Monthly Archive:: December 2007

The GNOME 2.21.4 Development Release is now available: This is the third release of the GNOME 2.21.x series, heading towards the stable GNOME 2.22.x release.

Matthew Szulik writes: "After almost a decade of leading Red Hat, I have decided to transition my CEO and President role for the personal reasons I have already discussed. It’s my privilege to continue serving this great company in the role of Chairman of the Board. Red Hat will be in the capable hands of a world-class executive team under the leadership of Jim Whitehurst as President and CEO."

"Today the Perl Foundation announces the release of Perl 5.10, the first major upgrade to the wildly popular dynamic programming language in over five years. This latest version builds on the successful 5.8.x series by adding powerful new language features and improving the Perl interpreter itself. The Perl development team, called the the Perl Porters, have taken features and inspiration from the ambitious Perl 6 project, as well as from chiefly academic languages and blended them with Perl's pragmatic view to practicality and usefulness."

It's the time of year again, folks. "The year 2007 has been an interesting year that brought us improved security with Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). But to get some perspective of how many publicly known holes found in these two operating systems, I've compiled all the security flaws in Mac OS X and Windows XP and Vista and placed them side by side. This is significant because it shows a trend that can give us a good estimate for how many flaws we can expect to find in the coming months." Do with it as you please.

As we say in Dutch, de kogel is door de kerk: Think Secret will cease all activities after reaching a settlement with Apple in a lawsuit Apple had filed against the website. In exchange for closing down Think Secret, Nick DePlume, its owner, will not have to reveal its sources to Apple. The press release on the Think Secret website reads: "Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides. As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published." My take: I have respect for the way DePlume protected his sources; very commendable. I have, however, little respect for Apple in this case (I have written, rather controversially, about it before), and it just scares the living daylights out of me that a company can exert this much power over independent websites.

Microsoft has posted the release candidate of Windows XP Service Pack 3 to its download site. The move marks the first opportunity for all users of the six-year-old operating system to try out its final upgrade. Previously, several thousand users were given access to test builds of SP3 only by Microsoft's invitation. Update: I just installed the RC on my Windows XP MCE installation, and it all went fairly painless. I haven't noticed anything radically different either yet.

"The software development kit for Google's Linux-based Android mobile phone operating system has been out in the wild for a over a month now, plenty of time for developers to form opinions of the platform and assess the capabilities of the API. The verdict from seasoned mobile software programmers is somewhat mixed; some are even expressing serious frustration."

"As a team, we've spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. Internet Explorer 8 now renders the 'Acid2 Face' correctly in IE8 standards mode." Insert freezing and hell joke.

"I recently sat down with Technical Fellow and SysInternals founder Mark Russinovich to dig a bit into what's new in the Windows Server 2008 kernel. Of course, we talk about many things including HyperV, application virtualization, kernel architecture (not everybody defines an OS kernel in the same way - tune in to understand why this is the case. Mark has his own definition that may not be the same as yours...)."

"Firefox 3 b2 is now available for download. This is the tenth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3."

"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 4.0 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD is a free, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system available for many platforms, from 64-bit Opteron machines and desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent in both production and research environments, and it is user-supported with complete source. Many applications are easily available through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection."

"The Maemo team officially announced OS2008 for Nokia Internet Tablets (N800 and N810) today. There are a great deal of changes and upgrades so I am reviewing this OS as software product all by itself."

"Following our policy strategy to publish releases on a regular basis, OpenOffice.org 2.3.1 is available for download now. Although it is primarily a maintenance release, we recommend users to install the release due to a security fix. Full details of the changes may be found in the Release Notes associated with the release."

To counter the success of the iPhone, Microsoft is revamping its mobile operating system, according to Ars Technica. "Never one to back down from a challenge, Microsoft is busily preparing both a minor UI refresh (Windows Mobile 6.1) and a major new release of the operating system (Windows Mobile 7.0). A gallery of screen shots from the 6.1 refresh compiled by Boy Genius shows an emphasis on simplification: the screens are more task-oriented and have less clutter than their immediate predecessor. A new and clearer font adorns the UI, and new features such as zooming, copy and paste in Internet Explorer, and auto-configuring ActiveSync for e-mails are sure to be welcome additions to the platform. In addition, Microsoft is making it easier (and more Windows-like) to switch tasks by adding a standardized task manager to the platform."