d-log

The Xoops foundation announced on October 22nd that the stable release version of Xoops 2.3 had been made available for download.

Even though this blog is running on Wordpress, the Linux philosophy dictates that you need the right tool for the job. Blogging is done using Wordpress, and site building is done, in my case, using the excellent Xoops. After some period of internal turmoil at the end of 2007, development seems to have picked up again, with some founding members returning to the community.

It shows. Instead of just updating the looks on some modules, the changelog is listing a lot of impressive and useful additions to the core system, both visible to end-users and some invisible ones that are there to ease module development. I’ve been trying to get the hang of module development for some weeks now (to get this DIF and DTS art site going), and I can see the additions and improvements will make my life easier, and shorten my development cycle considerably.

My verdict: Xoops is back. Development is going forward at a brisk pace, and the community seems to have stabilised. Now all that is needed are some more finished and well-maintained modules, and this will be again a system to be reckoned with.

Firefox

Firefox 3 has just been released! I subscribed for Download Day, where Mozilla tries to establish a world record of downloads in the 24 hours after release. And as I pledged, I’m currently downloading the file from Mozillas download servers. No Dutch version at launch, contrary to the previous release though. This download is coming from Brazil, but as long as it’ll install, I don’t have a problem with that. Nice download speeds too, considering the mass of people currently downloading.

The download is in. Let’s have a look at FF 3.0 now…

read more | digg story

Xara has been acquired by Magix AG, a leading German software distributor for video and music applications. Xara, once distributed by Corel, has been in the news for its open source version of Xara Xtreme which was struggling to gain momentum, and then eventually stopped due to lack of developer interest.
It seems the acquisition by MAGIX will provide them with more funds to further development and to make distribution of their software easier.
MAGIX is distributor of MAGIX Music Maker and MAGIX Video Deluxe 2008.

read more | digg story

It seems there is an exploit in the XML-RPC functionality of the Wordpress we’re using at the moment. It has been patched. More information can be found at the Wordpress site.

On a post on the website, Tom Spinner announces that Stage6, the DivX initiated web platform for DivX encoded movie playing online, will cease operations at the end of this month. Well, they even didn’t take into consideration that we have 29 days in february this year.

The reason is a simple one : it became the casualty of its own success. I am a DivX user and even though I didn’t produce anything worth showing the world, I remember being routed to Stage6 many times when looking at trailers and teasers for Video games. Starcraft 2 is one that comes to mind.

Of course, many sites on the net are offering downloads, but you will be hard pressed to find a site offering the same video quality at the moment. Youtube isn’t even considered, the quality of most movies there is laughable, given the fact that most of the movies are re-encoded to Flash video from other formats, without the special tweaking the DivX publisher could do when preparing his own movie on his own computer in the format that would be distributed.

A sad evolution, but I guess some other sites will take over. When looking around, many video sites are stopping, due to high bandwidth costs, which are directly related to their popularity, or due to the fact that they can’t compete with the best-known ones (Google Video comes to mind). We’ll see what the future may bring, as the last sentence is fairly promising in the post:

We remain committed to empowering content creators to deliver high-quality video to a
wide audience, and we’ll continue to offer services that will make it easy to find videos online in the DivX format.

It’s been a wild ride, and none of it would have been possible without the support of our users. Thank you for making Stage6 everything that it was.

I read this nice news on the FON newsletter. Seems Belgium isn’t that behind after all. Now let’s hope Leuven follows suit, so that we can alle enjoy free Wifi in the library.

FONTASTIC FON SPOTS

The City Library of Izegem in Belgium is our first FONtastic public library in Europe. The library’s visitors can bring their laptops, surf the net and send emails for free. The FON WiFi signal covers the library’s lobby, Reading Room, Meeting Room and Exhibit Hall.

“Since we added FON WiFi, our visitors no longer need to wait to use one of the few available computers we keep for accessing the internet. They can bring along their own laptops and save online research directly onto their computers. We’re also doing something innovative and are the first public place in Izegem to offer free wireless internet access. FON WiFi makes using our facilities so much more comfortable and an even more ideal place to work and study for everyone!”

– Nicolas Cappelle, Head Librarian

Privacy considerations will be very present again, as Google is bundling the different logins for its applications into a new part of their eco-system: Google Profile. It provides a way for the customers to have to maintain one profile, and be able to link from some, but in the future all, Google products.

I can see the reason for this in a service like Blogger, where your profile could be important when you post responses to a certain post, but I’m not sure about the rest of the services. Sometimes, I don’t want people to see my email, so I don’t give it. When you have it in your profile, it might prove difficult to segment what information you want to provide to whom.

From http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/15/google-starts-rolling-out-centralized-profiles

It has been discussed on many places, but since a month or so, GMail has received a new GUI. Nothing really earth shattering, if you ask me, but it shows that Google is taking the remarks serious. Most ‘industry watchers’ seem to think that this is one of the first steps in the process of getting GMail to be Google Gears compatible.

When you’re not sure about what Google Gears is, think of it as a dump of part of the internet on your machine, for those moments when you’re not connected to the ‘net. It is similar to Adobe AIR in many respects. These types of web services would be available everywhere, anytime, thus starting to make inroads in the turf of the desktop application market. Until now, that has been the major selling point for desktop applications : Microsoft engineers complaining “but what if you don’t have a network connection”?

Continue reading ‘Webmail : Google Mail getting updates’ »

You might have noticed by older posts here that I am a member of the FON community. That means I offer the ability to other FON members to use my wireless access point in exchange for access to theirs when I happen to be in the vicinity. FON is backed by Skype and Google (for obvious reasons I would say), and has created a router for their own network about a year ago called the Fonera.

I guess, with the Fonera+ around the corner, there are still shitloads of Fonera’s available, and now they are giving them away for free. Really free, as you don’t even have to pay the shipping costs. I ordered mine today, and I know exactly where I will send them. I know some friends that have not yet succumbed to the Wifi temptation. Time to let them sweat

Since just over 2 weeks, I’ve installed the Analytics plugin for Wordpress, and am looking at the number of people coming to my pages, and how they end up here. It’s quite interesting to see using which search terms people land on your sites. Posts from quite some time ago still attract visitors, which also helps with the click-rate on the Google Ads on the pages.

Continue reading ‘Google Analytics on AIR’ »