Mozilla your new Desktop?

Since Netscape released its navigator source code, the developers community has an active participation in the development of the Mozilla platform, 1998.
This platform has leveraged the development of multiple, different and exciting projects such as Thunderbird, Songbird, Flock and Firefox, of course.
Mozilla exhibits a modular design that allows to expand the projects functionality through an architecture based on plug-ins.
Of course, I'm a fan of Firefox and I want to mention three plug-ins that have gotten my attention.

• NoScript: This project aims to block all the scripts contained in the web pages that you regularly visit. Then, it avoids that you browser becomes overloaded for executing multiple instances of javascript code and saves you from running javascript code from unstrusted sites, as well.
  As a matter of fact, three weeks ago appeared a news about how malicious javascript code embedded on Internet web pages, retrieves your PayPal account info and sends it to Russian servers. Certainly, NoScript will reduce the possibility of lose your valuable info.
• ScribeFire: This plug-in provides a simple to-use interface for publishing entries to your blog. In addition, it allows you to incorporate ads to your blog in such a way that you can earn some money meanwhile you write for fun ;-). In fact, I write for fun and I subscribed to the ScribFire ad program but still I didn't earn a penny for my writings ;-), but who cares :-D, I'm enjoying this journey ;-).
  
• Ubiquity: This project was introduced on August, 2008. As its statement says It's an experiment for connecting the web with language. Then, it provides a friendly interface that allows you to execute multiple tasks such as to look up info on google and wikipedia, share info with popular social networks, edit web pages, interact with google maps, among others.
  I have never written something about this plug-in, because I found that it imposed to my browser a high overload, however, today I downloaded the last version and I found it very functional, gorgeous and exhibiting a promptly response to my requests.

As you can see, Mozilla, in particular Firefox, offers an amazing platform that can leverage your productivy if you know the proper plug-ins that best fulfill your needs. I have shared some of them with you and I hope that you give a change to open and smart computing platforms.

Happy new year :-D

PS: BTW, my computer is a Compaq R3000 with 1Gb of RAM and AMD Athlon(tm) XP Processor 3000+, running Fedora Core 7. :-)

Variety of Virtualization Appliances

On December 17, was announced the release of VirtualBox 2.1.
This release comes with a lot of new features such as support for 3D graphics and support for virtualizing x86 and x64 appliances.
Now, you could execute your 3D Windows games inside your Linux box.
As well, you could test any x64 operating system and your x86 legacy system.
However, if your machine has a modest hardware resources you might experiment a low performance of your appliances.

That situation can be alleviated if your machine is empowered with processors that include a set of virtual instructions.
These instructions are tuned for reducing the overhead to occur during the virtualization process.
Intel offers the VT technology. This technology masks the virtualization operations enhancing the performance of virtual appliances.

Then, if you want to exploit all benefits of VirtualBox, I highly recommend you to upgrade your hardware. Thereby, buy a multi-core processor with support for VT Technology, 3 Gbytes of RAM, and video card with GPU.

Good hack!


Resources

• Intel processor finder
• VirtualBox
• NVidia
  

RPM a quick guide...

Hi,

RPM is a package management system defined by RedHat. Different distributions (Fedora, Rocks Cluster, Mandriva) and package management tools (yum) rely on it.
You can ignore the rpm command when your favorite repository provides the packages that you need however when you get a rpm from third party software provider you'll require a little knowledge about the rpm tool.

What packages are installed? rpm -qa | less
How to uninstall packages? rpm -e package_name
How to install packages? rpm -i file_name

Regards,

Green Computing

Today many of us are more conscious about our environment. Due to either high prices in combustibles or green house effect we look for ways to save energy and become more green.
Linux Journal has an article with ideas of people from different places around the world about how to save energy re-utilizing the power emitted by legacy data centers.
Take a look ;-)

Finally, recycle, turn off unnecessary lights, put your computer on hibernate mode as frequent as you can, don't waste the water; please, collaborate to save our limited resources.

'Time Machine' for Linux

Today, I was talking with a friend of mine who is a 'Mac' user.
During our conversation, she showed me the 'TimeMachine' application and I was amazed for the quality and how useful it is.

I'm a Linux fan and promptly I came back to my laptop and search for similar applications available for Linux, then, I found those:

• flyback: tool developed by 'Google' people under python. It's very simple at this time, but I expect some enhancements in the near future.  'flyback' is an early stages it is a GUI for grouping a set of tools already available on Linux.
• Dirvish: although the 'news' section suggest a high activity levels during 2003 up to 2005, there is an announcement of the dirvish guide submitted on October 2008, so the project has not die.
• TimeVault: I didn't test.
  
  

Try some one, it could save your work and 'life', :-D.

Cheers,

Port associated to Process in Linux

Many times, it's necessary to identify what application has assigned a given port. According to www.linuxquestions.org there are three ways to achieve that:

• lsof -w n -i tcp:#### 
• fuser -n tcp ####
  
• netstat -anp | grep :####

enjoy it!

Why another blog?

I have been excited for many years with concepts and technologies behind of distributed computing.
These days, I have a lot of work in the practical side of the distributed computing, and certainly, I found different drawbacks during implementing concepts and developing applications.
I will post, aperiodically, tips about how you can work with grid technologies, mainly topics related with PRAGMA, GridRPC and Groovy language.
Besides, I will keep publishing in my another blog blog-grid.blogspot.com. By now, that's all. Take care.