3 reasons why you should let Google host jQuery for you

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Best Backup Solutions for Desktop Linux

Despite common misconceptions, there are more solid backup solutions for desktop Linux than most people might suspect. Best of all, many of them are completely free with the code being open source. Some of them however, are not.

In this piece, I will give you a break down of each of them. How they can work in your specific situation, where you will find the applications, and I'll provide the needed details so that you can better decide what option is best for you.

Move Over Eclipse. NetBeans 6 Rocks!

Ok, I admit the title is a bit inflammatory to Eclipse fans. But after working with NetBeans 6 over the last week, I have to say I am very impressed. This is not simply a minor upgrade, as is so common in IDEs these days even when they are given a new major version number. Quite the contrary, NetBeans 6 is a major new release, and a major improvement over NetBeans 5.5.

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NetBeans 6.5 review

During the weekend, I tried out NetBeans 6.5 and its new PHP related functionality. I had earlier seen some quick shots of how the support was, and it seemed like a good contender for big names like Zend Studio.

What features does NetBeans 6.5 have for PHP developers? How does it compare against Zend Studio for Eclipse?

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10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming

PHP programming has climbed rapidly since its humble beginnings in 1995. Since then, PHP has become the most popular programming language for Web applications. Many popular websites are powered by PHP, and an overwhelming majority of scripts and Web projects are built with the popular language.

Because of PHP’s huge popularity, it has become almost impossible for Web developers not to have at least a working knowledge of PHP. This tutorial is aimed at people who are just past the beginning stages of learning PHP and are ready to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with the language. Listed below are 10 excellent techniques that PHP developers should learn and use every time they program. These tips will speed up proficiency and make the code much more responsive, cleaner and more optimized for performance.

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Tripwire: Linux Host Based Intrusion Detection System

Tripwire is a host based Intrusion detection system for Linux. Tripwire monitors Linux system to detect and report any unauthorized changes to the files and directories. Once a baseline is created, tripwire monitors and detects, which file is added, which file is changed, what is changed, who changed it, and when it was changed. If the changes are legitimate, you can update the tripwire database to accept these changes.

This step by step instruction guide explains how to install and configure open source version of tripwire.

Software RAID in FreeBSD

FreeBSD provides a helpful tool to manage software RAID with ATA deivces. This tool provides features such as hot swapping ATA RAID devices, which was previously unheard of. This functionality and features will be elaborated here.

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How To Install FreeBSD 7.x From USB

I have the horrible habit of not putting a label on a CD after I’ve burned it. This leads to having a stack of CDs and not knowing which does what. This was my problem recently when installing FreeBSD, so I decided to start using USB based installations where possible. I prefer the multiple-write capability of USB, and this way I don’t waste CDs.

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Foundation End-of-Year Fund Raising Drive Update

Dear FreeBSD Community,

First, we would like to thank everyone who has donated to the FreeBSD Foundation this year. We have raised $198,583 towards our 2008 goal of $300,000! We are almost 2/3 of the way to reaching our goal!

Like most non-profits, we are seeing the affects of the weak economy. This time last year we had raised $346,587. By meeting our goal this year will allow us to continue the same amount of support next year, as well as continue to invest some of the funds.

Why do we need donations?

The goal of the FreeBSD Project is to provide software that may be used for any purpose -- and without strings attached. Our mission is to support the FreeBSD Project and community. Our funding comes from people like you – those who are determined to keep FreeBSD free!

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FreeBSD 7.1-RC1 Available

"FreeBSD 7.1-RC1 is now available, the first of the Release Candidates. There will be at least one more Release Candidate before the release so the release itself is likely around 3 weeks from now IF no new show-stoppers are uncovered during testing."

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OpenVPN - creating a routed VPN

"In this article, I will show you how I created a routed VPN using OpenVPN. In this network, multiple clients can attach to the server, each of which has access to the network attached to the server. Each client can also contact any other client, subject to firewall rules.

In my case, I wanted a way for all my servers (on the internet, in data centers) to contact my CVS repository behind my firewall at home. Given that home has a dynamic IP address, it complicates matters. A VPN solves this issue and provides several benefits."

OpenVPN - getting it running

"This article is about OpenVPN, a full-featured open source SSL VPN solution. I first started using OpenVPN in December 2006. That is nearly two years ago. I took some notes but I never published anything until today. My original use for OpenVPN was easy access to my home network while away from home. For this is was wonderful. Being able to ssh "directly" to my machines, cvsup, etc, was very convenient."

Creating your own Certificate Authority

"In this article, I write about creating your own Certificate Authority (CA) and generating certificates and keys for an OpenVPN server and multiple clients. It is based around the the OpenVPN How To and the README provided with that package.

There is an abundance of material for creating a CA. Why bother? I bother because getting this right is easy. It's easy if you know the goals and how to accomplish them. However, getting there is often trial and error. I don't want to do the error bit the next time I need to do this. The added bonus is neither do you. You can use these steps."

Cutting Edge Browsers and Their Development Tools

"This is a hot time in the world of browsers. Despite a rocky morning, Firefox 3 got over 8 million downloads when it was released. It’s up to over 24 million now. I bet many of you are amongst these downloaders, I know I was =)

I bet many of you do your web design and development in Firefox. Things just seem to behave as you expect them to in Firefox. Plus, it has a wealth of invaluable development tools like the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug. If you have never heard of or aren’t currently using Firebug, I did an introductory screencast for it you can check out.

The ability to view and manipulate the entire DOM of a web page after it is rendered is crazy powerful. I’m not sure if Firebug was the first tool ever created to do this (I doubt it), but it has certainly popularized it. The way that it works, being part of the browser itself, has started a new paradigm of browser-specific development tools. Let’s take a look at all the browsers and their latest offerings."

New channel on YouTube for BSD technical talks

I'm pleased to announce the availability of a dedicated YouTube channel for technical lectures about FreeBSD and other BSD operating systems :

http://www.youtube.com/bsdconferences

This channel allows us to post full hour long lectures from FreeBSD conferences. The first four videos that Julian Elisher recorded at MeetBSD 2008 have been posted :

Isolating Cluster Jobs for Performance and Predictability, Brooks Davis, MeetBSD 2008
BSD Certification, Dru Lavigne, MeetBSD 2008
Embedding FreeBSD, Warner Losh, MeetBSD 2008
FreeBSD Foundation Update & Recognition, Robert Watson, MeetBSD 2008

This channel provides the rich YouTube API for extracting and embedding these videos in other websites. You can also simply subscribe to the RSS feed in your feedreader to be notified when new videos are posted. Work is ongoing to integrate the video content here with the multimedia area of the FreeBSD web site.

If you have video content from a previous BSD conference that you would like to see added to this channel, please let me know.

Thanks to the Google Open Source Program Office for their help in setting up this special channel for the BSD community.

- Murray

FreeBSD ports that you maintain which are currently marked broken

Dear FreeBSD port maintainer:

As part of an ongoing effort to reduce the number of problems in the FreeBSD ports system, we periodically notify users of ports that are marked as "broken" in their Makefiles. In many cases these ports are failing to compile on some subset of the FreeBSD build environments. The most common problem is that recent versions of -CURRENT include gcc4.2, which is much stricter than older versions.

The next most common problem is that compiles succeed on the i386 architecture (e.g. the common Intel PC), but fail on one or more of the other architectures due to assumptions about things such as size of various types, byte-alignment issues, and so forth.

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