Monthly Archive:: July 2006

"Firefox 1.5.0.5 is a security update that is part of our ongoing program to provide a safe Internet experience for our customers. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version." Improvements to product stability were made, several security fixes were added, as well as changes for the Frisian locale (fy-NL). Buter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries. No, I'm not either.

The eighth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention kicked off Monday at the Oregon Convention Center. The first two days at OSCON are all about tutorials, with half-day presentations by key contributors to open source projects discussing how to make use of their tools. OSCON has several tracks, including tracks for Web applications, databases, Perl, JavaScript and AJAX, Ruby, Linux, programming, and business.

Microsoft has shipped the release candidate for IronPython 1.0 on its CodePlex community source site. IronPython is a project that implements the dynamic object-oriented Python language on top of the Microsoft Common Language Infrastructure. IronPython is both well-integrated with the .Net Framework and is a true implementation of the Python language.

After a bit over 20 months, work on ROCK 3 has been completed. ROCK is a Distribution Build Kit. This means it is a tool to create and maintain GNU/Linux distributions. With a few keystrokes and some patience, you can have a generic distribution up in a short time. With some more work, you can adjust its package selection. With the help of freshmeat and the power of autotools you can add new packages in a heartbeat. The ChangeLog is available and the Roadmap for ROCK 4 is already there, too.

Given the lack of qwerty keyboards on most touchscreen-based PocketPC phones and PDAs, this (recently freed for personal usage) input method will change the way you feel about your device. TenGO is using predictive text with only 6 buttons and in this video you can witness a woman writing 72 words per minute with her stylus. The buttons are pretty large and so finger typing is pretty fast too (at least 45 wpm which is faster than typing T9 on a cellphone or on Blackberry/Treo's crammed thumbboards). Version 2 of the software is even more powerful and available for $25.

Microsoft plans to automatically push Internet Explorer 7 to Windows XP users when the browser update is ready later this year. IE 7 will be delivered in the fourth quarter as a 'high priority' update via Automatic Updates in Windows XP, Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of IE product management, said in an interview Tuesday.

The OpenDarwin project is shutting down. "Over the past few years, OpenDarwin has become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects. The original notions of developing the Mac OS X and Darwin sources has not panned out. Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this. Administering a system to host other people's projects is not what the remaining OpenDarwin contributors had signed up for and have been doing this thankless task far longer than they expected. It is time for OpenDarwin to go dark."

Greg Kroah-Hartman has put the slides and a transcript to his keynote at OLS online. The title speaks volumes: "Myths, Lies, and Truths about the Linux kernel". He starts off: "I'm going to discuss the a number of different lies that people always say about the kernel and try to debunk them; go over a few truths that aren't commonly known, and discuss some myths that I hear repeated a lot."

Nigeria has officially ordered and paid for one million of the One Laptop per Child devices, according to the Nigerian Vanguard newspaper. The deal is the first actual order for the project that aims to provide Linux-powered laptops to children in developing economies. Make the cheesiest spam joke, and you get a cookie.

With the latest update to the ADC Reference Library, Apple has deprecated the entire Foundation and Application Kits for Java. Previously, it was stated that the Java-Cocoa bridge was still valid for learning purposes.

Freespire has released the second beta release of Freespire (build 0.0.76). This is the Debian-based Linux distribution which legally supports (or has one-click access to support): MP3, DVD, Windows Media, QuickTime, Java, Flash, Real, ATI drivers, nVidia drivers, Adobe Acrobat Reader, proprietary WiFi drivers, fonts, and so on. It provides free access to the entire Freespire open source application pool using apt-get. There's also a screenshot tour.

In the Linux land 99% of the applications are open source. It is part of the nature of the GNU/Linux community ecosystem to endorse open software. But there are a few applications that are not open and as they fill up a niche, they are pretty popular. Come in and vote for your favorite.

This article looks at vulnerabilities detected in Mac OS X in the first half of 2006. It compares these vulnerabilities to those detected in the first half of 2005, providing an overview of the evolution of threats targeting this increasingly popular platform. While the author believes that Mac OS X is pretty secure by default, he states that "like any other platform, Mac OS X has software flaws. Such flaws inevitably draw the attention of malicious users, especially if users don't think they need to take action to protect against possible threats." In the meantime, Apple has launched a Bluetooth version of its Mighty Mouse.

Mark Shuttleworth, millionaire cosmonaut and self-funded Linux guru, has managed to make his Ubuntu project the Linux distribution of choice in just two years. But now the friendly brown OS with the cute drumming noises faces an awkward journey towards the commercial mainstream.