We just finished a major upgrade, moving our servers from an older, commercial version of Frontier (prior to open source release) to the open source Frontier Kernel which David compiled and built here at ZATZ. Nearly everything has moved over cleanly, but there are still a few things needing to be fixed. We’ve got a few links that need repair and a few style sheets got zorched. We should have everything back to normal within a few days. Stay tuned; we’ll also have a story shortly about what it’s like to add capabilities to an open source project.

IBM and Oracle announced a strategic initiative to collaborate on the sales and marketing of a series of enterprise business solutions with Oracle applications and technology for Linux on System z in order to target the business requirements of large and medium size enterprise customers and meet growing market demand. This initiative complements a series of investments IBM and Oracle have made in support of Linux as an enterprise application platform.

The Eclipse-based architecture of IBM Lotus Sametime Connect V7.5 allows you to enhance your client to your heart’s content. In this article, you learn how to customize the Lotus Sametime client to play back a user-assigned audio file when an instant message is received from a specific Sametime partner. The end goal of this article is to create the WAV Playback plug-in. During your study, you learn what programmatically happens when a Sametime instant message is received by the Lotus Sametime client. You also see how to create a custom reaction to an instant message being received. Accordingly, after reading this article, you can embark on your own escapades of Sametime client plug-in development with your newfound knowledge. This article is intended for application developers interested in customizing the Lotus Sametime Connect client. Some familiarity with Eclipse is helpful, but not required. Knowledge of Java is expected.

Cisco Systems has a new executive to spearhead the company’s own use of IT. On Tuesday, the company named Rebecca Jacoby as senior vice president and chief information officer. The 11-year Cisco veteran previously was vice president of customer service and operational systems. In that role, she had been handling some CIO roles while former CIO Brad Boston was shifting to a new position.

The city of Chicago is investigating a security glitch in its elections Web site that hackers could have used to swipe Social Security numbers and the personal information of about 1.3 million voters, officials said. It wasn’t immediately clear if anyone actually stole or misused any of the information, Chicago Board of Elections spokesman Tom Leach said. He said the problem had been fixed and a forensic computer expert would be brought in to examine the site’s logs for any signs of illegal access.

Mozilla officially released Firefox 2 on Tuesday afternoon, adding security features and a new interface. Firefox 2 was made available for free download. Mozilla has set up two download sites for the update, which it said it has optimized for the expected high volume of traffic, at Getfirefox.com and Mozilla.com. The revamped Firefox includes a new interface theme and more security protection such as built-in phishing protection. It also has session memory, which, when the browser is re-opened, brings back the set of Web pages that were in use when it was last closed. Changes have also been made in the technology to import RSS feeds, which now offers a feed list view with title and first lines.

Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Oracle are teaming up on a push to make it easier for users to modernize their applications that currently reside on mainframes. The three vendors are unveiling the Application Modernization Initiative at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Mark Hurd, HP’s chairman, president and CEO, will announce the program during his keynote address at the show.

Key aspects of Amazon.com’s retailing Web site are improperly built on technologies developed at IBM, Big Blue alleged Monday in two lawsuits against Amazon. Amazon is accused of infringing on five IBM patents, including technologies that govern how the site recommends products to customers, serves up advertising and stores data. Some of the patents were first filed in the 1980s, including one titled "Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalog."

One of the endless challenges for a large corporate software engineering organization is to develop an effective process for handling the steady stream of small changes, fixes and enhancements that seem to accumulate around installed software, both custom developed and Commercial of the Shelf–no matter how good it is initially. The problem for the engineering managers, however, is that each change generally requires considerable impact analysis before it is made, and considerable testing after it has been implemented but before the new "version" of the software goes into production. This "engineering process" effort can easily dwarf the core engineering resource requirements as each small change includes all the aforementioned associated "overhead."

Enterprise software giant SAP is looking to bolster its position in the service-oriented architecture arena, by launching a variety of consulting services aimed at helping customers transition to SOA. The new consulting services will help customers develop a road map to transition their enterprise systems to SOA, according to Bernd-Michael Rumpf, head of SAS’s Global Field Services group and chief executive of the software company’s systems integration division. The services will also help companies roll out SOA-based systems, leveraging the vendor’s NetWeaver technology.