While reading Wil Wheaton’s blog I found out that today, on the anniversary of the first Moon landing, James Montgomery Doohan died at the age of 85. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease. If you are a Star Trek fan you sure know him as the funny chief engineer Scotty from the starship Enterprise from The Original Series. As he would say: “Scotty to Heaven… One to beam up.”. May he rest in peace!

Tags: james doohan, scotty, star trek, the original series

A few hours ago my first patch for KDE has been committed to KDE SVN. It is nothing big, just a fix for a compilation problem for Juk (a very nice music player and tag editor) when Akode is not installed on the system. But it is a start and I hope to learn enough C++ and Qt soon to be more helpful. Until then I’ll continue to do my best with translation into Slovenian, testing and bug reporting. Oh and by the way, I was following these instructions on how to send patches to KDE.

Tags: personal, programming, patch, kde, linux

Only a few days after releasing versions 1.0.5 of the extremely popular web browser Firefox and e-mail client Thunderbird there are allready new releases available. The previous releases had some changes in API (application programming interface) which broke some extensions. So all should be fixed in versions 1.0.6. You can get them here:
Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6 | ED2K
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6 | ED2K

Tags: mozilla, firefox, thunderbird, web browsers, e-mail, email, internet

Yesterday evening my roommate Vito informed me that in the next semester his girlfriend is finally moving in to live with him. This unfortunately means that there is no free bed for me left in the apartment and I will have to join my sister in a search for a new room in Ljubljana. I hope we find something that is close to our faculties and that is reasonably priced. The task is not easy and good luck plays quite an important role in this. Anyways, I had a great time in this apartment. The best place I’ve had in Ljubljana so far. Thanks to all roommates for this and sorry for any inconveniences I’ve cased. I must also say goodbye to our neighbor students on the upper floor. Take care and have a great time! All of you in the house. Oh and if anyone reading this knows of any cool place for two or three students, be sure to drop me a note.

Tags: personal, room, apartment, ljubljana

Issue 5 of Free Software Magazine is finally here. Articles for June 2005 are:

• Editorial

• The internet’s plague: spam

• Linux in a Windows World by Roderick Smith
• From Bash to Z Shell by Oliver Kiddle, Jerry Peek and Peter Stephenson

• The leap from virtual host to virtual machine
• Xen, the virtual machine monitor
• Linux-VServer

• Haskell
• Newsflash!
• Web site blocking techniques
• Who’s behind that web site?

• The future of computing: is free software ready?
• Free software 2.0
• On the “Creative Commons”: a critique of the commons without commonalty

Download from home page, using ED2K links or using BitTorrent.

Tags: free software magazine, fsm, magazine, free software, open source

While we are all waiting for the next issue of Free Software Magazine I would like to tell you about another free magazine I have come across a few days ago. It is called MyOSS Magazine, where MyOSS stands for Malaysian Open Source Software. And no, it is not written in Malaysian, it is in English so everyone can read it. To find out more about the magazine be sure to check out its mission and social contract. If you already have some FOSS article ready or are thinking about writing one you are more then welcome to contribute to the magazine and community. Besides downloading MyOSS from its home page you can also use ED2K links. Oh and a big thanks to people behind MyOSS for a link to my blog in one of their articles on the home page.

Tags: myoss, malaysianoss, magazine, free software, open source

Just a few minutes ago I found out that after about 20 years of existence IBM is going to stop marketing (now) and selling (on December 23, 2005) their OS/2 operating system. OS/2 Warp 4 was the first operating system we had on our very first computer. I still remember all the countless hours I spent playing the excellent game Galactic Civilizations. As far as I remember OS/2 was a great operating system. Completely 32 bit, very stable and powerful. Much better than Windows 95 we had to buy later. Well OS/2 is gone now and IBM are recommending that their customers migrate to Linux now. They have even prepared a special OS/2 to Linux Client Transition guide.

Tags: ibm, os/2, os2, linux, operating systems, galactic civilizations

Right after updating the best web browser Mozilla foundation has also released a new version of my favorite e-mail client (additionally it is also a very nice client for news groups (usenet) and a great RSS/Atom feed reader) Thunderbird. Version 1.0.5 has improved stability and a couple of fixed potential security problems. Download here. You can also get the new Thunderbird using ED2K links or any BitTorrent client using these torrents: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X

Tags: mozilla, thunderbird, e-mail, email, internet

A new version of one of the best web browsers, Firefox, is out. Version 1.0.5 is bringing you some stability fixes and plugs a couple of potential security holes. So update as soon as possible. Download here. You can also get the new Firefox using ED2K links or any BitTorrent client using these torrents: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X.

Oh and by the way. Firefox has recently just passed the 70 000 000 downloads mark and is also on the 4th place of the most frequently downloaded apps on Download.com during the past 10 years. Extremely impressive for such a young application.

Tags: mozilla, firefox, web browsers, internet

The extremely popular web browser Firefox already has many easy to use modern features by default. And there are a lot of additional extensions that make Firefox even better. Google released three extensions of their own yesterday:

• Google Toolbar: among other things it brings spellchecking, automatic fill out for forms and translation
• Google Send to Phone: enables you to send short text messages of web page content to your mobile phone (unfortunately limited to US numbers only)
• Google Suggest: completes your search terms as you type them into the search box located to the right of the address bar

If you are still using some old and insecure browser like Internet Explorer be sure to check out Firefox and extensions for it.

Tags: firefox, extensions, google, browsers, web browsers, internet

BitTorrent has become a very popular technology for downloading files. Almost all GNU/Linux distributions can be downloaded this way and more authors are deciding to release their creations using BitTorrent every day. If you want to download using BitTorrent now you need a special client, like the original one or one of the more advanced ones like Azureus. Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could use BitTorrent directly from your browser? This would make it as easy to use as it is downloading files over HTTP or FTP.

Good news everyone! It’s happening as I write this. They just released first beta version of Opera 8.02 (download from FTP) which already includes simple support for BitTorrent downloads. There is also BitTorrent support in the works for Firefox browser (as part of the Google Summer of Code project). Unfortunately it will not be ready for integration into version 1.1. Until version 2.0 comes out we will have to use an extension to get the support. It is not going to be as powerful as Azureus, but it will bring BitTorrent closer to the average user and make it much easier to use.

Tags: bittorrent, browsers, opera, firefox, internet

In the morning members of the European parliament voted on a very important issue for every computer user. They were deciding on the future of the software patent directive. As all of you should know by now, it would legalize almost unlimited patentability of software, if accepted. This would only be good for big multinational companies and extremely damaging for everyone else (medium and small size companies, free and opensource software community and all the people who use computer software).

Fortunately the fight for our rights was successful. Members of European parliament clearly rejected the software patents directive in its current form by a large margin (648 votes against 14). This means that the directive must be rewritten from scratch. And this time we have to make sure it will be written properly and benefit all the people.

Sources:

• FFII - European Parliament says No to software patents
• BBC - Software patent bill thrown out
• Reuters - EU assembly throws out bill to harmonize patents
• RTE - EU vote over software patents
• IHT - Patent law is rejected in Europe

Tags: software patents, european union, software, free software, open source

Ubuntu Linux is getting very popular among users of the free operating system. I’ve read some very positive reviews and heard only good things about it. After visiting DistroWatch.com I could see that second beta (or Colony 2 as they call it) of version 5.10 is out and I decided to download it and try it out.

First I tried to download it using BitTorrent but the download was extremely slow. So I just decided to use the normal download and the ISO image of LiveCD for AMD64 was down in less than an hour. Before burning it I have let it share over BitTorrent for about one day.

I finally rebooted my computer yesterday evening to boot into Ubuntu and check it out. But unfortunately I didn’t get far. After some booting activity I was “welcomed” by a blank black screen with a blinking character _ in the lower left corner of the screen. As it is expected from a good open source community member I have immediately reported a bug about this. During the night another person with the same problem reported his computer configuration and I guess it is some problem with nVidia graphics driver failing to load.

First exploration of Ubuntu didn’t even start. It looks like I’ll have to wait for Colony 3 (or maybe even final version). Unless there is some workaround.

Tags: ubuntu, linux, operating systems, free software, open source

In March I have reported that the development will stop on Mozilla Application Suite and shift to individual applications (Firefox, Thunderbird, Nvu and so on). But a lot of people and some developers like the suite so much that they have decided to continue working on it. And so the SeaMonkey Project was born. This wouldn’t be possible if Mozilla was not free software and open source. When some company decides to stop working on some proprietary and closed source application, well there is nothing you can do and application is dead.

You can read the official announcement here:
SeaMonkey Project Continues Internet Suite

Tags: mozilla, seamonkey, internet, browsers, free software, open source

There is a nice article at Groklaw that has a couple of quotes from Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds and other well known people from the free software and open source world. They tell how software patents are dangerous to them and other small and medium sized companies. And some people, with substantial help from mega-corporations, try very hard to hide this danger from us.

Let me remind you that voting on software patents directive is on 6^th of July when European Parliament will have the last chance to prevent disaster from happening. And we, the people, have the last chance to tell them why software patents are so damaging to all of us. We have to convince members of European parliament to vote for Buzek-Rocard-Duff amendments!

Tags: software patents, european union, free software, open source