A random fact, I have an AT&T Nexus One with ClaroPR. I bought it full price and it’s awesome.

If anyone has any questions about it or android, feel free to ask. Right now I have it rooted and I flashed CyanogenMOD on it (: …

Plasma on KDE 4.3

The KDE team has released the latest iteration of their famous cross platform desktop environment. KDE 4 is a desktop environment that has great potential as it has embraced some really powerful and state of the art technologies as its pillars e.g. nepomuk, akonadi, Plasma, Qt4 and others. Also its creators have a really good vision of where they are heading and how they will keep the desktop from becoming obsolete in this Web 2.0 world.

I’ve been using KDE 4 on and off since its highly controversial 4.0 release. The 4.0 release and its subsequent 4.1 release were very immature and definitely weren’t ready for mass consumption. Although the developers claimed that these releases were not meant for regular users maybe they should have advertised that fact better and maybe they should have the 4.0 numbering. The 4.2 release was widely regarded as finally something for “regular users” and “what should have been the 4.0″. In my opinion not even the 4.2 release was ready for prime time. Many annoying bugs were still present, some caused by distributions, others due to driver issues and others were just plain KDE bugs. Also many KDE 3 apps still weren’t ported to 4 which caused a void that had to be filled with GNOME or KDE 3 applications, not a pretty thing.  But with this 4.3 release things are looking pretty good. I’ve been using this 4.3 release since this first beta and I’ve seen it grow and mature. And I have to say that this release is what I would finally label as a good release for mass consumption of general users i.e. not developers, hobbyists and enthusiasts, as long as the distributions don’t screw it up. I’m not saying this release is without problems or bugs, but they are not that noticeable and prevalent as before.

Something that has impressed me a lot about the KDE developers its the speed on which they develop the KDE environment. If you compare the 4.o release to this 4.3 release they are worlds apart. The things they have achieved in such a short amount of time is astonishing. Maybe it is due to the technologies they are using or maybe its just due to growth in the community and energetic developers.

The KDE community has fixed over 10,000 bugs and implemented almost 2,000 feature requests in the last 6 months. Close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors. Read on for an overview of the changes in the KDE 4.3 Desktop Workspace, Application Suites and the KDE 4.3 Development Platform.

Although the initial releases were somewhat half baked this 4.3 release is in my opinion a demonstration that the platform is starting to mature and that from this point on we will start seeing even more great innovations and progress on the desktop. 4.3 was released and I already can’t wait for 4.4. I’m sure 4.4 will rock big time. The GSOC student’s work will be merged in, some of the new ideas thought up on the GCDS will be implemented and this will be the first release using gitorious for development. Some of the things to look forward in future releases are the materialization of the  “social desktop” and the “semantic desktop” within KDE.

• Slashdot
• KDE Dot (News)
• Release notes and announcement

kawaii!!!

Like I had mentioned before I’m once again in a quest to learn Japanese, but this time its for real, I promise   Anyway I’ve been looking at the different resources and methods to train oneself in Japanese and found a couple of Firefox add-ons that can help you learn Japanese while surfing the net. These are the one’s I thought would be the most helpful but by no means its an exhaustive list. To see more options visit the Mozilla add-ons page.

1. Furigana Injector: “Looks up the readings for kanji words and inserts them as furigana.”
2. Kanji-li: “What the program does is simple. It replaces the first letter of a word with a kanji of similar meaning. For example, the word read might appear as 読ead.” Unfortunately this add-on is only available for older versions of Firefox.
3. FetchImi: “FetchImi is an English to Japanese pop-up translator. Read English web sites with pop-up translations just by moving the cursor over the word you want to lookup. ” This add-on is till “experimental”.
4. Ubiquity: Ubiquity is wonderful “do it all” tool for Firefox. It comes with a translation command that can be very handy.

This add-ons are definitely helpful for intermediate and advanced Japanese students but not so much for beginners like me.

It was only yesterday that we said when various people would be getting the final RTM copy of Windows 7. Well today, Microsoft has announced via the Windows Team Blog that Windows 7 has been Released to Manufacturers (RTM) and that the final build is 7600.16385.090713-1255, one build version up from the leaked copy of 7600 we saw last week.

OEMs should be expecting the RTM copy in around 2 days, with all TechNet and MSDN subscribers having to wait until August 6 to try out the final build of Windows 7. Keep tuned at The SDF to hear their thoughts on the final copy of Windows 7 when they can get it.

(Post taken straight from The PC Report)

Our hackers enjoying some free beers paid by Canonical, damn I wish I was there. Credit: jcorrius cc-by flickr

If Microsoft wanted to destroy the FOSS desktop it would bomb Gran Canaria right now as the top hackers of both leading FOSS desktop environments, KDE and GNOME, are meeting there right now. But we all know Microsoft is no that evil, or are they? For the first time ever both GUADEC, the annual GNOME developers conference, and Akademy, the annual KDE developers conference, are being held at the same place and time. This will hopefully result in greater collaboration and interoperability between the FOSS desktops.

This special meeting has been titled the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit and it will feature many interesting and exciting talks. There were some really big names in the keynotes schedule including Richard Stallman, father of the free software movement, and Robert Lefkowitz, a really great speaker and a really respected and experienced man in the industry. Also in addition to the regular GUADEC and Akademy conference tracks there is going to be a special cross-desktop track. From looking over the talks there seems to be a lot of talks targeted at taking care of some old FOSS desktop issues. Also there are many talks that discuss new and exciting technologies and the innovations that will be made with them.

Also many big announcements of what is being planned for the future for the FOSS dekstop will be made there. Something quite shocking that was revealed already is that Nokia, the Finnish communications giant, plans to switch to Qt from GTK+ for its Maemo platform citing  a desire to be more cross platform. This is a big win for KDE but quite a loss for GNOME. But something that will benefit both projects is Nokia’s announcement of further commitment to Linux, the FOSS desktop and FOSS in general.

“Our vision: To bring open source and Linux to mainstream consumers. Standard Linux and free desktop technologies optimized for finger touch UI. Direct contribution to the upstream projects. Code talks. Collaboration withing key open source communities.” –Source

It seems like Nokia is quickly becoming one of the biggest FOSS centered companies out there. Recently they open sourced the Symbian OS and relicensed Qt, which was already fully FOSS under the GPL, under the more liberal terms of the LGPL. Also they have opened up both platforms, which are recent Nokia acquisitions, for community development. Good for them. This demonstrates once again that going FOSS can lead to profits and be a good strategy for companies.

If you want to keep track of the latest announcements made in the conference keep track of the GNOME and KDE planets. Also most likely by the end of the conference the press will write some summaries of the highlights of the conference. If newinfo2day had payed me to go there I would have proudly covered the event but it seems like they are somewhat short on cash, you know, because of the economy But I will do the next best thing and I will keep track of what’s going just by using the Internetz

According to Microsoft: Internet Explorer 8 vs Mozilla Firefox vs Google Chrome

It may seem that Microsoft is scared of losing even more market share to Firefox and Chrome. They have resorted to blatant lies; and dirt trowing at the competition. A good product should be able to stand on it’s own, just like a good politician should talk about his plans, achievements and ideals for making life better instead of spending all his time and effort attacking and criticizing his competitors.

However it’s good to know Microsoft has some new ads that talk about the ‘awesomeness’ of it’s web browsing application, look at them and share your thoughts! I’ll share my favorite MS ad so far first, it’s about Internet Explorer’s InPrivate Browsing or as we like to call it porn mode:

Click here to view the embedded video.

S.H.Y.N.E.S.S. (Sharing Accelerators):

Click here to view the embedded video.

F.O.M.S. (Web Slices)

Click here to view the embedded video.

G.R.I.P.E.S. (Speed improvements)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Proggit
Hacker News
Slashdot

As a bonus there is oursignal which is basically a cool digest of these three sites and also del.icio.us, yahoo buzz and digg.

Which are your favorites? Know of another great link? Be sure to let us know.

Next post, top programming blogs Stay tuned.

The Mozilla community has announced the immediate availability of Firefox 3.5 codenamed “Shiretoko”. This browser is jam packed with new features and improvements. Also there are some new exciting addons from Mozilla labs like Mozilla Weave and Mozilla Jet Pack. Although Firefox is no longer the fastest kid in the block it is still pretty fast and it still knows no peer when it comes to functionality, innovation and privacy. Enjoy!

Get Firefox 3.5 now!

Have you always dreamed of having your own Linux file server but were worried about hardware or energy costs? Well with 150$ or less you could build your own portable, energy efficient and powerful Linux file server. All you have to do is buy a Western Digital MyBook World Edition and perform some hacker magic which will grant you root access to the device. The device runs Linux out of the box and is quite jam packed with features but you can’t use any of that functionality without liberating your device. Without voiding you warranty you are just limited to the functionality revealed through the device’s web panel. After you unlock your device you can do almost everything with it. You could even install bit torrent on it and have it download torrents for you all day and control the torrents remotely via ssh or a torrent web panel.

A guide to hacking the WD MyBook World Ed
New WD MyBook World Ed on Amazon

You can buy the device new or just get it a lot cheaper through ebay

Google Pages' Successor

Of all the seemingly useless technology name changes in the world (Microsoft Bing anyone?), I bring you one of the more recent ones to hit my Gmail inbox.

Google Sites looks cool… but so did Google Pages (Actually, the themes on Google Sites aren’t as nice as the ones on Pages). There’s really no huge difference. It seems it Sites uses a structured wiki system where there are three different user types: Owners, Collaborators, and Viewers. You can make a Google Site viewable by anyone, or only by a select group of Googlers. I made a test page and people can add attachments and comments, which is a nifty feature. I suppose this would be good for some small businesses if it didn’t look much more professional to have a real website under your own domain.

Most things still work the same way. You still get 100MB of space for *almost* any files that you wish to upload. To my dismay, you cannot upload certain file types to Google Sites whereas Google Pages had no restrictions. The file types I’ve found that are disallowed are HTM, HTML, and JS. So I guess they don’t want you to be able to make pages on your own and upload them, bypassing their page editor and the annoying theme and layout that must be used on all the pages created with it. I suppose since you still can edit the HTML, you could easily change the entire layout though, but this makes it not as easy.

I’m a bit disappointed in this switch, mostly because of the file restrictions, but I guess Google Sites is being more directed towards collaborative projects. Just try it out, if nothing else at all, it’s a little bit of fun for at least a half hour, and a good way to host some small files with no download limitations.

It’s worth checking out if you are interested in a free site. Google Sites