Sean Michael Kerner

Linux lovers rejoice — you’ll also be getting a present this Valentine’s Day in the form of the Debian Lenny release. Lenny, named after a character in the Disney/Pixar film “Toy Story,” marks the first major Debian release since Etch in April 2007. It’s an important milestone for the distro, which is the basis of […]

Apple has come out with its first major security advisory update of 2009, with fixes to Mac OS X as well as the Safari Web browser. But at least one security expert said the company took too long to respond to problems that had been flagged in Safari. On the OS X side, Security Update […]

From the ‘Unix time is its own time zone‘ files: At 6:31:30 PM (EST) today, Unix time will equal ‘1234567890’. That number is the number of seconds (so 1.23 billion) since the beginning of the Unix epoch on 00:00:00, Jan. 1, 1971. Neat. I will admit that at various points in my career I’ve used […]

From the ‘I hope I don’t get frozen in Carbonite‘ files: Some Star Wars fans think that Episode V “The Empire Strikes Back” is the best of the original trilogy. A key part of that film is Bespin’s Cloud City where Lando Calrissian makes a deal with Darth Vader to betray Han Solo. What does […]

InternetNews.com has learned that financially troubled networking vendor Nortel Networks is developing a new services router that could potentially enable applications to run on top of networking gear. Though full details on the new Nortel services router are still being worked out, the platform might end up competing against HP ProCurve’s ONE initiative that lets […]

Though times are tough throughout the economy, open source networking vendor GroundWork claims it’s doing just fine — and it’s counting on a new release of its flagship monitoring software to keep it that way. The company this week introduced its new Monitor 5.3 release, which it said increases its scalability and availability while adding […]

From the ‘Don’t Click’ files: Over the span of 90 minutes today I got a whole bunch of tweets from people I follow with the message “Don’t Click.” Apparently it was a clickjacking attack. Clickjacking is something that involves getting the user to click on an element that then triggers a second or hidden element […]

From the ‘What? Linux isn’t American!?‘ files: Reuters has an interesting story today titled, “Cuba launches own Linux variant to counter U.S.” The gist of the story is that Cuba is now going to produce their own Linux distro called ‘Nova’ in some sort of attempt to not have to use American software.  Nonsense. If […]

Carrier Ethernet is a technology that is often thought of as being something that exists in the core of carrier networks. Networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent has released a new access switch this week that it claims will extend Carrier Ethernet right to the enterprise front door. The new Alcatel-Lucent 7210 Service Access Switch is a device […]

There was a time when it was enough for middleware to be just a Java J2EE application server stack. Times do change, though: J2EE is now called JavaEE, and middleware needs are more than just Java. To help meet the evolving requirements of the modern enterprise, Sun this week released its Glassfish Portfolio, which provides […]

From the ‘they told me so‘ files: The Novell led Moonlight effort to enable Microsoft Silverlight on Linux has reached its 1.0 milestone release today. I’m not surprised. In December of 2008, Miguel de Icaza the Moonlight project lead talked to me about Moonlight 1.0 beta (which seemed complete to me) and told me that […]

From the ‘making progress‘ files: Mozilla is out now with its first milestone release of its Fennec mobile browser for Windows Mobile based smart phones. Fennec developers have labeled the release as a pre-alpha and it currenlty only supports the HTC Touch Pro. It’s basically an early adopter player to get it out there for […]