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Slashback: Cinelerra, Dolphiname, Phoenix
And you don't want your database being a Flipper. MySQL has finally announced the name of their logo dolphin, and the winner is... Sakila! The name, submitted by Ambrose Twebaze of Swaziland, was chosen from 6357 entries "because it represents the global reach of MySQL as well as the friendly, open nature of the company." Slashdot covered the contest back in January, and MySQL listed some of the more popular names submitted back in April.
Perverse incentives are the most fun. Mark Barnett writes in reference to the ongoing pets.com lawsuit story Update: 10/04 00:18 GMT by T : Sorry, that's "PetsWarehouse," not "pets.com.":
"I was one of the settling parties. I did not settle out of fear. I settled because he wanted me to run his banner on my website for 120 days. The settlement did not say anything about the number of times it had to run. I ran it once per day at about 4 AM EST for 120 days. It was my joke on him. I think I got the better deal. I ran the defense fund banner about 1.5 million times versus his 120 times."
Wings for a lizard. Espectr0 writes "Phoenix 0.2 has been released!. Improvements include the return of the sidebar, extensions management and web form autocomplete. It's also a little smaller and faster, and 0.3 will be released in about a week. Get the scoop here."
Unsolicited testimonial. boomerang_56 writes "Wanting to see what the fuss was about, I just installed Red Hat 8. For me, working IEEE1394 features are a must. It was nice to see that now I don't have to recompile the kernel just to have Firewire working. So I downloaded and compiled Kino, and was able to capture from my camcorder, and even control it, without the major tweaks I used to have to do. Then I found out that Cinelerra has been released at version 1.0!!! So I downloaded and installed it via RPM (Pentium II binaries). I had to install an old version of libstdc++-3, but that was easy. No "--force" or the other hassles we used to have to go through. So the first time I fired up Cinelerra, after changing the preferences for IEEE1394 capture, I was impressed to see it actually captured on the first try. I guess the bottom line for this submission is as a user I wanted to say "thanks" for all the developers working on this kind of thing. We all know that besides gaming, video editing is the big killer app. It's really nice to be able to have this kind of power in open source software and not have to boot to Windows just to edit video now. It's not easy enough for my mom yet, but the way things are going, it won't be long. Oh, links... get Cinelerra here (check out the screenshots too). Get Kino here."
Blinkenlampen ueber Paris. fluxdvd writes "In celebration of the Nuit Blanche art festival in Paris, Project Blinkenlights has transformed Tower T2 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France into what is claimed to be the world's largest computer screen. The system used to drive the display runs an embedded version of Linux.
Read the story at Linuxdevices.com. They have live streams of the building at night (Paris time) and replay the previous night's display druing the day. It's quite impressive :)"
We mentioned the plans for this display a few weeks ago.
Don't you hunger for a patent-free, royalty-free, better-at-identical-bitrate alternative? The release of Red Hat 8.0 included the notable, intentional ommission of MP3 software, a decision Red Hat made on the basis of possible patent and royalty problems.
Now SnowDeath writes "After two days of trying to get my ALSA install to work correctly in RedHat 8.0 (Psyche), I finally headed over to the xmms website to see if there were any known bugs with ALSA. Low and behold, the first thing my eyes read tells how RedHat Software decided to not include the mp3 plugin in their xmms install in Psyche in fear of pending patent problems. So, do not despair, there is an rpm "update" for this particular problem on the xmms site."
What version of Linux should I be programming to? Should I go with The Standard, Redhat? The Pure, Debian? The Cool, SuSE? or The Esoteric, Sorcerer? I would love to develop applications for Linux, but it is too difficult to nail down a baseline system what with each distro constantly adding and removing components all the time.
Each distro also demands tradeoffs. Redhat sacrifices everything to be "easy to install". Debian sacrifices currentness for stability (ha-ha). SuSE sacrifices compatibility with other distros for ease-of-use. And Sorcerer sacrifices that compatibility even more.
When Redhat removes another component like they did here, it's just business as usual in the Linux distro world. But for those developers out here who want to write applications, it's really hard with moving targets like these.
Since RedHat removed mp3 libraries from their distribution we should embrace a new format. This time, we should use a lossless format such as FLAC or Monkey's audio or even Meridian not only because of sound quality but because we need to show the Labels that we mean business. With lossless formats we will have equal standing with their business model technically and literally. We need to establish an age of freely distributed carbon copies of their material so that they become completely irrelevant. College dorms have enough bandwidth to exchange 30mb songs between each other. We should actively encourage people to adopt lossless file formats so we have more freedom in dissemination and use of OUR content. We need to defeat the Labels every way possible. By completely eliminating every reason for their existance we might come closer to their demise.
I'm using Phoenix right now, and seriously, I'm blown away by it. Not only is it lightning fast in comparison to Mozilla, but it already has the things I've been trying to get in the Mozilla trunk for a long time now. (For those of you who browse Bugzilla, you know how frustrating getting something into the trunk can be sometimes!) Some of the notable features of Phoenix are:
.5
1) Customizable Toolbars
2) Home button where it SHOULD BE!
3) Inline form management (Mozilla's form manager is all but worthless unless you've already filled out 20+ pages of forms.)
4) Theme that respects my system colors! (Go ahead, change your system colors, Phoenix changes with them!)
5) No bundled on software--I just want a browser! And if you use Mozilla for the mail, don't worry, the Mail client will be getting the same overhaul as the browser. It's a project called Minotaur, and will be started on roughly when Phoenix hits
There are tons of other things to mention here like the extensions manager, default popup blocking, tabs, worthwhile sidebars, ability to remove the throbber, a clean statusbar that actually works, etc., but it's best if you just see it for yourself! Go grab a copy, and then while you're enjoying it, thank Asa Dotzler, Blake Ross, Dave Hyatt, and the other guys who are making this a reality!
Thanks guys!
Go grab a copy, and then while you're enjoying it, thank Asa Dotzler, Blake Ross, Dave Hyatt, and the other guys who are making this a reality!
Not sure about the others, but Dave Hyatt is/was one of the principles on the Chimera project and you can really see the similarity between these two browsers -- even to the point of the OS X style slide-out preference sheets. Very nice.
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.