Monthly Archive:: February 2005

Red Hat engineers announced today that the very popular ClearLooks theme engine will probably be the default theme for the Gnome 2.12. The theme was developed by Richard Stellingwerff helped out by Daniel "Spark" Borgmann, others, and with some help from myself on the usability side. This was a much needed refresh of the Gnome default desktop (old theme, new theme screenshots). Hopefully, a more usable variant of the Winter-Bold window manager theme (get matching colors, on-mouse-overs, don't get so greyed out when unfocused, buttons better vertically centered etc) will make it in as the companion of ClearLooks on Gnome instead of the currently bundled (and not as sexy) Industrial. Update: Elsewhere, GTK+ 2.6.3 was released, with bug fixes mainly for the Win32 platform.

GI3D, the native SkyOS 2D/3D Hardware acceleration interface, has allowed for an much requested feature in SkyOS: screensavers. The entire screensaver framework is plugin-based, and even supports OpenGL screensavers. Additionally, GI3D brings to SkyOS translucent windows and full alpha blending.

"So what should the OS vendors be doing? I can think of five things that operating system developers should look at having part of the OS." Read Brad Wardell's editorial here.

"My work involves administering Unix Web servers and a mix of office desktops, along with developing the applications we run on them. I use Mac OS X to do it because it is something like a superset of those other popular OS choices. While much of the software I deploy is free, both as in speech and as in beer, I'm willing to open my wallet for OS X." Read the article at NewsForge.

I’m sure that everyone has heard the old saying, "Mac for Productivity, Unix for Development, and Windows for Solitaire". My experience has shown me that at least for my needs, the Mac is not only for productivity, but for development as well. Windows? Well, some things never change.

One of the most important components of ACL-based security in Windows is unfortunately also one of the most subtle and overlooked: ownership. Learn about ownership and its importance to security in this sample chapter.

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) provides a flexible and efficient way to store, transmit, and express data. The open source community has produced an impressive lineup of XML editing utilities. In this article Ryan Paul takes a look at some of the most useful.

OneStat today reported that Mozilla's browsers have a total global usage share of 8.45%. The total usage share of Mozilla increased more than 1 percent since Novermber 2004. Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates the global browser market with a global usage share of 87,28% which is 1.62% less as at the end of November 2004. Please note that OneStat seems to measure Mozilla's and Firefox's usage as one browser (however it differentiates Netscape and other Gecko browsers).

Jef Raskin, creator of the Macintosh, died yesterday at 61. He headed the project from 1978 up to 1982, when he was forced out of Apple. Since then, he worked on several different products to introduce 'humane computing', but is still best known for his contributions to the Macintosh. Read his story here.

"By the time you read this, the 2004 holiday season will have dissolved into memory. I spent the last days of the year going through my list of "things I want to check out if I ever get the chance." As usual, I found some interesting tidbits." Read more here. Elsewhere, Scott Long of FreeBSD release engineering team describes some of the finer points where FreeBSD continues to innovate and display its mature development environment.

I came across this while browsing the Linspire Forums. It's a link to MP3beamer, but you get a peek at the underlying OS, Linspire 5.0.

Most recent PalmOne/Clie devices and some PocketPC ones come with Bluetooth instead of WiFi. Imagine yourself in a WiFi-enabled hotel room with your dual wireless *book on your lap and a BT-enabled PDA/phone device. How do you route networking to these devices *from* your Mac?

The KDE Project released the first release candidate of KDE 3.4. Only sources, Live-CD and build script are available at time of release.

Ubuntu is supposed to be a very user friendly distro. I guess the real test, as far as I was concerned, was to see how my wife (a computer neophyte) and my 6 year old son would do. My wife just sat down, opened FireFox and went to Ebay without noticing she wasn't in Windows. Read the full review at GUILinux.com.