Thom Holwerda Archive

"The release of Firefox 1.5 is almost certain to drive adoption rates even higher. PCMag.com recently reviewed the new version, and found that the most noticeable improvement is the ability to reorder tabs via drag-and-drop. Navigation is significantly faster, as Mozilla has implemented 'intelligent caching' on the forward and back buttons. The final, gold-code release of Firefox 1.5 should arrive before the end of November." UPDATE: One more review.

"We are all aware of AGEIA and its desire to bring a PhysX processor for physics processing in order to make games look and feel more realistic. We all want the characters to move and act realistically, and that's exactly what AGEIA's PhysX will accomplish once it debuts. However, in order for the technology to work, it requires an expansion card for the motherboard. ASUS will debut the card in February 2006 when more games become available to take advantage of AGEIA's innovation."

The Inq pays attention to Advantage Six' upcoming A9 Home machine. "AdvantageSix's new machine is a tiny blue fanless aluminium box about the size of a couple of floppy drives - 168x103x53mm. The A9 Home is a sealed unit - it comes with 128MB RAM and a notebook-size 40GB hard disk - which you can't upgrade, not that you'd want to; this is masses for RISC OS. There is a small external power supply brick which puts out a stonking 20W. It has to be that much to power a few USB peripherals - the machine itself draws about 3W under load. "That's actually quite a lot. We haven't enabled most of the power management yet."

Samba 3.0.20b and CUPS 1.1.23 have been ported to Syllable. Work has now begun to integrate the two into Syllable. Michael Saunders has also been active on the porting front and has ported a number of games and emulators to Syllable.

"Yesterday, Microsoft let the other shoe drop in a two-pronged attack on the support that has been building for the OpenDocument OASIS Format. It's still far too early to say that the dust has settled, but I'll attempt to pull together here the most significant pieces of information that I've located since last night's post, and what it all means."

"TheOpenCD team is pleased to announce the release of TheOpenCD 3.1. Core applications including OpenOffice, Firefox and Gaim have been upgraded to major new versions. The popular game Battle for Wesnoth has reached 1.0 and a range familiar programs appear in minor version updates. The Live CD component is now based on Ubuntu 5.10. Blender has returned in version 2.37a and the MoinMoin Desktop Edition has been added."

While programs in the Java language are theoretically immune from memory leaks, there are situations in which objects are not garbage collected even though they are no longer part of the program's logical state. This article explores a common cause of unintentional object retention and shows how to plug the leak with weak references.

The Rosetta emulation platform in 10.4.3 build 8F1111A has been upgraded to feature full G4 support, including Altivec. This not only adds a new layer of compatibility to Rosetta, but also improved speed for Altivec-equipped applications. Also, new ATI drivers available in 10.4.3 seem to offer much greater support for PC ATI graphics chipsets.

Here is a (very) brief interview with Andrew Morton, the maintainer of the Linux kernel 2.6 tree. Andrew discusses the debates behind revision control systems, new kernel features and his own -mm tree.

Sources indicate that OSx86 10.4.3 - which contains increased hardware restrictions - has now been cracked in the same fashion as 10.4.1. It was initially thought that these restrictions would slow the progress of hackers, but it appears that it has done little to deter those tackling the challenge. It appears that "Maxxuss" has outdone Apple yet again.

"Even on a 2 GB RAM workstation (as mine) VMware virtual machines can run slowly. Too slowly sometimes. This can depend on a large amount of factors but we can reduce the number to 4 critical issues."

"In case you lose your iPod (or any other external drive for that matter) or it gets stolen your data is in danger. I'm one of those people that constantly carries data on their iPod between two locations and I want to keep it safe. What follows is a brief tutorial aimed at those that want their data protected without investing in commercial software. In case you didn't know, you can increase your privacy pretty easily with features embedded directly into Mac OS X."

"For the last two years, I've been keeping track of the UN sponsored, International Telecommunication Union administered, World Summit on the Information Society process that held its first mass meeting in Geneva, Switzerland in December 2003. The process culminated last week with a meeting of over 19000 people in Tunis, Tunisia. I was reading the final reports emanating from the conference over the last several days, a question occurred to me. What happened to open source?"

"Although Linux gets much of the attention in the Free and open source operating system world, the BSD operating system is also very popular. BSD has a longer history, and its roots go right back to one of the original Unix implementations that spawned commercial Unix variants like Solaris and Mac OS X. BSD is actually a popular source for server-focused operating systems and, due to an open license, it is sometimes more attractive to developers as the base for their projects. With some BSD variants, security and high-performance networking are key drivers."