Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time Internet chat or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group (many-to-many) communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message and data transfers via Direct Client-to-Client. Meanwhile, Instant Messaging (IM) is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. The text is conveyed via computers connected over a network such as the Internet.

The open source community is literally rocking the world and so is India’s largest Linux and Open Source convention and expo. The community is now being supported by Microsoft, long considered to be the 'opposing side'. Open Source India Week (OSIW) 2008 kicked off yesterday in Delhi after completing the Bengalure and Mumbai editions. At the occasion, Radhesh Balakrishnan, director, platform strategy, Microsoft, could be seen wooing the open source community, holding an olive branch in the form of promoting interoperability between the two systems.

With MySQLfs you can store a filesystem inside a MySQL relational database. MySQLfs breaks up the byte content of files that you store in its filesystem into tuples in the database, which allows you to store large files in the filesystem without requiring the database to support extremely large BLOB fields. With MySQLfs you can throw a filesystem into a MySQL database and take advantage of whatever database backup, clustering, and replication setup you have to protect your MySQLfs filesystem.

Nothing like a little doom and gloom to start the morning! The folks over at PC World think the sky is falling . It is being reported that there is a major exploitable bug in the Linux Kernal. At first I as taken by surprise with this news, but then, fortunately a very witty commenter by the name of Evildave came to the rescue.

I just read a post by Bruce Byfield, where he raises an interesting question: after the fact that Canonical will try and offer commercial software from a specific repository, would anyone use it? And if not, could it alienate other users of Ubuntu from using the distribution at all?

Yes, folks. Rick Jelliffe, who just told us that Microsoft hired him ("As I have mentioned, one of my jobs this month is for Microsoft, to play Devil’s Advocate with the Ecma responses..."), is representing Australia at the BRM. "Political issues don't come into it." Don't you just love it?]

Have you ever said, "This program is pretty nice, but I wish it would ..."? For applications that offer the capability, scripting gives users the ability to customize, extend, and tailor a program to meet their needs. Scribus, a free page layout program that runs on Linux (and Mac OS and Windows) uses the Python programming language for user scripting. Python scripting in Scribus can drastically improve your work flow, and it's relatively easy for beginners to not only use scripts, but also write them.