Yesterday I discussed Beagle and Tracker with regards to their preferences settings, the time to index a collection of both HTML and PDF files, and how to extract information from individual files. In this article I'll go over the interfaces used to submit queries and the syntax used for complex queries for both projects.

For a community distribution, Ubuntu sure knows how to preen itself to look good for the business world. Canonical hasn't exactly kept its plans to get on IT managers' radar a secret, but the number of enterprise-ready applications for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS that are slowly becoming available in the Ubuntu Partner repository is getting hard to ignore.

I’ve been thinking about how to best improve the Linux* userland over the last few days. I was venting pretty loudly about my Linux gripe of the day–I don’t even remember what I was complaining about at the time, but it was a mess of shell scripting, pipes, and about half a dozen command line programs that were conspiring to drive me up the wall.

I have recently been in the market for a new smartphone. The iPhone looks like some nice hardware and I’m already an AT&T customer, but after seeing news like this I’m just not buying. Apple has proven to me that I don’t want to live in a closed ecosystem. Sometimes is really is true that “you don’t know what you got ‘till it’s gone.”

Linus Torvalds explains how he keeps the people and software on-track, with the software quality Linux demands.

"On the eve the Olympic Games opening ceremony in Beijing, Reporters Without Borders is today launching a blog about human rights in China during the games and the flip side of the Chinese government’s propaganda..."

StarOffice 9 coming to Mac users; Updegrove explains ISO's failures.

More new hints are suggesting that Microsoft could quietly accept debt in order to elevate its stagnant stock.