Southern writes:  

In recent weeks and months there has been quite a bit of work towards improving the responsiveness of the Linux desktop with some very significant milestones building up recently and new patches continuing to come. This work is greatly improving the experience of the Linux desktop when the computer is withstanding a great deal of CPU load and memory strain. Fortunately, the exciting improvements are far from over. There is a new patch that has not yet been merged but has undergone a few revisions over the past several weeks and it is quite small -- just over 200 lines of code -- but it does wonders for the Linux desktop.

The patch being talked about is designed to automatically create task groups per TTY in an effort to improve the desktop interactivity under system strain. Mike Galbraith wrote the patch, which is currently in its third version in recent weeks, after Linus Torvalds inspired this idea. In its third form (patch), this patch only adds 224 lines of code to the kernel's scheduler while stripping away nine lines of code, thus only 233 lines of code are in play.

Tests done by Mike show the maximum latency dropping by over ten times and the average latency of the desktop by about 60 times. Linus Torvalds has already heavily praised (in an email) this miracle patch.

more: phoronix

Southern writes:  

Most commercial products run a fairly set course; you get Microsoft Office 1.5, then 1.6, 3.0, 4.0, all the way up to office 2010 (For Windows, at least). It's a fairly orderly progression, with version numbers rising over time – pretty easy to follow.

Open-source projects are a different beast, however. When enough developers don't like the direction a project is going, they sometimes just create a fork and go on developing their own product. Sometimes projects have to fork for legal reasons, and sometimes it's a business decision, too.

The bottom line is that if you could plot the Linux timeline, it would look more like a crazy family tree than like an orderly progression of versions. And what do you know, one Donjan Rodic has gone and done just that, in the form of the GNU/Linux distro timeline.

More: DownloadSquad

nb1 writes:  

PhpSecInfo provides an equivalent to the phpinfo() function that reports security information about the PHP environment, and offers suggestions for improvement. It is not a replacement for secure development techniques, and does not do any kind of code or app auditing, but can be a useful tool in a multilayered security approach

PHPSec Home Page

jestrella writes:  

I'm happy to announce that Google Friend Connect features are now also available for Drupal and Joomla. Now that Friend Connect is integrated with these popular open source CMS platforms, site owners can make registration easier for users and offer them a set of social features -- all without writing a single line of code. Even site owners without programming experience can add these plug-ins.

Full article @ Google social web blog

What do you think? Would you like to see something like that core integrated into RavenNuke CMS? Would it be viable?

link writes:  

Just wanted to post a notice to all RavenNuke™ users about a free service we've started up. The site is called WhatsAFile.com and its a file types and file extensions utility site.

If you have ever downloaded a file and have no clue how to open it or what to do with it, just hop over to WhatsAFile.com and submit a request with the file info. We'll do the research and post the answer usually within hours. We think this is going to be a great resource to computer resources everywhere. Be sure to tell your friends.

nb1 writes:  

If you often use the print story button just to get a Web article on one page, and without the hijinks that get you to mistakenly click on advertisements, Readability may be just what you're looking for. This small bookmarklet, which you simply drag up to your bookmarks toolbar to add to your browser, will re-format the page you're on to make it easier to read. It gets rid of layout, advertising, and any of the site's original navigation. In return, the story retains its links, photos, and any embedded content, letting you read freely and without distraction.

To customize the experience you can set the default font size, and layout style, which includes a quirky "terminal" view that puts creamy white text on a dark green background. You can also set the width from super wide to a narrow column view that looks and feels like a newspaper All of this, however, must be done when first setting up the bookmarklet, so there's no option to change the text side and width from within the Readability view.

This tool reminds me quite a bit of PrintWhatYouLike, the service that lets you customize what page elements you want to print, even if the source site does not have its own print story function. It is, however noticeably faster about cutting out the page elements--it's almost instantaneous.

If you liked Readability, you'll definitely enjoy TidyRead. It does the same exact things as Readability but lets you swap things like the font size, width, and style on the fly. It works in other languages, which as of now Readability manages to flub. It also lets you send simplified article pages to friends via a special re-direct page, just like this one.

Readability


TidyRead