Looks like some Mozilla developers, like Gervase Markham, have noticed that Slovenia may soon become the first country in the world where Firefox will pass the 50% point when it comes to internet browser market share. When this happens Firefox will definitely be the most used web browser in our beautiful country.

The latest report from Xiti Monitor (in French) cites Firefox share in Slovenia to be at 47,9%. Gervase even thinks that Firefox is already the most widely used browser in Slovenia. Well in my opinion this hasn’t happened quite yet. If you check out my previous blog article Slovenia loves Mozilla Firefox web browser, you can see that a Slovenian internet advertisement company Iprom measured lower share of Firefox. By about 11% lower than Xiti. As long as the difference is still the same today, then Iprom would spit out a 37% share.

In any case the share of Firefox is very high in Slovenia and we are on a very good way to truly be the first country in the world to pass the magical 50% share. And I think there is still a couple months of time left to organise the World Slovenia Day that Gervase proposes.

To all Slovenians: Let’s not let Finland beat us to it. They are only 2,5% behind us. Ditch your old, closed source and insecure browser and switch to Firefox! Let’s make the whole world proud of Slovenia!

Tags: slovenia, mozilla, firefox, browsers, web, internet, ie, internet explorer

That’s the number the entire internet is talking about today. A number with letters in it? Yes, it is in hexadecimal notation, which is often used in computers to represent numbers. Converted into decimal system we use every day it would be: 13256278887989457651018865901401704640.

So what is so special about it? Well it’s more or less this way. The greedy movie and music industry (represented by MPAA and RIAA) is using various forms of digital restrictions management (DRM) on the content they write on media. In effect they scramble it in such a way that you can’t view it if you don’t know the secret recipe to unscramble it. I think it is quite obvious to everyone that this DRM crap doesn’t work at all and only hurts people who legally buy movies and music. It only makes it all more complicated, more expensive. And to think that this DRM stupidity s even integrated into Windows Vista. Just one more good reason to avoid it.

Well back to our number. This once secret number is used in DRM system which infects HD-DVD discs. It is needed by any player (software or hardware) that wants to decode video from HD-DVD. But now it’s not so secret any more. How could it happen? Well in all their greedy stupidity the industry has sent it within a DMCA complaint notice to some poor guy from which it wasn’t so hard to get this number. And sure enough today it is al over the internet.

To read more about this DRM stupidity and take some action in order to stop the greedy industry hurting consumers and buyers be sure to check out DefectiveByDesign.org. We must not tolerate this any more! Eliminate DRM!

Tags: drm, digital restrictions management, consumer rights, mpaa, riaa, movies, music, hd-dvd, technology

Yesterday I attended the fourth and the final part of a free Plone workshop that was organised by Kiberpipa (Cyberpipe) multimedia centre here in Ljubljana. My main motivation for taking part in this workshop was LUGOS. You see, the web page of our Slovenian Linux user group is running on Plone. So I thought it would be a good idea to learn Plone to also be able to help in this department.

Each part was about two hours long and during the entire workshop we’ve learned the basics about Plone. First about Zope application framework and server and how Plone is a product that uses it. Then we took a look at the main parts of a Plone-based portal. We also installed Plone on Linux machines there (it was very easy: unpack, run installation, start the server). After that we learned how to add various types of content and how to organise it. We also found out about packages that add functionality to default Plone, these packages are called Plone products. Portlets were introduced and techniques to modify the layout and looks of the Plone portal were presented. At the end even concepts like states, transitions, workflow, roles, groups and security couldn’t escape from us.

All in all it was a very nice workshop and I think I’ve learned a lot of useful stuff about Plone. It has also surprised me to see how many sites use Plone. I visit some of them (like Trolltech, The Free Software Foundation, Open4Business) more or less frequently and I didn’t even know that Plone is behind them. A special thanks to our mentor Rok Gerbas who has done a great job introducing us to the powerful Plone content management system.

Tags: plone, zope, cms, content management system, internet, web, web design, open source, free software, python, kiberpipa, cyberpipe

Ko je bratranec Matej postavljal svoj blog, ga je seveda želel imeti v slovenskem jeziku. S samim WordPressom ni bilo težav. Vsa zahvala za prevod WordPressa v slovenščino gre Simonu Rozmanu. Sicer prevoda za različico 2.1 še ni na voljo, a prevod za različico 2.0.7 posloveni tudi veliko večino različice 2.1.

Druga komponenta, ki jo je bilo treba posloveniti, je bila tema. Matej si je za svoj spletni dnevnik izbral temo Connections Reloaded 1.5, za katero pa še ni obstajal slovenski prevod. Nič, pljunil sem v roke in temo pač prevedel v slovenščino. Za osnovo sem vzel paket s francoskim prevodom in ga naučil govoriti slovensko. Rezultat vam je na voljo za prenos:
Tema Connections Reloaded 1.5 za WordPress v slovenščini

Za uporabo temo odpakirajte v mapo wp-content/themes in jo nato izberite v nastavitvah za WordPress > Predstavitev > Teme. Da delujejo povezave na vrhu strani je potrebno še ustvariti nove strani z vsebino: O avtorju (o-avtorju), Arhivi (arhivi), Povezave (povezave) in Stik (stik). V oklepajih so nizi, ki jih morate pri ustvarjanju strani uporabiti za nastavitev Žeton objave (Page Slug).

Upam, da bo še komu prišla prav. Če opazite kako napako ali manjkajoč prevod, mi kar sporočite spodaj v komentarjih.

Značke: blog, bloganje, internet, wordpress, slovenščina, prevod, prevajanje

If you check the Powered By section in the right sidebar you can see that one component that makes this blog possible is WordPress, an open source personal publishing system. Today a new major version of WordPress was released. In version 2.1 you can find new features like: autosave, tabbed editor, lossless XML import/export, spell checking and search engine privacy option. An expert from MySQL (the database behind WordPress) has also gone through the code and optimized it so it is now faster. You can read more about this release (and the future) in the post WordPress 2.1 “Ella”. The download is available here.

Tags: blog, blogging, internet, wordpress, cms

A couple of months back we could read a report from a French company called Xiti Monitor, which indicated that here in Slovenia 40.5% people use Mozilla Firefox. This figure is great, but I think it is a little bit too high. Or in other words, the sample might not represent larger population in the best way.

Today a Slovenian company Iprom released their report (in Slovenian language), which should be very accurate. It shows that 29,5% of Slovenians use Firefox to surf the web. Still a very high share of Firefox users. They also indicate how fast the share of Firefox users is increasing. From January 2006 to December 2006 the Firefox share has increased by 64%.

Whatever the completely accurate number is, it is nice to see that Slovenia is the world leader when it comes to use of open source web browser. And it is great to see that so many people are switching to Firefox. Now, if only people at some Slovenian banks, who still force people to use the highly insecure Internet Explorer, would read these reports.

Tags: slovenia, firefox, browsers, web, internet, ie, internet explorer

A new crop circle has appeared in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky. This time the message from the aliens is quite clear. It could be understood as: “We use Firefox web browser” or “Earthlings, use Firefox web browser.” Since many of us are intelligent enough to know how Firefox is great, we already use it

Of course it should be clear that the crop circle is not from aliens. It was made by 12 people from the Linux Users Group at the Oregon State University who like Firefox a lot. They have documented the whole process. The photos are already available and we can expect videos soon.

Tags: firefox, crop circle, crop circles, web browser, web browsers, fun, funny, entertainment

When I started my career (if you can call it so) as a blogger, my first publishing system of choice was Google’s Blogger. I was happy with it until I published two parts of a very successful article titled JLP’s KDE 3.5 Previews. The story even made it to Slashdot and then the problems started. Blogger, at that time, didn’t have any anti comments spam system in place. All you could do is turn off comments completely. After all the spamming at that time I started to look for alternatives. I’ve checked out many of them and in the end I was by far the most impressed with Wordpress. Very powerful, flexible and lots of great looking themes and plug-ins.

Why am I telling you this? Well, after a promising start, the developers of Blogger more or less stopped working on it. No interesting new features, no new themes and people that stayed with Blogger had to wait quite a long time until they got a half decent anti-spam system. But it finally looks like that the developers are waking up from their sleep as they have just released a new (beta) version of Blogger. There are now new templates, more options to customise your template, support for more writers, more control over who can view posts, more feed options and the publishing is now instant (no more of the stupid “Republish entire blog” thing ). You can read some more in the Blogger new features tour and on the Google Operating System blog.

Will all this make me switch back to Blogger? Off course not. Wordpress is still a whole lot better. I highly recommend it if you are a more serious blogger and have access to a server that runs or can run Wordpress. But these, long overdue, enhancements to Blogger are sure welcome for people who are using it, or for those who are thinking about starting blogging and are looking for a good service. Let’s just hope Google continues working on it more actively in the future.

Tags: blogger, google, blogging, blog, blogs, wordpress, internet

To get the notification about the latest news from European Space Agency I’ve been subscribed to several of their mailing lists. I was extremely happy a couple of days ago when I found out that ESA has added RSS feeds to their web portal. So now I can finally use my favourite feed reader, Akregator, to follow news more conveniently. If you are using Firefox web browser, you can also subscribe to news, simply by adding the feed link as a new live bookmark. Besides feeds for top news, there are also feeds available for specific programmes/projects and for national news. For more information see the list of RSS feeds from ESA.

Tags: esa, european space agency, rss, feed, feeds, news, space, astronautics

As you can see from the counter in the left sidebar, Mozilla Firefox web browser has just passed the mark of incredible 200 000 000 downloads. So many downloads in less then two years, and downloads from non-official sites aren’t even included in this huge number. People simply love Firefox because of its speed, security, flexibility, themes, extensions and other modern features. If you are still using some old and insecure browser like Internet Explorer, you shouldn’t wait any second longer and finally upgrade to a browser you can trust. Take back the web and download Firefox.

Tags: mozilla, firefox, web, browsers, browser, web browser, web browsers

If you are a regular reader of this blog, then you have probably noticed that I have changed the graphical theme for it. The blog is powered by the flexible WordPress publishing system and there are many themes that users have designed for it. While upgrading to WordPress 2.0.4 I have decided it would be about time to switch from the default theme to something else. The theme I’m currently using is called WP-Andreas09. It was designed by Andreas Viklund and ported to WordPress by Ainslie Johnson.

Off course I didn’t leave the theme untouched and did some tweaking to it. I’ve enlarged the font size to make it easier to read and got rid of boxes around entries under Categories and Archives sections in the left sidebar. In my opinion links to RSS feeds are quite important, so I moved the Subscribe section from the bottom of the left sidebar to the top of the right sidebar. What I also like about this theme is that separate pages are listed in the toolbar at the top. Another nice addition are links to the last five articles published, that you can find in the right sidebar. These could be useful to people who come to the specific article after using a search engine. With this theme comments are also enabled for each page.

All in all I think the new theme is an improvement over the default one. It looks nicer and it functions better. I hope you like it as much as I do. If you find any error because of the switch, I would be more then glad to hear about it.

Tags: blog, blogs, blogging, wordpress, theme, themes

When I was looking for a Slovenian public Jabber/XMPP server the other day, I was quite surprised about what I found out. Slovenian TV station POP TV has frequently been running this add about their social web site called Frendi in flirt (in English: friends and flirt). The site offers a place to put up your personal profile, write a blog and share photos. Soon users will also be able to upload their own videos. And the biggest surprise for me was that this popular site also offers their users the possibility to chat and they use the open instant messaging (IM) protocol called Jabber for it. For this they have also set up their own Jabber server, available at jabber.24ur.com. So when a user registers with Frendi in flirt, they automatically get a new Jabber account. The site also offers a Jabber client for easy download, which is basically a customised GAIM client. There are almost 10000 users registered at this moment. I also registered and tried to connect with the Jabber server using my favourite IM client - Psi (also translated into Slovenian). Needless to say, all went just fine. You simply have to love open standards. And it is nice to see that web developers for Frendi in flirt chose an open standard instead of reinventing their own or using some closed and proprietary protocol. They should be commended for this.

Tags: jabber, xmpp, im, instant messaging, gaim, psi, slovenia, standards

Google has just blurred the line between instant messaging and e-mail a little bit more. They just released a new version of their Jabber based instant messenger called Google Talk. In version 1.0.0.86 a feature was added enabling you to save conversation history into a special section in your GMail account. Some existing and all new users of GMail e-mail service can also notice a new feature called Gmail Chat. Basically it is an instant messenger integrated right into your GMail account and it enables you quick access to all your Google Talk and other Jabber contacts.

More info:
Google Talk chat history saving
Gmail Chat

Tags: google, gmail, google talk, gtalk, jabber, xmpp, instant messaging

The Extend Firefox Contest is now over and the finalists are selected (out of 200+ submissions). The participants had the task to craft the most innovative and useful extension they can. If I had to select only one of the finalists, it would be Sage. It is a great extension that collects articles from blogs and other web pages that offer RSS or Atom feeds. I also use Adblock to block all the pesky ads (including Flash based ones) and DownThemAll to filer and download several links from a web page. If you are designing web pages you should also check out the Web Developer toolbar. Be sure to check out other finalists and even more extensions to make Firefox even better browser then it already is.

Tags: mozilla, firefox, extensions, browsers

I’m a regular reader of two free electronic magazines: TUX Magazine (perfect for new Linux users) and Free Software Magazine (all about free and open source software). They both come in PDF and are made professionally. I’ve already talked about them here on this blog: TUX and FSM. A couple of days ago I found another high quality free magazine: O3 Magazine. This is how publishers describe it:

The focus of O3 is on the use of Free and Open Source (FOSS) software in Enterprise Data Networking environments. Some articles in O3 will introduce open source solutions, while some are designed to demonstrate how to integrate open source solutions with leading Enterprise Data Networking hardware from a wide variety of vendors.

After reading the first two issues I added it to the list of regularly read magazines right away.

In February 2006 issue of TUX you can read about: getting Linux onto desktops and everywhere else, Hydrogen, OpenOffice.org 2.0 Impress, KDE Instant Messaging, OpenOffice.org 2.0 Base, Neverball, Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and OpenOffice.org 2.0 Math.

In January, February 2006 issue of Free Software Magazine: what’s free about free software, X Window System, browsers for Mac OS X, GRUB, Debian GNU/Linux, convincing management to approve free software, political campaigning using the Internet, 64 Studo, free matter economy and how free software liberated Venezuela.

And in January 2006 issue of O3: Linux and the IBM zSeries mainframes, networking the IBM zSeries, Grsecurity, Real time streaming protocol (RTSP), Load Balancing IDS, Deploying Localized Web Services and dNMS.

You can download these magazines from here:
TUX Magazine | ED2K
Free Software Magazine | ED2K
O3 Magazine | ED2K

Tags: magazines, free software, open source, administration, enterprise, networking