Binaries are great, if you are a computer
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News.com's Ina Fried leaps into the blogosphere with Beyond Binary, a look beyond the ones and zeros of technology.
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To each his own, but I love eye candy.  When I heard that you could get the 3D Xgl and Compiz environment running on Ubuntu/Kubuntu dapper (my default distribution), I immediately searched the web for instructions.  Most of the instructions take a reasonably timid approach, which gets your 3D environment running in a test console (the second display, or :1).  I'm more adventurous, however, and I immediately went for a total replacement.  What follows are instructions for doing the same.
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During the construction of my 64-bit box I collected enough spare parts to build another machine, one destined for a 32-bit Linux system. Last week I finally got that machine built and running with a sparkling new version of the Jacklab Audio Distribution (JAD). I've been using JAD in its alpha releases, but the new box is running the first beta version. Various improvements have been made in JAD since my earlier review, including the adoption of a 2.6.19 kernel optimized for superb realtime performance. Since I've profiled the system in an earlier blog entry I decided to briefly review some of the more unusual software included with the distribution or built with the help of its development packages. JAD contains more than 70 applications for audio and video composition and production, most of which are at their most recent release versions, so come join me in a look at some less typical sound &amp; music software running on one of the best of the new breed of multimedia-optimized Linux distributions.
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This might be a big geeky but my favorite UNIX directory is /etc.  Whats yours? /proc? /usr/local is pretty good?  There always good stuff in /var!  What about /tmp?
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Plus: File sharing growing like a Weed. [News.com Extra]
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Our colleagues over at PC World gathered up a list of products that each of them simply couldn't imagine going through daily life without. Some are relatively obvious, such as Windows 2003,  TiVO and Skype, and others a bit more odd, such as Cyber Systems' RoboForm. Heh?
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Does Ubuntu point the way to the real future for desktop Linux?
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Open source is not always the best software.  When it's not, use something else.  Is this complicated?
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Adobe Integrated Runtime paves the way for Web applications that perform like desktop-bound programs.Images: Building apps on AIR
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Mandrakesoft is on the Move. "Move" is specifically geared toward beginners to eschew the perception that Linux is too complex to be viable on the desktop. Move does not require installation nor does it make any changes to the host system; the entire operating system runs from a single compact disc.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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A Win/Mac developer recently asked me what I thought about his plan to create a binary of his application and sell it to interested Linux sound and music people. He asked with some trepidation, having already received a rather critical chorus of objection from some overly enthusiastic Linux users. This man's work is excellent and his software already runs nicely under Wine.read more
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Compact kit for the thumb-generation
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Perl is so good at handling plain text files that it's seductively easy to use them when you need something better. Yet sometimes using a full-fledged database is just Too Much Work. If only Dave Baker had written an article on using complex, persistent data structures with MLDBM.
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Windows? Linux? Mac OS? One day it won't matter.
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Lorenzo Alberton has posted some updates about the PEAR packages that he maintains to his blog today including MDB_QueryTool, Mail_Queue2, MDB2, and Translation2.   Even if lately I've been coding way more in C/C++ than in PHP, I still keep an eye on PEAR developement: I reckon in the last month I've closed a bug a day, on average. And after my last call for help about my PEAR packages, I'm also pleased to announce that someone did indeed offer a hand. I'm happy to welcome not one, but two new developers!   Each of the items has links to their PEAR homepage and a few quick words on where the package stands (including developers involved or wanting to get involved). He also reminds developers out there that they can help out too if they want to jump in and get into PEAR.
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Ivo Jansch has a recent post made the other day that takes a look at one of the recent offerings from IBM targeted at PHP developers - the functionality to allow PHP to run on their System i platform.   Some of the developers at Ibuildings are working with PHP on IBM's System-i platform. If that name doesn't ring a bell, it has been called 'iSeries' for a while and it's basically a new name for the old AS/400. [...] Recently IBM and Zend have teamed up to port PHP to the i5/OS operating system. So far this port seems succesful; one of the reasons is perhaps that PHP is easier to adopt by traditional System-i developers than Java, which forces you to learn Object Oriented Programming.   He makes mention of the db2 database extension you can use to access the database as well as a "i5 toolkit" to help with the same. He even links to an article talking about it.