Have you ever peeked into one of those bazillion .el files in your Emacs installation’s lisp folder and wondered what it meant? Or have you ever looked at a GIMP script .scm file and scratched your head over all the parentheses? Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages still in common use, and Scheme is a streamlined dialect of Lisp. Many universities use Scheme as the language to introduce students to the Computer Science curriculum, and some of their teaching methods are based on the assumption that Scheme is the one language they can count on their students knowing. Even so, many active programmers and system administrators are unfamiliar with Scheme. This article will get you on your way to adding this tool to your developer or sysadmin toolkit.

It’s time to learn Scheme

Version 2.6 of the Amanda open source network backup software has just been released. This is a significant update that includes new tools to ease installation and configuration, added security and performance enhancements, a new data transfer architecture and device API, and more built in checks as well as a utility for checking dump images. There are significant advances in architecture and coding to improve the accessibility of the code to developers who can put Amanda to use in a variety of ways.
For more information, see: http://www.zmanda.com/amanda-26-released.html

 Amanda 2.6 Released