Big news for all Linux users with Intel graphics chips who want to do 3D accelarated stuff like Xgl and 3D Linux games using open source drivers, because Intel have released the source code to their 3D drivers for their Intel 965 Express range.

Sounds good to me – but to be honest neither does it have a particularly profound effect for me because on this machine I’m running the binary Nvidia proprietary drivers (for my 6600 GT) and I don’t own/have access to a machine running Intel integrated graphics. Still, if anyone has any experiences with these drivers, leave a comment, I’d like to hear what people think of them.

The LXF Team Blog seems to reckon that Sun will officially open source Java in an open source briefing on the 15th, that’s next week. That really is great news – not that Java is somehow a better product open sourced, but opening it up will hopefully allow it to be packaged with most Linux distros and stop GCJ hell (I appreciate the work you do GCJ guys, but nothing beats the Sun JRE for compatibility). That’s presuming that the licence that Sun pick is compatible with the GPL and the big distro guys feel like packaging it as standard.

“On Tuesday 15 August 2006 Sun Microsystems invites you to an open source briefing. We welcome you to join Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer to hear the announcement firsthand.”

Java pre-installed by FC6? Sounds good to me. Should make trying RSSOwl out a lot easier anyway (watch this space for a potential review of said project soon).

So Apple have released the Mac Pro, previewed Mac OS X Leopard and I’ve decided to wait until Leopard goes gold to buy my MacBook (presuming I have enough by then).

With Apple’s WWDC conference going on, they’ve also made a good attempt to try and restart a free and open source software building community around Mac OS X. They’ve re-released the x86 kernel source of XNU (OS X’s kernel) and have launched a brand new FOSS community site, Mac OS Forge.

To be honest, it looks rather sad at the moment – only a very few projects are hosted there and there are precious little comments. Well, to be fair to them, Apple certainly are trying hard (again) to engage the open source community around OS X. They could certainly benefit from the community link if people were willing to take the source from bits of Mac OS X and do work on it, but that will only happen if developers feel like their contributions are going to be worth it – go to a good cause.
If/when I do join the Mac community, I plan to do some application development for Mac OS X (presuming I know C++ by then). Most of it will most likely be free and open source and I’d love for there to be a real FOSS community based around the Macintosh platform that I can join in with. So, good luck Mac OS Forge.
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Just came across this blog post, detailing some positive experiences with Ubuntu. Hey, apparently, even the wireless networking worked with zero configuration! Now that’s impressive, even for a commercial operating system.

So why not try Ubuntu today?

Happy birthday world wide web! Apparently, today in 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee first released files for the first ever web browser, WorldWideWeb and the first web server, httpd, to the world. They were, incidentally, written on the now defunct NeXTStep operating system. When I say defunct, I mean, Steve Jobs went back to Apple and turned it into Mac OS X.

Tim’s also the founder of the W3C – the de facto web standards and web authority.
From the Wikipedia article:

“Berners-Lee’s made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that their standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone.”

Now that’s what I like to hear.

OPML is really cool. In case you don’t know, OPML is an implementation of XML that basically produces a list of feeds (RSS, Atom and the like). Now I use Google’s Personalised Homepage (also known as Google IG) to track my feeds. It’s not quite as featured as Google Reader, in that it doesn’t natively support OPML import/export. Thankfully, there is a cool plugin for your Personalised Homepage called OPML Export. It’s a tiny bit of JavaScript that extracts a list of your feeds and sends you an OPML file.

The aim of exporting the list of my feeds was so that I could try out some different feed readers for a change, to see if they were better (I’m sure there are many better ones). OPML file in hand, I tried importing into Google Reader. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t accept the OPML file, but after adding an XML line to the top of the file, it successfully imported my feeds.

The next thing I wanted to have a look at was Firefox Live Bookmarks. I knew about this feature, but I hadn’t used it very extensively. Thanks to a neat Firefox extension called OPML Support, I could import my feeds as Live Bookmarks. One gripe. It imported them all into the root of my bookmarks. I tried to batch move them to a Feeds folder, but batch moving caused Firefox to crash (bug do you think?), so I had to move the Live Bookmarks one by one into my Feeds folder. Thank goodness there’s only 30 odd and not hundreds.

Well, now I’ll try out some more feed readers – desktop and web-based – and see if I find a better solution than Google IG.

I’ve updated the WordPress Get script (you might need to Ctrl-F5 on that page to retrieve the latest version) so it now handles ‘smart quotes’ in the post body correctly. Thanks to Chris Shiflett for the smart quote to entity conversion function and to Adam at Concept:Sublime for being the first person (I think) to implement WPGet on his personal page, and of course to telling me about the smart quote bug.

I’m now going to set up a little Projects page on the blog to temporarily house scripts and mini-projects like these until my main site arrives (which will use the WPGet integration on the home page).

Oh, and another thing – WordPress Get is now officially licensed under the GPL and LGPL (so you can integrate it into a closed site design), despite the fact that there’s only the GPL header in the script. Just make sure to mention WPGet, Peter Upfold (and link to peter.upfold.org.uk please).

Oh, and if you do choose to use this script, thanks!

I’ve just started writing a small project which is (at the moment) called WordPress Get. The idea is that it can be integrated into site designs to pull out the latest few WordPress blog posts, so you can display them in a small sidebar/box or whatever.

At the moment, this version is very embryonic and has a few features that are missing, namely email error log reporting and a nicer error message if it should go wrong. Also, at the moment all this script does is print the whole array of WP data that is fetched, you’ll need to adapt it to print just post titles, or extracts of the posts or whatever suits you.

I was going to need something like this anyway for my future site here (which will be a portal to all my stuff around the web) which will include a small box with the latest blog post or something (and a link to the main blog).

It was this post at TeenDev that motivated me to actually get started, and I’ve GPL’d this code so that you can adapt it for another FOSS project. If you want to use it in a closed design, I might consider LGPL-ing the code at some point, when it’s matured a bit more.

• Download the script here

Thanks and enjoy.

Slow, I know I am. But I’ve just run the Ubuntu Dapper Drake Live CD (well, actually the standard CD is the Live CD).

My first impressions are good. It boots pretty quickly for a live distro, and hardware compatibility on this machine was very good. The only thing Ubuntu couldn’t handle properly was my 19″ CRT, but nothing seems to manage that. It ran at 1280×1024@60Hz, which was a good resolution but a very poor refresh rate.

The Gnome desktop was slick and fast considering it was coming off a CD. Not my choice of desktop, but nevertheless, Gnome has come a very long way since I last used it seriously. The Gnome applications feel very slick and Ubuntu’s icon set particularly added to the polished feel.

The applications were up-to-date, the latest Gnome (2.14 if I’m right), Firefox 1.5.0.4 and a host of cool Gnome applications. Hankering to use my favourite KDE apps, however, I wasn’t too impressed with the fact that they run with a blue internal colour scheme, compared to Ubuntu’s standard orangey look. This is due to the lack of something like KDE’s GTK-QT-Engine which translates Gnome/GTK apps to look as if they’re running under KDE. Gnome could probably use this, but the problem isn’t nearly as bad as it could be, because there are more GTK-based apps than there are KDE/QT applications.

Anyway, that’s all for now, but I might well extend my Beginner’s Linux Tutorial series by running a quick tut on how to install Ubuntu off the Desktop (aka Live) CD.

Sorry, I just have a fundamental disagreement with MySpace, I’m not sure about other social networking sites, but these are my reasons why:

1. MySpace is dangerous – there are dangerous people on MySpace.
2. MySpace push malware-infected ads.
3. MySpace uses other ad campaigns that target young people – it’s debatable whether this is irresponsible in some cases.
4. MySpace profiles attract terrible CSS coding and terrible web usability.
5. MySpace profiles often have irritating auto-play Flash music players and other Flash embeds.
6. MySpace blogs are generally rubbish.
7. I already have ‘my space’ – that’s this blog. I don’t need someone to plonk their advertising on it and restrict what I can do.
8. From my very limited experience of MySpace, you get people posting stupid messages/comments on your profile, and I find that irritating.
9. Rupert Murdoch has enough money already without me giving him more advertising revenue.
10. MySpace should leverage technology like XFN to promote open standards (don’t get me started)

OK I’m sorry about that, I just don’t like and don’t intend to use MySpace. I’ll post something nice and friendly now.