Lately, the Falcon Programming Language has attracted growing interest and excited a deal of curiosity.

In this article I’ll document some unique features of Falcon that allow users to build easily what I define as a “second order virtual machine”.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

GNU/Linux is slowly invading everybody’s everyday life. I won’t say “The year of the GNU/Linux desktop is here”. Been there, done that. But, GNU/Linux is definitely imposing its presence — think about Android, or the number of people who are currently using GNU/Linux as their main desktop.

And yet, software installation in GNU/Linux is broken. No, not broken… it’s terribly broken. Why is that, and what can be done to fix it?

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

Greetings everybody!

At the moment, we are looking for tutorial-style articles for Free Software Magazine.

Some of our readers pointed out that our magazine is focussing more and more on “opinions”, and we are forgetting how to get our hands dirty.

This is a story of hubris, nemesis and very bad language. Mine. We all like to have our egos flattered and I’m no exception, so when two old acquaintances told me their Windows laptops were infected with viruses I knew they were about to put the bite on me. They did. Could I fix them? Well, my vanity was flattered of course but it was to be a salutary experience that got me to thinking about whether it will ever be possible to wean users off Microsoft products.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

If you haven’t heard yet, Google have released a developer preview of their new social networking and collaboration tool - Wave. What impact might this have on free software users and developers?

I have been talking about the convergence of telephony and desktop computing for years. Nowadays, more and more companies are announcing small devices (“netbooks”) that will run Android — and we are not talking about phones here. Is this the beginning of a new revolution? Or maybe not?

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

This article is necessarily going to be short: I am busy restoring our server from a backup from the 2nd of June. Why? Because 3FN was shut down by the FTC; and yes, 3fn is the hosting company we used and were sponsored by.

We are now hosting the magazine with the angels at OpenHosting, which in this case were a life saver.

Some time ago I wrote an article about Jim Kent, an American biologist who used free and open software to race Craig Ventnor to the finishing line, sequencing the human genome. That was very big, cutting edge science with a global audience and reach. We live in an age when big science is done, overwhelmingly, in big businesses, universities, research labs and government laboratories. In Eric Raymond’s paradigm it is the culture of the Cathedral.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

In my last article about Xorg, I touched upon several points that have been in a state of continual flux in Xorg. Here’s a follow-up on that article, as it seems to have generated quite a lot of interest. However, I didn’t expand much on some features and their implications, so I will do so here.

I will, also, touch upon a few improvements other than pure graphics.

The 2009 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ‘09) will take place June 14-19, 2009, in San Diego, CA.

Our friends at USENIX asked us to spread the word… so here we are. This is not a full blog post, but it’s definitely worth knowing about USENIX — especially if you are in California next month!

Over time, many people have complained about the X Window system; the X Window system, or Xorg in its current most popular implementation, is the layer between applications and the graphics adapter.

Fashion is fickle. One day thin clients and clusters are the fashion de jour, the next it’s Web 2.0, Virtualisation or distributed computing and Grids. They who live by the sword of fashion will surely perish by it but a new model has been strutting its stuff along the catwalk of web fashion and she goes by the name of Cloud Computing. Like all fashions there is a deal of hype surrounding it but there is a consistent concern emerging from all that hype and is about the dangers of proprietary cloud computing. Richard Stallman has called it a “trap”. He is right—but it is more than that. It is a well-baited, DRM-like honey trap for the unwary. That is not immediately obvious. Like all good traps it suckers you in before the wire noose tightens around your neck. You don’t have any wire cutters in your rucksack but you do have the GPL and free software to effect an escape. Can it save us from vendor lock in and proprietary software?

Recently, I had to fact-check some older articles I wrote about One Laptop Per Child in order to bring them up to date. This meant digging through the controversy in 2008, and what I found was some pretty appalling human behavior. That’s the “bitter”. The “sweet” is that both OLPC and Sugar (now separate projects) are both doing a lot of good in the world. Sugar, in particular, is doing a better job of connecting with the community. That’s a challenge for us in the community to step up and do a much better job connecting with Sugar. We need to make it the best thing ever, and that’s going to mean more than lip service. So we all need to get it installed and start contributing.

It is not often that you fail to find half a dozen free software programs to fill a particular niche -browsers, e-mail clients or file managers to name a few; so it was with both surprise and disappointment that I nearly drew a blank in my search for an Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) for GNU/Linux. Yes, Freevo and MythTV have this feature built in, but installing and configuring them just to get your mitts on an EPG looks like overkill. I wanted a simple, stand-alone EPG programme. I got TV-Browser and I got a hell of a lot more than I bargained for.