Piquant Picks for the Penguin

Parallel Lines

Panasas ( "story_link">http://www.panasas.com), a maker of
high-performance storage systems and the creator of the
Parallel Network File System (pNFS),
announced its plans to open source its pNFS client software. The
code, which should be available by the end of this summer,
complements the company’s donation of pNFS to the Internet
Engineering Task Force, which has incorporated the protocol into
the Network File System 4.1 standard.

Pananas’s software, named "i">DirectFLOW, implements all of the features of pNFS. To
boost performance, pNFS separates data and metadata, and removes
the metadata server from the data path between a client and
storage. (See the pNFS home page, class="story_link">http://www.pnfs.com, for an architectural
overview.) pNFS supports block, object, and file transfers.

The NFS 4.1 RFC ( "http://tools.ietf.org/wg/nfsv4" class=
"story_link">http://tools.ietf.org/wg/nfsv4) is being developed
by Panasas, IBM, EMC, Network Appliance, Sun, and the University of
Michigan. You can find the Panasas code at the company’s Web
site and at the pNFS home page.

KDE Kicks It

As this issue of Linux Magazine went to press, the KDE project
( "story_link">http://www.kde.org) loosed KDE
3.5.7, a maintenance release with oomph.

In addition to bug fixes in personal information managers
KAddressBook, KOrganizer, and "i">KAlarm, and performance enhancements in chat client
Kopete, the project expanded "i">IMAP support in email application "i">KMail and improved code completion in "i">KDevelop, among other additions. "i">KHTML and KJS, the KDE
HTML and JavaScript
engines, continued to be refined as well.

As of 3.5.7, KDE supports 65 languages. Packages for your
favorite distribution should be readily available by the time you
read this, or download the source directly from "http://kde.org/info/3.5.7.php" class=
"story_link">http://kde.org/info/3.5.7.php to compile it
yourself.

Browse Better, Bud, Or Else

A novel Firefox extension, "i">Remove It Permanently (R.I.P.)
(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/521?id=521) has an
offer you can’t refuse. R.I.P., as its name implies, removes
virtually any element from a Web page "i">permanently.

Once R.I.P. is installed, just move your cursor over an ad, an
IFrame, an image, a table, or even some text and right-click to put
cement galoshes on the content. For example, you can make Jimmy
Hoffa disappear again.

class="story_image"> "http://www.linux-mag.com/images/2007-07/front/jimmy.jpg" class=
"story_image"> "http://www.linux-mag.com/images/2007-07/front/goner.jpg" class=
"story_image"> "http://www.linux-mag.com/images/2007-07/front/goner.jpg" class=
"story_image">

Cleverly, the page is redrawn, as if nothing ever happened.
Better yet, you can “sleeps with the fishes” similar
content using size or an XPath
specification, apply your muscle across many pages or an entire
domain, and import and export lists of things you’ve
“rubbed out,” so to speak.

And unlike the family business, you can undo your dirty work.
Modified pages display a tombstone in the bottom right corner of
the Firefox window — mouse over it to see a body count, or
click it to open a dialog to expand, modify, or revert
“rips”.

Motorola Makes Good

Four years after announcing the company would adopt "i">Linux, Motorola finally debuted a series of cellular
telephones based on the Penguin and "i">Java.

The Motorola MotoRokr Z6, the
touch-screen Ming, and some of the
company’s second generation Razr
phone, the Razr2, all available beginning
this summer, run on Linux and Java.

class="story_image"> "http://www.linux-mag.com/images/2007-07/front/razr2.jpg" class=
"story_image">

The Razr2 is sleeker, thinner, and more durable than its
predecessor, and includes a high-speed USB
2.0 connector, a full Web browser, a two-megapixel camera,
touch screen buttons on the exterior screen, and personal
videoconferencing. The telephone should be available in August
2007.