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Hackszine.com

O'Reilly's Hacks Series reclaims the term 'hacking' for the good guys--innovators who explore and experiment, unearth shortcuts, create useful tools, and come up with fun things to try on their own

Google Code University - tutorials and course content for CS studentsYesterday

Google's Code University is another great "bootstrap education" resource for CS students. I've written previously about other free resources for the self-guided software engineer, such as MIT's Open Courseware and Standford's Engineering Everywhere. While Google Code University currently offers a smaller subset of courses, it's all geared toward topics related to large scale web application development.

This website provides tutorials and sample course content so CS students and educators can learn more about current computing technologies and paradigms. In particular, this content is Creative Commons licensed which makes it easy for CS educators to use in their own classes.

The Courses section contains tutorials, lecture slides, and problem sets for a variety of topic areas:

AJAX Programming
Algorithms
Distributed Systems
Web Security
Languages
In the Tools 101 section, you will find a set of introductions to some common tools used in Computer Science such as version control systems and databases.

As yo

MIDI Hero - Guitar Hero with a drum kitNovember 29

iPhone LinuxNovember 28

The iPhone dev team, hard at work as usual, announced a successful iPhone Linux port today. It's still at a very early stage, but the kernel boots on first and second generation iPhones and the first generation iPod touch. A framebuffer driver and a working Busybox installation point to an exciting open source future:

What we have:

- Framebuffer driver
- Serial driver
- Serial over USB driver
- Interrupts, MMU, clock, etc.

What we have in openiboot (but hasn't been ported yet):

- Read-only support for the NAND

What we don't have (yet!):

- Write support for the NAND
- Wireless networking
- Touchscreen
- Sound
- Accelerometer
- Baseband support

If you're a Linux hacker and want to pitch in with the porting process, hop on the #iphonelinux IRC channel at irc.osx86.hu.

iPhone Linux - Official Announcement

It's just a demo at this point, but if you can't wait to see this running on your own phone, here's what you need:
Installation Instructions
iphonelinux-demo.tar.gz

Build a Skype server and replace your land lineNovember 27

With some of my family overseas, Skype and iChat have become important tools for voice communication, second only to the cell phone and face to face protocol. It occurred to me that outside of telemarketers and the very occasional late-night pizza dial, the land line has become a relatively unused service. Unused, yet a consistent and not insubstantial monthly bill.

With thoughts of finally ditching the land line, but still a bit resistant to going completely phoneless in the home (what about when my cell battery dies?), I came across an article in Linux Journal by Andrew Sheppard, author of Skype Hacks, that shows you how to reconfigure your home telephone system to be completely routed through a server running Skype and Linux.

My solution was to build a Skype server that provides 24/7 phone service with the minimum of hassle and fuss. By dumping your regular phone company and taking back control of your home phone wiring using a Skype server, you will have not only a phone system with nearly the same capabilities as before--indeed, in some ways better--you will also save a bundle of money! In my case, I save a little less than $700 US each year (this year, next year, and the year after that, and so on), or about 82% off of my old phone bill.

Using a Skype server plugge