WordPressMU reaching 1.0 is a biggie – I tried an older version about a year ago, and it just didn’t fly. The new version has been used to power WordPress.com for a while now and seems to have all of the bugs shaken out of it.

bbPress is described as: “forum software with the WordPress touch, and developed by the same folks.” It has also had an extensive shakedown powering the WordPress Support Forums.

Thanks to everyone who contributes to such a fine product!

I’ have already listened to the first one which focuses on iFolder and NLD. The speakers knew their topics well, and although I was already familiar with both products, I learned quite a bit. Future topics include: Samba, Banshee and Novell Identity Manager. They are looking for input on future topics, so let them know what you want to hear about!

He lists the secret as this:

1. Download the source code to the program you want to change
2. Untar it on your hard drive
3. Get it to build and run
4. Open the source code in an editor
5. Find the part of the code that you need to change to make the program do what you want it to do
6. Make the changes you need to make to the code and test it to make sure it works
7. Run the diff -u command and email the output to the mailing list

This he claims is a guaranteed recipe for hackerdom. The rest of the article is an interesting read, but I have to agree with him. My best programming skills (which are lame to poor as far as I am concerned) have come from taking someone else’s code and bending it to my will. Aside from the Inform game I helped my daughter write a while back, I probably haven’t written anything from “scratch” in 5+ years. I do feel that I have learned enough from some of my hackery that I could write code from scratch in PHP (used for my website) or VBScript (managing 750+ XP workstations with a crew of 4) now if I needed to, but haven’t felt the need to re-invent the wheel.

I do know that the advice above is a better way to pick up a new programming/scripting language than reading books or taking courses (as long as you have some programming experience to start with), and that’s a guarantee!

So far, parts one, two, three and four of the seven part series are online.

NX seems like very slick technology – coming very close to the promise of any application on any device anywhere at anytime.

As is becoming more commonplace, there is an open-source version, FreeNX, and the commercial version, nomachine’s NX server/client. The 1-2 CPU version of the unlimited client enterprise edition server is only ~$300 with educational pricing ($600 list), so it’s not exactly a budget breaker.

There is currently server support for Linux and Solaris, with client support including: Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS X, and PlayStation2.

It’s worth checking out – I’m brewing up a few ideas on how this could be implemented on my network.

To clarify what Novell means when it says it is “opening” SUSE, Mancusi-Ungaro says “SUSE Linux is already open from a code perspective. [It] has not been open from a development perspective. Development was closed, beta was closed, and there was little opportunity for users and external developers to help us shape the product. Now there will be, through the OpenSUSE project.”

The project has an interesting roadmap:
Phase One: (August 2005)

• Establish the openSUSE community
• Deliver the essential community infrastructure: website, downloadable builds, and source. Open Bugzilla, IRC, and channels.
• Accept patches for SUSE Linux 10.0 beta through bugzilla
• Open beta testing of SUSE Linux 10.0.

Phase Two: (targeted spring 2006)

• Simplify the patch submission process and establish a formal code checkout/checkin system
• Personalized developer accounts to allow easier participation in the openSUSE development process

Phase Three: (targeted summer 2006)

• Introduce a complete community infrastructure – with the publicly accessible build server, packagers can quickly create packages and incorporate them into test versions of the entire distribution.

All of the projects he mentions are worth checking out if you are not familiar with them:
K12LTSP
SchoolTool
Cando
Edubuntu

A good listing of K-12 Open Source projects is the Edu Educational Application Index, maintained in conjunction with SchoolForge. If anyone is aware of a site like Freshmeat where you can sort these projects by language, maturity, etc. let me know. Because nothing is worse than finding a project that would meet your need exactly, only to find out it’s written in COBOL and in early alpha development.

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Firefox is one of the best, if not the the best web browsers available today. It’s a poster child for the OpenSource movement and a tribute to the fact that there will alway be more talented engineers outside an organization than in. Thoes engineers program because they enjoy it and find OpenSource projects outside of their work environment to fill their creative need.

One of the best features of Firefox is it’s ability to be extended via plugins and extensions. Plugins for the Firefox web browser provide viewing of enhanced content such as graphics and video formats, while extensions add to the usability and functionality of the browser itself.

As I’ve used Firefox over the last couple years or so, I have found a few extensions that really make my browser a powerfull tool for me and may do the same for you.

• Web Developer
  Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
• Forecastfox
  Get international weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com, and display it in any toolbar or statusbar with this highly customizable and unobtrusive extension.
• Tabbrowser Preferences
  Enables enhanced control for some aspects of tabbed browsing.
• RiteOfTongue
  Right-click on a typed word inside a web form on any webpage to get a suggested spelling for that word. Then select the word from the popup menu to change it. The words are obtained in real-time over the Internet using Yahoo!’s Spelling Suggestion service. This is a life saver if you spell as good as I do 8^)
• Greasemonkey
  Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of pouplar sites, are already available in the Greasemonkey script repository at http://dunck.us/collab/GreaseMonkeyUserScripts. You can write your own scripts too.
• Dict
  Extension for defining words in a Web page

The most promising and flexible extension is Greasemonkey. GM allows you to change the way you interact with sites by changing/adding/removing/disabling/etc. Javascript, CSS, form data and other aspects associated with the site. There are several GM scripts available for secific sites as well as some generic scritps. You can obtain new scripts at the dunck.us site. There are also several GM resources on the web including the mozdev site and a complete online book by Mark Pilgrim’s about using and developing user scripts for Greasemonkey called “Dive into Greasemonkey“.

Here’s a short exerpt from section 1.1 of Dive into Greasemonkey:

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. You can use it to make a web site more readable or more usable. You can fix rendering bugs that the site owner can’t be bothered to fix themselves. You can alter pages so they work better with assistive technologies that speak a web page out loud or convert it to Braille. You can even automatically retrieve data from other sites to make two sites more interconnected.

Greasemonkey by itself does none of these things. In fact, after you install it, you won’t notice any change at all… until you start installing what are called “user scripts”. A user script is just a chunk of Javascript code, with some additional information that tells Greasemonkey where and when it should be run. Each user script can target a specific page, a specific site, or a group of sites. A user script can do anything you can do in Javascript. In fact, it can do even more than that, because Greasemonkey provides special functions that are only available to user scripts.

From my breif look at DiGM, it looks like a great resource and I expect to spend some time diving into it’s pages. Hopefully, you will either find the Firefox extensions I listed above helpful or find some of the several other browser extensions beneficial to you.

The link for the main repository of Firefox plugins can be found at https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/