Thom Holwerda Archive

MacFUSE 2.0 was recently released onto the world, and now, its author, Amit Singh, as given Mac users something they've been waiting for ever since they first laid eyes on Mac OS X: access to numerous old (and more recent) file systems, through something called AncientFS. Always wanted to mount v1tap DEC tapes as ordinary volumes in Mac OS X? Here's your chance.

Virtual Worlds User Interface for the Blind is a prototype user interface that enables blind users to participate in virtual world environments. It provides communication, navigation, and perception functions using GUI elements. As a way of enriching the virtual environment with descriptive semantic information, sighted users contribute annotations of virtual objects using a scripted gadget equipped by their avatar. These annotations are then made available to the blind users through the special user interface.

Earlier this month we reported on RISCOS Ltd possibly undertaking legal action against RISC OS Open Ltd , with the latter being the shared source project started by Castle. This news came down pretty hard on the already small RISC OS community, but it did have a number of positive effects: representatives from both ROL and ROOL were quick to explain that there is absolutely no animosity between the two companies, and that the community has nothing to fear.

Today, a number of screen shots of RIM's BlackBerry OS running on a Windows Mobile HTC Fuze hit the Web. The "BlackBerry virtualization" is possible thanks to the new BlackBerry Application Suite, which is a piece of software for non-RIM devices that lets users take advantage of various RIM security features, as well as the company's "push" delivery tech. The BlackBerry Application Suite isn't currently available, but it should be soon, according to reports.

The first "point release" of the AROS distribution VmwAROS has been published, and it's available on its website. This version introduces a lot of changes and many new features that make it visually different from regular AROS build. Ken Lester's double state icons, for instance, make VmwAROS look more Amiga-like, and former Amiga users can also continue using their applications thanks to AmiBridge, a poweful scripting system which allows launching AmigaOS programs straight from AROS. A big effort has been made to enhance VmwAROS useability and user-friendlyness.

InternetNews.com states: "Microsoft (or a really smart ISV) should build a full application manager for Windows, similar to what most Linux distributions do today." Most Windows applications come with their own distinctive updating mechanism (much like Mac OS X), instead of having a centralised updating location like most Linux distributions offer. While it certainly wouldn't be harmful for Windows to gain such a feature - the question remains: isn't it time we rethink program installation and management altogether?

I'm sure you're all still (sadly) familiar with the recent 'debate' I had with InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy, which detailed a lot of silly things. The seed of that discussion was planted with Kennedy's first article which, among other things, claimed that Windows 7 performed similarly to Windows Vista (meaning, slower than XP). Leaving the thread count discussion behind, Kennedy did include a benchmark which showed that Windows 7 performed similar to Windows Vista. There's a new benchmark out now, comparing a slightly more recent build of Windows 7 to Vista RTM/SP1 and XP SP3, and in these tests, Windows 7 blows all of those out of the water.

After just 100 days, Google has lifted the veil of betaness off its web browser, Chrome, by releasing version 1.0. When Chrome made its first public appearance earlier this year, it was met with positive reveiws due to its JavaScript performance, as well as its robust multithreaded model. Now that the beta label has been ripped off Chrome, Google can't hide itself anymore: Chrome will now have to take Firefox and Internet Explorer head-on.

Guice is Google's open source dependency injection framework for Java development. It enables better testing and modularity by taking away the pain of writing your own factories. This article offers a tour of the most important Guice concepts that will leave you ready to Guice up your applications.

Did you know that Perl creator Larry Wall thinks the community 'paints a little picture in heaven'? In a lengthy interview about the history of Perl, Wall talks about the evolving nature of programming languages, especially Perl, and in the future a lot of people will be getting into programming as a profession, but not calling it programming. Wall's genius is expressed in his desire to not recognise Perl in 20 years, instead to design the ability to create things we will need in 20 or 100 years. And, yes, Wall picked the Camel mascot as it is 'an animal that is self-sufficient in a dry place'.

And it seems as if another minor, barely-alive operating system will become encumbered by legal bickering between two small companies. The RISC OS scene, which is already a tangled and complicated mess of companies, version number teasing and incompatible versions, might be torn apart even further because RISCOS Ltd might take legal action trying to prevent RISC OS Open Ltd from releasing a RiscPC compatible ROM from the RISC OS 5 shared source project. Should you feel confused, you needn't worry: so does everyone else.

Google has released an early version of Native Client, a framework designed to run portable x86 binaries inside a web browser - in a sandbox. Native Client also includes technologies that allow for easier communication between JavaScript and Native Client executables, which makes it possible for web applications to leverage native code when it comes to processor intensive tasks. This sounds eerily similar to Microsoft's ActiveX - one of the biggest security failures of the Windows operating system. Google insists, however, that Native Client is much, much more secure.

Apart from its use as a powerful Web application development platform, in combination with the Rails framework Ruby is also a powerful scripting language. It has immense capabilities, owing to the availability of many built-in and external libraries, the power of which can be harnessed to solve a great deal of the scripting needs that surface in typical systems administrative work environments.

Every day people rely on search engines to find specific content in the many terabytes of data that exist on the Internet, but have you ever wondered how this search is actually performed? One approach is Apache's Hadoop, which is a software framework that enables distributed manipulation of vast amounts of data. This article introduces the Hadoop framework and shows you why it's one of the most important Linux-based distributed computing frameworks.