OStatic

Members of various open-source database communities will get together in mid-November for the first-ever OpenSQL camp. The free conference, which has room for 150 attendees, will be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is meant to help the members of all open-source database projects to learn from one another. Potential participants are encouraged to register on the Wiki, as well as to propose conference talks. Organizers want the camp to make it possible for participants to learn, to participate, to contribute, and to write code.

There's a lot of buzz right now about Ubiquity: Mozilla's attempt to explore command-based interaction within Firefox. Users of other command-oriented interfaces like QuickSilver or Enso, will feel right at home with Ubiquity: you activate it within your browser with a simple key combination, and then start typing. Depending on what you type, stuff happens.

Perspectives, a Firefox extension from Carnegie Mellon, offers robust privacy features.....

Are there too many cooks in the kitchen, working on too many open source projects? Would consolidation help?.....

Open source gaming goes commercial with Wiz handheld.....

Postpath is an open source e-mail and collaboration server offering interoperability with Microsoft Exchange.....

Take a gander at Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client.....

Adium, an open-source instant-messaging client for OS X, has released its latest version (1.3). Adium, like the Pidgin IM client, makes it possible to use a single IM program, rather than run multiple clients simultaneously for AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and several other networks. Adium's latest release includes support for the Facebook IM client, providing desktop access to this otherwise Web-only communications channel.

A major problem with the officially distributed version of Perl on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has led to a firestorm of complaints among developers. The problem, which also manifests itself on some versions of the Fedora and CentOS Linux distributions, means that some programs will take more than 100 (yes, one hundred) times longer to execute under Red Hat than other distributions. A Red Hat engineer has indicated that it will fix the problem in its next release (i.e., Red Hat Enterprise 5.3), but has not said when that update will arrive.