Example image from the local Gallery installation

Gallery is one of the most popular photo management packages on the Web. As a matter of fact, this domain has a Gallery installation (feed: ) as well. Gallery was built in PHP and is absolutely free. The number of features it makes available to site visitors and the site administrator is endless.

A fourth beta version of Gallery 2 has just been released and a demonstration purposes site was set up to boast the features of this next generation of Gallery: interface language, tree structure navigation and nice flexible page layouts are only a few enhancement that catch the eye.

I am not too keen on the beta name though: “Flippin’ Sweet!“. Not something you can recommend to your boss…

here are healthy competitions and morbid competitions. A competition which involves handicapping the opponents is always a destructive and dangerous one. Nevertheless, there are examples in industry where Xerox, Microsoft, Amazon and other leaders file laughable patents for what should certainly remain a taboo — a no-go area. After 5 years and 4 rejection, Amazon received exclusive rights to inform customers of what they already bought (history). Sounds outrageous? It gets worse…

Microsoft are patenting the custom emoticons, practically opening the door to control of social behaviour with an army of lawyers. Instead of following such footsteps, companies must strive to innovate and offer some added value, not imitate and shield uninnovative ideas that have floated around for decades.

Bill Gates posing for a teen magazine in 1985
with a Mac at the back, from which he nicked the GUI

A competition where giants impose legal barriers to obstruct smaller opponents is like taking the lead in running race, tossing water bootles back at the track. Proprietary, patents and artificial channelling of users all have this effect. At the end of the day, Bill Gates wonders why computer science is slowly dying in the United States.

Lars Rasmussen, a maps engineer at Google, has just published the following item in the Google blog:

Can’t decide between looking at a map of your house or a photo of your house? See both at once with Google Maps’ new Hybrid mode, available in the US, Canada, the UK and Japan.

Be the first to observe this new feature of Google Maps, which was already incorporated into Google Earth about a month ago. It is now all accessible via the server rather than a local installation of gratuitous software.

Spherical desktop – experimental demo

Longhorn beta – recent screenshot

Longhorn has just become Windows Vista (also see BBC and CNN reports).

The new name, which means view, reflects on the main point of emphasis for the operating system, namely looks. As mentioned before, Longhorn/Vista will be little more than Windows XP with new colours and — as more recently seen — will incorporate transparency. It has been pointed out that Longhorn/Vista will look slightly different from XP, but will offer little or no added value in terms of productivity.

One wonders if the change of names is due to the bad reputation and rumours that are accompanied with the word “Longhorn”. The name Longhorn was derived from the name of a pub, which certainly does not add to credibility.

Spreadsheet representation of music history (click to enlarge)

ome weeks ago I wrote about an XMMS extension that I had devised. This collection of steps which I described could make XMMS store simple log files for music (music ‘history’). That work has now been thoroughly extended to produce spreadsheets (comma-separated values (CSV) to be precise) rather than flat log files.

In brief, what is obtained using this trick are music history logs, one file for each day. Each file contains full, detailed history of the tracks listened to. Interesting information can be derived from these, e.g. most frequently played tracks, tracks quickly skipped (implying the possibility of deletion or removal from playlist). As already said in last entry:

A music log file results in even more redundant data to store. According to a rough calculations, I will see it growing by 1 megabyte every month or so. Compression, however, should make it only 10-20% of its original size.

You can find all the details on this work (installation instructions included) in my Linux Utilities page.

Dr. Irving from the University reported a ‘critical’ issue with the Linux distribution that had been installed in student clusters. The following message was posted yesterday afternoon to the Linux-users mailing list. I believe it is worth quoting:

Several of our students have been complaining about a pornographic screensaver on Redhat Fedora Core 3 desktops. After a bit of rooting around I’ve tracked this down to the webcollage.desktop screensaver which picks random images off the internet and displays them within the screensaver. Not a very responsible inclusion in a desktop environment but it can be found in /usr/share/applnk/System/ScreenSavers should anyone receive similar complaints.

Linux computer for under $255 in the UK (click to enlarge)

ithin this post lies my main argument as to why Linux (or complimentary Open Source streams or movements) will rise hugely in less than a decade. The cost of production continues to slide while human intellect (development) is among the more expensive commodities. The Zipit demonstrates that by using Linux, the leading free operating system, a PDA with WiFi, 320×240 pixels display and stereo DAC can sell for as little as $99.

$299 for the entire package

In Britain, Dabs are now selling a Mandrake 9.2 Linux box (quicklinx 3QV3WS, no monitor is included) for 140 British pounds ($245) excluding VAT. Elsewhere in the world, the fully-featured MOBILIS computer (shown above) goes for only $299 list and speculations are made as to why commercial software will perish once hardware costs equate to it.

Enterprises still need software, and lots of it, to run their operations, but they are buying few new licenses. Part of the story is that the market is mature and buyers have enough software already. Part of the story is that offshore outsourcing makes it cheaper to build your own. A big part of the story is the appearance of more efficient alternatives, such as open source.

With such low prices across the market, buying a larger number of computational units is possible for prices that are comparable with that of several Windows PC‘s or Apple Macs. Server rooms will benefit in terms of performance, as they do already. Homes will be able to offer a computer to each member of the family or exploit computers for otherwise remote uses like home entertainment, productivity and automation in the garden , the kitchen (see kitchen of the future) and even the car.