Thanks to Daniel Chang for sharing this with me.

Cola: Real-Time Shared Editing from Mustafa K. Isik on Vimeo.

                          

For our Linux users, you can safely update to Ubuntu Hardy if the one thing holding your breath was compatibility with the Blooploader.

Currently we run the Blooploader in Linux from source, you just need to have installed, Qt4, sip4, and PyQt4 on your machine. If you are an Ubuntu user this translates to:

1. Checking out the source from our subversion repository
2. sudo apt-get install python-sip4 python-qt4 python-qt-4-common
3. ./run

For those of you that want to try the Blooploader in Ubuntu, and you have no clue on how to use the command line, we promise we’ll have a new .deb installer for our next release now that Hardy has enabled binary packages on their repository for all our dependencies.

                          

Edinburgh, UK (PRWEB) March 27, 2008 — The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.4, the latest version of the leading open source office productivity suite. OpenOffice.org 2.4 includes new features, enhancements, and bug fixes to all its core components.

Users will appreciate changes such as usability improvements in printing, and further enhancements to PDF handling (OpenOffice.org creates PDF files ‘out of the box’ to ISO standard). The default font is now DejaVu, which supports more languages/localisations than the previous BitStream Vera -part of a raft of localisation improvements covering languages from Hiligaynon to Quechua. Mac OS X users will appreciate the use of the native Quicktime player and spell-checker.

Writer

OpenOffice.org’s word processor, now has easier selection of the language for spellchecking; users can set options for printing hidden and place holder text and for following hyperlinks; text selection and ‘find and replace’ have been improved; and ‘power users’ will appreciate new extra keyboard shortcuts for paragraph styles.

Calc

Regular users of Calc, OpenOffice.org’s spreadsheet, will appreciate the streamlining of data and formulae entry. Other new features include a ’smart move and copy’ for blocks of cells; the ability to transform data into columns; and improvements to printing, data filtering, and the Data Pilot.

Draw

Usability improvements have been made to Draw, the drawing and diagramming module, and Impress, OpenOffice.org’s application for creating presentations. Both applications have enhanced PDF export capabilities. In addition, Impress now has a new range of thrilling 3D transition effects supported through an extension.

The Chart module, used throughout OpenOffice.org, continues to evolve rapidly. Novice users benefit from more intelligent default choices from the graphics engine; advanced users have more options allowing them to fine tune a chart exactly the way they want it.

Base
OpenOffice.org’s database application, Base, now supports MS-Access 2007 (accdb files on MS-Windows), and has enhanced capabilities for MySQL, Oracle/jdbc, and native (HSQL) databases. The Query Designer is also improved.

OpenOffice.org 2.4 is the eleventh release in the 2.x series (launched in October 2005) and demonstrates the Community’s commitment to continuous and regular improvement of its software. The next major release – 3.0 – is planned for the autumn/fall this year.

About OpenOffice.org

The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, translate, support, and promote the leading open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org®. OpenOffice.org’s leading edge software technology (UNO) is also available for developers, systems integrators, etc to use in OpenOffice.org extensions or in their own applications.

OpenOffice.org uses the OpenDocument Format OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as well as supporting legacy file formats such as Microsoft Office, and is available on major computing platforms in over 80 languages. OpenOffice.org software is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) and may be used free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial.

The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a number of companies, including Sun Microsystems, the founding sponsor and primary contributor.

Source: PRWeb

                          

Over 1,000 people gathered at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare Hotel for PyCon 2008. The influx of proposals was so great this year that organizers could only accept half the proposals received, simply due to lack of space. Demand for tutorials, in particular, rose so high that organizers added an extra timeslot full of new sessions. Twenty-five of the 28 tutorials were sold out and there were 22 open source development sprint projects available for attendees to participate in, up from 13 in 2007. More than 270 people took part in the development sprints, which is more than attended the entire first PyCon in 2003.

The best part about PyCon is the people you get to meet
“As jam-packed as the week’s events were, a number of attendees and speakers remarked to me that they felt the conference this year was the best yet,” said PyCon 2008 chair David Goodger. “It’s great to see months of work come together and have people really enjoy it.”

PyCon 2008 is organized and run entirely by volunteers. A true grassroots movement, it is a community conference put on by the community for the community. Many attendees enjoy the numerous sessions, but more importantly, they believe the real value of the conference is the community all being there together.

“The best part about PyCon is the people you get to meet,” said Chris McAvoy, founder and president of the Chicago Python Users Group, which hosted PyCon 2008. “That, coupled with more than 1,000 attendees, compared to the 600 last year, says to me that Python is really building a market here in Chicago and elsewhere. It’s an exciting time to be a Python developer.”

PyCon 2009 will also be held in Chicago. For more information about PyCon, please visit http://us.pycon.org.

About PyCon

Presented by the Python Software Foundation, the world’s largest Python conference brings together a diverse group of developers, enthusiasts, and organizations to explore new challenges, launch new businesses and forge new connections within the Python community. PyCon provides attendees with the opportunity to delve into the dynamic programming language employed by well-known companies such as Google, Cisco, and the New York Times. PyCon helps people learn new tools and techniques, showcase projects, and meet other Python fans.

Source: PRWeb.com

                          

Project Indiana
I must say at the beginning of the presentation he switched from talking about the MySQL acquisition to selling us a new version of Open Solaris called Project Indiana, which seems to be led by no less than Ian Murdock creator of Debian. I suppose its his job now to sell sun and he had to do it, but things got a lot more interesting specially in the Q&A.

So for Project Indiana, as you can imagine having someone like Ian Murdock there means Open Solaris will have apt capabilities (like Debian or Ubuntu).

The other thing that caught my eye about Project Indiana (coming from the Linux world) is that Sun will require all drivers to be open sourced, otherwise they won’t be accepted to the distribution. I’m not sure if this has done anything for projects like Debian where they’re really strict, but Sun is a monster with a lot of corporate influence, maybe their new Open source approach will help things change (manufacturers releasing drivers with open licenses), and finally we’ll get lots of drivers available for Linux as well.

They also mentioned an “open source” license called CDDL (“cuddle” as they call it), no clue about its differences, if its good or bad, it seems to me there might be something weird behind it, but I’m just talking out of my ass here, I’ve not read it yet. It’d be good if someone could complement this article with their thoughts on CDDL vs GPL2 vs LGPL vs others…

How things have changed

Quoting Antoniades:

“Basically we have an influx of cash”

MySQL AB went from a 400 employee company to being part of an organization of about 34,000 employees, and now they have a lot more cash, the purchase according to Antoniades was mostly paid in cash (and you know cash is king baby!).

Philip even mentioned they’re hiring 2 SysAdmins for their New York office, (contact him if you’re interested), also, when they need a feature, they just don’t put it in the wish list, if its important enough they get 30 engineers from Sun to help them.

He made a lot of emphasis about how they already got a guru focused on optimization of MySQL and how they’re pushing for more threading (parallel programming) on MySQL. He said that Sun has a lot of DB experience, that they basically helped Oracle in getting their DB to run spotless on Solaris and they have the knowledge about DB development problems as well as a lot of smart people to help them.

On the Q&A session I finally learned that Yes there’s plans between Java/MySQL integration (stored procedures in java could be a project to come, and they mentioned that a couple of the MySQL AB engineers had already done something along those lines, and as the acquisition was happening the people from Sun brought up the fact they knew about such efforts. MySQL AB has always been a good Java shop, and they claimed their jdbc driver was always one of their best products). MySQL basically wants to learn a little more of that engineering discipline from Sun, and it seems like a nice blend between 2 very different cultures.

Other interesting topics of conversation during Q&A were about using Memcached as a storage Engine, so that you can use MySQL as a client for Memcached, maybe it sounds as an extra layer with a certain overhead, but you could certainly do a lot of more complex stuff just by using SQL, seems interesting, didn’t know you could actually do that (actually opens a lot of possibilities in my mind for stuff we need in MyBloop.com that we were planning to use raw key-value-approach on memcached)

Also learned about a new storage engine called Maria, that will be the successor of Innodb.

So I think that now, we can be sure that MySQL will be churning out a lot more fixes (in shorter periods, maybe MySQL 6.0 will come out sooner now) given the cash and new added man power, probably the folks using MySQL enterprise will be even more benefited by this, they talked about a lot of enterprise tools to optimize queries, analyze queries, very interesting stuff.

                          

So I was curious and I downloaded and tried the benchmark on Firefox 3.0b4. to see how much Firefox 3.0 will improve its Javascript performance, key to today’s web applications and the future of the web.

After seeing the results, I say Kudos to the Firefox 3 team, they’ve improved considerably their JavaScript engine and that only makes me glad cause I won’t have to switch to Safari. :)

I will not make any tests on HTML rendering, if you find any benchmark results on HTML rendering, please leave links on the comments section.

Once again, here are the results side by side:

FIREFOX 3.0b4
========================
RESULTS
(means and 95% confidence intervals)
-----------------------------------------
Total:                 3876.6ms +/- 0.9%
-----------------------------------------

  3d:                   489.0ms +/- 1.3%
    cube:               193.8ms +/- 1.2%
    morph:              138.2ms +/- 1.5%
    raytrace:           157.0ms +/- 3.8%

  access:               594.2ms +/- 5.6%
    binary-trees:        57.4ms +/- 5.9%
    fannkuch:           246.0ms +/- 0.8%
    nbody:              219.8ms +/- 13.6%
    nsieve:              71.0ms +/- 2.1%

  bitops:               470.4ms +/- 0.7%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:   67.8ms +/- 1.5%
    bits-in-byte:        90.8ms +/- 1.8%
    bitwise-and:        177.4ms +/- 1.1%
    nsieve-bits:        134.4ms +/- 0.5%

  controlflow:           42.4ms +/- 1.6%
    recursive:           42.4ms +/- 1.6%

  crypto:               257.2ms +/- 1.2%
    aes:                 87.4ms +/- 1.3%
    md5:                 83.8ms +/- 4.0%
    sha1:                86.0ms +/- 0.0%

  date:                 412.0ms +/- 0.4%
    format-tofte:       251.6ms +/- 0.6%
    format-xparb:       160.4ms +/- 0.4%

  math:                 502.0ms +/- 2.2%
    cordic:             188.0ms +/- 0.5%
    partial-sums:       231.2ms +/- 5.2%
    spectral-norm:       82.8ms +/- 3.6%

  regexp:               275.6ms +/- 1.0%
    dna:                275.6ms +/- 1.0%

  string:               833.8ms +/- 0.7%
    base64:              98.6ms +/- 1.4%
    fasta:              228.8ms +/- 3.2%
    tagcloud:           166.2ms +/- 0.6%
    unpack-code:        218.6ms +/- 0.5%
    validate-input:     121.6ms +/- 0.6%

SAFARI 3.1
========================
RESULTS
(means and 95% confidence intervals)
-----------------------------------------
Total:                 3368.8ms +/- 1.0%
-----------------------------------------

  3d:                   414.8ms +/- 1.9%
    cube:               132.2ms +/- 2.4%
    morph:              144.6ms +/- 4.1%
    raytrace:           138.0ms +/- 0.6%

  access:               520.4ms +/- 4.1%
    binary-trees:        78.6ms +/- 11.3%
    fannkuch:           231.4ms +/- 2.0%
    nbody:              149.2ms +/- 8.1%
    nsieve:              61.2ms +/- 3.9%

  bitops:               449.6ms +/- 2.4%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:   69.8ms +/- 9.6%
    bits-in-byte:        99.2ms +/- 4.6%
    bitwise-and:        167.2ms +/- 2.3%
    nsieve-bits:        113.4ms +/- 6.7%

  controlflow:           91.2ms +/- 4.7%
    recursive:           91.2ms +/- 4.7%

  crypto:               247.2ms +/- 2.3%
    aes:                 81.2ms +/- 2.5%
    md5:                 83.8ms +/- 4.6%
    sha1:                82.2ms +/- 2.0%

  date:                 306.4ms +/- 0.5%
    format-tofte:       146.6ms +/- 1.4%
    format-xparb:       159.8ms +/- 1.0%

  math:                 454.8ms +/- 1.3%
    cordic:             174.4ms +/- 1.6%
    partial-sums:       193.8ms +/- 1.2%
    spectral-norm:       86.6ms +/- 4.4%

  regexp:               209.6ms +/- 0.7%
    dna:                209.6ms +/- 0.7%

  string:               674.8ms +/- 2.2%
    base64:             103.8ms +/- 9.0%
    fasta:              177.0ms +/- 1.0%
    tagcloud:           136.0ms +/- 4.6%
    unpack-code:        136.0ms +/- 1.7%
    validate-input:     122.0ms +/- 2.6%

Almost there. Only in Flow control and recursion it beats Safari, the rest needs to improve, however, it’s improved a lot comparing to the previous version of Firefox.

The machine used for this test is a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Version 10.4.11 with a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM.

                          

Today I read about the new updates, and I read something that caught my eye at Mackinando.com.

it executes JavaScript six times faster than the rest

I go to the Safari Site, and they compare themselves with a previous version, Firefox, and Opera (not IE, not even worth mentioning)

I couldn’t believe my eyes, so I googled for “JavaScript Benchmark“, and tried the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark onboth Firefox 2.0.0.12 and the shiny new Safari 3.1.

The machine used for this test is a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Version 10.4.11 with a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM.

Here are the results side by side:

FIREFOX 2.0.0.12
========================
RESULTS
(means and 95% confidence intervals)
-----------------------------------------
Total:                 15365.4ms +/- 1.7%
-----------------------------------------

  3d:                   2386.6ms +/- 7.9%
    cube:                733.0ms +/- 20.8%
    morph:              1269.8ms +/- 9.4%
    raytrace:            383.8ms +/- 37.1%

  access:               1386.2ms +/- 4.8%
    binary-trees:        201.6ms +/- 0.6%
    fannkuch:            294.8ms +/- 5.4%
    nbody:               691.2ms +/- 8.9%
    nsieve:              198.6ms +/- 1.5%

  bitops:               3461.2ms +/- 0.4%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:   275.8ms +/- 0.6%
    bits-in-byte:        248.2ms +/- 0.7%
    bitwise-and:        2765.2ms +/- 0.5%
    nsieve-bits:         172.0ms +/- 4.7%

  controlflow:           153.4ms +/- 0.7%
    recursive:           153.4ms +/- 0.7%

  crypto:                527.2ms +/- 0.5%
    aes:                 230.8ms +/- 1.2%
    md5:                 147.4ms +/- 0.5%
    sha1:                149.0ms +/- 0.6%

  date:                 2551.8ms +/- 0.3%
    format-tofte:       1449.6ms +/- 0.3%
    format-xparb:       1102.2ms +/- 0.8%

  math:                 1312.6ms +/- 12.8%
    cordic:              497.4ms +/- 12.0%
    partial-sums:        501.6ms +/- 1.6%
    spectral-norm:       313.6ms +/- 36.1%

  regexp:                501.0ms +/- 0.2%
    dna:                 501.0ms +/- 0.2%

  string:               3085.4ms +/- 10.3%
    base64:              914.6ms +/- 3.4%
    fasta:               676.0ms +/- 35.4%
    tagcloud:            441.4ms +/- 0.6%
    unpack-code:         846.8ms +/- 25.4%
    validate-input:      206.6ms +/- 1.1%

SAFARI 3.1
========================
RESULTS
(means and 95% confidence intervals)
-----------------------------------------
Total:                 3368.8ms +/- 1.0%
-----------------------------------------

  3d:                   414.8ms +/- 1.9%
    cube:               132.2ms +/- 2.4%
    morph:              144.6ms +/- 4.1%
    raytrace:           138.0ms +/- 0.6%

  access:               520.4ms +/- 4.1%
    binary-trees:        78.6ms +/- 11.3%
    fannkuch:           231.4ms +/- 2.0%
    nbody:              149.2ms +/- 8.1%
    nsieve:              61.2ms +/- 3.9%

  bitops:               449.6ms +/- 2.4%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:   69.8ms +/- 9.6%
    bits-in-byte:        99.2ms +/- 4.6%
    bitwise-and:        167.2ms +/- 2.3%
    nsieve-bits:        113.4ms +/- 6.7%

  controlflow:           91.2ms +/- 4.7%
    recursive:           91.2ms +/- 4.7%

  crypto:               247.2ms +/- 2.3%
    aes:                 81.2ms +/- 2.5%
    md5:                 83.8ms +/- 4.6%
    sha1:                82.2ms +/- 2.0%

  date:                 306.4ms +/- 0.5%
    format-tofte:       146.6ms +/- 1.4%
    format-xparb:       159.8ms +/- 1.0%

  math:                 454.8ms +/- 1.3%
    cordic:             174.4ms +/- 1.6%
    partial-sums:       193.8ms +/- 1.2%
    spectral-norm:       86.6ms +/- 4.4%

  regexp:               209.6ms +/- 0.7%
    dna:                209.6ms +/- 0.7%

  string:               674.8ms +/- 2.2%
    base64:             103.8ms +/- 9.0%
    fasta:              177.0ms +/- 1.0%
    tagcloud:           136.0ms +/- 4.6%
    unpack-code:        136.0ms +/- 1.7%
    validate-input:     122.0ms +/- 2.6%

Comparing with Firefox, the overall result of this test was that it’s 4.56 times faster.

However, if we look test by test, there are areas where I feel embarrassed for Firefox.

Bitwise Operations
For example, Bit-Operation tests in Safari 3.1 are 7.7 times faster in Safari, being the case of the bitwise-AND (&) operator the worst of them, Safari performed bitwise-and’s 16 times faster than Firefox

OUCH!!

String Operations
So you’d be curious now about String operations, which is probably a lot of what goes on with Javascript, and Ajax, parsing those XML results and what not, maybe the bitwise & won’t hurt us that much given that not many programmers today are smart enough to use them for web programming.

When it comes to String operations, Safari 3.1 was 4.5 times faster than Firefox 2.

Kudos to the Safari Team, I thought there was no point in having Safari until I did this benchmark. I guess they don’t want to let go of Web Browser users, maybe they make millions every month with ad-clicks on Google generated with the search field they have at the top of the browser which is set by default to do Google search.

Once again the saying proves it self

“Competition is good”

Let’s hope this will make the Firefox team think more on Javascript improvements with the upcoming Firefox 3. Once it’s release ready, it’ll be worth it running this benchmark again and see where it stands.

Update (March 20th, 2008)

I’ve made tests on Firefox 3 beta 4, You can see the results here. Tests have been made again on the same Macbook Pro. The improvements of Firefox 3 are notable, however, on the mac, Safari still wins.

                          

I was invited to her show Variedades en Red to talk about the past, present and future of MyBloop.com as well as the new Blooploader.

If you are a Spanish speaker you should not miss the episode, great music, other good geek interviews about iPhone hacking, and of course you might hear a few surprises that may come out soon to MyBloop.com

Variedades en Red is a weekly hispanic podcast that’s aired in several web radio stations reaching crowds anywhere from Argentina, to the US, to Spain and all of latin america.

Some of the radio stations that broadcast this show are:

• OidoEnRadio.com
• EnLaRed.com.ve
• SuperMusica.com.ve

                          

FrostWire 4.13.5 is now available for MS Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Major updates improve network bootstraping and peer discovery. 4.13.5 includes improvements on the Chatroom tab, Audio Previews and more.

Other improvements have taken place for the FrostWire build process (for developers this means true One-Step builds for all versions). Updates on translations have been made thanks to the feedback from users in Poland and throughout Latin America. .

In more detail users can expect the following:

• Faster peer discovery on connection bootstraping. No more “Starting Connection…” problems, first time users will connect faster without using the official FixConnecting.zip patch.

• Smiley Support to the chatroom

Users can see the available smileys by entering the command
/smileys

Now its possible to see and use Smileys from the Community Chat tab, Smiley display can be enabled or disabled from the view menu:

Users can also toggle Smiley display directly from the chat window by typing the command
/tsmileys

• Fixed wording on Spanish and Polish translations.

Bug Fixes and other improvements for this release also include:

• FrostWire Message Update System improved. Per community request, some announcements will not be shown more than once so the user is not annoyed upon every application launch
• Fixed bugs on the media player and playlists on Preview.
• Fixed bug on search box auto-focusing while a search was running.
• Fixed i18n system error for systems which default language is not english
• Potential bugs related to deprecated code gone

Users can find now by details without the auto-focusing problem.

FrostWire 4.13.5 is expected to be the last of the 4.13.x series.

About FrostWire

FrostWire, a Gnutella Peer-to-Peer client, is a collaborative effort from many Open Source and freelance developers located from all around the world. In late 2005, concerned developers of LimeWire’s open source community announced the start of a new project fork “FrostWire” that would protect the developmental source code of the LimeWire client and any improvements to the Gnutella protocol design. The developers of FrostWire give high regard and respect to the GNU General Public License and consider it to be the ideal foundation of a creative and free enterprise market.

• Media Kit / Link Us
• Contact the Team

                          

This feels like graduating or something similar. I can’t believe our grassroot effort after about a year of work has gone so far, far enough to make it to the Top 20 most popular software on download.com

I guess I can only thank all the users and all the people that have helped spread the word, since this is probably like 95% the work of word of mouth. Thanks, we can only feel like releasing more and more FrostWire versions for you in the near future to see if we can get on the top 10 now.

                          

So, I created a solution in python, compiled it with p2exe and by executing a .reg file, it gets bound to your right click context menu on Windows.

You can download the zip file here
Instructions are included (where to unzip, etc) , and source code is included as well.

We found way more advanced solutions for this, but they were non-free versions, or shareware versions that would expire.
This only took about an hour to create, so you can use this all you want, note that it will only list the names of the files, each on one line, and folders will look like [this].

Customizing, Building

If you want to add more information about the file, you’ll have to hack it, you have the source code inside the .zip file, it’s python so its pretty easy, all you’ll need to build it is, python2.5, py2exe, and then you just execute that setup.py script, I believe like this

python setup.py py2eye

and it will create a new binary version for you on a dist/ folder.

DO NOT BUY THIS SOFTWARE ITS FREE SOFTWARE