Yesterday, December 10th, WordPress 2.7 RC2 was released, and a day later, which is today, December 11th, the stable version of 2.7 is finally released. A month overdue from it's supposed release date, but the wait was well worth it. I have been following and testing the WordPress 2.7 since it's pre-beta days, and I became a first-hand witness to the evolution of 2.7's development. The transformation I witnessed was awesome, and I realize that I now regret not getting screenshots of each and every iteration that has become what it is today. The new administrative interface is more intuitive. The new features and functions the developers integrated is somewhat the answer of a typical users usual gripes. Here are some screenshots that I managed to get before and after WordPress 2.7 was released. [gallery link="file" columns="4"] In one word, spiffy. [caption id="attachment_774" align="aligncenter" width="734" caption="SPIFFEH!"] [/caption] Kudos to the WordPress Developers. This is truly one great milestone in the history of WordPress.

In my previous posts, I was talking about installing gOS. gOS is an operating system that was bundled with the gPC, a $200 Linux PC that aims to provide a very affordable way of getting online. Everex is the company that makes these computers. The Everex TC2502 Green gPC comes equipped with a basic 1.5 GHz VIA C7 CPU, 512mb DDR2 memory and an 80GB hard drive. The package, however, doesn't include a monitor. TechCrunch believes people like a Google-focused PC, but let me make it clear: the gPC or gOS is NOT manufactured or developed by Google. The "G" in gOS or gPC stands for Green. Google, however, let Everex and gOS developers use Google-related icons and trademarks. As for gOS's performance, all I can say is gOS made the right decision of basing it on Ubuntu. The latest version of gOS Rocket Beta is based on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and, consequently, has integrated NTFS read-write capabilities. gOS makes thin-client computing possible by focusing on web-based apps. It also has offline desktop apps, like OpenOffice et al, to make sure that when there is no way to go online, you can still be productive. Inevitably, the only way to tell if the operating system is good, or good enough, is to compare it to other operating systems.

Read the rest of this post »

Catching wind from TechCrunch, Microsoft is now trying to befriend the open-source community by releasing 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows. And it's not all crap documentation. Specifications for Vista, Server 2008, Office 2007, and others are included.

Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products. Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.

Not yet open-source but Microsoft is starting to embrace the force that is open-source (rhyme unintentional). Or are they really? One can speculate. And Microsoft is doing all this in the name of Interoperability and Data Portability. This may also be in line with their participation in the development of OpenID. The Redmond giants released this in a form of a promise. But as far as cliches go, promises are made to be broken. I still can't trust Microsoft. And this move of theirs is just making me more paranoid. I'll just keep my fingers crossed in the hopes that someday, there will be better interoperability between Microsoft and Open Source software.

Anne Zelenka of GigaOM posted an article about WordPress becoming the next social networking profile, which basically makes me think about my blog and it becoming a social network. The article talks about blogs in general, and WordPress as the platform in particular, as a social network. Although it wasn't mentioned in the article, I'm assuming that they were referring to the WordPress application and not the WordPress.com "free blog" site. Anne did a good job in pointing out the trend that is currently happening in social networking circles.

Read the rest of this post »

In case you have no idea what OpenID is, it is a way of managing your online identity in the sense that if you have one, and the site you are visiting supports OpenID and requires you to login to contribute to a discussion, you don't have to sign-up or register with that site and you don't have to create yet another username and password for that particular site. All you have to do is use your OpenID and you are automatically in. It basically makes site registration simple by using a universally recognized identification system.

Read the rest of this post »