Nokia N900

I want one of these.

What if Steve Jobs run Microsoft and Steve Ballmer run Apple!

I have just read an extremely funny article which can be found here about what would happen if Steve Jobs took control of Microsoft.

And the follow up is what life at Apple would be like under Steve Ballmer.

Although slightly comical the articles do high light the differences between the two.

Arch Package Deletion Issues

As reported on the Arch news feed, this link details that some packages have been removed from the central Arch repository.

The problems is resolved and the mirrors are just playing catch up.

I'm hoping this is why ethtool would not upgrade correctly at the weekend.

Arch Virtual Box Package - Upgrade For 2.6.30 Kernels

For Arch users that are running Virtual Box and are trying to run a distro within Virtual Box that uses the 2.6.30 kernel you will probably find that you VM does not want to run. From what I can find it seems the problem is to do with drive handling.

Make sure you upgrade to at least virtualbox-ose-3.0.4-2 which is now patched to fix the issue.

Google Native Code Research Project.

This is a link to a Google code research project looking at making it possible to run native code in a browser.

This is the second such project I have seen, I have blogged before about Adobe's effort in the same area.

However, Google have ported Quake to the browser which gives them extra points if you ask me.

Seriously, I think this is a really interesting project. The possibilities could be only limited by the tools supplied for developers to use.

There is an interesting video about the project at the above link.

/. Article on programming language use.

An interesting article has been posted on /. which details the types of questions being asked on Stackoverflow.com.

Apparently during the working week C# and Java seem to have a high tally of questions whilst at weekends it appears that Python and Ruby see more activity.

What about C++/PHP/Perl .... ???

KDE Hater

Silence is golden or in this instance .... silence. Someone starts the KDE Hater blog for only 4 or 5 posts and then .... nothing.

Are you out there??

If so come back we where interested to hear your opinion!!

KDE Air Plasma Theme.

Hmmmm..... I upgraded my main laptops Arch packages last week to 4.3 and since have found an anoying bug. It seemed that whenever I rebooted I would have messed up panels with widgets in a different order to when I shutdown, panels that where centered to the left and a System Tray that could and would appear anywhere.

After much playing around I think I have nailed it down to the Plasma default theme, Air. It seems that if you apply a different Plasma theme the problems vanish. I'm not sure if this is a known issue or not but if anyone does know anything I would be interested.

I will try and get on #plasma tomorrow to speak to the guys and find out if it is a known bug and if not file a bug report.

30 Most Influentia People In Programming

I found this list of the top 30 people in programming.

I have to say that number one is although very, very worthy of a number one spot on a list (another list) is probably not my first choice. In fact I would suggest 6, 7 and 8 should actually be number 1, 2 and 3.

But that is my opinion!

Arch KDE 4.3 GStreamer Issues.

It would seem I was not alone after launching Amarok only to hear.... nothing!! dooooh -><-

For some reason the switch to GStreamer as the prefered Phonon backend under 4.3 has caused some issues as discussed here.

As detailed in the above post the following should resolve most issues :

pacman -S gstreamer0.10-plugins

That will install all plugins required. However some people are switching to xine which also appears to rectify most problems.

Shaman Does Not Support Latest Pacman

I ran into a small problem last night. I tried to update my packages using Shaman, the rather excellent package management for Arch Linux, but it complained when trying to upgrade pacman.

It turns out that Shaman does not support the latest version pf pacman. So for now at least you will have to remove (pacman -R) Shaman and use pacman direct from the command line to manage your packages.

Or you might use one of the other package managers and if you do I would be interested to hear which one and why you use it.

Microsoft Admit Linux A Threat....But We're Not Dangerous!

This short article details how Microsoft in their Form 10k filling has detailed that certain Linux distributions could become a "threat" going forward to their desktop business.

Red Hat and Canonical are the named business that could become the threat and it steams mainly from the new Netbook market that has developed over the last 2 years.

Does this show that Linux use on the desktop is increasing? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's just a sign that more business users are using it and that Linux is finally being shipped by OTMs. Either way it is an encouraging sign.

KDE 4.3 Is Out.

Six months of hard work is now available for public use, KDE 4.3 "Caizen" is out.