Apparently, Sun are announcing and releasing GPL’ed Java today (possibly at 16:30 my time, GMT, but I could well have done the conversion wrong).
This will be awesome and will hopefully not only strengthen Java as a platform as Linux developers move to Java and build cross-platform applications, but hopefully it will also get Linux working even better out of the box.
According to Ars Technica, the first crack for Vista and Office 2007 has surfaced.
Unlike a normal crack, however, this one just replaces some of the key Windows and Office files (presumably the activation and ‘revenue protection’ DLLs) with their contemporaries from the earlier releases. That means you can use Beta or Release Candidate activation keys on the final release and use the final versions.
Unfortunately the article doesn’t mention whether the cracked versions have the expiry date that the pre-release versions had (software with an expiry date? Now that sucks).
No doubt they’ll just block the beta keys very soon via Windows Update or Windows Genuine-we’re-going-to-make-you-run-some-stupid-software Validation.
Very interesting…
Listen to the special Novell Open Audio report here.
Strange title, you reckon?
No.
Not really.
Something really big is happening. I’m a founding member of Oratos Media, a blog and podcast network.
Joining the already founded Gizbuzz, YouMakeMedia and PodDev in the network is FOSSwire, a free and open source software blog. Don’t worry, the tutorials will still keep coming here too, but they’ll be more (and not always written by me) at FOSSwire. Subscribe to it now!
Anyway, you can read more about the network at Gizbuzz (or any other Oratos blog actually).
This is so exciting…
Apple just upgraded the MacBook to Core 2 Duo. And I didn’t even realise the Core 2 did 64-bit either!
I want one.
But I also want Leopard, so I’ll see you in the spring, MacBook Core 2 Duo… with 64-bit Leopard and all my KDE apps running on top of OS X.
In completely unrelated news, I now officially consider myself a Linux geek as I successfully compiled my own kernel and got it to run on my spare machine under Ubuntu.
Beat that kernel name! Hosted on ZooomrThe fact that the code is exactly the same as the vanilla 2.6.18.2 release is completely irrelevant and coincidental! 😛
The tutorial I used to build the kernel is here.
I’ve now started a brand new coding project. It’s currently codenamed Megaphone (that may or may not be the final name :P) and here’s a quick look at what it’s hopefully going to be.
The idea stemmed from the problem that it was difficult to track story submission ideas (generally for blogs, when people send emails for things to cover). With no existing infrastructure for logging these submissions, it was difficult to keep track, see what was going on where, and whether something had been followed up or not.
So Megaphone is a database-driven web app (PHP powered, of course, as that’s all I know on the webdev front) which eases this process, by allowing submissions, listing them, tagging them, categorising them and allowing collaboration on them (comments etc.).
As always, keep up-to-date with the development effort by watching this blog (subscribe dammit!).
The code is currently in a very early stage and isn’t worth publicising yet (plus there are redundant bits of old code particularly in the sign in system that need to be flushed out), but I’m pretty sure this will end up a free/open source project. I’m guessing it will be GPL’ed when I release it, but there’s no guarantees.
Also, there are no guarantees at this stage that I will not give up this project. If some better solution appears, I may without warning cease development, so you have been warned.
Also #2 – if anyone wants to volunteer to do the theme, including the artwork and stylesheets and stuff for when I release it, then comment on this post. You’ll have to be happy for your stuff to be subject to the GPL (or whatever licence I end up choosing), but of course you will retain copyright of your contributions, so you will be able to reuse it for whatever.
Come on, you know what this is about.
But I’m really not sure where I stand on this.
On the one hand, there’s a chance that this could help FOSS and interoperability, but at the same time, Microsoft is a company. Companies want to make profit – as much of the damn stuff as possible; and MS will make more profit in a world without FOSS. I just can’t help thinking this is the first stage of embrance, extend and extinguish.
I really hope Novell aren’t stabbing the community in the back. Only time will tell, I guess.
I’ll certainly be listening to the Novell Open Audio on this subject, to hear their point of view.
I’m just having a play around with Flock, and doing a test blog post from within the browser.
Nice!
Blogged with Flock
When I posted back in October about the results of the PHP Classes Innovation Awards, they were actually the results of the August 2006 award, not the September one where WPGet was entered (congrats anyway, though, to everyone who was nominated!).
Well, I just got this email because the September results are now out:
Congratulations Peter,
This is a notification message to let you know that your package WPGet is
ranked as number 3 on the PHP Programming Innovation Award in the PHP
Classes site during the month of September of 2006. It has gotten 10.53%
of all votes. The final ranking listing is available here:
(It’s worth noting that I’m joint third with 4 other projects, which the email doesn’t say)
This is absolutely brilliant!
You can see the full results at the PHP Classes results page, and of course congratulations to Georgi Momchilov, whose class Gunit (an automated class feature testing class) won the award!
W00t!
This site – Don’t Click It, is very interesting.
Basically, you don’t have to (and aren’t supposed to) click the mouse button at all (apart from the initial ‘click here’ at the very start) to navigate it. I’ve had a play around and it’s actually really difficult to try and stop yourself clicking, especially when there are buttons that you expect to have to click.
It breaks all the rules of interface design that we’re used to, and it is an interesting exercise in seeing whether you can resist clicking.
Have a play around!
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