[Mon Apr 16 08:58:41 CEST 2007]

Just read the daily newsletter from Information Week sent to me past Saturday, and noticed the editor's note: Vista Apps: How to Avoid a Compatibility Quagmire. Among other things, we're told:

This weekend's coverage zeroes in on practical issues introduced by a migration to Windows Vista. Experts Nelson and Danielle Ruest explain how you can modify app installation logic to accommodate Vista, given that it represents a new version number (6) of Windows.

They also detail how to work around the fact that 64-bit Vista doesn't support 16-bit apps, among other issues that you'll face. In all, it's an important set of topics they tackle: about 1,000 apps are now deemed "compatible" with Vista, but that's at best a fraction of the total Windows apps universe. Buyer, or implementer, beware.

I believe the link to the main story is here. I'm so glad people don't have to deal with so many incompatible versions of Linux! After all, as Steve Ballmer and Jonathan Schwartz once warned, how would you know that an application that runs on your RHEL would ever run on SLES. Sheesh! {link to this story}

[Wed Apr 11 12:07:33 CEST 2007]

Well, here we go with yet another example of why open source software is far more flexible than anything else the proprietary world has to offer. Yes, sure, it may be "for techies". Yes, sure, quite a few people may get lost in the terminology. However, if you are computer literate and know the difference between WebDAV and SFTP (and, let's face it, in this day and age anybody who calls himself computer literate shuld know the difference), open source software allows you a degree of flexibility and, ultimately, power that no other model provides. Here is my problem: before we moved to Spain, I signed up with a decent American web hosting service (PHPWebHosting), and decided that when I found the time I'd migrate all our services back to my own server at home, as I was doing in the US. Well, as you can imagine, I still didn't find the time to do such migration, which means that nine months into our Spanish adventure we are still using the web hosting services. The problem is that they don't appear to offer a WebDAV service, which we used to synchronize our family calendars back when everything was set to run from my own home server. Fiddling around, I realized that Evolution supports SFTP to publish and subscribe to calendars. So, that would be the perfect solution to our problem until I found the time to finally set up everything at home, right? Wrong! It turned out that Apple's iCal doesn't support anything other than WebDAV to synchronize to remote calendars. So, searching around in Google, I found a little freeware app called Scalp that should solve my problems. Wrong again! After downloading it, I noticed that it only seems to work if one wants to publish a calendar from iCal, but not when trying to subscribe to one. So much for that. On the other hand, it provided a good chance to explain to my wife why open source software may be a bit more difficult to get used to but ends up being worth the effort, especially since it allows me far more freedom than any other proprietary solution. {link to this story}

[Wed Apr 11 10:26:55 CEST 2007]

Michael Larabel publishes in Phoronix a short visual history of Fedora and another one for Ubuntu that are sort of interesting as an easy reference. I'm already looking forward to Ubuntu's Feisty Fawn release, which should be out in a few days, that includes GNOME 2.18.0, X.org 7.2.0, the Linux kernel 2.6.20/2.6.21 and, above all, the Ubuntu Migration Assistant. Not that I will be using the migration assistant, but it definitely is a neat idea and evident proof that the Ubuntu folks are not just taking advantage of the underlying Debian platform to make some quick money, but they are also building and innovating on top of it. This is open souce at its best. {link to this story}