It looks like Google are taking more fire on the privacy front with the new search across computers feature in Google Desktop 3 Beta. See here and here. A bit of a more in-depth post about this will appear on another blog I’m contributing to, Gizbuzz, shortly. I don’t know the link yet and it may not even be online yet UPDATE: The permalink is here.

But now more about my experiences with the free VMware Server product. I think it’s brilliant. Having now tested both the Windows and Linux versions and I conclude that the Linux server is faster, but slows down your desktop a bit more. That’s probably due to the fact that Linux is a more server-oriented system and to really prove this I’d need to conduct studies with different hardware and settings.

Also, Project Krystal has made it to a release candidate now (see story), but unfortunately, as yet, WorldPay integration is not completely finished. Don’t ask about my weird versioning either.

School is out for a week. So whoo! Brilliant, super duper.

What is slightly more interesting is this story. What this means for us die hard PC gamers is that, yes, we do get Halo 2. But it also looks like we will have to upgrade to Windows Vista. Now this doesn’t really affect me, because I plan to upgrade anyway, but for some people… well, we’ll see.

Oh and check out the new version of Google Desktop, it’s got some cool new features.

Can’t wait to play Halo 2 without buying an Xbox. Sorry, but I don’t do consoles.

Whoo! I’m actually very happy because I’ve just got my sweaty palms on a copy of the new free beta of VMware Server. This could be certainly useful for someone like me who can’t afford loads of hardware to run different OSs on (well, who can?) I’ve grabbed both the Windows and Linux servers and from my tests on both Win and Lin, the Linux server version seems to be a lot faster when installing and running operating systems. So this is basically my chance to play with a hell of a load of different Linux distros, not to mention the Windows Server 2003 trial.

Looking forward also to getting some dedicated hardware anyway though, because it means I will be able to run a semi-permanent Linux web server to get some hosting going on.

So, who’s for VMware?

And as for XEN (built-in open source virtualisation for Linux), well, I’m on the side of VMware, considering how easy it was to install.

Anyway…

In the world of PK (Project Krystal) development, we’ve had some new features. Namely these include various bugfixes for the product basket system (yes, some very important ones) and lots of other stuff too. The main things feature-wise are:

• An online discount system (for percentage discounts for buying online) – this involved integrating with all current elements of the basket, so fairly time consuming.
• New UI and UX enhancements to do with the basket (losing some of the old debugging buttons).

Well, let’s hope I can meet the supposed deadline of this Sunday, although considering the stability and potential for bugs in these new features, I doubt it will be 100% stable by then, even if the features are in there.

This has been cross-posted at the Hybrid site.

Sorry! I haven’t posted for ages, and I apologise.

What has been happening is a lot. Project Krystal, my main development arm at the moment is being set up for its first roll-out on the website of a garden machinery company, and that is taking up all my development time. We are currently working in version 0.8, but this branch of Project Krystal is codenamed Freestyle, as it has additional features:

• Multiple products categories with sort/search facilities
• Ajax-powered product basket with (hopefully) WorldPay purchase integration
• A new brilliant looking horizontal navigation bar setup

Due to reasons of the development still being in progress, there is no rolling test version that you can view, or screenies available. But rest assured, there will be soon.

You can also check the Project Krystal target schedule here.

Also, if anyone is reading this at all, visit Linux-noob.com. I’ve posted about them before, but they are a really good forum for people new to Linux. Everyone is friendly and doesn’t mind answering the odd RTFM-type question. So, join up and tell them Hybrid sent you.

Anyway, I hope to post again soon with less of a delay between posts. See you all later. And post a comment if you like reading this, I don’t seem to get any.

First, I have at least two apologies to make.

1) I haven’t posted in absolutely ages, partly due to a Hybrid contract meaning I can’t talk too much about what is going on while things are provisional.

2) The joke in this post title is actually quite shocking.

But anyway, aside from the potential contract that I can’t talk about, a few things have happened. I have been given an invite to the Windows Live Messenger Beta (yes, a screeny). At the moment, I have four invites left, and it’s first come first served (Blogger users can leave a comment). It’s quite cool to get on a beta (finally) and the new interface is quite cool too. Big up to the guy at the Gizbuzz blog for kitting me out with an invite. Incidentally, I’ve also got a Windows Live Mail account, but in its current state of (IE only, grrr…) development, it’s not too impressive. When it does go live (no pun intended), it may well rival Gmail, I would vouch.

So what else do I say, really? I can’t talk too much, so I won’t. Let’s hope my next post will have less of a gap between it and this one.

Keep it real.

Well, I’m back from my long blog break. No particular reason. Neither, unfortunately can I talk much about what is going on in dev at the moment, more will be revealed later. Sorry, this one is short.

As you can tell if you read the title of this post aloud, this post comes in three parts, and they all rhyme.

I started today by hooking up an ancient Pentium 75 with 16 MB RAM with FreeBSD 4.8 (latest version that will run on that hardware). It worked, up until the point at which I wanted to put Apache on it, and I couldn’t mount the CD-R I had burnt with the sources on. So that stopped there.

I then did some Visual Basic.NET programming, with Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition. I started to create a little Text Editor application for Windows. I got fairly far, then VB crashed and I hadn’t saved. Grrr. So I have got just beyond that point now, and I will continue another day.

Now I am downloading the official trial version of Windows Server 2003 R2 from Microsoft. If I can find a suitable box to run it on, I hope to see how it compares to Linux when it comes to doing server stuff. Over a 1MB connection, though, this could take some time.

Hello everyone, and before I start proper – Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all (if anyone does read this, that is). It’s Christmas Eve, so don’t expect a blog post tomorrow, people.

You may have noticed that in this post’s title I have substituted the word ‘Happy’ for ‘Hybrid’, and there is a very good reason for this. I have relaunched my Hybrid Web Services site with an all-new look and the latest Project Krystal build, version 0.6a. There’s a tiny bit of info on Project Krystal here, along with my RSS Generator (which is in its next version now, having cleared up a few minor issues).

Well, there’s not much else dev-wise I’ve been doing, today I was pretty much just skinning Project Krystal to Hybrid’s requirements and making it look integrated with the whole Hybrid look. Well, I did rediscover a gaming classic (and found a patch to make it run on Windows XP) – Worms 2. It rules. See you soon.

Well, it’s certainly taken me a while – I’ll grant you that, but at least now SUSE Linux 10 is back online. I’ve installed Apache 2.0.54 and a PHP 4 version included with SUSE 10, so I avoid compiling myself and once again causing the partition table problem. SUSE 10 works, it works well, and I even found an RPM for Firefox 1.5, so I’m fully upgraded and operational.

Windows, however, is plagued with a choppy sound, plus still the disappearing mouse trouble from my last post. I’m working on a solution with the guys at Linux-noob.com (thanks guys, you rock), but until then it looks like MS Office doesn’t work.

Ah well, at least I can continue webdev finally (on Linux, naturally). I am adding a user logon auditing system to Project Krystal. Speaking of which, the build on the Buttons site is now v0.5.2.

Let’s hope Windows starts working soon.