blogging Tools

There are at least 3 tools that enable you to blog from your desktop to blogger.com:

Drivel is able to post both on the old API RPC2 and the new ATOM API. Its quite powerfull and very good looking, with dictionary support. My tool of choice...

gnome-blog is an applet for the GNOME desktop that is simple and easy to use, to post blogs directly from the GNOME panel. It only supports RPC2 protocol, but includes dictionary support!!!

BloGtk is a GUI for posting to several bloggers, but it only supports RPC2 protocol.

SpeedCrunch, the calculator the technical guy

Don't you find the calculator programs simply too clumsy for speed usage?
Mostly run by keyboard, SpeedCrunch is the calculator for the technical or engineer oriented professional. A "must look" at...

Plotting tool and more

Remember that great tool for that awfull Windoze OS... Origin?? Well, if you want a plotting tool that can also do curve fitting in Linux and aims to replace the Origin way of work and functionality, have a look at QtiPlot. Thanks to Qt toolkit, it's even cross-platform!!!

Mouse gestures on Linux

Using the Freehand Gestures packages you can launch applications without touching the keyboard or even clicking the a mouse button. Why is it usefull? Well, you don't loose sight/focus of the current window you are watching...

Gambas, Basic IDE with object extensions

Not aiming to be a clone, Gambas is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions, much like Visual Basic.

Kexi database

Kexi is an integrated database management application, a part of the KOffice suite, it is the long waited Open Source competitor of MsAccess.
Really worth looking at...

ShowImg, Another image viewer for KDE

Supporting many image formats, including RAW translation and viewing of EXIF header, ShowImg is a promessing image viewer, that also features image management.

Emulation vs Virtualization technology

"... while emulation essentially creates an entire hardware environment that may bear no relation to the actual hardware of the machine it's running on, virtualization provides an indirect access layer to the actual hardware of the host system." -- Tom Haddon, Linux.com

QEMU

For emulation in the Linux OS, one can turn to many solutions, but one that came to my notice recently is QEMU, via this article, which is capable of x86 and x86_64 32 and 64 bit user code, supporting the following OS's: GNU/Linux, Windows 9X, 2000, XP, Solaris 9/10, NetBSD, and so on...

XEN

For emulation pure virtualization, the Xen project is the leading open source virtual machine, and RedHat has shown recent insterest in putting effort to include support directly into the kernel.
In my own opinion, and based on recent articles and fuss-fuss not only on the net but in the IT buiseness circles, virtualization is going to be the next BIG thing in IT: having hit the frequency barrier, and with CPU companies pushing the multiple core solutions, this will drive the software to follow two main streams:

• on the side of the software applications, more and more will be multi-threaded, to explore the full potential of the multi-core architectures.
• on the side of the operating systems, they should start to support virtualization at the lowest (kernel) level, to allow for multiple machines to be emulated, yet centralized, thus simplifying maintenance and improving uptime.