Full screen ncurses and X11 traceroute tool.mtr combines the functionality of the ‘traceroute’ and ‘ping’ programs in a single network diagnostic tool.

I had a lengthy discussion with a new acquaintance the other day, and as it so often does in conversations I'm involved in, topics eventually shifted to the philosophy of knowledge and ideas, and their impact on the improvements within human societies over time.

So, this is a rant. Please don't quote me on this article, as my opinion might have changed a day after posting. In the meantime, there's a rant I've been meaning to write for a long time that I've put off since I'm officially wearing the KDE Marketing hat. Tonight, I take it off.

It happens all the time. Sooner or later, every organization may run out of qualified UNIX system administrator / staff because of various issues. As a single admin you may have to do lots of work because other people in accouting, sales, or programmers may not have all the skills required to run servers. Also, I don't trust new people or people with Windows background.

"He's a one-time futures trader and the force behind one of the internet's most successful sites - and unlike many of his peers he hasn't sold out to big business for billions. It's all done in the name of free knowledge for all, he says.

A few years back when I had relatively little knowledge of anything I installed a linux distribution (no names mentioned) on my old desktop and couldn’t really get anything to work. The biggest problem was getting the internet to work; it just didn’t seem to want to work at all. That really put me off trying again for a long time. I had an old laptop lying about that just wasn’t being used so I thought I would just install it and see what happened.

TeX Live is a TeX distribution which is the replacement of teTeX. It is now the default TeX distribution for several Linux distributions such as Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo. Other Unix operating systems like OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD are also converting from teTeX to TeX Live. TeX Live may be run directly, or "live", from a CD ROM, or from a DVD ROM, hence its name.

A little while back, Michael Meeks published a lengthy piece about copyright assignment (not nearly as lengthy as the articles he links to on untangling Wittgenstein's net). Go on, read it (Michael's stuff, not the net). It's worth your time. When you get to the bottom, follow the link to Dave Neary's take on assignment as well.

A Canadian company, Intelligence Realm, last week launched a distributed computing project on Linux called "Artificial intelligence - Reverse engineering the brain". The company has invited members of the public to volounteer and donate computer time to help this project develop artificial intelligence (AI).