Software Engineering blog

Using Jquery datepicker + mask together

Laszlo — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:43:00 +0000

I needed to use Jquery datepicker and mask plugin on the same input field on a page, which’s content was created with AJAX, so I had to use the jquery live function. I found a solution here, but althoughthis was a great article, there were some problems with it. When the user deleted characters from the date, the whole date became empty and the datepicker went crazy, too. So I tried to hack jquery for a while, but after a while I think I found a good solution.

$(‘#dateFrom’).live(‘click’, function() {
if (!$(this).data(“datepicker”)) {
$(this).datepicker(‘destroy’).datepicker(datePickerOptions).focus();
} });

This adds the datepicker correctly with the live function.

$(‘#dateFrom’).mask(“99/99/9999″);

This sets the date mask for the input field.

$(‘#dateFrom’).live(‘keydown’, function() {

$(this).datepicker(‘hide’);
$(this).datepicker(‘destroy’);

});

And this one “destroys” the datepicker when the user starts to type.

For me until now, this solution works nicely.

Voila!

Starting the DS

Laszlo — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:47:28 +0000

In two days, I’m gonna start working on my dissertation. I’m thinking about posting some things, about it, because I will be about an intresting topic, website usability, url usability, probably (provided the Dissertation Advisor accepts it). Are you intrested in it?

Capabilities of computing and issues raised by them

Laszlo — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 19:58:44 +0000

The assignment was:

1. Identify and describe 5 specific capabilities of computing (e.g., speed, permanence/storage) made possible or enhanced by computing technology.

2. Select one of the capabilities you identified and discuss its relationship to the following issues raised by the application of the technology:

Privacy
Ownership
Control
Accuracy
Security 3. Describe the areas of potential IT policy decisions that may be triggered by your selected capability.

1.) Capabilities of computing

I chose the following capabilities: connectivity, multimedia handling, accuracy, fast mathematical calculations, repetitive operations.

Connectivity: it is the first in my list and it’s the most important capability of the computers for me. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to learn here for example. My whole life is built on computing and nowadays mostly around Internet, so it’s an important feature for me. Connectivit means that you are able to communicate with virtually any connected computer user in the whole world. It’s unbeleivable how much nations can be found here or in internet based games for example.
Multimedia handling: This is the ability of recording and playing voice and video content on the computers.
Accuracy: computer operations are accurate. The result will always be the same, doesn’t matters how many times we make it repeated or which computer we use.
Fast mathematical calculations: it’s one of the most important capabilities of computing. It makes us able to search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, drive airplanes, forecast weather, etc.
Repetitive operations: a computer will never be tired. It can repeat the same operation again and again with the same result.

2.) Issues raised by connectivity
I obviously choose connectivity from my list to discuss. I do it, because it’s very close to me, and because it raises all the mentioned issues. In most cases, I’ll refer this capability as Internet, because currently this is the most used way of connecting computers.

Privacy
On the internet, this is surely an issue. Timothy J. Walton (2000) wrote in the first sentence of his article: “The right to privacy in Internet activity is a serious issue facing society.”. There are many problems mentioned by the author, like unsolicited e-mail, usage of cookies, building of huge company databases about the customers’ behaviour, selling customers’ data.

Ownership
It’s a huge problem nowadays. First of all, the ownership of the information. Internet is huge and mostly anonymous. Nowadays it’s moving towards a more and more open information publishing. Free websites, blogs, community networks make it very hard to take care of the ownership of the information. Another problem, which is closely related to this one is the Intellectual Property Rights. Who can prove, who is the owher of an article or a novel for example? How can it be assured, that no body will state, that it’s his/her work?

Control
Issue of control is raised by connectity daily. First you can think of control of the computer itself. Nowadays there are many ways hackers can use to take control of the connected computer you use. There are troyans, backdoor opening viruses, password crackers, network sniffers. This is a very important issue nowadays. Another issue is that influencing masses through information flow is much easyer than it ever was. In Hungary the biges “mediahack” was when a clever journalist made fool of the whole Hungarian press. According to Sz. I. M. (2007), Gábor Varga found out an imaginary story about the Madzsari tribe in Africa. Madzsari sounds very similar to Magyar, which is the Hungarian word for Hungarian. The story was simple and wrote that an imaginary Swiss institute, African Research Institute was the source of the information. It wrote, that www.ar-institute.ch is the homepage of the institute. The author intentionally hide some traps in the article, for exapmle, there were no such institute, and even the homepage didn’t exist. For the first time, the whole Hungarian press, including the bigest newspapers wrote about it as a fact and the bigest television stations presented it as a huge sensation and as a proof of Hungarian greatness. Nobody checked the source and nobody tried to open the website. The first one who tried to check it was SZ.I.M, the journalist of my favourite Hungarian portal.

Accuracy
Connectivity helps us to gather more accurate information quickly. You can ask anybody in no time or check an information website in minutes, so connectivity helps us to imporove accuracy of information. Although there are a lot of difficulties because there are numerous information sources and you cannot always tell which one is reliable. Robert Harris (2007) writes about very good methods of evaluating information found on the internet. He says that information needs to be avaluated carefully because unlike traditional information sources, internet articles usually published without a preliminary approval process.

Security
Security is a complex idea. Because, what is security? Security is basically the ability to keep privacy, ownership and control. A house is secure, when nobody can enter it without the owner’s will. A computer is secure if nobody can enter it without the owner’s will. Nowadays it’s not an easy thing to keep your computer secure.

Mixed issues

All the mentioned issues are connected to each other. Let’s look at just one exapmle. According to Randy James (2009) Internet censorship in China not only makes it impossible to reach specific websites, but when you try to view some information, you have to provide your personal details. They restrict access to pornography websites and many political topics. I’m sure, that this “total” control helps to improve the security level of Chineese internet, but affects privacy, accuracy and control, too. We say, it’s bad. But what we do with company firewalls and proxes? Limit the access to information. And in modern companies access to internet is not an anonymous activity any more. And what did USA – and many other countries – try in the schools? A proxy like control system to limit the access to specific information.

3.) IT policy decisions triggered by connectivity
Connectivity triggers numerous policy decisions. Maybe the most common is that almost all companies access internet through a proxy servers. Many companies limit the access to websites and internet services with a well defined internet policy. Some companies even limit the access to the internet with policy decisions. Policies can be written ones or software / hardware forced ones.
The National B2B Centre (n.d.) developed a very detailed guide about making internet policies. They write that making clearly stated internet usage policies to help the employees to follow it and the company to defend itself when an employee makes unacceptable things using the company’s resources on the internet.

Reference list:

Randy James (2009) A Brief History of: Chinese Internet Censorship [Online] Available from: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1885961,00.html (Accessed: 10. February 2010)

SZ.I.M (2007) Magyar törzset fedeztek fel Kongóban? [Online] Available from: http://index.hu/tudomany/tortenelem/magykonfg367/ (Accessed: 09. February 2010)

The National B2B Centre (n.d.) Introduce an internet and email policy [Online] Available from: http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/layer?topicId=1074402338 (Accessed: 10. February 2010)
Timothy J. Walton (2000) Internet Privacy Law [Online] Available from: http://www.netatty.com/privacy/privacy.html (Accessed 09. February 2010)

Communications

Laszlo — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 19:55:28 +0000

The question was: “Does the use of contractions, slang and icons in text messaging and email signal the development of a new communication style, or just the death of appreciation of written language? Do the same or similar things happen with your language if it’s other than English? Please provide examples”I think language is a constantly evolving communication tool. Many old people hate that youngs find out new words and change the way they use the old ones. Althogh we need new words to express new things. The world is faster and faster, at least it seems to me. Faster world needs faster more efficient communication.

We can say, that contractions, slang and icons are signals of a new communication style, but I’m absolutely sure, that it’s not the death of appreciation of written language. I don’t think that today’s people would use Shakespeare’s (1597) language:

“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”

Today, we use a different language than even 50 years ago. We many times cannot understand our parents and they cannot understand us.
I don’t think that written language is not appreciated nowadays. Let’ just look at the Internet! Almost all information can be found here written. We can see, that the number of multimedia is growing, but it’s still mostly text based. Information archiving and searching is text based also. Although as Brad Linder (2008) wrote Google is able to recognise spoken text in selected Youtube videos, I don’t think that this technology will replace text based storage and search in the near future.

My native language is Hungarian. The problems here are basically the same. We do have an Academy which defines the “official” language, although it’s not forced. But there are some people, who think that anybody using a bit different Hungarian than the official version is uneducated and they think it is unacceptable. The situation is more intresting, because we use a growing number of English words. So many people hate it! They ant to defend the language from foreign words. Although it’s more difficult to express many things in plain Hungarian, than with using English words. Many professions, including IT, use it’s specialised words only in English. Although noadays even the operatingg systems are localised, for me it’s very difficult to use them in Hungarian. For example I know, that I can change the settings in Windows in the Control Panel, but in Hungarian it’s called Vezérlőpult. It’s not a problem, when I myself using the Hungarian version, I can recognise everythin. But it’s etremely difficult to give orders on the phone when I’m not in front of the computer and my partner is using Hungarian version of the software.

Reference list:

William Shakespeare (1597) Richard III [Online] Available from: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardiii/index.html (Accessed: 07. February 2010)
Brad Linder (2008) Google adds speech recognition to video search [Online] Available from: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/07/15/google-adds-speech-recognition-to-video-search/ (Accessed:07. February 2010)

Professional responsibility

Laszlo — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 19:52:47 +0000

The question was: “What responsibility do computing professionals have to society at large and to other members of their profession? Do they have any responsibilities or are their working lives solely measured in terms of their adherence to company policy and goals? How does this translate into the broader area of business ethics?”Maybe I seem profane in many’s eyes, but I do think, that computing professionals don’t have any special responsibilities. We’re not special, although many of us like to think so. In my oppinion all our responsibilities are determined by our actual role. This profession nowadays is not a single one. When I started to work, all IT experts had to be able to write programs, install software, in most cases train people. Nowadays you cannot be trainer, engineer, developer, help-desk professional in the same time. Even those categories are split into numerous other categories. In my oppinion, our work is glued to work of others, our roles have their pair amongst the old, existing roles. Let’s take some examples: IT trainer – teacher, software developer – engineer, user support – mechanic, etc. Of course I don’t say, that every role existed in the past. I believe, that the responsibility’s roots are the same now and were the same in the past.

We are responsible fo our acts as we are human. Computer professionals’ responsibility is for example to defend the children from the dangers on the internet. But all humans are responsible to defend the children from dangers in the world. Stefan C. Dombrowski & Karen L. Gischlar (n.d) for example suggest a kind of parent-children “contract” in order to make sure both the parents and the children have the same knowledge about the rules. A good resource of articles is the website of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. For example the user nbrigham wrote on this website ” Strict copyright laws may protect the interests of companies selling intellectual property products, but these same laws could limit public access to information.” which shows that many times there isn’t just one good and one bad way. In my oppinion IT professionals working for a company has to follow the company’s directions and work for it’s goals, unless the company works illegally or making unethicaly products, for example virus or troyan software. But this also not different for non-it professionals. They should not take part in making of any illegal or unethical product or service.

My oppinion is that responsibility and ethics are not derived from a profession, they are derived from the humanity.

References:

Stefan C. Dombrowski & Karen L. Gischlar (n.d) Keeping Children Safe on the Internet: Guidelines for Parents [Online] Available from: http://www.nasponline.org/publications/cq/cq342internetsafety_ho.aspx (Accessed: 07. February 2010)
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (2008) Intellectual Property [Online] Available from: http://cpsr.org/issues/ip/index.html (Accessed: 07. February 2010)

Liability or reality?

Laszlo — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:57:44 +0000

I chose this question one because of my personal experience. My company made a website for a client who was our partner for many years. It was more than a partnership, near to a friendship. We were near to the end of the project (two days before the handover) when one of our partner’s employees made an error, our partner thought that we made it and because his life in those times was very stressful he got mad. He decided to sue us to pay back all his money and refused to pay our remaining fee. It’s a four year old story and we’re still fighting on the court. I not just can imagine, but I know exactly how difficult is to define the limits of liability.
Theoretically it is possible to make error free programs. Francez Nissim(1993) thinks that using discrete maths and formal logic it is possible to make error free algorithms. But programs are the implementation of the algorithms. Programs are made by engineers and not mathematicans. Nowadays applications are running on the top of many layers, eg. operating system, code frameworks, they are using device drivers to handle hardware devices. For software development we use editors, compilers, IDEs. All mentioned layers and tools are programs themselves, too and they are made by a lot of programmers. Sometimes hundreds of programmers are working on one of those programs. We know, the man is not perfect. Practically even if our software is perfect, it has to run on thoose layers and it has to be made by the mentioned tools. Since any of them can contain errors what affects our software, we cannot guarantee that our software will work perfectly.
On the other side, software is a key factor in our life now. We can find them even in some washing machines or refrigerators. Charlie White (2006) wrote about an existing smart refrigerator in 2006, years ago! Softwares participate in flight control and airplane driving. They do almost all calculations instead of engineers who build skyscrapers or malls. It’s obvious for me, that developers need to be responsible for their work. The ethical liability is obvious. The hard part is the legal liability. Glyn Moody (2009) writes about several possible solutions. EU proposes a regulation, what says that software should work perfectly in normal conditions. They say it’s the customers’ right – which sounds right. He cites Bruce Schneider, who wrote: “Computers are the only mass-market consumer item that pushes this burden onto the consumer, requiring him to have a high level of technical sophistication just to survive.” What makes this question even more difficult is Open Source software. Who can find the guilty amongst hundreds of contributors, who many times just use nicknames to sign the code?

Reference list:
Charlie White (2006) Samsung Smart Zipel Refrigerator [Online] Available from: http://gizmodo.com/156257/samsung-smart-zipel-refrigerator (Accessed: 15 October 2009)
Glyn Moody (2009) Should Software Developers Be Liable for their Code? [Online] Available from: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/should-software-developers-be-liable-their-code (Accessed: 15. October 2009)
Francez Nissim (1993) Program Verification (International Computer Science Series) Boston: Addison-Wesley.

Different ways of thinking

Laszlo — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:56:12 +0000

A program is a list of tasks to be performed by definition. But it can also be defined as a way of mapping a large task to shorter tasks. A computer always performs a program as a list of tasks. I take this question as a theoretical one. In my opinion the difference is the problem solver’s way of thinking. Let’s see a real world example. Assume, we have to sort a set of values. In case we try to solve it as a list of tasks, we probably come to a result, similar to the bubble sort algorithm. Paul E. Black (2009) gives a definition of bubble sort algorithm: “Sort by comparing each adjacent pair of items in a list in turn, swapping the items if necessary, and repeating the pass through the list until no swaps are done.”. This algorithm is an iterative way of solving the given problem. What happens when we try to map the large task to shorter tasks? Although there are a lot of sources where I can find this algorithm, I chose the same source because I think this dictionary is very useful. Conrado Martinez (2009) gave a definition of Quicksort algorithm: ” Pick an element from the array (the pivot), partition the remaining elements into those greater than and less than this pivot, and recursively sort the partitions.”. Divide et impera. Nice and elegant solution of the same problem. We can see the difference in the way of thinking. Both of them can give us a solution and both ways have it’s pros and cons. Recursion’s main drawback is the intensive memory usage. It is especially important in Java, my favourite programing language. Although Shawn Bayern (2001) writes about a very nice method of reducing the size of needed memory while keeping the code nice. I also have to mention another practical aspect. Although recursive algorithms are usually more elegant and many times it’s more easy to solve problem using them, they are usually slower as shiman (2008) wrote in his blog with some nice examples. He also summarizes the main cause of using the recursion: “Q: Then why use recursion?? A: It makes the code beautiful – recursion is a beauty of programming. Sometimes it is much simpler to write the recursive version.” Reference list: Conrado Martinez (2009) quicksort in Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures [Online]. Available from: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/HTML/quicksort.html (Accessed: 15 October 2009) Paul E. Black (2009) bubble sort in Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures [Online]. Available from: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/HTML/bubblesort.html (Accessed: 15 October 2009) Shawn Bayern (2001) Synchronized Recursion [Online]. Available from: http://www.ddj.com/architect/184404657 (Accessed: 15 October 2009) shiman (2008) Recursion VS Iteration (Looping) : Speed & Memory Comparison [Online]. Available from: http://shiman.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/recursion-vs-iteration/ (Accessed: 15 October 2009)

Describe an OS

Laszlo — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:22:14 +0000

I have a small company, where we decided to choose Freebsd as the server platform. We don’t have too much money to spend so the price was one of the main reasons. We needed a server platform which can host web services reliably. Although my partners and me also are IT experts, we wanted to spend the least possible time with the operating system. We wanted to concentrate on the web development instead. When we started the company, Windows wasn’t reliable at all. We hadn’t got enough time to support it – not mentioning the price of a Windows server with Microsoft or Oracle SQL server. LINUX was an obvious choice. After fighting with the problems in several LINUX distributions (SUSE, Slackware), one of my friends asked: Why don’t you try Freebsd? I never had any problems with it! Upon his suggestion we installed Freebsd on a server without any previous experience. We experienced that Freebsd completely fulfilled our needs, it adequately performs as a web server which needs no maintenance. We usually reinstall our servers when we need a full version upgrade, apart from it our Freebsd servers were running all time without interruption. These “servers” were desktop computers without any server features! On a workshop SamoaTel ISP wrote: “And, in case you missed this, FreeBSD is extremely stable, particularly under heavy load. ” (http://ws.edu.isoc.org/workshops/2006/ccTLD-Samoa/day1/freebsd/whyfreebsd.html, 2006) I think Freebsd have more advantages than disadvantages. Once it is set up properly – which is not always easy in case of exotic hardware devices – it runs till the end of the hardware’s life. Bob Bruce and Murray Stokely also thinks that Freebsd is a very realiable operating system with an uptime what can be measured in years (http://people.freebsd.org/~murray/bsd_flier.html,n.d). I also experienced, that Freebsd is a very secure operating system. We only had succesfull attacks from hackers because of our own misconfiguration. Almost all information sources tells you a lot about security in Freebsd because it’s one of the most important features of this operating system. It has a very thorough release engineering process to minimize the chance of the security leaks in the code. Freebsd issues a regular Security advisory newsletter to advise the administrators. Jail system ensures, that you can run any application in a “sandbox” wihout affecting the performance. It ships with three enterprise level firewall and strong security audit features! Another very important aspect is the Ports tree. This Ports three is a hierarchically organized software collection. The Ports tree itself only contains a small stub file with the location of the source code of the software. When you need a new application, you can simply navigate in the hierarchy to it – or you can also use a search function – and type in a make install command. Freebsd will download the source, compile it, configure it and the application is ready to use. I have to mention that it’s hard to find better references about freebsd, than Freebsd Handbook. The FreeBSD Documentation Project (2009) FreeBSD Handbook [Online]. Available from: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/ (Accessed: 11. October 2009). If I could modify just one element, I’d improve the support of Virtualization. Although Sun’s VirtualBox is available in Ports, Freebsd’s competitors usually offer more choices. Rogier Dittner,David Rule (2007) The best damn server virtualization book period. Burlington: Syngress Publishing Inc., pp 39-40 published a detailed comparison table about virtualization solutions and they only list Freebsd as a guest OS. This definitely needs to be improved. Reference list: Bob Bruce, Murray Stokely (n.d) FreeBSD vs. Linux vs. Windows 2000 [Online]. Available from: http://people.freebsd.org/~murray/bsd_flier.html (Accessed: 11. October 2009) Rogier Dittner,David Rule (2007) The best damn server virtualization book period. Burlington: Syngress Publishing Inc., pp 39-40 SamoaTel ISP (2006) Why Did We Choose FreeBSD? [Online] Available from: http://ws.edu.isoc.org/workshops/2006/ccTLD-Samoa/day1/freebsd/whyfreebsd.html (Accessed: 11. October 2009) The FreeBSD Documentation Project (2009) FreeBSD Handbook [Online]. Available from: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/ (Accessed: 11. October 2009)

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Tool for Teamwork

Laszlo — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:41:44 +0000

I’m looking for the perfect solution for coordinating my little team’s software development. I’ve tested several collaboration solutions and now I think I’ve found a good one.

Codespaces Dashboard

What I need is: svn hosting with web interface (Trac or similar) and at least a common worklpace for the developers or information sharing and communication. And it has to be cheap I’ve found what I need in Codespaces (www.codespaces.com) . It has svn hosting with the option of downloading the backup files for archiving purpose (they backup, too). You can create project workspaces. You can make svn repositories in those workspaces. Any number of repositories can go into one project, but one repository can belong to multiple projects, too. You can make wiki and a forum, for the project. Of course it has a feature/milestone handling tool, too, you can handle error reports and fixing there, too. You have a nice dashboard to have an overview on the progress of the team. You can switch between the projects quickly. Of course you can have multiple users and they can be assigned to different projects – they cannot see the rest of the projects. They can have different access rights. And the pirce is amazing. The plan I currently need is only $9,99 per month for a 1G space! Try it, it worths!

Codespaces GANTT chart

www.codespaces.com And no, it is not an advertisement

Linux operating system

Laszlo — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:28:47 +0000

In 25th of August, 1991 the history of Linux has begun with a post to the MINIX newsgroup by Linus Torwalds: “Hello everybody out there using minix – I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. … PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have .” (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html, 2009). Some years has passed, so now we can say, that those words changed the history of computing. It’s interesting to read, that this operating system wasn’t intended to be a professional one, it wasn’t intended to be a portable one. It was simply a tool for Linus for practicing C language and the 80286 processor’s architecture. Although there was a keyword in his post: free. Linux was free and remained to be free. Anybody was allowed to contribute and thus thousands of developers started to use it. For years, Linux was the playground of the programmers. I myself also used it a lot years ago just for the sole purpose of trying out many different programming languages. In those years Microsoft was dominant on the PCs and Unix was dominant on the servers. All commercial operating systems source code was closed. The code contained errors. I do believe, that the real programmer likes to solve problems (solve problems better then other programmers). Many of them didn’t learn programming in a school, they became programmers because they found that it’s a challenging new industry. It was more difficult to find education resources and participating in development of an operating system was – and still is a very challenging task. Parallel with the evolution of Linux the revolution of the Internet became faster and faster, what made a huge need for web servers and other services on the Internet. Developers made free servers and community started to use them, test them and even patch them and published the patches. The word “free” makes possible for developers to participate, but it’s not enough for organizations. Most organizations need stability and support. Many told that Linux had and has greater stability than Windows for example, but there was a big difference: Windows had commercial support but Linux hadn’t. According to Redhat.com (http://www.redhat.com/about/companyprofile/history/, n.d), in December, 1997 they introduced Redhat 5.0 and the commercial phone support for Linux. This meant, that any organization was able to turn to a respected and trusted company for support and they knew, that they are not alone if they cannot solve a problem with their operation system. Programmers can play but companies cannot. On the other side, selling commercial support for Linux seems to be a Win-Win situation. Organizations need it and companies selling commercial support can attract investors and make profit. Kenneth Hess on Linuxplanet.com wrote: “The idea of fixed yearly support costs is an appealing one. Knowing exactly what your desktop and server support costs will be for the coming year makes it much simpler to create a budget. Purchase a three-year subscription and enjoy a 10 percent discount on the price. Imagine accurately planning a three-year budget — that’s the stuff of bean-counters’ dreams!” (http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6681/1/, February 25, 2009). In my opinion commercial support and the huge number of available applications are the key for Linux’s success amongst commercial organizations. Reference list: Kenneth Hess (2009) Commercial Linux Support Showdown [Online] Linuxplanet.com. Available from: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6681/1/ (Accessed: 11. October 2009) Linus Torwalds (n.d) LINUX’s History [Online] Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. Available from: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html (Accessed: 11. October 2009) RedHat Inc. (n.d) Red Hat History [Online]. Available from: http://www.redhat.com/about/companyprofile/history/ (Accessed: 11. October 2009)