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.

We get a fair amount of traffic over at FOSSwire. Like most of the WordPress installations I have a connection with, we have an Akismet installation running there to deal with comment spam.

To its credit, it’s pretty good, but recently I’ve been having to manually clean up a load of trackback spam that’s getting past the filter. It’s a real pain and irritates me immensely. Usually Akismet works so well…

Maybe it’s worth installing an additional spam comment solution such as Bad Behaviour. I really don’t know. Anyone else had any success with any other anti-spam solutions?

I’ve just finished rolling out an update to the site here, so you might have noticed a few changes. Here’s what’s happened:

• Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible integration. A nice red Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible banner appears at the top of every page with my latest tweet.
• New page – the portfolio. Admittedly, it’s not a true portfolio, but I couldn’t think of a better name. That page is all about raising my profile with potential employers. That’s the aim.
• New header image!
• Tweaks and optimisations to make things run better and more smoothly. For the time being, my Zooomr photos in the sidebar have been removed, as the Zooomr photo page RSS feeds no longer work since Mark III (apparently they will be reinstated shortly). Before the update, pages were taking longer than necessary to load because of the overhead of checking Zooomr for a non-existent feed URL every pageload (and the feed caching didn’t kick in because it was returning a 404).
• A few CSS hacks and alterations for better support at lower resolutions and in IE.

By the way, if you can’t see the new design tweaks and the Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible banner isn’t red, hit reload again to make sure you have the latest stylesheet cached.

Anyway, must now get back on with the Project, before I’m missed!

Incidentally, if you’re tracking version numbers this revision to the design could be called version 3.1 (I probably missed out minor revisions in the 2.x range as well):

• 1.0 – original Blogger template
• 2.0 – modified WP-Andreas09 in orange
• 3.0 – original revision of this design
• 3.1 – current revision

Left – MacBook with Firefox open, with the project I’m developing open and tabs with any other resources I need to hand.

Middle – IM and other random windows so I can stay in contact and stash stuff I want close. Only 1024×768, but ah well.

Right – code open in (one of) the world’s greatest web development IDE(s) – Quanta.

Please boycott Xandros. Giving in to the game is stupid.

Novell, Xandros, who is going to give in next? Isn’t this a fun game…

Roll on GPLv3 as quickly as possible. Please. Before we lose anyone else.

… to 200MB used on my primary Gmail account.

For those of you who don’t already know, I’m extremely pleased to announce that I won the PHP Classes Innovation Award of April 2007 for my latest free software release, SleekTabs.

I’d like to thank everyone who voted for me and everyone in the PHP Classes community. I am very proud to be recognised.

I may well get some time this weekend to work on the next version, which should improve some of the annoying quirks in the first release, add some new features and stabilise the code a bit.

Once again, thanks to everyone who supported me. I hope that in time SleekTabs can help out a lot of people and I of course welcome all suggestions and comments regarding it.

Today marks one month of running this site from my own server! It really doesn’t seem that long to be honest, and apart from a couple of minor hiccups (which I’ll go into later), it’s been a very successful setup.

I’m very happy with the setup actually, but unfortunately recently we had a couple of issues. First of all, on Thursday my ISP decided to have connection issues with our local exchange, bringing the connection – and the site – down for several hours.

The other problem was that yesterday I woke up, checked the server’s Tripwire logs as I always do and noticed something very strange. Tripwire was reporting that something had modified all the system critical binaries and several libraries too (everything in /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin and /sbin and most of /usr/lib). I couldn’t find a reasonable explanation for the modifications and had no idea what had happened, so I spent a large portion of Monday reinstalling the OS and porting the data back over.

Everything’s running fine now.

I don’t know whether someone broke into the server (I can’t find any evidence of a break-in at all looking at the dump I did of the filesystem) or whether it was just some quirk in Tripwire or some change CentOS had made. Still, I didn’t want to take any chances so I reinstalled clean.

Still, I’m bemused. If anyone can shed any light on the issue or wants to help me analyse the data I have, give me a shout.

Anyway, back to the festivities. Woot! Here’s to the next month of self-hosting!