WordPress 2.0: coming to a blog near you by Christmas?

recently mentioned rigorous testing of WordPress 2.0. There are still odd bugs here and there; And yet, only hours ago came out a word of gossip. It suggests that WordPress 2.0 will be officially released just before Christmas. I wonder if it is rushed merely because of the important date. There is a typical download rush throughout the holiday. People have time to spare, so they upgrade software or hop on the blogging wagon. Christmas last year was the time of heavy WordPress 1.2 downloads.

Moving on to a different subject, after lengthy use and experience with WordPress, I decided to join the support forums and make contributions on rare occasions. I participated in the mailing lists for a long time (roughly 1 year), but never in the support forums. My first post was addressing to the problem below.

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ALM have intended, for quite some time in fact, to ditch Palm OS in favour of the Linux kernel.Then again, there are independent efforts by individuals to boot and run Linux on Palm devices, regardless of Palm’s mainstream initiatives.

Two new examples:

• The Palm LifeDrive
• The Palm Tungsten T3

Related (older) items: Linux on the Tungsten E

“Joy O’ Joy. You got mail. 10,000 of it…”

S if hijacked Windows boxes were not enough to attribute spam to Windows, have a look at the following story. As it comes from The Register, it is not reluctant to point out that mail floods were initiated by a Microsoft Small Business Server:

The problem was attributed to an improper server configuration, causing five servers to send out more than half a million emails to Dublin solicitors. The deluge of mail originated with a publishing company’s email marketing message, which was sent to solicitors. When some solicitors attempted to reply to the mail, a fault in the solicitors’ configuration of Microsoft Small Business Server sent the original email to their entire email database tens of thousands of times.

Putting the factors above together, Microsoft can no longer deny the fact that spam sometimes originates in their improperly-built operating system. The Windows advocates would argue that the server was configured badly, but should it not be intuitive and protect the users from themselves? Fortunately, there is no doubt in my mind that Dublin lawyers all use Windows, which makes it a dog-eat-dog situation.

Let us hope that the sysadmins have learned their lesson and realised that mail should not be administered by ‘Toy O/S‘. Other companies have learned that mail is better handled by Linux.

[HP’s] Schulz said that HP’s entire email infrastructure… is run on Linux and delivers in the region of three terrabytes [sic] of mail annually.

Isolate yourself from noise and life will get easier

UIET in a technical context is a scenario where users require little or no support. Yes again, the principles described in this post apply to most things in life. Some time ago in the Palm newsgroups, somebody raised a question and then made the observation that few people ever mention Tungsten E devices. The Tungsten E is a modern, lower-end PDA, which is certainly popular, so how could its quiet existence be explained?

The discussion groups tend to have a troubleshooting, technical nature, so fault are usually reported while praises are deemed irrelevant and almost frowned upon. Should a person assume that the Tungsten E does not sell well? No. The very few mentionings of it simply imply that the model is reliable and nobody complains about it. Quiet, you see, is often a sign of success. It means that people carry on with their work and never bother to complain. Noise, on the other hand, is an indication of failure. To use a popular example, if Windows hits the headlines very often, it is in the context of security exploits. If people speak to their friends and colleagues about their computer, even while in the pub, this often involves a rant or a request for advice — a cry for help perhaps.

Better Palm PDA’s can be compared to a power plant. Linux servers likewise. We do not hear about Linux success stories quite so often despite the fact that many organisations happily use it. Google and Hewlett Packard are almost shy to admit that they use Open Source for their operations. We rarely hear about server problems that involve Linux because mail servers running Linux can go on for many years without even requiring a reboot. All they do is collect dust and often be forgotten about. The independence of a workstation often leads to forgetting the value of stability and low maintenance requirements.

As we hear about large migrations to Linux across schools in Macedonia, one wonders if the story will ever be used as a case study. When all operations succeed, nobody will bother to say a word. Nobody can fund or promote media commotion either because Linux is not directly bound to a profit-making organisation. Only when matters go out of hand, enemies are able to grab the opportunity and amplify the story of failure. With large budgets, a certain company can also fund and echo deceiving facts — a ‘disinformation’ perhaps — which can only be described as falsified propaganda.

The bottom line: be aware that information (or conversely misinformation) can receive varying levels of amplitude, which is sometimes affected by financial incentives in companies. Also remember that when problems are not echoed, the implication is that work carries on smoothly. People are good at making a fuss when things go wrong, but choose to remain focused and isolated when no problems crop up.

KDE (yes, it’s Linux above) can be customised to
look and behave like Jaguar/Tiger (and far beyond)

UITE recently I enabled all shadows, translucency, and fade-in/out effects in KDE. The results are stunning, but they require a real-time demonstration (or animation) to be fully appreciated. The load on the CPU is almost bearable while translucency is the biggest detriment of all.

The progress made by the KDE team is tremendous, so envy (sometimes hatred) among GNOME’rs seems beyond understandable. Admittedly, I am working in GNOME while I compose this item, yet I always long for KDE. I am not mesmerised by a default KDE desktop, which is simple, user-friendly, yet somewhat dull. I am actually thinking about heavily-customised environments and powerful settings enabled as in the example above, which illustrates Mac OS X intersections.

It is also worth checking what shall come up in KDE 4. It is said to incorporate the new component titled Plasma. It’s not just eye candy, but a productivity tool, which gives power to the power users.

External Link: KDE 3.5 Released

OpenDocument may lead the way to Web-based office suites
(TinyMCE is shown for illustrational purposes only)

TAGED acceptance of the OpenDocument standard was discussed in the context of Massachusetts. It was also argued, with timely backing from the media, that corporate Open Source migrations are no longer the exception. Finally, IBM have big plans for OpenDocument, which they can vigorously employ and help spread.

IBM plans to support early next year the OpenDocument standard in its desktop software, a product the company intends to market aggressively in developing countries.

IBM and their occasional Open Source push gets mentioned in an article titled “Is Open Source Really Just as Good”? (Part I, Part II – published today)

While I didn’t say it explicitly, when companies like IBM, HP, Novell, Dell and even Sun are driving the adoption, deployment and support of various parts of the LAMP stack in the enterprise, it’s safe to say that the ecosystem for many open source projects is thriving…

Hotter among the gamers’ headlines: Quake4 Demo for Linux

The answer is actually rather complex.

The Free Software Foundation in France argues that the French government considers a ban on free software. Taking into account the possible implications (namely controversy), I initially believed this to be an overstatement or a case of quote-mining.

Will the French be forced to use Internet Explorer (bearing in mind that Opera is now free)? I am not sure what the motive of the government actually is, but I can only speculate. Perhaps it is shielding people’s jobs — primarily in the software industry, that is. Maybe it is the realisation of that DRM and the like suffer from OSS (if not vice versa).

Clarifications soon emerged in a newsgroup that I regularly read (posted by 7):

What they are trying to say is that a new law passed in France will allow those that publish any software to access protected content will face prosecution from those that are harmed by that software. Because any software can become a target, even free software is also a target.

It seems fatally flawed, because you could publish it as two separate modules and have the thing working only when they are brought together by the user as happens now with certain codecs.

In any case, the whole world is running away from DRM because it denies mind share and contributes to elimination of public interest in a companies product, and thus eliminate their revenue!

The day is coming when DRM is burned along side the word hate in the public’s mind.

And nobody will want to touch it and instead opt to go with sharing friendly companies that allows media to be downloaded and stored permanently and transferrably on hard disks and players.

In other (and better) news, the 2008 Olympic Games aim for an Open Source migration.

Contextually-related : No Software Patents in Europe