Tune in Monday at 10 AM Pacific, 1 PM Eastern, for Steve Job’s keynote Presentation at the World Wide Developer Conference, http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/. I always find Jobs’ presentations entertaining. Buy your developers lunch and set up a projector in the lunch room to watch along. With any luck, you’ll have a good idea on what Microsoft will be announcing next month, Of course, it won’t ship until Longhorn. In 2007.
Archive | 2005
Hang onto your, er, hats!
OSNews is reporting that Red Hat lets go of Fedora Linux. “Red Hat is changing course again with its free Fedora version of Linux, announcing Friday that it will turn over copyrights and development work to an outside entity called the Fedora Foundation.”
Unlike the news out of Seattle, which has been a pretty grim bunch of product delays, end-of-life announcements and news on which products they will no longer be supporting, the Linux community is hopping with activity. Look to Fedora Core 4 to ship on Monday. And keep an eye on Ubuntu as it rapidly becomes the desktop of choice.
Dartmouth Lake Sunapee Linux User Group tonight
Off to DLSLUG tonight, where Jeff Woodward will be demonstrating OpenAFS:
OpenAFS is a distributed filesystem product, pioneered at Carnegie Mellon University and supported and developed as a product by Transarc Corporation (now IBM Pittsburgh Labs). It offers a client-server architecture for file sharing, providing location independence, scalability and transparent migration capabilities for data. IBM branched the source of the AFS product, and made a copy of the source available for community development and maintenance. They called the release OpenAFS.
CentraLUG: Ed Lawson presents Scribus, 7 PM June 6th, NHTI
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Technical Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. (Note that we’re likely to reschedule the July meeting as it falls on the Fourth.)
This month, we’ll be meeting in Room 146 of the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, http://www.nhti.net/nhtimap.pdf, marked as “I” on that map. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, with Ed Lawson presenting Scribus, an open desktop publishing system. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.
Scribus is available from http://www.scribus.org.uk and is not just another pretentious word processor, but an entire pre-press system for producing high-quality documents suitable for publication. It will generate PDF files. It has a new “Scriptor” API for scripting in Python. Imports and exports SVG. Bells! Whistles! It runs natively under Linux and under X11 on Mac OS X and (in theory, anyway) CygWin on Windows. Scribus is distributed under the GPL.
More details at about this meeting and the group are available at http://www.centralug.org and http://www.gnhlug.org.
Hope to see you there!
Roadmap Paved With Good Intentions
Ken Levy’s monthly letter is out and points to a revised VFP Roadmap, most of which has been leaked by Ken over the past month on the UT. No surprises here. The project code-named “Sedna” – how harsh! – is officially announced.
There’s a great plug for the Hentzenwerke “New in Nine” book.
Microsoft abandons Windows 2000 customers
Slashdot posts No IE7 For 2k, Now In Extended Service. Yankovic writes “Looks like MS will not support IE7 on Windows 2000. ‘It should be no surprise that we do not plan on releasing IE7 for Windows 2000… [S]ome of the security work in IE7 relies on operating system functionality in XPSP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000.’ While security fixes will still be available until 2010, I guess that means the only browsers with tabs for W2k will be Opera and Firefox.” All the details about an MS product’s fall into senility available at the lifecycle page.
I think this is great news! Perhaps the IE7 security flaws won’t affect the many users of non-WinXP platforms, estimated to be around 200 million PC users. Microsoft’s continual shedding of responsibility for the software it has put out there has to come to an end.
Welcome to the mainstream
Scripting News points to Time: “The wiki genie is out of the bottle.”
TTGOOo Review
Tracey Donvito reviews Hentzenwerke‘s “The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org”
The small publishing company Hentzenwerke focuses their books on two areas: the migration from Windows to Linux, and OpenOffice.org. They have already published three books on OOo, and are becoming the go-to publisher for OOo information.
Congratulations to author Benjamin Horst, editor Solveig Haugland and publisher Whil Hentzen!
Apple adds a new stripe to Tiger: 10.4.1 released
MacMerc notes the update to Tiger, OS X 10.4.1. I think it is remarkable to see a version-point-one within a few weeks of the software shipping, but it looks like they’ve got some good bug fixes not caught in the beta process.
MacMerc says “Sayeth Software Update….
The 10.4.1 Update delivers overall improved reliability for Mac OS X v10.4 and is recommended for all users. It includes improvements for:
- file sharing using AFP and SMB/CIFS network file services
- using DHCP in wireless networks
- user login when accessing LDAP and Active Directory servers
- core graphics including updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers
- synchronization with .Mac
- Address Book, iCal, Font Book, Mail, and Preview applications
- Dashboard widgets: Address Book, Flight Tracker, Phone Book, and World Clock
- creating and burning disk images using Disk Utility
- compatibility with third party applications and devices
For detailed information on this Update, please visit this website.
Grab the update via Software Update or download it here. “
Taboo: Safari multi-tab close confirmation dialog
From the macosxhints Pick Of The Week department: Taboo – Prevent tab closing stupidity in Safari. “The macosxhints Rating:[Score: 10 out of 10], Developer: Obsessive Compulsive Development, Price: Free
“A simple PotW this week, as it really only does one thing. Taboo is a plug-in for Safari that warns you if you hit the red…” more.
I cannot tell you how many times I have screamed “No!” as I mean to close a tab or another document and inadvertently closed a dozen precious tabs in Safari. This is a must-have!