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

The WordPress dashboard in its ’2.0 gown’

OR the past few weeks I have been working with the existing revision of WordPress 2.0 (RC2, soon Beta). It is currently on ‘feature freeze’, so it’s primarily a matter of cleaning up all imperfections and minor bugs. The nightly build of WordPress appears to be in a solid state and can definitely be described as “impressive”. My intention is to move this modified WordPress 1.2 blog (as well as another) into a newer and more robust section. There are various limitations to WordPress 1.2, the main one being its adaptability to scale and accommodation for functionality.

I have not made the new installation public yet, but the idea I have in mind is migrating the feeds to the new platform. I will be leaving the old 1.2 installation as-is to serve as a collection of legacy pages. The new installation will not contain older posts as to avoid duplicates. It can be perceived as a successor in a sense.

So what else should you know about WordPress 2.0? [Read on for details]

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My personal experiences in handling comment spam are limited, as often is the case. Very few individuals have had the opportunity to test the full spectrum of any given type of software or product (a classic example are laptops, of which they are many models and manufacturers). Only an exhaustive trial, in turn, enables to give a good and comprehensive review.

As regards faults or statistics or reliability, these can rarely be accounted for unless a careful, systematic, and prolonged study is conducted. As a result, the suggestion I make will suffer from a relatively narrow scope. By all means, I am not proposing the best prevention methods for comment spam. I can merely add my 2 cents, speaking about my evolutionary experience with a few spam prevention tools, plug-ins, or paradigms. I shall also provide some links to a variety of popular tools that I am less familiar with.

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Example of globe-like rotation: 30 frames, 63 colours, 200 KB in total

ACK in July, I elaborately described how animated graphics can be created in the GIMP. The GIMP is a free application, which is available for Windows, the Mac and Linux. There is also GIMPShop in the wild, which is a nifty GIMP fork for the photoshop-inclined audience.

I recently decided to change my static favicon.ico image with a dynamic sequence, having discovered that Mozilla Firefox supports icon animations. GIMP was a satisfactory (yet not perfect) tool for this task.

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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

More options and parameters to fine-tune

Firefox has hidden options, which can be unveiled and altered by entering about:config in the address bar. For example, the browser can be configured to better exploit pipieling or put an end to the most stubborn pop-ups. What is this good for? Avoidance of arbitrary choices of values which are otherwide hard-coded and this immutable. Hidden options are allowing these to be changed, using some loose UI or commands syntax, shall that ever become a necessity.

Hidden options are an excellent idea in principle. Thunderbird enables you to enter a variety of statements into JavaScript files, thereby customising the mail client quite endlessly (introduction phrase, symbols, etc.). Whether these hidden option are implication of an advanced option that is not yet implemented, I can’t tell. Either way, it is a selling point to anyone who feels passionate about hacking or even requires certain customisations.

For example, I know I would be deterred by a client that does not handle exectutable/dynamic signatures and I also feel uncomfortable having no control over the X-headers. I currently use 3 mail clients in tandem (KMail, Thunderbird, Horde) because none offers all the required features. Thunderbird with its hidden options and plug-ins is yet the most powerful/flexible.

As regards hidden options in general, the only issue I can think of is increased complexity in the code. Many conditional statements and more parameters/values which are not hardcoded make code flow harder to keep abreast of. Support for multiple languages has a similar effect. Having said that, since broadly speaking, those to ever look at the code know what they are doing, I think it is balanced by the positive points, if not overwhelmed by them. Many would disagree nonetheless.