Want to get Unix/Linux techies arguing? Besides classic flame wars such as whether vi or EMACS is the better text editor, another surefire way to start a fight is to talk about which file systems are the best. Google, which knows a thing or two about fast systems has decided, for their purposes anyway, that Ext4 is the best and close to the fastest file system of all.

We often read (including in the book Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper) that if we pass variable names as parameters to functions, they will be treated as string literals and cannot be dereferenced (ie the value is not available). But this is not so...

These test profiles seem irrelevant for free system distributions in that they use some non-free software in order to make their benchmarks "powerful". Phoronix Test Suite is free software: i think it'd be useful to do these benchmarks with software freedom involved...

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Ubuntu 9.10. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.

I have a portable USB drive that has an ext3 Linux partition and a FAT Windows partition. The drive is a bit flaky due, I'm pretty sure, inadequate power from the USB connection. My solution in the next few paragraphs is less than ideal, and I've since found a better way to make my drive work.

The schemes commonly used to encrypt GSM telephone calls, SMS messages, and data transmissions have been theoretically broken for years at both the protocol and cipher levels, but results presented in Berlin at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) on December 27 demonstrate that a practical attack can be easily implemented.

FreeSWITCH is an open-source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat driven products scaling from a soft-phone up to a soft-switch. It can be used as a simple switching engine, a PBX, a media gateway or a media server to host IVR applications using simple scripts or XML to control the callflow.