Monthly Archive:: October 2010

It's one of those days again. A supposed security threat appears, and the internet loses its collective brain and starts panicking like Alpha and Omega's kingdom come. This time around, it's a trojan horse thing (it's a trojan, worm, and root kit all in one, though) that targets Mac OS X and Windows. As it turns out, though, the threat this thing poses is not very large (at this point in time).

"Mozilla has pushed back the planned release of Firefox to sometime in 'early 2011'. Previously, the open source outfit had said its latest desktop browser would be officially released next month."

The KDevelop hackers are proud and happy to announce the release of KDevelop 4.1. The main features include: Git integration, project fetching, an hex editor, PHP 5.3 support and patch exporting.

So, Windows 7 has been out for a year now; the same applies to Windows Server 2008 R2. Is it time for a service pack already? Are there even any major pressing issues that need addressing, as was the case with the vanilla Windows Vista release? Well, none that I can think of, and as such, these upcoming service packs, which just entered RC stage, are incredibly boring releases.

Recently a project called 'Qt Modularization' was initiated. This is a project that aims to modularize Qt at every level. As you may know already, Qt is currently modularized on the DLL level; each module has its own DLL. However, the project as a whole is still monolithic; all the code is hosted in a single repository, you cannot build a leaf module without building the modules on which it depends. This project aims to change that, so that the modules are hosted in different repositories, with separate maintainers, and modules may have different release schedules.

Well, this was inevitable. After Samsung and Sony Ericsson abandoning Symbian for their line of smartphones, and after Symbian Foundation executive director Lee Williams leaving the company for "personal reasons", there's now a report that the Symbian Foundation is winding down its operations, in preparation for closing up shop entirely.

ChibiOS/RT 2.0.6 has been released. This new stable release fixes some minor bugs in the 2.0.x branch and brings performance improvements in the threads creation benchmark.
This efficient embedded RTOS supports multiple architectures like ARM7, ARM Cortex-M0, ARM Cortex-M3, MegaAVR, MSP430, Power Architecture, STM8 and others. A matrix of all the implemented features is available here.
ChibiOS/RT is licensed under the GPL with a linking exception allowing commercial applications.

Remember those crazy people who said the PlayBook didn't exist? Well, RIM demoed its PlayBook live on stage today at the Adobe Air Max conference. Why this conference? Well, the entire user interface of the PlayBook and the QNX-based operating system it runs is written in Adobe AIR - and AIR is also the developer framework for third party applications.

Windows 8 isn't expected to be released until the end of 2012 and "new feature" details is still officially non-existent, but some of these recent rumours began to bear more weight since a slide was "officially leaked" on Microsoft-journal.spaces.live.com/blog. This slide although has since been removed, but it can however still be seen on lmsfkitchen.

Being the brains behind Microsoft has made Bill Gates the wealthiest guy in the world. So he can pretty much afford to buy his kids any gadgets they want. However, Apple devices are banned in the Gates’ house. This is surprisingly not a rule set by Bill Gates. Melinda Gates has made it very clear in an interview with The New York Times that she does not allow Apple hardware in the house. If the kids want an iPod they’ll have to settle for a Zune instead.

"Windows 7 might be a massive commercial success and an undeniably rock solid piece of software, but Microsoft is apparently unwilling to rest on those soft and cozy laurels. Asked about the riskiest product bet the Redmond crew is currently developing, its fearless leader Steve Ballmer took no time in answering 'the next release of Windows'." Also of note in this same video interview thing: Ballmer states that Silverlight is now pretty much strictly a client, non-cross platform thing, while explicitly stating that when it comes to doing something universal, "the world's gone HTML5".

"The good news, however, is that the FreeBSD Foundation is willing to finance a developer to work on bringing kernel mode-setting and Graphics Execution Manager support over to the FreeBSD kernel."

My husband stopped trusting me with his PS3 after I burned three Netflix PS3 software disks (a known problem), so he asked me to get my Netflix kick with another device (that was before the disk-less PS3 solution). So I bought the $99 Roku XD|S, the highest Roku model, a Linux-based video streaming TV device.

"There, I said it. Microsoft has been bombarding the media with claims about how much better IE9 is than all the other browsers, more HTML5 and CSS3 compliant than any other browser that ever existing and ever will. It's the only browser that passes all the tests they made up. And, Microsoft has finally implemented the CSS3 selectors that were implemented by other browsers back in, what? 2003? Because Microsoft has updated IE to support CSS3 selectors and rounded corners, they want us to believe that somehow IE9 magically supports the whole slew of CSS3 visual styling. I'm afraid it doesn't. As a matter of fact, IE9's support for CSS3 visual styling is so poor that the results are shocking."