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I spent several years of my childhood in a remote corner of bush Alaska. When thinking about those times, I remember one village in particular: Point Lay, mid-way between Point Hope and Barrow. In Point Lay, in the late 1970s, we got our news twice a week from people and mail arriving on our regular mail planes. Every Tuesday and Friday, depending on the weather, news from the outside world would arrive, filtered by the people who happened to be on the airplane or the magazines we were subscribed to. We didn't have television, or good radio reception. Aside from the delivery vehicle, the news we received was much like living in rural America a hundred years ago--second or third hand, heavily filtered.

Flavio's TechnoTalk has some good tips for securing a Linux server.

Here's an article from Builder AU that goes straight to the point of using open source for small business.

How to make money from Open source.

Newsforge is running a story about the realities of using OS Commerce, the open source shopping cart/e-commerce package. It describes the pluses and minuses fairly well: NewsForge | OSCommerce in action

The Register is running a story today about a botnet--a network of compromised computers--that is under the control of hackers. Is your computer one of the bots? For a surprising number of people, the answer could be yes.

Lots of people have been looking for a good timesheet program. Here's one I just stumbled upon. Timesheet.php Homepage. It's available on Sourceforge, under the GPL.

Continuing on the thought-stream I started last week...

If you haven't paid attention, the World Wide Web has been changing dramatically over the past few years. It used to be that if you wanted to create a web site, you either had to learn the basics of HTML, or spend a few hundred dollars on a web development tool. Or hire a designer to put one together for you.

Every time you want to add new content to your web site, you'd have to go back to your tools, add a new page, update all of the site navigation, or pay another fee to your web designer.

Those days are history. Thanks to a variety of different content management systems, you can easily add new content to your web site with no technical knowledge whatsoever.

Joining the ranks of Sharepoint Portal Server, Plone, Mambo, PostNuke, and hundreds of other portal systems, is the open source Metadot Portal Server.

Why pay for something you can get for free? Many reasons:

Interesting article about the open source and free software movements in the MIT Technology Review. While the author generalizes a little bit too much, he makes some interesting arguments.

Can you tell I have posts stacked up to write? Taking a bit today to post some links I've stumbled across in the past few weeks.