http://www.unixodbc.org/

The unixODBC Project goals are to develop and promote unixODBC to be the definitive standard for ODBC on non MS Windows platforms. This is to include GUI support for both KDE and GNOME.

http://www.freetds.org/index.html

FreeTDS is a set of libraries for Unix and Linux that allows your programs to natively talk to Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase databases.

Technically speaking, FreeTDS is an open source implementation of the TDS (Tabular Data Stream) protocol used by these databases for their own clients. It supports many different flavors of the protocol and three APIs to access it. Additionally FreeTDS works with other software such as Perl and PHP, providing access from those languages as well.

If you are looking for a Java implementation, we refer you to the jTDS project on SourceForge.

FreeTDS has many possible uses. It has been used by Unix/Linux webservers to present data stored in SQL Server to the web, to port SQL Server database code from NT to Unix, to import data into SQL Server from a Unix source, and to provide database access on platforms (such as realtime systems) that have no native drivers.

The FreeTDS C libraries are available under the terms of the GNU LGPL license, consult the COPYING.LIB file in the distribution for details.

http://faq.perl.org/

The perlfaq comprises several documents that answer the most commonly asked questions about Perl and Perl programming. It’s divided by topic into nine major sections outlined in this document.

Where to get the perlfaq

The perlfaq comes with the standard Perl distribution, so if you have Perl you should have the perlfaq. You should also have the perldoc tool that let’s you read the perlfaq:

	$ perldoc perlfaq

Besides your local system, you can find the perlfaq on the web, including at http://perldoc.perl.org/ .

The perlfaq is an evolving document and you can read the latest version at http://faq.perl.org/ . The perlfaq-workers periodically post extracts of the latest perlfaq to comp.lang.perl.misc.

You can view the source tree at https://svn.perl.org/modules/perlfaq/trunk/ (which is outside of the main Perl source tree). The SVN repository notes all changes to the FAQ and holds the latest version of the working documents and may vary significantly from the version distributed with the latest version of Perl. Check the repository before sending your corrections.

http://ecir2008.dcs.gla.ac.uk/industry.html

ECIR 2008 will be followed by a special day on Thursday 3rd April 2008 devoted to the interests and needs of Information Retrieval practitioners. The Industry Day is devoted to designing and developing practical solutions for information retrieval products and services, and aims to build bridges between IR specialists in industry and academia. This forum presents an opportunity for commercial organisations and individuals to share their work with a wider audience, and for researchers to learn more about the issues and problems faced by IR practitioners in developing practical solutions for the information search and retrieval industry.

While this is the first time an industry day is held as an intrinsic part of the ECIR programme and in the same venue as the main conference, the previous editions of the BCS IRSG industry day held in London .

http://libots.sourceforge.net/

The Open Text Summarizer is an open source tool for summarizing texts. The program reads a text and decides which sentences are important and which are not. It ships with Ubuntu, Fedora and other major linux distros. Several academic publications have benchmarked it and praised it.

Example 1:
cat articles/sacbee1.txt | ./ots –ratio 20 –html

This command will summarize the article from the Sacramento Bee (sacbee1.txt) and highlight the 20% of sentences most important to the content of the article.

Example 2:
cat articles/sacbee1.txt | ./ots –ratio 40

This command will summarize the article, giving the 40% of the article which is most important, and print it as text.