Microsoft has announced that it will sponsor ASF “Apache Software Foundation”. Yahoo and Google are already on board.

Microsoft was quick to say that they will not ditch IIS as tremendous work is constantly being put into it. IIS 8 is already in development and native support for PHP is on the todo list.

As quated from MS;

Open Specification Promise: Microsoft is putting a wide range
of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program
under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). This guarantees their
freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and
includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols.

Source: nixCraft || port25

Raj Kissu Rajendran from APIT, who is also a Google Summer Of Code participant gets featured in the local papers.

Raj is working on the “BLOB Streaming Support for phpMyAdmin” project which enables the management of streaming content (audio, video) in and out of the MySQL database through phpMyAdmin. keep up with his progress

This is what he had to say about the local OSS scene,

I envision a more innovation-centric industry driven by research and collaboration, especially in open source. The nature of open source is in its shared environment where experts help newbies design and implement efficient code. I think the local ICT industry needs to be more adventurous in R&D (research and development).

OSS in Malaysia is still slow due to the lake of exposure but it’s people like this who help spread the word by contributing great work.

Good job dude!!

Source: NST

KDE 4.1.0

The KDE community released KDE 4.1.0 today. The second release for KDE4.

Boasting new features, new applications and improved eye candy, KDE 4.1 is managing to WOW many. Nothing but good reviews all around the net unlike 4.0.

Plasma now supports multiple panels and allows the resizing of panels like how it was with KDE3.

A new “folder view” plasmoid sees it’s way on to the desktop providing a new way to interact with the desktop. The removal of desktop icons scared many but with the new folder view plasmoid users are able to access any folder they please from the desktop instead of being locked down to the default desktop.

Eye candy. If you have a good software which looked like crap would people want it? I guess not.

KDE 4.1 includes many new improvements to it’s interface. Thinner borders, better transparencies, cleaner interfaces, new themes and plasma now has it’s own theme engine.

Plasma Folder View

From a software standpoint, KDE-PIM is back with Kmail and KOrganizer. Dragon player, the new video player comes default. New games are included, KSystemlog, KSCD CD player, just to mention a few.

However, Amarok 2.0 is still not in

KDE 4.1 is really looking more like a complete desktop now. KDE 3 users will take sometime to get used to the new interface but eventually they will get there. Can’t say the same about Vista

Wanna take it for a spin?

Get the live CD || Other Alternatives

Source: KDE

Most of the time, users are having a Windows Machine on their desk or laptop. Normally, we want to perform a full scale data retrieval from our Linux servers in the DC, where we don’t have a trusted Linux server to manage it….the answer to it is use “PLINK” utility.

Plink comes together with the Putty…

A simple example of usage is:

C:\> plink USERNAME@SERVERNAME ‘YOUR-LINUX-COMMAND’

If you have a dozen of servers…then you probably want to write a batch script in Windows to loop through a list of servers and mention the list of commands juz like what i did…..

Here a typical windows batch script:

@echo off

for / f “tokens=*” %%A in (your-server-list.txt) ( C:\path\to\plink.exe user@server -w YOUR-PASSWORD -m linuxcommandscript > YOUR_OUTPUT_FILE.txt)

There you go, i did this for my sar report data collection for root cause analysis and infrastructure load analysis….keying in a password wif every darn login is impractical and yet you dont want to generate a security key for the servers.

BarCamp’s in a few hours. It’s gonna be my first. The Google Android session is what I’m going for first.

What is BarCamp? It’s an Unconference .

Interested? Initialy seats were limited but due to overwhelming interest from the public, BarCamp decided to opened up it’s door to all. Just walk in.

See you there,

When
July 26-27, 2008
Saturday 10:00 AM-6:00PM (official section)
Hangout time 6pm to Sunday morning
Sunday 10:00 AM-2:00PM

Where
xTrain Sdn Bhd
Unit E-7-1, Block E
Megan Avenue 1
189 Jalan Tun Razak
50400 Kuala Lumpur
Google map - View

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