IT & computers

Voting is over, tararara, the package was accepted! NET_DNSBL made it to be an official PEAR package! We got +7, two marks higher than was needed.

Well, If you don't know what PEAR is, let me explain.

If you know NOTHING about programming, imagine you're a musician, and a peice of music you composed was accepted to be national anthem for your country hehe, something like that! If you're a designer, imagine working with the best artists from around the world, and then they accept your work as a master peice of something. I really can't explain how great this is.

To the computer GURUs, simply PEAR is the OFFICIAL PHP classes repository. When you download PHP, you will have the PEAR installer installed most likely. So it's top quality community accepted PHP code. The goal is to create generic reusable PHP packages. Think of it as the 'official' classes that come with Java, but not the JVM.

FUD is an abbreviation for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

FUD was first defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products." (quoted in [1])

This term is popular in the open source community. Anyway, Michi Ramsay is shooting a movie about open source, entitled FUD.

Download the trailer: FUD Trailer (6.3 MB) AVI

Open Usability - Mission Statement

OpenUsability.org is a project that brings open source developers and usability experts together.

The idea behind is simple: There are many Usability Experts who want to contribute to software projects. And there are many developers who want to make their software more usable, and - as a consequence - more successful.

Isn't that interesting, it's about time to have more usable open source software!

Interesting article Via InfoWorld.

My favorites are:

2. Dismissing open source -- or bowing before it

11. Developing Web apps for IE only

18. Underestimating PHP

IT managers who look only as far as J2EE and .Net when developing scalable Web apps are making a mistake by not taking a second look at scripting languages -- particularly PHP

I logged in to my hotmail account, and here's what I found

I'm really shocked, I was surfing some forums, and there are many techniques to make pages load much much faster in firefox! IT's amazing.

I'm using Firefox 1.0 and I have a 512 ADSL connection. If you have dialup, there are some better tips over here.

in the adress bar Type 'about:config'
Change the following proporties to these values:
1) network.http.pipelining
2) network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
3) network.http.proxy.pipelining

1) set to true
2) set to 32
3) set to true

What happens is that you enable pipelining. which enables the browser to get the parts of the page at the same time( parallel ). I suppose it opens a thread for every request. Becuase loading an html page is not one request, it must have a seperate request for every object in the page( Image, imported CSS .. ).

The only problem I encountered so far, is that on some sites images appear to be broken.

Isn't this really funny? Seems like Microsoft used an illegal copy of soundForge to edit some wav file, read the story on sladhdot

Good news to wordpress users. I started writing a plugin that would almost eliminate spam I will have the first version out in a couple of days.

The concept:
There's a great service called SURBL, which provides a black list of all spammers domains. So I will let the script check the spammers url's, emails and whatever is there against SURBL.

The plugin is gonna be published under the GPL license. More details later...

If you think Photo blogs are the hottest thing now, it's tim you think again A great Video Blog is out there. It's some sort of production diary for Peter Jacksons new movie, King is Kong.

I just felt like sharing my ideas

A year ago I started wondering if I could make my car intelligent and It all started. Since then I became obsessed with the idea, I've done so much research, it's really doable, All I need is time & some money. Back then I had little time and no extra money, now I got the money but no time at all.

The idea is based on a computer embedded in the car. And this computer should be able to get commands from the driver by using voice tags, the driver would say 'Music On', the system would start to play songs, and so on.

I will try to use open source software as much as possible. The operating System of the computer should be Linux of course.

This is just the basic idea; I have lots of things I wanna add. If all goes well, this should help handicapped people driver cars.

I think developing the first prototype should take 2 months of hard work, if I managed to get all the equipment I need.

Where does the name 'Catrina' come from?
I'll save that for press releases when I become famous

Finally, I got debian up and running with 2.6 Kernel, KDE and almost everything I need. The remaining issues I need to fix, is to recompile the kernel when I have more time, because I got the precompiled one. Also check all the device drivers and everything.

Next thing I'm gonna work on is writing a Database Layer(Wrapper) for MySQL in C. This is part of project NOISA.

Thanks to Mousa Nassar for pointing out that SUN is developing a totally new and innovative desktop, the project is named Project Looking Glass.

Also don't forget to check the presentation.

I believe if SUN didn't adopy Linux, they wouldn't have been able to come out with such things. Now they can concentrate on developing value added features instead of reinventing the wheel. Open Source made it possible.