First of all, sorry for my lack of posting. I’ve been really busy trying to work on Vaveo (which is coming along very nicely), trying to keep up a post a day on FOSSwire (and pretty much managing it too) and of course trying to keep up with life too. 😉

That means my personal blog here has had to suffer over the last few weeks, so if you were expecting lots of awesome content here, try here instead.

Over the past month and a bit, we have literally gone from nothing on Vaveo to where we are now, where we have a significant number of features done. There are still features left to do, and lots of testing to do and bugs to squash, but I’m really happy that we are getting there and making very good progress considering I’m not even able to do this full time at the moment. By this time next weekend, it should be full time, though.

It is the weekend now, so I get a little more time (I don’t stop working on Vaveo, however, but I don’t do full days either or I’d go mad!) and hopefully get to catch up with stuff. Like this blog. 🙂

An IM conversation a little earlier today:

Chris Van Patten: drupal 6 is going to be preinstalled with openid support
Peter Upfold: awesome
Peter Upfold: when is it out?
Chris Van Patten: soon, i hope… i have to digg up the email
Peter Upfold: digg lol
Peter Upfold: ;D
Chris Van Patten: hahahaha
Chris Van Patten: wow i can’t believe i did that
Peter Upfold: that’s what the web does to you 😛

Also posted on Chris’s Tumblr but I wanted to repost it here too. 😉

I recently won the PHP Classes Innovation Award for SleekTabs.

You do get a prize for winning, selectable from several generous corporate sponsors. I chose an O’Reilly book of choice, which happened to be MySQL Cookbook.

It arrived today, shipped all the way from California.

Massive thanks to O’Reilly and all the other sponsors and of course to the PHP Classes site for the recognition I have been given by this award. SleekTabs will hopefully get some well-needed dev attention pretty soon. 😀

Thanks again, everyone!

Thanks to Preferences dialogue regression in Firefox 2.0, the option to force all links that would open in a new window to open in tabs instead disappeared. Which is pretty stupid.

Just wiped out my old, bloated Firefox profile on my Kubuntu desktop here and suddenly, horror of horrors, it starts opening new windows instead of new tabs. I can’t use the Preferences dialogue, so…

browser.link.open_newwindow in about:config needs to be set to 3. Someone should make an extension which can change all these preferences that didn’t make the cut to 2.x from the GUI.

All fixed now.

Skitch – it has a bit of a quirky and unusual UI, but it is admittedly a very cool application.

Uploaded with Skitch!

The Project, which can now be publicly known as Vaveo (I have no idea how to pronounce that, by the way), is what I have been working really hard on for the past few weeks. Since it all has been very secret up until now, there are some screenshots for the impatient and curious below. 😀

The screenshots below demonstrate only some of what is Vaveo – we’re not giving the whole game away just yet!

» Read the rest of this post…

Nothing like a bit of lolcode.

Teh find iz by cvp. Orignal sauce.. kthxbai

Not again.

Intellectual Property Assurance
Through the agreement, Microsoft and Linspire have developed a framework to provide patent covenants for Linspire customers. The patent covenants provide customers with confidence that the Linspire technologies they use come with rights to relevant Microsoft patents. As well, Linspire now joins a growing group of open source software (OSS) distributors collaborating with Microsoft on efforts to establish rich interoperability, deliver IP assurance to customers and build the bridge between open source and proprietary software.

For Microsoft, the agreement is the latest in a series of collaborations with Linux platform and OSS providers. This list of collaborators includes JBoss, LG Electronics, Novell, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Xandros Inc., XenSource Inc. and Zend Technologies Inc.

I now refuse to run Linspire as well. I feel really strong about this – I refuse to let Microsoft have any influence over my Linux system. They have plenty of industry influence already and every deal like this just makes me more livid.

The strangest thing about this deal?

Linspire will select the Live Search service of Windows Live as the Linspire 5.0 default Web search engine, allowing Microsoft to bring Live Search to a broader set of users and providing leading search capabilities to Linspire customers.

Seems a bit ironic they’re setting a search engine which on the UK version can’t find the FSF on a query for ‘free software’ as the default. On what is supposed to be a free software operating system (but arguably isn’t anymore).

With Apple just having released Safari for Windows and people wondering exactly why, I wanted to put out my thoughts on Gecko versus WebKit. I may well be wrong on some of the technical and historical points here, I’m just going on what my understanding is and my opinion on the two engines. Please do correct me in the comments, I’m sure I’ve made some mistake somewhere. I just want to put out my opinion on this.

At the moment, Gecko has the edge in terms of compatibility. There are only few sites that do not render properly in it, and it does very well as a rendering engine.

The problem is – Gecko was designed for Netscape 6 for Windows. Netscape 6 was a complete disaster, but the Gecko rendering engine survived and made it to where it is today.

Unfortunately, it still carries around baggage from those NS6 days. Gecko wasn’t really built for what it is doing today (although it is doing a pretty damn good job at it). Add to that the complexity of some of the architecture like XPCOM and XUL, Gecko starts to look quite heavyweight.

XPCOM adds a lot of code for marshalling objects between different usage contexts (eg. different languages). This leads to code bloat in XPCOM based systems. This was one of the reasons why Apple chose KHTML over the XPCOM-based Gecko rendering engine for their Web Browser[3]. Source

Apple chose to fork KHTML and built WebKit over implementing Gecko because they saw the value of KHTML being light, speedy, developed from the ground up for these things. In the long term, WebKit’s architecture is probably a better choice for Apple.

Do you really want to carry around Netscape 6 on your iPhone?

As far as compatibility goes, I think things will only get better now that Safari runs on Windows.

As much as I love Gecko, use Firefox, advocate Firefox and will continue to use it in the future, I think Apple made and are making the right decisions with WebKit and the Safari platform.

Just my £0.02.

Add LG Electronics to the list of companies that have sold out and are playing the game.

At this rate, there won’t be many companies left.