IT Administrators

I stumbled upon an amazing research tool toady while I was searching for a download management Firefox extension today.  Zotero is more than just a download tool.  It is a literary reasearch tool which allows you to track web citations, bookmarks, and the like from within the browser.  I would traditionally create a Bookmark folder and dump links into it until I fealt I had enough to write a post.  However, with Zotero, all my notes, bookmarks, and files from the web are stored inside a project file that my browser stores.  I cannot comment enough on the professionalism that went into this extension.    Unlike the usual extensions that do little tricks for you (downloading YouTube videos for example) this one is an actual productivity tool.  I hope this is a sign that more professionals are seriously moving to open source software development.

Zotero can be found at http://www.zotero.org/

I’ve added a GrandCentral button over on the right hand side to leave me a voicemail with any suggestions / complaints / praise you may have for the site. Also, please leave me a message if you are a sys admin interested in starting an IT podcast. It is completely up in the air what the schedule will be like, but I’m hoping to start off slow, maybe 12 episodes a year. Nothing too formal or stuffy. It will probably start out as a skype conversation and grow from there.

For several years, a dark cloud has hung over the US open source community. Mostly triggered by the “SCO v. Everybody cases”, this cloud is the fear that some manner of patent could bring down open source projects, such as the kernel itself.

Two days ago, Red Hat, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, the Free Software Foundation and several others have chimed in that it is time for patent reform by filing briefs in a case involving two guys trying to patent betting on the weather. I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to over-analyze this thing, but I will provide links to all the gory details.

http://www.press.redhat.com/2008/04/07/red-hat-asks-federal-court-to-limit-patents-on-software/

http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/gen/34783lgl20080403.html

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/04/bilski

http://www.law.berkeley.edu/samuelsonclinic/intellectual_property_0

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080409033837121

I am testing the Hardy Heron beta right now. I’ll spare a recap of the features that everyone else is talking about and delve into a UI change that I noticed right away. Instead of having a million boxes all over your screen when you are deleting, copying , and moving files, there is one that stacks all your active Nautilus progress bars together. This is more than likely a feature of the new Gnome release, but being the geeky sysadmin that I am, it was the first shiny thing that caught my eye. I still haven’t tested Brasero, but I will try to over the weekend. K3B is really getting to be overkill even though it has been my favorite recording software for the past six years. I will post more results when I can.