Cody Taylor

Using “off-the-shelf hardware”, we have modified a Kill-a-Watt(TM) power meter to “tweet” (publish wirelessly) the daily KWH consumed to the user’s Twitter account (Cumulative Killowatt-hours). We are releasing this project as an “Open source hardware”.

An anonymous reader writes “‘The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through Open Source technologies and products.’ The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley’s most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration.”

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PHP is one of the most widely used open-source server-side scripting languages that exist today. With over 20 million indexed domains using PHP, including major websites like Facebook, Digg and WordPress, there are good reasons why many Web developers prefer it to other server-side scripting languages, such as Python and Ruby.

Derwent sends along a Computerworld piece which begins: “The Ubuntu Mobile operating system is undergoing its most radical change with a port to the ARM processor for Internet devices and netbooks, and may use Nokia’s LGPL Qt development environment as an alternative to GNOME. During a presentation at this year’s linux.conf.au conference, Canonical’s David Mandala said Ubuntu Mobile has changed a lot over the past year… ‘I worked on ARM devices for many years so a full Linux distribution on ARM is exciting,’ Mandala said, adding one of the biggest challenges is reminding developers to write applications for 800 by 600 screen resolutions found in smaller devices. ‘The standard [resolution] for GNOME [apps] is 800 by 600, but not all apps are. For this reason Ubuntu Mobile uses the GNOME Mobile (Hildon framework) instead of a full GNOME desktop, but since Nokia open sourced Qt under the LGPL it may consider this as an alternative.'”

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holy_calamity writes “TechCrunch blogger Mike Arrington decided last year to invent a new class of low-cost internet tablet using open source hardware and software. The second prototype has been unveiled, sporting a 12-inch touchscreen powered by a Via Nano processor, 1 GB of ram and a 4 GB flash drive. It runs a browser and nothing else on top of a custom Linux build. ‘Resolution is 1024×768, which means the vast majority of websites are viewed in full width without scrolling. The device also has wifi, an accelerometer (so when you turn the screen on its side you can view more of a web page), a camera and a four cell battery.'”

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Da Massive writes in with another possible answer to a recent Ask Slashdot about FOSS replacements for Microsoft AD server. “Enterprise networks now have an alternative choice to Microsoft Active Directory (AD) servers, with the open source Samba project aiming for feature parity with the forthcoming release of version 4, according to Canberra-based Samba developer Andrew Bartlett. Speaking at this year’s linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Hobart, Bartlett said Samba 4 is aiming to be a replacement for AD by providing a free software implementation of Microsoft’s custom protocols. Because AD is ‘far more than LDAP and Kerberos,’ Bartlett said, Samba 4 is not only about developing with Microsoft’s customization of those protocols, it is also about moving the project beyond just providing an NT 4 compatible domain manager.”

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Jonah Bomber writes with this excerpt from Information Week: “In addition to Google’s announcements about the elimination of 100 recruiting positions and the shutdown of offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden, the company said it would close Dodgeball, Google Catalog Search, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebook, and Jaiku. It also said it’s discontinuing the ability to upload videos to Google Video. … Jaiku, however, will live on as an open source project. Gundotra said that Google engineers have been porting the microblogging service to Google App Engine and that when the migration is completed, the company plans to make the code available under the Apache license.”

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danboid writes “I’m an IT technician at a large school near Manchester, England. We currently have two separate networks (one for pupils, one for staff) each with its own Windows Server 2003 Active Directory box handling authentication and storing users’ files. We’re planning on restructuring the network soon and we’d like to be able to replace the two aging AD servers with a single, more powerful Linux server running an open source OpenLDAP implementation. The main contenders for this purpose seem to be Fedora Directory Server, OpenDS, and Apache Directory Server; but I’ve been unable to find meaningful comparisons among the three. I’d like to hear which solution Slashdot readers recommend. What is your experience with ease of implementation / maintenance? Any stories of similar (un)successful migrations? Any other tips for an organization wanting to drop AD for a FOSS equivalent?”

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