Many interesting things (some saddening) took place in July. Some of those are mentioned in the following sections.

Linux / FOSS:

• The official Ubuntu Forums were hacked. They did the right thing by immediately acknowledging the hack. But the overall handling of the situation has left a sour taste in my mouth. Reasons:

  • First they took several days to send notifications out to the users by email.

  • After finally restoring the forums after about a week, they are now requiring everyone to register with Ubuntu One and that account will be tied with the forums account.

• Feel that the BusyBox is lacking in some places? Toybox is a BSD-licensed alternative for that.

• Slackware is now 20 years old!.

• The H — often regarded as one of the few decent open source related publications — has gone the way of the Dodo. They cited lack of profit as the reason. I had read articles published on The H a few times in the past, but only recently had I started visiting it regularly. Too bad, that didn't last for long.

Useful Services:

• RSS 4 Twitter is a very useful service which — as the name implies — provides RSS feeds for Twitter. In case you didn't know, Twitter killed off RSS support with their latest API change. Unfortunately, this service seems to be down most of the time lately, due to very heavy load. Please donate to them, if you find the service useful.

• DuckDuckGo has started providing an XMPP service.

Cool Stuff:

• YouCompleteMe is a very promising plugin for the Vim text editor. I'll probably give it a try some day.

• Wonder what type of keyboards did the Prehistoric Humans use? They must have looked like one of these.

Various:

• The ASCII Ribbon campaign is dead. Too bad, not many people give a damn about email etiquettes.

• The GitHub folks have launched a website to help you choose a license for your project.