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Scientist: How to attribute free software contributions in journal article, proceeding and monograph

Scientists, academicians and researchers are a group of users that benefits greatly from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS / FLOSS). Most them would use free software not only to help in preparing graph and documentation, but also as the main tool in their investigation.

Although it is not explicitly required by the software license or by software authors, the role of free software should be appropriately attributed by academicians and scientists who used them in their investigations as it would not only acknowledge the contribution of free software authors (some of them are hardworking academicians or scientists themselves), but this will also done to fulfill the academic accountability on the researchers part.

Examples on how to attribute Free Software use in Academic Paper
1. Researchers/Academician may cite the software URL and the software author in the “Literature Review/Background”, “Methods”or “Acknowledgement section” in the articles.

2. The citation should include the software release number and the URL to download the software in order to help other researchers to replicate the work (publishing paper is all about guiding others to replicate the investigation)

3. If free software being used as the main tool in the investigation, it would be helpful if the academician/researcher could explain why this particular Free Software is chosen for the research, etc in their journal article or academic papers.

For more examples: Visit the Debian Free Software Guideline, there’s a section about attributing free software in scientific and academic papers.

Give credit to Free Software! Please share this post
If you are an academician or researcher, then please share this post because it will increase awareness about the need to properly attribute free software tools, software author and their role in scientific community.

Thanks!

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Ubuntu One Files client for Android phones

Ubuntu One Files for Android is an application written by Micha? Karnicki as part of Google Summer of Code Project (GSoC) 2010. The client is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL v3 and its source code is available from Launchpad.

Google Android Ubuntu One files

The application lets you synchronize your phone contacts, files and photo gallery on the cloud automatically. Ubuntu One files also offers convenient feature to change the visibility of your files, making it easier for you to share files with the rest of the world.

Ubuntu One Files is also available on the Android Market, free of charge.

Note: Ubuntu One is a service similar to Box.net that enables you to store your files on the cloud. You do not need to be an Ubuntu user to use Ubuntu One. Each registered user are given 2GB space for free.

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Debian Squeeze 6.0.2 update (Security – important)

Debian project has released update on Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) which addressed several security issues and bugfix. Debian Squeeze users are advised to update their installation using “apt-get update” and “apt-get upgrade” command to ensure all of the updates are installed properly.

p/s: Although I currently use Ubuntu, I was actually a Debian user and I continue to use Debian on my VPS to host this website till this very day. Without Debian, I would never has discovered thousands of wonderful open source software in it vast software repositories :)

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How to limit MySQL port access to specific network

MySQL service port are not meant to be accessible to the outside world as it would become a security concern to the administrator.

Although MySQL server (mysqld) by itself has a built-in mechanism to deny access from unauthorized ip-address, it still does not protect it from being overwhelmed by multiple malicious requests or buffer overflow attack directed to the server.

One of the solution is to limit the MySQL port access to trusted network using iptables

This assume your trusted network has the address within the range of 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.254


iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -s 192.168.1.0/24 --dport 3306 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -o eth0 -p tcp --sport 3306 -m state --state ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

MySQL server (mysqld) uses port 3306.

Note: Always assume the internet as the untrusted network!

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Ubuntu 11.10 drops Synaptic package manager

The upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 release (Oneiric Ocelot) will drop Synaptic Package Manager from default installation in favor of Ubuntu Software Center.

This has been foreseen since Canonical has spend their effort in developing and improving Ubuntu Software Center as a convenience one-stop center to install free and paid software alike.

Personal Thoughts
Personally, I still prefer to use Synaptic Package Manager over Ubuntu Software Center as it is still doesn’t offer the same number of options that I used to get from Synaptic (ability to search by name, description, ability to test the fastest mirror).

But I believe the changes that Canonical and Ubuntu community made might make it easier to streamline the looks and functionality of package manager into desktop environment (Unity) regardless of the computing platform.

Synaptic