Data Visualization is a free cross data base and cross platform reporting tool. Its target is very simple: whatever operating system you use, whatever data base you keep data in and whatever report you want to have, you can create it for free in few a minutes using simple GUI.

Today I needed to reset a password on an Ubuntu system. While doing this, I was reminded of just how simple it is to get root access on a default install of Ubuntu. I wanted to share these steps on this blog to remind people that if someone has physical access to your Ubuntu system, they can get root access in just a few seconds.

Even with all of the high quality software available, sometimes you just have to break down and write a custom application, and usually you don't have a lot of time to devote to it. This is the situation I found myself in when my wife started a new business and needed a simple means of tracking sales leads.

What if your boss demands a new version of a spreadsheet, with fresh data, every day? Should you enter them manually? No, if your data have a fixed structure and the spreadsheet can be in OpenDocument format (ODF)! If that's the case, it only takes a bit of shell and Perl scripting to generate automatically a new spreadsheet whenever the raw data change.

"I code in Emacs. Emacs has good support for version control tool interaction in the vc-mode package. I want to use git and have vc-mode work with git. I also want access to special git commands that the vc-mode does not export directly. The notes below are for Ubuntu Hardy, which is what I use all the time..."

"...I doubt that a query language as general and flexible as SPARQL will be the best basis for it... what’s needed is a query language where the result is another graph."

The ability to import and export data is crucial to any database management system, and OpenOffice.org Base is no exception. While you may be surprised to discover that OpenOffice.org lacks a dedicated import/export feature, it does allow you to get data into and out of a database in a variety of ways.

When I first used Mono, shortly after its first appearance in 2004, one of my most important requirements was to get connected to a MySQL back end. This was quickly achieved at the time with the ByteFX data connector. Following the basic Mono tutorial quickly had me up and running, with access to MySQL databases.

KOffice 1.6.3 is out with a long list of changes, particularly for database management tool Kexi, the KOffice answer to Microsoft Access.