Linux kernel report

Jonathan Corbet presented a informative presentation about the recent linux kernel work. It was held at the 11′th realtime Linux workshop, and offers some insides and statements not always presented in the normal press, like from 2.6.27 -> 2.6.31++ rough timeframe (October 9, 2008 to September 18, 2009) 48,000 changesets was merged by 2,500 developers and 400 employers. This result is that the kernel grew by 2.5 million lines, or better 140 changesets merged per day and 7267 lines of code added every day. But he also depicts some major functionality added by each version and why it’s needed. paired with some funny pictures a nice walk through. The other papers from the conference are also a good read, take a look at them by yourself

60 GHZ ECMA-387 demonstrated

TUD presented EASY-A and achieved a record in transmission. They claim its very energy efficient in that the emitter and receiver only need one bit resolution for transmission. The signals use 4GHz bandwith and it took 6.4 seconds for 8 Gigabyte.
one have to admit, that they (still) used cable for transmission, but they’ve designed/created the demonstrator using the concept of their 60 GHz wireless transmission. They estimate about 5 years before this could be used in commercial products.

File system

File System and Storage Lab provides a wealth of informations about various issues in that space

Code Splitting for Network-Bound Web 2.0 Applications

Ajax apps provides us with rich and responsive user interfaces. And aside all code reductions modern frameworks provide, if you use firebug or fiddler or tamperdata one easily thinks about further optimization. Microsoft research has researched this topic and created Doloto. Take a look at their paper and of course at the tool itself and yes, you need windows for it, but i still like the paper :-)

mobileHacking.org

The people behind MobileHacking.org has put together a useful collection of variuos parts needed to craft together an application, or at least obtain an idea whats available. especially the mindmaps under application mapping offers you a glimpse about what combinations are possible, evem you have to figure out what works together. nevertheless thanks for he list

don’t even need a keylogger…

research teams from LASEC (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) and Inverse Path have taken a close look at the electromagnetic radiation that is generated every time a computer keyboard is tapped. take a look at COMPROMISING ELECTROMAGNETIC EMANATIONS OF WIRED AND WIRELESS KEYBOARDS. There are other good articles at LASEC. This one gives an overview of various user-aided message authentication protocols and their applications.

sourcing map

ephorie provides a nice sourcing map. The explanations are in German, the intentions are to provide some structure in the ever growing jungle surounding the term sourcing

Linux virus writing article by foobar

As Uwe reminded me yesterday, that I haven’t posted for a long time, lets start briefly about some thoughts from foobar about writing a Linux virus. It’s not always kernel hacking :-)

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. W3C has specified the API’s and Events. I think widgets will definitly become one of the next big things in mobile development. A widget is essential a zipped website. the creator takes the html file including css javascript and images, zips it together and adds the .wgt extension. The benefit is, that it will be only loaded once. needed data is fetched via ajax. unfortunatly we aren’t at the point that the widget toolkits are fully compatible, but I gues this is just a matter of time. Until we reach this point, phonegap is defintly an alternative to start with as it currently covers iphone,android and (limited) blackberry. And I’m confident, other will follow…

CMDB and asset management

looks promising, but I have only skimmed through the webpages and looked at the activity in forums/wiki. The ezix project hosts beside other nice projects one called lshw which is a hardware lister. Its a similar project as dmidecode. seems also promising as a free asset management tool all these tools can be used standalone, but as it seems, the project tries to put many of those under one hood