I stumbled across an interesting and useful tool recently called dzen, a "general purpose messaging and notification program" written by Rob Manea. Basically, dzen provides an instant-on/instant-off pop-up terminal window, along with a multitude of options that allow you to run just about any command.

Embedded virtualization specialist VirtualLogix has announced series B funding of $16 million. New investors included Intel Capital and round leader Esprit Capital Partners, while existing investors Atlas Venture and Index Ventures also contributed.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

It appears that later this month Intel will be announcing a new technology that will be open-source. While what exactly is being launched is not known, from the information provided it is an open-source Intel technology that may deal with optimizing your software to take advantage of multiple computing cores.

The European Union funded FLOSSCom research project is investigating Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities as learning environments. The project aims to identify principles of FLOSS communities that could be transferred to educational settings, e.g. how the community model could help to improve education.

I've just read an article about 10 ways to improve the GNOME Desktop, and I must admit that many points are sensible. Let analyze them.

The wildly popular Linux distro isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially if you try to install it on a laptop, our reviewer Alex Wolfe finds. Come along on his Ubuntu safari, as he hacks his way through bug-fraught installation attempts.

Audacity's follow-up to its cult-classic audio editor, Audacity 1.3, warrants the attention of amateur and "prosumer" music editors. Audacity 1.3 adds minor (though useful) editing effects, and greases the wheels with some time-saving functionality.