"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." - Paul Ehrlich

News Archive - December 2005

Mozilla and KDE

Saturday 31st December 2005

Category: News

First of all, the site has just been changed slightly. It's not a particularly big change, but big enough to make sure that something is broken! If you do find any problems, please get in touch.

Meanwhile, Mozilla is looking for filmmakers for another marketing campaign, again for Firefox. There's also another article about why KDE rules.

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Seamonkey, X.Org, Google Analytics and Microsoft

Friday 23rd December 2005

Category: News

Seamonkey 1.0 is due for release in January, but until then, there is the beta instead. Seamonkey is effectively the continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite, but being developed by the community rather than Mozilla itself. Despite being a beta, it is extremely stable, at least on my system! Another release was that of X.Org X11R7.0 and X11R6.9.

There was an article in the Jem Report about Google Analytics, stating that it may be Google's first mistake. Some people like this service, some don't - we shall see how successful it becomes, although they have already stopped new sign ups due to popularity.

Finally, a couple of things concerning Microsoft. First of all, it seems Microsoft may be soon be fined daily if they don't comply with the European Commision. Also, Internet Explorer 7 has adopted the RSS logo from Firefox, which should help create a more consistant and recognisable icon for feeds.

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SUSE 10.0

ReviewsGNU/LinuxFLOSS

Sunday 18th December 2005

Categories: Reviews, GNU/Linux, FLOSS

SUSE. It had the 10.0 release a couple of months ago, and remains rather popular. You can either pay for it, or choose the open source version (which I did because I'm tight). And now I'm going to review it.

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Torvalds on Gnome and Office XML

Saturday 17th December 2005

Category: News

Once again, Linus Torvalds makes the news - this time, telling people to stop using GNOME and use KDE instead. This is covered in different places, such as Free Software Magazine and OSNews.com. As for me, regardless of what is said, I'll stick to GNOME. As good as KDE is, I just prefer GNOME - it is, after all, my choice.

On eweek.com, there was an article about Microsoft's new XML standards.

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HTML, OpenOffice.org and Firefox

Tuesday 13th December 2005

Category: News

The biggest piece of news recently is the explosions and fire at Buncefield Oil Depot - it is truly remarkable that nobody has been killed. Let's just hope that the damage to the surrounding area is as small as possible.

Back to some more normal topics, there is an article about the future of HTML. It makes for interesting reading, but HTML (and other standards, such as CSS) can never move forward if it is not supported - there is a myriad of CSS features that are not implemented in many browsers yet.

From the Guardian is an article on OpenOffice.org and its bugs. Personally, I've found using both OpenOffice 1 and 2 to be just as easy to use as Microsoft Office, without the hefty price tag. When I want something that isn't bloated, I normally turn to Gnome Office, Abiword in particular.

Finally, something on Firefox (hardly surprising... of all the news posts on the front page right now, only one doesn't mention Firefox), specifically, Firefox's safety. Personally, while I feel that Firefox is safer than Internet Explorer, there is no replacement for some common sense and learning a little about how to protect yourself and your computer.

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Beginner's Guide to XHTML: Forms

GuidesInternetCode

Saturday 10th December 2005

Categories: Guides, Internet, Code

So far, the topics covered have been fairly general - at one point or another, you'll probably need to use one. Forms, on the other hand, are not so frequently used, at least on smaller sites. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of uses for them. Note that this is a guide on the XHTML aspect of forms - creating scripts to handle the information won't be covered here.

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Firefox 1.5, Wikipedia and MS XML

Tuesday 6th December 2005

Category: News

So far as I can tell, the biggest piece of news recently has been the release of Firefox 1.5 at its shiny new home of mozilla.com. No doubt a quick search on Google will show a array of articles on this new release - there are far too many to list here, and most aren't even that interesting!

Wikipedia has imposed some new rules - that is, you have to register to create articles. It is a shame that some people cannot be trusted to use such services, but that's life! Finally, there is a comparison between the OpenDocument Format and Microsoft's new XML format for Office: ODF Vs MS XML.

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