• Unlike a home web server, SSH is read/write, meaning you can get and put files on a server with it.
• Unlike a home FTP server, SSH is secure. All the transactions are encrypted and cannot be sniffed.
• Unlike a VNC server, SSH alone doesnt let you drive your computer remotely, and it is also secure and encrypted while VNC is not.

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The site provides an administrator username and password for every system which allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here without fear of breaking anything. Each system is deleted and re-installed every two hours.

At the upper left hand side of your screen you will see a clock that is counting down. What it shows is how much time is left in this two hour demo window. Once the clock hits 00:00:00, opensourceCMS.com will shut down and the demos are completely refreshed.

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Google gives an example of usage:
“For example, lets say you are in charge of your club soccer teams website, and you want to add a current weather forecast so your fans can plan for your games or you want to include a daily brainteaser on your site without having to come up with something new everyday. Google Gadgets lets you do this easily. Just visit the directory of “Google Gadgets for your webpage” to find gadgets that youd like to add to your own page and select your preferences for how the gadget will appear on your page. Then, copy and paste the HTML from the window into the HTML code for your own website. Its an easy way to get the content you need and want without spending hours writing code”

Previously, some gadgets could be included in Google Page Creator if you selected the experimental features.
Here’s an example (called babelfish):

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One issue I did come up against is that although you can put Template Tags and PHP code into a Page Template, you cannot put these into the content of a Page and expect them to run. This meant I had to use a PHP evaluating Plugin (example: RunPHP) to enable the < ?php randomFeedList() ?> feature of the Feed List plugin.

EDIT: October 10
I’ve completely revamped how I use this plugin.

• I have a WordPress Page with it’s own template (page_rss_parent), that is an exact replica of my standard Page template except it incldues the Dynamic Ajax Content from www.dynamicdrive.com. As you select a link to a particular RSS feed, this Page loads it dynamically.
• The RSS feeds are each in their own page, using the FeedList plugin . These pages have their own template ( page_rss) that has no call to sidebar or footer. This is because these pages will be loaded into a DIV on already already existing page, with the header, sidebar footer etc already present.
• I have another page that is the parent of the pages with the RSS feeds. This means I can exclude this page (and therefore the underlying RSS Feed pages) when using wp_list_pages in my header.
• I don’t need the runPHP plugin.

Next step is to write it up as a plugin. The big issue is where to store the RSS feeds:

• If I store them in WordPress as Pages, you’ll need to do the wp_list_pages hack described above.
• If I store them in another table, it raises issues of tidiness and compatibility with later versions
• If I store them as a text file in the plugin directory, there’s issues around the read/write permissions

from http://arstechnica.com – arstechnica.

1. P2P investigations now illegal in Switzerland -

   Switzerland, a longtime haven for all kinds of financial shenanigans, has just expanded its reputation for "discretion" to cover file-sharing as well. That's the conclusion of Logistep AG, anyway, as a Swiss court has just gutted its P2P surveillance business with a ruling that says gathering even publicly-available information is illegal.

   Logistep has operated in Switzerland since 2004, doing what all of these firms do: trolling BitTorrent sites for movies, music, or software, then connecting to swarms and logging the information of everyone offering the file. Bits of the file are downloaded as proof that these aren't simply "mistitled" files, and information like IP address, file hash value, and time of day are recorded in a giant spreadsheet. Content providers who rely on Logistep can take this information and submit it to local courts, seeking to identify and then sue individual file-swappers.

   

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2. Android usage to surpass BlackBerry, iOS by year end -

   Android is on its way to taking the silver medal in mobile market share worldwide, and gold in North America—as long as the platform maintains its currently strong growth numbers. According to market research firm Gartner, the mobile world will be dominated by Symbian and Android devices by 2014, with RIM's BlackBerry and Apple's iOS projected to come in third and fourth place, respectively.

   Symbian will maintain its market dominance thanks to Nokia's sheer sales volume, while Android will outpace the rest of the competition because of the impending launch of "many new budget Android devices" by the end of 2010 that will help the OS get into the mass market. "Other players, such as Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola, will follow a similar strategy. This trend should help Android become the top OS in North America by the end of 2010," wrote Gartner.

   

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3. Feature: Ars reviews the 6th-generation iPod nano: all screen, all the time -

   The sixth-generation iPod nano's design marks the largest divergence from the nano line since the device was introduced in 2005. The new device is also the first iPod nano to have a touchscreen interface, and the last iPod with a screen to get a touchscreen interface (not counting the languishing iPod classic, as that would just turn it into an iPod touch). As of now, the nano no longer has the telltale circular click wheel that helped to make the iPod so iconic.

   However, the new iPod nano differs from its touchscreen iDevice brethren in that it doesn't run iOS, or at least not a version of iOS that any of us are familiar with so far. In reality, the sixth-generation nano is kind of a mutant—a cross between the old iPod and the new, where you can move things around with your finger but can still only play music and perform a few other functions. What to make of this electronic chimera?

   

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4. Hands on with VLC Movie-Player for iPad -

   

   

   We know that the iPad is (mostly) great for video playback, as long as you can be bothered to convert it to the right format or buy your movies and TV shows from Apple. But what if there were a way to play not just H.264 MP4 files with AAC audio (yes, the Apple spec is pretty specific), but to play any file? Thanks to VLC for the iPad, there is.

   VLC is a port of the popular and excellent desktop application. The open-source project is famous for playing video files that will kill lesser applications, and it is set to make its iPad debut early next week. Romain Goyet, the CTO of the developer behind the app—Applidium—was kind enough to send the final version to me for testing.

   

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5. God of War: Ghost of Sparta demo is more of the same, wonderful -

   As the demo for God of War: Ghost of Sparta on the PSP begins, you're on a ship sailing toward Atlantis. You fight on the boat, you land, and you fight on the land. It gives you a feel for the new weapons—a spear and a shield—as well as the new attack, a charging move that lets you pick up and throw down an enemy to punish him on the ground. It looks stunning on the PSP, with water effects and a steady frame rate. The problem is... well, haven't we seen all this before?

   Yes, you fight an epic boss across a series of confrontations, and at one point you drag a stone to a pressure-sensitive switch to open the way forward. There are quick-time events, some enemies are more powerful than others, and you can of course kill those in very violent ways. There are also hidden red orbs to find, if you don't mind doing a little exploring.

   

   The demo only lasted about 20 minutes or so, and you can play it now if you're a PlayStation Plus subscriber, but you honestly already know what you'll find. That's not a terrible thing—if the game was on store shelves this afternoon I'd head to the store and pick it up. The God of War games have a very specific formula to them, and this does very little to break out of it, at least in the section shown here.

   We need to get rid of the usual demo and video dog-and-pony show of showing a boss, having  the character and the boss run at each other, and then the demo is over and we're told to buy or wait for the full game. Seriously.

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6. Nyko's Wand+ Wiimote brings the Motion+ without the + -

   Nyko's Wand+ controller isn't reinventing the wheel, it's simply doing what the wheel does for a little less money and without two pieces. In fact... let's get away from this metaphor before I hurt myself.

   The Wand+ is Nyko's take on the Wiimote, albeit with the Motion Plus technology built-in. There is no dongle, there is no extension on the controller—it's just one standard-sized Wiimote that does everything the Motion Plus does. We tested the controller by playing Wii Sports Resort and it worked flawlessly, just as well as the official controllers. Isn't that the mark of greatness when it comes to third-party accessories? Even after switching back and forth between the Wand+ and the first-party controller we couldn't feel a difference in accuracy or responsiveness.

   

   It does feature a few design eccentricities: the power button is now on the right hand side of the controller, the A-button is square and a little larger, and the plastic has a smoother feel than the standard controller. To my hand all these things are actually advantages over the official controller, but that's more preference than fact. This is simply a comfortable, attractive Wiimote.

   At $39.99 MSRP it's even $10 cheaper than the standard Wiimote with a Motion Plus dongle at most retailers. If you're tired of losing your Motion Plus attachment, or you don't like the added length of the dongle, this is a good alternative. It's neither flashy nor an amazing leap forward. It simply does everything as advertised. There's nothing wrong with that.

   Verdict: Buy

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7. Meet your next 'Net? Academics rethink the Internet's guts -

   Judging by the National Science Foundation's latest grants for Internet development, our universities are packed with scientists who think that the 'Net is woefully unprepared for the future, and are anxious to tackle the problem. In fact, these people can't wait to untether cyberspace from its current rules and architectures.

   Take, for example, Professor Lixia Zhang of the University of California at Los Angeles. She started out driving a tractor on a farm in Northern China, then got to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1980s. Now she studies the Internet Protocol at UCLA, where she questions whether IP will carry the Internet to where it needs to go in the coming years.

   "Users and applications operate in terms of content, making it increasingly limiting and difficult to conform to IP's requirement to communicate by discovering and specifying location," Dr. Zhang's NSF award statement explains. It's time to get past IP's host/location based assumptions with a new Internet architecture that she calls Named Data Networking (NDN).

   

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8. Xbox 360 wins horrid August, Madden dominates software -

   The gaming industry had its worst August in the US since 1996 this year, but Microsoft has much to be proud of, with both the best-selling hardware and software. That's not to say the PlayStation 3 is in bad shape, as NPD Analyst Anita Frazier points the PS3 "has now enjoyed 13 consecutive months of year-over year hardware sales increases and that momentum is reflected in the content and accessories categories as well."

   Let's take a look at the hardware sales:

   

   Data source: NPD Group

   Madden did some big numbers in August, and the gap between the sales on the 360 and PS3 shows just how much ground Sony has made up in the past year. Nintendo continues to put a good number of first-party titles on the board.

   1. Madden NFL 11 on Xbox 360 with 920,000
   2. Madden NFL 11 on PS3 with 893,600
   3. Super Mario Galaxy 2 on Wii with 124,600
   4. Mafia 2 on Xbox 360 with 121,600
   5. New Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo DS with 110,400
   6. New Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo Wii
   7. Mafia 2 on PS3
   8. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox 360
   9. NCAA Football 11 on Xbox 360
   10. Wii Fit Plus on Wii

   Things should look very similar next month, when Microsoft releases the sure-to-explode Halo: Reach to retail, along with a new version of the Xbox 360. Sony has the Move and its accompanying games to look forward to as well. Nintendo? Price drops on the DS line of hardware are coming, but don't expect much more sales momentum until the 3DS is released.

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9. ARM's Eagle has landed: meet the A15 -

   Just as products based on ARM's much anticipated Cortex A9 are finally poised to hit the market, the company has announced yet another, even higher-end core design: the A15. Codenamed "Eagle," the A15 architecture is ostensibly aimed at netbooks and tablets, but a look at the spec sheet leaves no doubt that ARM is absolutely gunning for the server market that Intel and AMD currently dominate. Indeed, even going by what little ARM has revealed about the A15, it's very hard to imagine this thing in a smartphone when it launches at 32nm in 2012 or 2013. This is a laptop and server part, and ARM will use it to take the fight to x86.

   

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10. NoSQL takes a seat on Android with new mobile version of CouchDB -

    A new mobile version of the CouchDB database system, called CouchOne Mobile, is available for Google's Android operating system. The mobile version is still at a relatively early stage of development, but it will allow developers to take advantage of CouchDB's sophisticated replication functionality to synchronize data between desktop and mobile applications.

    CouchDB is a schema-less document-based database that uses JSON as a storage format and JavaScript as a query language. It is popular in the so-called NoSQL community and is increasingly seeing deployment in high-profile business and scientific computing environments.

    

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Whether you’re looking to make a somewhat involved chronological timeline, or just a simple from Point A to Point B kind of deal, this tutorial’s got you covered. Create a Timeline in Excel [Microsoft Education Center]

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Blond and Danish or not, do be careful broadcasting your IP address with BT – Check out some info on anonymous BT so you can at least try to hide.

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More details about Anoushe Ansari

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Programs and services that start whenever Windows boots do so in various ways. The simplest way to install programs and services that start whenever Windows boots is to create a shortcut to the program within the Startup folder for the current user (or for each user on the machine). To open your Startup folder, click Start, then Run, and type the following:

%userprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

To open the Startup folder for all users, click Start, then Run, and type the following:

%allusersprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

In addition, Registry keys are another common way to launch programs or services at startup. You can also use tools like your System Configuration Utility (click Start, then Run, type msconfig.exe, click OK, and select the Startup tab) or a third-party tool like Autoruns from Sysinternals. Once you’ve found all this junk though, how do you get rid of it?

Removing items from your Startup folder (or the common Startup folder) is generally safe, but deleting values from your Registry should be done only as a last resort. In fact, sometimes deleting a registry value won’t even work–as soon as you run the application associated with the startup program, the deleted registry value may get automatically re-created!

The best way to proceed is to first try to see if the application itself lets you remove the feature or component that’s starting up every time Windows boots. You might need to rerun your application’s Setup program to do this. If this fails, then (and only then) should you consider deleting a registry value (but always back up your registry before making any changes to it).

Finally, here a few more sources of information on the topic of startup programs:

• How to Remove Startup Programs
• How To Manage Windows Startup
• Configure Auto-Starting Applications
• How to Modify the List of Programs that Run When You Start Windows XP
• Restore Your Computer’s Performance with Windows XP

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EverythingLinux’s excellent rsync tutorial discusses some of the reasons why rsync is better than ftp.

• Diffs – Only actual changed pieces of files are transferred, rather than the whole file. This makes updates faster, especially over slower links like modems. FTP would transfer the entire file, even if only one byte changed.
• Compression – The tiny pieces of diffs are then compressed on the fly, further saving you file transfer time and reducing the load on the network.
• Secure Shell – The security conscious of you out there would like this, and you should all be using it. The stream from rsync is passed through the ssh protocol to encrypt your session.

previous links:

Rsync on Windows
rsync – Windows, MAC, Unix, Linux, BSD

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It appears that there is no real hard and fast rule anymore. And setting it against a static value (like physical memory) is incredibly wasteful. It’s a much better idea to set it interactively. In other words, use the system without adjusting the Virtual Memory for a while, then take a look at your usage and set your virtual memory against that usage.

For instance:
If you’re in a Windows machine, let it run normally for a few days.
Run everything the way you normally use it.
– Multiple apps,
– Multiple instances,
– everything you normally run.

Then open up the Task Manager and look at the Performance tab.
Take a look at the Peak value under “Commit Charge”.
Set your virtual memory, min and max, at about 10% above that value to leave yourself a little headroom. Normally this will be enough to deal with your maximum swap requests.
If, somehow, you begin bumping against virtual memory limits again AFTER that, bump it another 10%.
If you still have problems, keep bumping it in 10% increments, and start looking for apps that are memory leaking.

You have to be aware of what your system is doing and what its based on. For example, the best *current* laptop drive is still slower than a fairly low-end *current* desktop drive. A current laptop drive however is much faster than a high-end desktop drive from just a couple years ago however.

The point here is that if a laptop hard drive powers down, then swapping gets REALLY slow. On the other hand, you really don’t want to be swapping on a laptop or your battery life disappears… (unless you’re using a laptop / notebook as a desktop replacement)

Some background
Swap has two purposes: To swap out uncommonly-used pages so you can load more of the current working set, and to extend the memory space available to programs. 10 years ago, when we had mere seconds of swap, this made more sense. You could load windows, and swap half of it out, and boy did you ever need that RAM. If you were going to load a Word document that didn’t quite fit, swap could save your bum, and if it got too loaded, it’d still run out of memory. You could afford to wait because you only had a few seconds of swap, and short of a really pathological swapping pattern you could expect your operation to terminate in a couple of minutes.

The second use in modern times is basically pointless; just let the program fail. You almost certainly do not want to let the program spend the next hour swapping. The first use might still be valid, but you might as well only use a couple of seconds of swap; call it 100MB. Beyond that, nothing is really useful. And in Windows, excessive swapping also tends to basically lock up the machine which is something to be avoided.

Huge swap partitions, unless you have another use for them (some implementations of Linux suspend are the only ones I know of) are basically a holdover from the past, religiously clung to by people who have been ‘doing it this way’ for over a decade. Skip the swap unless you know why you shouldn’t.

Why do I talk about ’seconds of swap’ rather than gigabytes of swap ?
Processors have gotten faster, memory has gotten somewhat faster, hard drives have gotten monstrously larger, but hard drives have only gotten marginally faster since ten years ago.

So, instead of measuring swap in terms of absolute size, measure it in terms of time-to-fill, if your system were writing flat-out.Let’s say you have 1GB of memory and you use the old timey rule-of-thumb for 2.5GB of swap. Using an average hard drive transfer of 50GB/sec (which would be the read speed, not the write speed which is much slower), if you’re going to use that swap, it would take you nearly a minute to use that space, writing flat out.

Odds are you’re not actually going to use it that way, so whatever is using that swap is probably going to take a lot longer, orders of magnitude more. Do you really need a minute’s worth of swap? Is there anything that is so critical that you can’t afford to run out of memory, but you’re willing to wait hours upon hours while the swap is fully utilized?

Some more background
Most operating systems, desktop and server, will swap well ahead of not having free memory (for good reason). This isn’t a bad thing generally.

There are generally two strategies:
-The common-sense one
This where you swap when you run out of memory. This makes a lot of practical sense on systems with limited write cycles (flash based swap, though you really never ever should do that anyway), and systems that want to spin down drives to conserve power for battery conservation. Performance wise (this may surprise people who haven’t spent time thinking about it), this can often be bad. Avoiding swapping is generally only good on systems where resource utilization is carefully managed and you know it won’t swap ever (the unneeded IO operations can interfere with the productive activity of a constantly busy system). This is actually a vast minority of systems in the world (no matter how l33t one may think themselves, they most certainly don’t have a usage pattern that would be impacted by the extraneous IO operations of occasional write to swap.

-Pre-emptive swapping. When the IO subsystem is idle and the system can afford to copy memory to swap area, it does so (depending on criteria). Generally speaking it will select memory not accessed much and write it to disk, but leave the memory copy in place if the physical memory is not immediately needed. A fair amount of swap used in an apparently underutilized system is duplicated in physical memory and swap space. The benefit here is that if the process reads back that memory, it doesn’t incur any penalty in reading it back despite it being also in swap (the system may make certain decisions on what is the best swap candidate and write to disk different data). The benefit of writing this stuff to swap even when not needed is clear when an application comes along that allocs more memory than the system has free in physical space. In the first strategy, this means the malloc blocks while data is written to disk, and the new application starting or needing a lot of data is severely impacted. In the pre-emptive swap case, the system notices the condition, knows what memory it has a backup in swap of that hasn’t been used lately, and can free that memory and satisfy the malloc pretty much instantly.

To those who have, say, a desktop with 1GB of RAM or more, it becomes less likely that the system will have to flush memory from physical RAM, but there is a balance to be struck between memory used directly invoked by applications, what the application memory access pattern is, and what ram you can use to buffer filesystem access. If your total application memory allocation is 75%, it still may make sense performance wise to only keep 50% of your physical memory dedicated to the applications, (the other bit relegated to swap), and 50% of the memory to buffer disk I/O.

A couple of usefull links
This extensive and fantastically informative guide on tweaking virtual memory was a huge help and a fascinating read.

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