Just a quick post to wish all my loyal readers, everyone who’s just arrived, and everyone in general a very merry and peaceful Christmas tomorrow. Please note the festive openclipart.org picture in the top right (feed reader people might have to click through to the site to see that!)

In fact, whatever you’re doing tomorrow, have a good one.

I’ll be back blogging probably either on Boxing Day (26th) or the 27th, depending on what happens and how quickly I decide to return to my busy development schedule – and after that how much time I have left to blog. Anyway, enjoy the holiday!

It’s kind of a fusion of ‘live’ and ‘velocity’. Don’t ask me about the name, I’m just a code monkey. 😛

But anyway – this is what I’m working on for a lot of my time at the moment.

Livelocity is a digital media marketplace for anyone. In the digital age, major labels and their top-down system of content delivery are irrelevant. Livelocity seeks to supplant that system with a new system that allows anyone to share and profit off of their art.

Livelocity will be available to the general public on February 14th.

If you’re at all interested in the sound of this, then why not head over and sign up for the beta testing period? It’s not done yet, but the code factory is working pretty much full time (when I can get to a computer and code anyway) so it should be here soon.

Oooh – also, if you know of any musicians or any kind of media creators that might be interested in being part of Livelocity at the beta stage and beyond, then get them in contact with Livelocity’s Chief Idea Factory, Chris Van Patten.

I guess I’ll be back tomorrow with a seasonal and festive post (and you better watch the top right hand corner of the site too :D), but if I’m not, have a great Christmas. I’ll no doubt blog again before the New Year.

Mozilla have released Firefox 2.0.0.1, which contains some important security updates and a couple of other fixes, plus official support for Vista (it worked fine in RC1 for me anyway, but now it’s officially supported).

To upgrade, go to Help > Check for updates (running as an administrator) and restart the browser when it’s done.

Well, I wasn’t not-free before, but as of today my Christmas break officially starts and I have days all to myself – in theory.

With a bit of luck – and provided that there are no unforeseen circumstances, development efforts on Megaphone and Livelocity (I think I’m allowed to say that :P) can accelerate to hopefully full speed.

WPGet is currently on the backburner, but idea suggestions are wanted for the next version.

I’ll obviously still be trying to juggle my time between the two major coding projects, keeping myself sane by messing about installing stuff, breaking stuff, reinstalling stuff and breaking it again and of course trying to not spend too much time on the computer too.

Tomorrow I may be on and off development (or running between rooms) as I’ve got to do a nice, fun Windows XP reinstall on another machine. But considering how long Windows takes to install, don’t be concerned. 😀

Apologies. It’s been literally months since I did my last tutorial here. Most of my tutorial effort has been focused on FOSSwire. Anyway, I’m back now and thanks to a request from Nick I’m starting a new multi-part tutorial today.

Now this has been covered in many places before and the subject is object-oriented programming (OOP) in PHP. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’m using PHP 5.1.6 on Linux, but all of this should work on PHP 5.x on any platform and most of it will work in PHP 4.x.

» Read the rest of this post…

This OSNews story tracks a conversation on a mailing list about the Linux kernel. Basically, some people who hack on the kernel want to place a warning in the kernel if you try and load a non-free kernel module or driver that it will not work in kernels released as of January 2008. The idea being they will release another patch by then that prevents non-free modules from loading.

I think this is a stupid idea.

First of all, this move would in theory lock out the proprietary Nvidia and ATI graphics drivers. Now I’m running the Nvidia driver for Linux as I type this. If that suddenly stops working in 2008 when I upgrade, then I won’t be able to enjoy beautiful graphics or play amazing open source games.

Also, in theory it would also block a technology called ndiswrapper, which allows you to run Windows network card drivers (usually for wireless cards) under Linux. It’s open source, but since it links with proprietary code (the Windows drivers), it would be restricted presumably.

More importantly, this makes Linux look worse as an OS to people who might consider switching, and might consider the free software/open source ideology. Their 3D graphics will never be able to work out of the box (unless they have an Intel chip) and their wireless cards are never going to work. Is this going to inspire more people to use a free platform?

No. It will alienate potential users and it will make Linux, in the eyes of the average computer user, go from almost a real alternative to being an interesting technical exercise for free software purists, and free software purists only.

To the people considering doing this – would you rather have people use a mostly free platform or use a completely proprietary platform because the 100% free one doesn’t work with their hardware and isn’t therefore useful to them? Make your choice.

I’ve made mine – if this goes through, in a year’s time I’ll be running a patched kernel with this restriction removed. Unless every single device driver goes open source within a year (which isn’t going to happen).

Thankfully, Linus is against this move and I support him on this. There are also other arguments against this – including that it violates Freedom 0, but I’ve said enough and you’ve read enough.

Following up from my post about the leaked Royale Noir theme, I’ve been told that Microsoft’s Zune theme for Windows XP is essentially the evolution of this theme.

It’s pretty nice actually and feels much more ‘finished’ than the Royale Noir theme. It’s now running on my Windows desktop.

Download it from Microsoft here.

ZuneTheme Hosted on Zooomr

Thanks for the tip, Adam.

You might notice that WPGet hasn’t been getting much development time recently. Basically, I was really happy with the 0.6 release and we’d had no reported problems, and I had no new feature ideas at the time, so I left it.

However, I’ve been scribbling down ideas for WPGet 0.7 and I’ve got some cool stuff I want to do. But what do you – the users think? Please feel free to contact me in any way you want (comments on here are fine!) to let me know what works for you, what I should add and what sucks beyond belief.

A few ideas so far are below. Please note – these ideas are subject to being scribbled out, and to more being scribbled down. This list doesn’t guarantee a feature will make it.

• New style system – the output from WPGet will have templated styles (plus custom stylesheets as well, and original mode)
• Perhaps generation of images (for off-site use, in forum signatures etc) from WordPress posts?
• Support for WordPress author, so you can see who wrote what in the WPGet preview.
• Stabilise the multi-category support (currently considered beta quality in 0.6)
• WordPress page support? (Is this even needed?)

UPDATE: Forgot to add – test it with WordPress 2.1

Any idea with a question marks on it is definitely not guaranteed.

So, tell me what you want and I’ll build it!

I’m really sorry about the title. Coding for too long* makes me go crazy.

Anyway, as you might have guessed, it was about time for another Megaphone source release, and here it is. The offending messy code has been eliminated for now, and I’ll add it back and and tidy it up when necessary.

Instructions for installation are in the archive in the INSTALL file (Windows users should open the .DOS.TXT files, as they are Notepad-friendly).

The archive includes the current PHP source, .htaccess files for mod_rewrite (required!) and a database skeleton SQL file.

Let me reiterate – Megaphone is not ready for the prime-time. It’s pre-alpha, pre-release, in development software. It has a tendency to eat your pets if you upset it. 😛

All the relevant stuff is in the archives available at the project page.

As ever, it’s released under the GNU General Public License, making it freely distributable and all that open source stuff. Share your code!

* Well, it’s been 6pm until 10pm last night, about an hour this morning and 4pm to 7pm this evening. But it’s awesome and I really do love doing it. It’s probably good thing the only thing I really do is tech…

After a couple of weeks off Megaphone development, the hacking has begun again and I’m working on strengthening the wobbly legs of basic infrastructure Megaphone has.

The new HTML sanitiser function (graciously contributed by Jacob Peddicord) is now up and running and is now in theory protecting both submissions and comments from unwanted HTML tags.

There’s also various bits of new functionality, including a new administration panel (where you can add a user) and some tweaks for better UI.

There’s still no styles (apart from an OpenClipArt logo), that’s a job for much later.

Screenshot, anyone? Click to biggify.

I promise I’ll get out another source release real soon. At the moment there’s still some redundant code that’s been ported from another project than needs weeding out and sorting out.

One more note – I’ve started writing up some developer documentation to explain how the project work and the technical details behind it and lay down some good coding practices. Any patches/code will be received gratefully and have a good chance of making it into Megaphone – this is open source!

As ever, development updates will be here as they happen. Just to reiterate, Megaphone is free/open source software under the GPL and the project page is here.