Trace your ancestry to Africa with cheek swab and $100. [via Boing Boing 4/13/2005] Want to know where your ancestors REALLY came from? $100 and a cheek swab will tell you. National Geographic has developed a five-year genographic study where participants can join in and track their genetic lineage to a common African ancestor. The $100 test will tell you the route that your ancestors took and when, and both the DNA and genographic results will be made available to individual participants on the 'net. 4/15/2005 9:43:19 AM    

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Preparing for Indigo—Choosing the Right Technology Today [DevX 4/14/2005; 12:53:34 AM] Today .NET offers three distinct technologies for application connectivity: Web services, remoting, and Enterprise Services. Each offers something that the other does not: interoperability, extensibility, and productivity. Since .NET debuted some five years ago, all three technologies have been inundated in either hype or misconceptions. With Indigo around the corner, it is time to take a long hard look at these three technologies, and separate fact from myth so that you will be best prepared for Indigo. This article starts by examining the existing technologies, describing their merits and shortcomings, putting them in the correct perspective of a modern distributed application, and suggests where to best apply them. Then the article briefly describes the Indigo programming model, and assesses how to best mitigate the cost of the migration. 4/15/2005 9:37:26 AM    

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Game developers too scared to program for Linux? Linux--How To Take Over The Market. [OSNews 4/13/2005 via Linux Today 4/13/2005] "The majority of new pc game releases are made for Windows. Perhaps some developers are too scared to program for Linux? I find Cedega is relatively good for Windows games, but Windows games will always run better in their native environment, no matter how good the program made to convert them. As great as Cedega and Wine are in general, they don't fix the immediate problem, that being the industry leaders in this market, or any market, don't program for Linux. If that were changed, I am sure that would give Linux the boost it needs to be pushed forward." 4/15/2005 9:28:05 AM    

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Linux--How To Take Over The Market. [OSNews 4/13/2005 via Linux Today 4/13/2005] "The purpose of this article is to voice my personal opinion on what I feel is keeping GNU/Linux from taking over the mainstream operating system market..."

"Windows XP is obsolete, it's old now. The successor? None, yet. At least not until when late 2005 or 2006 rolls around and with it, Windows Longhorn. But what about those that don't want to wait that long for up to date software and the newest technologies? The answer to quite a few is Linux. But when casual users think of Linux, they either think about geeks with bottle glasses and plaid shirts, or something that is completely unknown, and to some, scary.

"If I had to pick one thing to improve above all others, I'd have to say software installation. For example, in order to install KDE 3.4 RC1 on my system, I found some APT repositories, downloaded and installed somewhere around 30 packages, and it worked. To install the Macromedia flash player I fire up the command line, download the Gnuzip package, throw a few commands in the terminal, and flash is ready to go. However, a new user to Linux (fresh from Windows) is accustomed to double-clicking a setup icon, clicking 'next' four or five times followed by 'Finish'. That won't work here. The last time I tried to explain Apt to an avid Windows user, I got a blank stare."

4/15/2005 9:25:48 AM    

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Searching Your Website with Microsoft Index Services. [4GuysFromRolla.com 4/15/2005] Search has become so ubiquitous that visitors to your site immediately look for the search function. This article examines using Microsoft Index Services to specify a specific group of documents or HTML pages to be indexed, using the Adobe IFilter plug-in which lets it index PDF documents as well, and building a simple, fast, and extensible search tool using .NET. 4/15/2005 8:53:53 AM    

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Unit Testing the Data Access Layer. [4GuysFromRolla.com 4/15/2005] Unit testing the Data Access Layer still remains a common problem, since databases are slow, common, persistent, external, and relational. This conflicts with the nature of unit tests, which should be quick, independent, and repeatable. This article will show how to resolve these problems so that you can reliably unit test database objects like stored procedures, functions, triggers, and the DAL that uses them. It also explains how to add diagnostic tests in NUnit to ensure that a developer's environment is set up correctly for unit tests, and how to handle configuration values like changing the database name or user connection information. 4/15/2005 8:45:45 AM    

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