Thom Holwerda Archive

There may not be fireworks. CIOs and IT directors may not be heaping their proprietary software on bonfires and dancing. Even so, the open source revolution is happening right now and will carry the day, said Bill Weinberg, open source architecture specialist and Linux evangelist for OSDL.

UIMA 1.1 is a pure Java SDK that supports the implementation, composition, and deployment of applications working with unstructured information on Linux. Version 1.1 has been incorporated into IBM's enterprise search product, WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition, Version 8.2.2. UIMA Annotators can now be deployed into WebSphere II OmniFind for semantic search solutions. Here's a helpful user guide.

AppleInsider is reporting that Sony's PlayStation 3 gaming console will support Apple's Mac OS X Tiger operating system. "Sony is expected to offer optional hard drives for the PlayStation 3 with potential memory capacity of 80 or 120 GB. It remains to be decided whether the standard version of the PS3 will come complete with a hard drive. The operating system has also yet to be clarified. The integrated Cell processor will be able to support a variety of operating systems (such as Linux or Apple's Tiger)."

In a recent blog posting, Internet Explorer's lead program manager Chris Wilson revealed many of the technical improvements that Microsoft will add to IE 7.0 for its final release. Almost all the improvements are related to bugs in IE's implementation of CSS. Many of these bugs aren't fixed in the currently available IE 7.0 Beta release. Wilson's post raises some serious questions about IE 7.0.

"RealSoftware's REALBasic 2005 - the popular cross-platform interactive development environment for Mac OS X and Windows - is scheduled to debut for the Linux platform later this month, perhaps as early as the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. For the past couple of weeks, I've been falling asleep each night to the glow of beta versions of REALBasic 2005 running happily on SUSE Pro 9.3 on my monitor."

It is no secret that the competition for global domination in the operating system market has moved from the desktop to the living room couch. The Olive Symphony, a Linux-powered hi-fi wi-fi stereo hub, stands a decent chance for a prime position before the living room throne.

For those of you who are intrested in OpenBSD's OpenCVS, NedBSD has put an interview with Joris Vink online. Joris Vink is an OpenBSD developer who is working on OpenCVS.

Between December 2004 and July 2005, the "defect density" in the Linux kernel has fallen from 0.17 to 0.16 and all serious defects have been corrected, a new report out from code analysis firm Coverity asserts. Defect density declined by 2.2 percent.

"With the introduction of Solaris 10 and the dynamic tracing facility (DTRACE), the ability to dynamically instrument a system and solve complex problems is a D script (D is the language used by DTRACE) away. Several extremely useful D scripts have emerged, so I thought I would share my ten favorite DTRACE scripts with the OSNews community."

Web content syndication is an area of growing importance on the Internet. Atom 1.0 provides a simple, well-defined, and unambiguous format for content syndication on the Web. This article shows you how this popular Web content syndication format stacks up to RSS, discusses Atom's technical strengths relative to other syndication formats, and offers several compelling use case examples that illustrate those strengths.

"The Code Skipper, a new free Qt community resource site has been founded to provide our community of developers with a place to meet. This is a site where tutorials and articles that can be found on a range of Qt related subjects. Skipper also contains a lot of code that can be easily integrated into your applications. Learn Qt tricks from there and share your own ideas."

Novell will be launching a community-based Linux distribution, OpenSuSE, at next week's LinuxWorld in San Francisco, according to sources close to the company. Following in the footsteps of Red Hat Inc. with its successful Fedora Project Linux distribution, Novell Inc. will be opening up its Linux development efforts with OpenSuSE, sources said.

Patrick Volkerding, Slackware's maintainer, announced that Slackware 10.2 is going into beta: "I think it's time to consider this to be mostly frozen and concentrate on beta testing in preparation for the Slackware 10.2 release, so there won't be too many more upgrades and additions."

Andrew Morton is the lead maintainer for the Linux public production kernel. In this 90-minute podcast he describes the Linux kernel development process and compares open-source and commercial processes and motivations.