مجمع الأخبار

Acquia (my company) is part of the exceptional group of companies vying for the 2008 Red Herring 100 North America award. The award recognizes the top 100 privately held companies in North America. This is big because previous winners included companies like Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube. It is still early days for Acquia but it is good to get noticed early on. The winners will be announced in May so fingers crossed ...

Good systems administrators know that implementing a robust backup procedure is one of their most important duties. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most complex and least fun. When the phone rings and there's a panic-stricken user on the other end who has just lost a crucial document, you need to be confident that you can promptly recover his missing files. Failure to do so can bring about a speedy end to a promising career in systems administration. So what's a budding sysadmin to do? Download the latest release of Bacula and watch those backup woes disappear into the dark of night.

Bob Bickel, co-founder of Ringside Networks, says companies need to harness the power of social networking and entice customers to visit corporate Web sites with the same eagerness they show for sites like Facebook. He believes the Ringside Social Application Server -- an open source platform that puts social networking tools on any existing Web site -- is the answer CEOs are looking for.

Today's Web development tools offer capabilities that go beyond basic HTML editing. I compared three Web editors for Linux -- Screem 0.16.1, Bluefish 1.0.7, and Quanta Plus 3.5.7 -- to determine how well they handle today's Web editing needs.

Many people leave their computers on around the clock. This usually implies that all the attached hard disks are always spinning. Constantly spinning up a hard disk normally increases the chances of drive failure. When a disk is not powered it should last longer than if it was spinning. There is a delicate balance between having a hard disk spinning down and up too frequently and leaving it spinning around the clock. If you have a filesystem that you want to have near instant access to but do so on an infrequent basis, you might like to use spindown to automatically spin down the disk containing that filesystem after you have finished accessing the drive.

Imagine an application that combines the features of a wiki and a Web-based notebook. It may sound like an unusual mix, but Luminotes wiki notebook is living proof that this combination works rather well.

The summer is off to a great start as Google continues to blow loving kisses at Drupal.

Google just announced that they will sponsor 21 Drupal developer stipends in this year's Summer of Code program (SoC). To inspire young developers to work on FOSS projects during the summer, Google will provide a stipend of 5,000 USD to each student developer, of which 4,500 USD goes to the student and 500 USD goes to Drupal Association (or to the mentors). With 21 accepted applications this adds up to a 105,000 USD investment over a three-month period.

The accepted students, their projects, and the mentors are listed on the official Drupal.org announcement. Many of the listed projects touch Drupal core, so it looks like I'm in for a really busy summer. Congratulations to all successful applicants, and thanks to the Drupal Summer of Code organizers, the Drupal mentors, and last but not least, Google. Great!

For the second time in a row, Drupal is a Webware 100 Awards winner. The Webware awards recognize the best sites, services, and applications on the web today.

Given that more than 5,000 products were nominated for the awards, and that nearly two million users voted to select the 100 top products, this award is a great testament to the awesomeness that is the Drupal community. The Drupal community is on a rocking spree!

Congratulations to Drupal for winning a CNET Webware 100 award in the publishing category.

The 2008 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, CNET's editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web's users decided the final cut, voting nearly two million times to select the 100 top products--10 each in of 10 categories--from our list of 300 finalists. We hope that the Drupal community is excited about being selected by your users. And we congratulate the Drupal community on offering a great Web service.

read more

Personal data safety is big business lately. There are a variety of ways to protect your identity or keep your personal information from the prying eyes of dishonest people, but Eric Wolbrom has what he believes is a unique service. Keep You Safe makes it possible for subscribers to store all their personal data securely in a virtual online "safe deposit box," and share the key with someone they trust. When Wolbrom, a self-described "security geek," finally had the chance to launch Keep You Safe, he knew that building it on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) was the best way to keep his customers' data secure.

We are thrilled to announce that Google will be sponsoring 21 Drupal projects for Summer of Code 2008. We'd like to extend our sincere thanks to Google, who are making more than a $100,000 investment in the Drupal project.

This year particularly, there were many more projects that we would've liked to accept than we were able to (probably due at least in part to changes Drupal made to its SoC application process this year). The mentoring team deliberated fiercely over the past two weeks, and arrived at the final acceptance list detailed in the "read more" link.

Many of the projects this year build on work done during previous Summer of Codes. Drupal core will benefit from a new aggregator, improved search scoring, OpenID attribute exchange, revamped help system and color module, SimpleTest security scanner and generalized Validation API. There are also projects focused on improvements to the Drupal.org infrastructure, including ApacheSolr search, version control API, and the much demanded plugin manager for secure, automated updating of module and themes.

Some of Drupal's major contributed modules will also gain, including Views as widgets, Views RDF/XML/JSON output, Views & CCK chart support, extensions to Nodequeue and OAuth support for Services.

There's also a healthy component of brand new functionality, including an image manipulation GUI, memetracker, bookings API, Icon module, document import module and Usability testing suite.

If you'd like to keep up on Summer of Code happenings, would like to volunteer to help test students' projects, and/or would like to help students as they find their way in our community, please join the SoC 2008 working group and help out in whatever ways you can. Also check out Planet SoC to read blog entries from Summer of Code students across all mentoring organizations.

Here's to another great summer! :) Read on to find more details about Drupal's accepted proposals.

read more

The GNU/Linux command line and desktop are both sophisticated interfaces, but they are mostly separate realities. You can drag text into a virtual terminal from the desktop, or use Edit -> Copy to move text in either direction, but by default moving files and directories between them is impossible -- a problem that often requires extra switching between them if you frequently work in both. Dragbox is designed to solve this problem and connect the two interfaces -- at least if one of them is GNOME -- through what might be described as a combination multiple clipboard and simple file manager.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.