Open Source News
April 23, 2004
Fedora Tracker
Fedora Tracker aims to be a comprehensive but easy to use index of Fedora apt/yum repositories on the internet. You can search by repository or by package/filename.
PhpGedView 3.0 released
Version 3.0 of PhpGedView, an online genealogy viewer, is out. "PhpGedView version 3.0 adds several new features and fixes lots of bugs. You will definately want to upgrade. The phpGedView project, SourceForge.net's December 2003 Project of the Month, parses GEDCOM 5.5 genealogy files and displays them on the internet in a format similar to PAF. All it requires to run is a php enabled web server and a gedcom file."
Dive Into Python
Version 5 of Dive Into Python, a free, online Python book, is out. See the revision history for a list of changes.
Will Mozilla Fly?
IT-Director.com is running another Robin Bloor column; this one describes a recent browser experience. "However, the initial (test) version of this applet was created for the Mozilla Firefox browser rather than Internet Explorer so I had to download the browser in order to try it out. So I did. It took me a whole five minutes to decide to ditch Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox."
Mozilla: Curiouser and Curiouser
Recommended reading: Robin Bloor's followup to his "Will Mozilla Fly?" article on IT-Director.com. "One of Microsoft's problems is that its interface designers suck. I believe that Microsoft is repeating a mistake IBM made in the 1990s. IBM was afraid of the PC market at first, but then it launched the IBM PC and very quickly took control of the market. It thought it had won, but actually it had lost. The PC players quickly got big enough and ugly enough to block IBM. The same is happening to Microsoft and Open Source is what's bringing the giant down."
The Guido van Robot Programming Language
Guido van Robot, or GvR for short, is a new programming language intended for instructional purposes. It is written in Python, and aims to be a Pythonic improvement of Karel the Robot.
Linux on desktop PCs
The Economist examines the prospects for Linux on the desktop. "More specifically, two windows, so to speak, of opportunity appear to be opening. One is that the next version of Windows, called Longhorn, has been delayed to 2006 at the earliest, in part by Microsoft's realisation that it has to tighten up security a lot more.... If Linux can establish a good reputation during this period, it might look even more attractive once Longhorn, which will be expensive and is likely to require new hardware, is released."
Linux for Grandma, Part 2
Matthew Newton puts together a Linux computer for his Grandmother, part 1 and part 2 as described in PC World. "As I've said, Grandma has zero experience with PCs. Every single concept that gets introduced to her is going to be new, so the easier those concepts are to digest, the better; the more related to the real world that Grandma has known for the better part of a century, the better. I don't ever want her to hear the words "hierarchical file system." But she can handle putting files into folders. So I want an interface that provides the most pure, consistent, unadulterated files-and-folders experience I can find."
MySQL Cluster
MySQL Cluster "provides a fault tolerant architecture that ensures your organization's mission critical applications achieve 99.999% availability."