It's time for New Year resolutions and what better than to resolve to not purchase media 'protected' by DRM? Many of us already follow this rule but by pledging this publicly we can educate the masses.

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KWordQuiz, KVocTrain, and other KDE-based programs use the KVTML file format for their data files. The format is just a fairly simple XML format but, unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything available to convert a text file to this format. So, once again, AWK to the rescue.

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It is midnight. You are browsing the web. Everything seems fine. Unbeknownst to you, a rogue advertisement composed of malware is displayed on a popular website and is attempting to steal your banking credentials. What can you do?

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This week I'm your straight reporter bringing you news of of updates, upgrades, and new releases in the world of Linux audio software. Development in this world is continuously productive, so I'll present only a selection of the Linux sound and music applications and utilities announced in the month of November in the year 2008.

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Remember back in August, when there was all the hoopla regarding me in a "Hot Blogger" calendar? Well, your votes paid off, and indeed I grace the eleventh page of the calendar as Mr. November. Seeing myself as a calendar model immediately made me think of cows. (Well, OK, not really -- but bear with me)

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As the end of 2008 approaches, people's thoughts naturally turn to 2009, and what it might hold. The dire economic situation means that many will be wondering what the year will bring in terms of employment and their financial situation. This is not the place to ponder such things, nor am I qualified to do so. Instead, I'd like to discuss a matter that is related to these larger questions, but which focusses on issues particularly germane to Linux Journal: will 2009 be a year in which openness thrives, or one in which closed thinking re-asserts itself?

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If you run a lot of terminal tabs or scripts that all need to make OpenSSH connections to the same server, you can speed them all up with multiplexing: making the first one act as the master and letting the others share its TCP connection to the server.

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Using pyuno you can script OpenOffice with Python. Pyuno allows you to create macros inside OpenOffice and it also allows you to create external Python scripts that talk to a running copy of OpenOffice. If you want to get started with pyuno be prepared for an often frustrating experience: the documentation is sketchy and

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Usually, when I write articles for Linux Journal, they are of a patently technical nature. This article is going to be quite a bit different. As we head into the Holiday Season and the start of a new year, I've begun to think about what I want to do in the next year, and what I wish I had done with this year.

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Setting up an https server in Apache is easy. This tutorial covers how to create and sign your ssl certificate as well as how to configure the web server.

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Occasionally, you need to process a number of files—some of which have been compressed and some which have not (think log files). Rather than running two variations, one compressed and one not, wrap it in a bash function:

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We're the first to admit that Linux is cool. Just using it is cool, but if you're doing something extra cool with Linux this is your chance to share it with the community. Our Cool Projects issue is coming up quick and we're looking for a few more project articles. We're partial to Cool projects that have a hardware slant, but if you have a Cool software project let us know about that too.

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The Internet is infrastructure. This should be plain, but it's not. The reason is that neither the Net nor infrastructure are well-understood, even though both could hardly be more widely used.

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Someone on the Seattle Linux List asked about Groupware and the usual suspects were suggested. One, however, I didn't know anything about. It is called Chandler. I figured it was worth looking at.

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Adobe releases AIR 1.5 for Linux today, December 18, 2008. This is great news for Linux users that have been stuck with 1.1 Beta. AIR applications that have been unable to install should install and run without problems.

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Back in January of 1994, Dave Fischer coined the idea of the "September that never ended." Basically, it referred to the influx of new Usenet users that came to college every September, and had to acclimate to how one conducts themselves on the 'net.

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As a buddy of mine always says "the nice thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from". Take CSV files for example. CSV, of course, stands for "Comma Separated Values", more often than not though, it seems that CSV files use tabs to separate values rather than commas.

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I was celebrating Leap Day (February 29) at a London pub with Mark Antony Kent, Head of Technology Strategy at British Telecom, hoping also to pump his brain for insights to follow up on a contentious FCC hearing at Harvard earlier that week—one convened to visit issues around Comcast's valving of BitTorrent traffic.

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Presentation software isn't complicated compared to a word processor or spreadsheet. It doesn't need to be. Maybe that's why OpenOffice.org's Impress offers a variety of views of your work.

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Many sceptics were convinced that as free software spread out beyond hackers into the general computing sector the rigorous GNU GPL licence would gradually be replaced by more accommodating – meaning weaker – forms, since it was “obvious” that its unbending rules were too strict for widespread use. In fact, the GPL has grown in importance, until today it is probably fair to say that it underpins most of the free software world, including enterprise applications. This makes any violation of its terms particularly worrying, because if left unchallenged, it threatens to undermine the entire ecosystem.

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