App: NetQin Android Booster aka Mobile Guard

If you are using an Android phone, I would like to introduce you NetQin Android Booster (a.k.a. Mobile Guard), which is a utility that can automatically free up memory, monitor network and power usage, prolong battery time, etc. This is an ads supported free app, which you can find in the Android Market.

If you are using S60 Symbian phone, there is also a Symbian version of NetQin Mobile Guard, but there are lots of different from this Android version.

Android Booster comes with a handy widget. With it, you can watch the battery level in percentage, quickly toggle the WiFi, Bluetooth and Mobile Data Network. There is also a one button quick optimizer to clean up running apps and free up memory and save some battery usage.

Although the new Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) in HTC Incredible S already has a quick setting page to toggle the WiFi, Bluetooth, Mobile Network, etc., it still involves a few steps to reach there, and I find Android Booster really handy for switching these connections on/off. Samsung Galaxy Tab also has handy WiFi and Bluetooth toggle by pulling down its Notifications, but lack of Mobile Network toggle.

Tap on "Android Booster" will open up the app itself, and tap on the battery will bring you direct to the Battery Consumption Tracker screen of the app.

When you open up the app, you will be shown the Overview screen, which displays the memory usage, mobile data network usage and battery remaining. The same "optimize" button as in the widget is also found here.

The Utilities screen lists down all the functionalities of Android Booster.

Task Manager lists out the running apps and their memory usage, and you can kill them here if you want. This is similar to the famous Advanced Task Killer apps. So with Android Booster, you don't need another Task Killer apps anymore.

Network Manager displays your data plan consumption and WiFi usage, which you can counter check with 3G Watchdog Pro. This is not as comprehensive as 3G Watchdog Pro, but will give you basic information about your network bandwidth usage.

Power Manager (a.k.a. Battery Consumption Tracker) will tell you what is the item that consume the battery most.

If you tap on Applications, it will further tell you which app consume the battery most.

Application Manager enables you to see the listing of installed system apps and 3rd party apps. Tap on the app and you'll be able to run it, show its detail info, and even uninstall it if it is a 3rd party app.

File Manager lets you access the file system of your memory card. You can view the folders and files, and perform functions such as delete, rename, copy, move, share, create new folder, etc.

Call / SMS Manager is another app by NetQin which can block unwanted calls and/or SMS, and also hide out secret SMS and/or call logs.

Location Privacy Manager teaches you how to switch off the option to disable Google from collecting location data from your phone.

As you can see, Android Booster is feature rich, and it is free (but you will see Ads bar at the bottom).

Tweaking Ubuntu 11.04 easily with Ubuntu Tweak

Ubuntu Tweak is an open source tool licensed with GPL v2, designed to make easy to configure your Ubuntu Linux system and desktop settings using its user friendly GUI interface.

It is developed by Tualatrix Chou (周鼎), a 24 years old Chinese guy who also founded HZLUG (Hangzhou Linux User Group).

Features of Ubuntu Tweak includes:

• Display Basic System Information (Distribution, Kernel, CPU, Memory, etc.)
• GNOME Session Control
• Auto Start Program Control
• Quick installer for popular applications
• Lots of 3rd-party sources to keep applications up-to-date
• Clean unneeded packages or cache to free disk space
• Show/Hide and Change Splash screen
• Show/Hide desktop icons or Mounted Volumes
• Show/Hide/Rename Computer, Home, Trash or Network icon
• Tweak Metacity Window Manager's style and behaviour
• Compiz Fusion settings, Screen Edge Settings, Window Effect Settings, Menu Effect Settings
• Set the Shortcuts to archive quicker access your favourite applications
• GNOME Panel Settings
• Nautilus Settings
• Advanced Power Management Settings
• System Security Settings
• and many more...

For example, many of us prefer to have the Window Titlebar buttons on the right instead of on the left. You can easily set this with Window Manager Settings in Ubuntu Tweak.

You can download the DEB installation package of Ubuntu Tweak from its website. To install it after download, just double click on the DEB file.

After installation, you can find Ubuntu Tweak inside the System category of Applications. Click the Applications launcher on the side bar of Ubuntu 11.04 Unity Desktop, drop down the search selector which default to All Applications and select System. Alternatively, you can search for "Ubuntu Tweak" by key-in its name in the application search box.

Free unlimited full version of Ashampoo Burning Studio Elements 10 (limited time offer)

Right now, Computeractive is offering free exclusive license (normal price US$29.99) for the famous Ashampoo Burning Studio Elements 10. This offer will end by 14 April 2011.

Ashampoo Burning Studio Elements 10 provides the straightforward, fast and effective way to burn movies, music and data easily. It is a handy tool to create data discs, burn backups, rip music, create audio CDs, burn already existing film files on Blu-ray Disc, create/burn disc images, create bootable discs, erase data in rewritable discs, design and print labels and covers, etc.

Note that there are several versions of Ashampoo Burning Studio software available for download:

• Ashampoo Burning Studio Elements 10 is based on Version 10 of the software
• Ashampoo Burning Studio 2010 Advanced is based on Version 9 of the software
• Ashampoo Burning Studio Free is based on Version 6 of the software

This Ashampoo Burning Studio Elements 10 can be upgraded with a discounted price to Ashampoo Burning Studio 10 (premium edition) which contains more features, including the Autoplay Editor module for building auto-start data discs with attractive interactive menus.

Click here to download your full version of Ashampoo Burning Studio Element 10 for free. You will need an email address to receive your free unlimited time license key from Ashampoo.

Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) today

After about 1 year of public testing since its 1st release of Platform Preview to developers on March 2010, Microsoft finally releases Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) today, in conjunction with the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) 2011 in Austin, Texas.

IE9 improves on support to the latest web technologies nowadays, including HTML5, CSS3, SVG, XHTML, and a new Javascript engine called "Chakra" (is this developed by Indian developers??). It also features GPU-powered hardware acceleration for better and faster graphical and video support.

However, IE9 is only made available for Windows 7 and Windows Vista, and is not supporting Windows XP. This means that if you are still using Windows XP and want to use a modern web browser, you are forced to upgrade to later version of Windows, or you better change your favourite browser to the upcoming Firefox 4 or Chrome 9, which will also support for the latest web technologies, and at the same time still available to Windows XP.

Click here to download Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.

Playing chess games with my Dell SX2210T multi-touch monitor

I realized that touch screen monitors such as my Dell SX2210T is pretty useful when using applications that requires a lot of point and click/tap actions. A typical example of such application is computer games.

I like to play chess games and card games, either with human or with computer AI.

Windows 7 Home Premium (and above) comes with a pretty nice game called Chess Titans. Its AI isn't that strong and you can easily defeat the computer.

Beside Western Chess, I also like to play Chinese chess. There is an open source Chinese chess game for Windows called Qianhong (浅红) by Jeremy Craner, which you can download here.

The GUI of Qianhong isn't great at all, but I care more about its features. Qianhong supports severate modes of playing including human-human, human-computer, and computer-computer. It also supports playing across the network.

Its 3-level AI is pretty weak not challenging at all. However, Qianhong supports AI plugins which you can download from their website, including 10-level Ki11egg AI by Tzer-jen Wei, 5-level VSCCPW by Pham Hong Nguyen, 5-level ElephantEye by Morning Yellow, etc.

By using the computer-computer mode, you can let the same or different AI of same or different level to compete between themselves, and you be the observer to learn their tactics.

Another free Chinese chess game I like is XieXie Master (谢谢大师) by Pascal Tang.

XieXie Master has a better looking GUI than Qianhong, but it doesn't have computer-computer mode. However, it has features that Qianhong doesn't have, including "handicap", etc.

LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice.org and be independent from Oracle

Over the last decades, Sun Microsystems has supported a lot to OpenOffice.org, and successfully made it the world's leading open-source productivity suite nowadays.

That was happened after they acquired StarDivision in 1999, forking out OpenOffice.org from the proprietary StarOffice by releasing its source code to the public. Sun continued selling StarOffice, which then based heavily on the development of OpenOffice.org by the community.

10 years later in 2009, Sun Microsystems was in turn acquired by Oracle. Oracle has then rebranded the proprietary StarOffice to be Oracle Open Office. At the same time,  Oracle announced their intention for "Oracle Cloud Office" as a cloud-computing suite, a similar approach like Microsoft Office 2010 Live. The future of OpenOffice.org remains uncertain.

As contributions to OpenOffice.org project requires copyright assignment to Sun (now Oracle), which the community has faith with Sun but might not remains at the same level with Oracle, it is this critical moment that some lead developers of OpenOffice.org had just made a critical decision, to form a new group called The Document Foundation and to fork a rebranded OpenOffice.org called LibreOffice. The historical moment was  28 September 2010 .

The Document Foundation will continue to be focused on developing, supporting, and promoting "the same software", now known as LibreOffice as the OpenOffice.org trademark is legally owned by Oracle.

In fact, this move also resolved some of the former disputes in the project. For example, LibreOffice will now incorporate all the enhancements produced by the Go-oo team (with Novell behind the scene). Go-oo was forked earlier from OpenOffice.org as Sun refused to put in some of the contributions such as better support to Microsoft's OOXML into OpenOffice.org. With this latest move,  Go-oo might be obsoleted by LibreOffice.

The Document Foundation and its LibreOffice have received support from Red Hat, Canonical (maker of Ubuntu), Novell (maker of SUSE), Google, Free Software Foundation (FSF, which Richard Stallman is the president), The GNOME Foundation, The Open Source Initiative (OSI), etc.

LibreOffice 3.3.0 is currently on beta, and has been downloaded for over 80,000 in a week time. People have started to contribute to the code, suggesting features, committing patches and filing bugs. In just one week, around 80 code contributions (patches, and direct commits) have been accepted in LibreOffice from a total of 27 volunteers, several of them newly-won, with around 100 developers hanging out on the #libreoffice irc channel which is buzzing with activity (around 14,000 messages sent).

Click here for more information about The Document Foundation and LibreOffice.

Free multi-touch screen games and fun applications for Windows 7 by Microsoft

If you have a multi-touch monitor such as Dell SX2210T, HP L2105tm, Acer T230H, Samsung LD220Z, etc., and your computer is running on Windows 7, you can download and install Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 from Microsoft Download Center for free.

Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 includes 6 applications designed to operate with multi-touch screen. After installation, you'll get:

Microsoft Blackboard, which is an intricate game of physics for you to solve puzzles by creating a fanciful machine on a "blackboard".

Microsoft Garden Pond, which is a game that takes place in a Japanese water gardens. Use your hand to create water ripples in the pond on your screen to guide the origami or to put off fire, without actually wetting your hand.

Microsoft Rebound, which is a game in which you use your fingertips to move Tesla balls with an electrical field between them to try and catapult a metal game ball into your opponent's goal.

Microsoft Surface Globe, which is a program that you can use to explore the earth as a flat 2D map or as an immersive 3D experience, similar to Google Earth.

Microsoft Surface Collage, which is a program that you can use to explore and interact with your photos and arrange them as a desktop background, similar to the one in Dell Touch Zone.

Microsoft Surface Lagoon, which is an interactive 3D screensaver that simulation an underwater world with fishes. You can play around with the water and fishes, without actually wetting your hand.

Migrating everything in SeaMonkey user profiles from one computer to another with MozBackup

If you want to backup/restore the user profiles of a Mozilla application (including SeaMonkey, Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Flock, Postbox Express, Mozilla Suite, Spicebird, Songbird, Netscape, Wyzo, etc.) or to migrate the user profiles from one computer to another, I've found a free, simple and amazing application called MozBackup.

MozBackup is a freeware (even for commercial use) and works on Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7. It is developed in Czech republic.

It can backup a Mozilla user profile into a single file, and restore it to the Mozilla applications in the same or different computer. It works with portable version of Mozilla applications too. You have the option to password protect the backup file too.

It is able to backup/restore everything in the Mozilla user profile, including all the settings, emails, address books, bookmarks, history, sidebars, user styles, extensions, saved passwords, cookies, saved form details, downloaded file list, security certificates , cache, signature files, etc.

It is intelligent enough to detect the Mozilla applications installed in the computer, and the backup/restore operation can be done within a few simple steps only.

I am able to transfer everything in my SeaMonkey from one computer to another within minutes. A big thumb-up for this.

Click here to go to the website of MozBackup. You can download it there.

Best antivirus / security suite in 2010

What is the best antivirus and/or security suite for home user now?

I believe a good security solution for home computer:

• should detect most if not all of the virus and malware.
• should be good in protecting from new/unknown virus and malware.
• should not have too much false positive.
• should not diminish the performance of the computer too much. The computer should not be sluggish when the security solution is running.
• should not consume too much CPU and memory resource.
• should be fast in scanning for virus and malware.

After reading the comparison and benchmarking reports in these websites...

• AntivirusWare
• AV-Comparatives
• Passmark Consumer Antivirus Performance Benchmarks (2011) report
• TopTenReviews
• Virus Bulletin

 I found that the best in 2010 is a competition between these 2 vendors:

• ESET
• Symantec

Slovakia company ESET produces the NOD32 Antivirus and the ESET Smart Security suite, while US company Symantec produces the Norton Antivirus and the Norton Internet Security suite.

However, in terms of pricing and availability in retail computer store in Malaysia, Symantec definitely has the upper hand.

Therefore, the best security suite in 2010 for me is Norton Internet Security 2010. I bought a genuine box of it with 1 year subscription to 3 computers at the price of RM100 in Digital Mall recently.

After installing Norton Internet Security 2010, I got free upgrade to Norton Internet Security 2011 with its Norton Update Center.

Microsoft Office 2010 Web edition will be free for all to use

Since 2009, there are rumours and talks about there will be a web edition for the upcoming Microsoft Office 2010, and it would most probably be provided at no cost to users.

Now this seems to come to reality soon, as Microsoft just officially announced that there will be Office 2010 Web service to be made available to some 400 millions users of their free Windows Live online service.

According to the source, this Office 2010 Web service will also be free to enterprise workers, provided they are licensed for Office's software maintenance program namely Software Assurance.

You might have noticed that over the past few years, the monopolized market of Microsoft Office has been threaten by rivals such as OpenOffice.org, Google Docs, etc.

In order to counter the competition from OpenOffice.org, selling price of the current Microsoft Office 2007 has been dropping with "special discounts", especially on the Home & Students Edition (3 licenses in a box) which now selling at the price of RM1xx only.

Microsoft's move to provide Office 2010 Web for free is seen to counter the competition from the free Google Docs in the cloud.

This kind of competition is definitely good to us consumers, and we hope that the competition will sustain, so that we could get better quality software, better support, at competitive cost of ownership.

Canonical will release Ubuntu 10.04 LTS tomorrow 29 Apr 2010

Good news to all Ubuntu Linux fans. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long Term Support) codename Lucid Lynx will be officially released by tomorrow, Thursday 29 April 2010.

As this is an LTS version, Canonical will provide at least 3 years support on Ubuntu Desktop, and 5 years on Ubuntu Server.

It is announced that more than 80 ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) are announcing support for about 100 applications in it.

Among the applications available for version 10.04 LTS are the Acquia-Drupal content management system from Drupal, IBM Lotusnotes and the DB2 database, Cloudera Hadoop distributed computing software from Hadoop, the Tcat server from Mulesoft, the Mozilla Firefox browser, and SugarCRM's self-named CRM system.

Ubuntu Desktop 10.04 LTS will feature extensive design work, faster boot speed, social network integration, online services and the Ubuntu One Music Store.

There will also be a Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition, which enables netbook users, in addition to benefiting from the improvements in the Desktop Edition, see even faster boot speeds on SSD-based devices and faster suspend/resume that will extend battery life. However, this 10.04 Netbook Edition will not be an LTS.

Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS extends the cloud-computing capability of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, powered by Eucalyptus. The Cloud enhancements include a minimal installation profile for minimum-footprint virtual machines and multi-language Amazon Web Services library support. This version also includes many major applications and packages added or updated since the previous LTS release, giving new and upgrading users an extended range of applications that can be easily installed at launch.

Are you ready for the upgrade?

Adding virtual desktops to Windows with VirtuaWin

Most Linux users are very familiar with virtual desktops (a.k.a. workspaces), which enables you to organize your opened applications in more than one desktop that you can switch over from one to another using hotkeys or mouse clicks.

Though virtual desktops feature is not bundled in MS Windows OS, its availability in the form of 3rd party software, either free or commercial, has been around for many years. Microsoft also provides a virtual desktops Powertoy called Virtual Desktop Manager (MSVDM), which many find it is slow, lack of functionality, and not performing as good as the 3rd party counterparts.

If you are looking for an open source virtual desktops for Windows, Virtual Dimension used to be a popular and good one, but its development seems to have ceased around 2005.

The virtual desktop I'm using now is VirtuaWin. It is free and licensed under GPL version 2, and latest release is Version 4.1 dated 09-09-2009.

VirtuaWin has been around since 1999. It can run in all version of modern Windows OS including Win 95, Win 98, Win ME, Win NT, Win 2000, Win XP, Win 2003, Win Vista and Win 7.

It is very lightweight, fast in desktop switching, modular with features expandable by loading more modules into it. It even has a portable version which doesn't need any prior installation to use.

VirtuaWin is very easy to install and run. By default, you will get 4 virtual desktops (2 x 2) which you can navigate by pressing Ctrl-Alt together with one of the arrow keys on your keyboard. If you don't like this hotkey setting, you can always change your preference in its setup.

You can increase or reduce the number of virtual desktops by configuring its Desktop Layout, up to a maximum of 20. The more virtual desktops you use, the more amount of memory will be consumed.

With VirtuaWin, now you can use, for example, one desktop for web browsing, one desktop for graphics editing, one desktop for document writing, one desktop for network monitoring, ... this is of course more organized than cluttering all of them in a single desktop in Windows.

If you are a developer, and find any feature lacking in VirtuaWin, you can in fact make the feature by yourself using the VirtuaWin module SDK. Being open source and modular, the feature list of VirtuaWin is believed to be able to expand unlimitedly with the support and contribution from the developers community.

In fact, some of the fancy features in other virtual desktops software has been made available to VirtuaWin via module contributions.

Show PageRank and Alexa ranking of websites in status bar of Firefox / SeaMonkey / IE with SearchStatus

By using the SearchStatus add-on, you can show at the status bar of your browser, the Google PageRank and Alexa popularity ranking of all the websites you are browsing.

This allows you to have a rough idea about the website's link importance and traffic importance, which is referenced by major search engines and Internet advertising services.

It could be useful to bloggers and webmasters in improving SEO for their websites. For example, you might want to get the high ranking websites to link to your own website, and SearchStatus can immediately tell you if the website you are visiting is of high ranking or not.

SearchStatus is available as add-in extension for Firefox and SeaMonkey. Beside Google PageRank and Alexa popularity ranking, it can also show the Compete.com ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank as well. It is also able to provide many Internet search related information of the website through its extensive menu items.

For Internet Explorer users, SearchStatus is included as a plug-in in the IE7Pro add-on. IE7Pro is a very famous plug-in which can be used in IE 6, IE 7 or IE 8 to enhance tremendously the IE features and usability.

Note that the last version of IE7Pro is 2.4.7, released on 16 Sep 2009. Its development and maintenance has stopped at this point.

The SearchStatus plug-in in IE7Pro is not on by default, but it is very simple to turn it on and include it in the IE's status bar.

Note that in order to gather information to produce the ranking statistic:

• Google PageRank sends your current URL and a hash of it to Google
• Alexa ranking sends your current URL domain, your local IP address and a unique constant to Alexa Web Services
• Compete ranking sends your current domain and a unique constant to Compete
• Linkscape ranking sends your current URL to Linkscape.

Click here for more information and download of SearchStatus for Firefox and SeaMonkey.

Click here for more information and download of IE7Pro for Internet Explorer.

You are welcomed to inform me if there are similar tools for other browsers such as Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc.

Office Reader the free open source application for Symbian & UIQ3 to open ODF files

Most of us already know that Microsoft Office documents can be opened in our smartphone by using applications such as Documents To Go or Quickoffice.

But how about the documents in Open Document Format (ODF) which is the De facto standard of OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, Go-oo, KOffice, AbiWord, etc?

Well, Office Reader is the ODF documents reader for Symbian and UIQ3 smartphones which is able to read OpenDocument text (.odt), spreadsheet (.ods) and presentation (.odp) as well as support for OpenOffice.org Hybrid PDF file.

Being a GPL version 3 open source application, Office Reader is free for use. It is sponsored by NLnet Foundation and Odendahl SEPT-Solutions. Odendahl SEPT-Solutions is the company that produced Mobile Office.

Office Reader is capable to open ODF documents directly from email attachments, MMS, Bluetooth, filebrowser as well as webbrowser.

The main limitation is: it can only read the documents, but not write to them.

Click here for more information and download of Office Reader.

Hiding your Internet web surfing trace with UltraSurf

UltraSurf is a very small program (less than 500kb) that will automatically change your Internet Explorer's setting to make use of anonymous proxy server in the United States. It is free. It also has add-on for Firefox browser.

It can be used to hide/obfuscate your computer's location, and be a workaround to overcome possible web censorship and blockage.

Any website you connected with your web browser is able to trace your computer's IP address, and use it to find out your location. What UltraSurf do is to connect your computer to their server, and then connect to the destination website with the IP address of their server instead of yours.

This will make any websites you surf on or browse into, to trace that you are coming from United States instead of your actual location.

You can see how the IP address is traced by visiting to http://whatismyipaddress.com/. See what's the different before and after you run UltraSurf.

UltraSurf also has options to allow you to remove your trace in your computer (what webpages you have visited) by deleting the cookie and history information automatically the moment you exit the program.

Click here to find out more about UltraSurf and to download it.

Using Avidemux to rotate video movie in Linux/BSD/Solaris/Mac/Windows

Recently, I wrote about "using free software to turn/rotate/flip video movie" which can be done with 2 Windows based applications namely Windows Movie Maker and Free Video Flip and Rotate.

Now I am going to write about Avidemux, which can do the same video rotating function, and is multi-platform (can run in Linux/BSD/Solaris/Mac/Windows). Being GNU GPL licensed, you can also install and use Avidemux for free.

To rotate a video, open the video file. Then, change "Copy" in the Video section to one of the video format of your choice.

After that, click on the "Filters" button.

Double click the "Rotate" option under the Transform filter, and select the rotation degree. You can click the "Preview" button to see how it is going to look like.

Close the Video Filter Manager when you are done. Save the video with a new filename and you will get the rotated video.

Click here to go to the website of Avidemux.

If you are using Ubuntu Linux, you can probably install Avidemux with Synaptic Package Manager.

Using free software to turn/rotate/flip video movie

Certain video taken by digital camera or mobile phone might be displayed at 90 degree rotated on your monitor. Don't worry, you can make use of some free tools to turn it back to normal orientation (instead of turning your neck to watch the video).

Method 1: Using Windows Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker that bundled in the Windows operating system is pretty feature rich, and is able to rotate the video by 90, 180 or 270 degree, as well as flipping (mirroring) vertially or horizontally.

You need to firstly open the original video file, then drag it to one of the box in the storyboard bar. After that, right click on the box and select "Video Effects...". You can pick and add the rotate effect from the list.

To save the rotated video, pull down the File menu and select "Save Movie File...". Follow the instruction and you will get a new rotated video file either saved in .WMV or .AVI format.

Method 2: Using Free Video Flip and Rotate

If you find Windows Movie Maker way of rotating video to be tedious, or Windows Movie Maker is unable to open and/or process your video file, you can download and use the Free Video Flip and Rotate utility.

This utility is very straight forward, and supports a vast variety of video format.

You just need to specify the source (input) video file, and the output file, then click on the conversion button (which allow you to rotate and/or flip the source video). Then click the "convert" button and you will get a new .AVI file.

Click here to go to the download page of Free Video Flip and Rotate.

You might also be interested to read about:

• Using Avidemux to rotate video movie in Linux/BSD/Solaris/Mac/Windows
  

Using JumboMem memory server to share RAM of multiple computers across network

If you need to run a memory-hungry program (eg. high resolution 3D animation renderer) that requires 1TB of memory, how should you run it?

As presented in the paper of Scott Pakin and Greg Johnson in 2007 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing titled Performance Analysis of a User-level Memory Server, JumboMem is an innovative open source Linux application which is the 1st entirely user-level memory server that enables unmodified sequential and also multi-threaded applications (as in version 2.0) to directly access all of the memory in a cluster of computers.

The goal of JumboMem is simple but very powerful, which is to improve the performance of memory-hungry applications by replacing accesses to a slow paging device (a disk) with accesses to fast RAM in other computers located across a high-speed network.

And there are some beauty in this middleware worth mentioning:

• No administrative access is required. All you need is an ordinary account on any Linux cluster. If you can run an MPI program you can run JumboMem.
  

• Your applications don’t need to be modified. Even binaries are okay. You can also run Perl, Python, PHP and other scripting languages.
• It is very scalable and proven to work with hundreds of nodes combining terrabytes of RAM.
  

Click here for more explanation, information and download of JumboMem the spectacular memory server.

Top 40 open source products for business and IT pros (Bossie 2009 winners)

Since 2007, each year InfoWorld's Bossie (Best of Open Source Software awards) will recognize a total of 40 best open source software from various categories for business and IT pros of the year.

The 2009 Bossie winners are...


Best of open source developer tools:

• BrowserShots service
  
• Drools BRMS
• Eclipse Web Services Tools
• Hadoop and Hive for distributed data processing
• jQuery JavaScript library
• Mono .Net platform
• NetBeans IDE for Java and dynamic languages
• OpenStreetMap mapping project
• PhoneGap framework for mobile application development
• WebKit browser rendering engine

Best of open source enterprise software:

• Compiere ERP systems
• Openbravo ERP systems
• Dimdim web conference software
• Drupal for content management
• Intalio for process management
• Jaspersoft for reporting and BI
• Pentaho for reporting and BI
• Magento for e-commerce
• Piwik for web analytics
• SugarCRM for sales and customer management
• WordPress blog publishing platform

Best of open source networking software:

• Cacti
• Nagios
• IPCop firewall
• Kamailio SIP proxy server
• KeePass password manager
• Openfiler SAN/NAS appliance
• OpenNMS enterprise monitoring system
• PacketFence network access control
• Puppet configuration management framework
• Untangle network security gateway

Best of open source platforms and middleware:

• Jitterbit data migration and integration
• Talend data migration and integration
• Mule service bus
• WSO2 modular SOA platform
• Nginx web server
• OpenVZ server virtualization platforms
• Xen server virtualization platforms
• VirtualBox desktop virtualization tool
• Turnkey Linux factory of software appliances

Beside the 40 Bossie winners, Infoworld also named the Top 10 Open Source Hall of Famers from the greatest open source software of all time. They are:

• Linux kernel
• GNU utilities and compilers
• Ubuntu
• The 3 BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD & NetBSD)
• Samba
• MySQL
• BIND
• Sendmail
• OpenSSH and OpenSSL
• Apache

Beside that, Infoworld recognises there are a lot of great open source apps for Windows too, and they've picked the 10 best:

• FileZilla
• VirtualBox
• OpenOffice.org
• Firefox
• Paint.Net
• Media Player Classic
• TrueCrypt
• PDFCreator
• 7-Zip
• ClamWin

Click here for more details about the Infoworld Bossie 2009 awards.

Using GMapTool to combine multiple maps into one mapset file for Garmin GPS

We mentioned earlier that Garmin GPS navigator supports several mapset files. That should be enough for normal users.

Saving different map into different mapset file also makes it easy to replace the map to newer version in the future, as well as convenient to remove a single map from the GPS storage.

However, if you have a lot of map that you want to load into your GPS, or you want to store all the maps into SD card which supports only a single gmapsupp.img in it, you might need to combine (join) the maps into one mapset file by using specific software tool. GMapTool is one of the powerful tool which allow you to join and/or split maps in mapset file.

You can visit this webpage to download GMapTool. It supports multiple platform:

• Windows - GUI and command line
• Linux - command line
• Mac OS X - command line
  
  
  

By using the GUI interface of GMapTool, it is pretty simple to combine the mapsets.

Firstly, store all the mapset files you wish to combine in different filename in your PC. It is recommended to store them in the same folder/directory.

Under the Files section of GMapTool, select the maps you want to combine by clicking on Add Files (to select one file at one time) or Add Directories (to select all *.img files in the directory). Note that you can always remove any file in the listing by selecting it and press the Delete button of your keyboard.

When you are done with the mapset selection, continue to the Join section.

Specify the Output File, and key-in the Mapset name of your file to be created. This mapset name will be displayed under each of the map name when you list your maps in Map Info function of your Garmin GPS.

Click the Join all button, and the combined mapset will be created. You can then copy the new mapset file to your Garmin's internal storage or SD card.

Note that if any of the maps in your mapset file is locked by vendor, you still need the 25 bytes unlock key stored in a *.unl file in the same folder and with the same name as the mapset file where the locked map is stored in. To unlock 2 maps inside the mapset file, put both the keys inside the *.unl file one after another, without space (the file size will be 50 bytes then).

To get rid of the hassle, you might want to use another tool called Garmin Unlocker to permanently unlock the maps before combining them with GMapTool.

You might probably be interested to also read about:

• Using GMapTool with cGPSmapper to convert finalized gmapsupp.img back to MapSource maps
• Fixed GMapTool problem regarding "Multiple products in img, creating TDB aborted"