Related link: http://osdir.com/Article1534.phtml

Brian ‘INGY’ Ingerson is a well known and prolific Perl programmer. Far from being yet another perl hacker he is the author of several CPAN modules including award winning Inline, YAML, and most notably of late his wiki application Kwiki. OSDir had the opportunity to interview INGY about his work on Kwiki, and his philosophy in programming in general.

Microsoft, showing its true colors (they are a convicted monopolist afterall), has implied that they’d rather see Sender-ID, a protocol for ending spam, die on the vine than permit it to be used by open source project, most of whom built and continue to run the internet.

“(Eric) Allman also isn’t optimistic about Microsoft making Sender ID open-source friendly. ‘It’s pretty clear that it’s going to take an act of whatever deity Microsoft worships in order to get them to back down on the sublicensing issue. They made it absolutely clear to us that they were not even going to consider changing this, and the legal folks made it further clear that they would rather see Sender ID die than back down.’”

It’s bad enough that so many Microsoft machines are the very bane of existance on the internet with viruses and spam, but given the chance to help make amends for their own incompetence and disregard for anyone they balk at the chance.

Leopard. Spots.

Related link: http://osdir.com/Article1513.phtml

XPde is a Linux desktop that looks so frighteningly close to Windows XP I didn’t recognize it as other than XP itself.

From the XPde website: “It’s a complete desktop environment for Linux on x86. It tries to make easier for Windows XP users to use a Linux box. Nothing more, no clipboard compatibility between Gtk and Qt applications, no emulation of Windows applications, no unification on the widgets of X applications, just a desktop environment.”

Well, you just have to see it to believe it. Here come the screenshots.

Related link: http://osdir.com/Article1502.phtml

Today I’m pleased to announce the beginning of a new column on OSDir called KDE: From the Source.

KDE has been critical to the past success of Linux in general, and is critical to the future successes of Linux on the Desktop in particular.

Heading up the column is widely known KDE developer, and unofficial spokesman for the project, George Staikos. George will be regularly giving us an “insider’s perspective”, or rather a view “from the source”, on issues and happenings from the KDE camp.

Let’s welcome George into his new column with his first article as he discusses the the recent KDE 3.3 release, what’s new, and why it is an important release for Linux on the desktop.

Related link: http://osdir.com/Article1495.phtml

The Enlightenment dev. team released the lastest Enlightenment window manager for linux yesterday. We’ve taken a few screenshots.

Don’t let the blank looking images fool you. That is a feature of Enlightenment.

From the release announcement: “DR16.7.1 has been released!. This is the biggest release since DR16 first debuted! In this release dependencies have changed from Imlib/FreeType to Imlib2/FreeType2. The old default themes (which made the distribution almost 18M in size!) have been replaced with “Winter” by rephorm. The distribution has been split into 3 diffrent packages: programs (source), docs (Edox), and themes. A long long list of bugs have been fixed (including some very old nagging ones that weren’t easy for kwo to squash). And probly of most interest to the end user: ‘Theme Transparency’.”

Related link: http://osdir.com/Article1490.phtml

The Forumzilla project has been around since about May/June of 2004. It is an extention of the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client that allows you to use it as a RSS/XML feedreader.

I’ve takens some screenshots of new version 0.5.2 for you to enjoy.

This version fixes a number of minor, but critical for use, bugs.

Hopping on the weblog cluetrain now is Redhat. They’ve begun the “Red Hat People” and “Red Hat Executives” weblogs.

The executive weblog is empty at the moment and I’m not sure why they don’t think they’re execs are people too, but that’s ok.

Subscribed.

Related link: http://osdir.com/Article1478.phtml

We’re trying something new here at OSDir.com. We’ll begin taking some screenshots of new releases so while we play with them to see what they’re capable of you can take a quick peek at the goods.

Our first; Mozilla’s newly announced Sunbird calerdaring application.

Enjoy

Related link: http://http://google.com

If you click the following malformed link with firefox are you directed to microsoft.com too?

http://http://google.com

So, RevAirTunes sounds great, but ummm can someone give me a copy??

steve@fooworks.com Ping me with an URL.

The nanocrew’s server has been down since news of RevAirTunes hit boingboing.

Related link: http://modfoo.com

All you Safari users can now join in at mod_foo. Thanks for the feedback & scathing email about the site rendering in Safari. Ouch. Anyhow, it’s all patched up & lookin’ good.

Related link: http://modfoo.com

Today’s mod_foo update is brought to you by the letters xml-rpc. As of this morning mod_foo members can now blog via xml-rpc enabled blogging clients.

I’ve tested with Ecto and it is working quite swimmingly.

As I mentioned yesterday, the member blogs all have individual rss/xml feeds too. Obvious, but you never know.

Related link: http://modfoo.com

Quick update on mod_foo, the anti-slashdot(genre): I’ve added a topic category for apple, and opened up weblogs. Every user now has a weblog with yummy rss/xml.

Related link: http://modfoo.com

This is both a confessional, and a repentance. It is a coming to grips with the fact that websites have been trying to emulate slashdot for years and to it’s credit it has endured while imitators withered. It is an acknowledgement that none other will be slashdot and that none more should try. This is a declaration to be the anti-slashdot.

When I write anti-slashdot, I don’t mean literally just slashdot. I mean slashdot and everyone who has tried to imitate it. It’s easy to try, but hard to succeed. The formula has been setup a news CMS, publish a paragraph on breaking news in your geeky genre, add a pithy opinion. Repeat.

I like slashdot, but “Thou Shalt Not Imitate Slashdot” should be an eleventh commandment, but for the internet.

I run a geeky news site, with some success, called OSDir.com. While running it I’ve spoken with so many other news site maintainers I’ve lost count. They all echo the same feelings, “How do I become like slashdot? How can I complete with slashdot?”

They’ve all been toiling away in silent envy under the strain of wanting to crush other websites with a mere link to them from their frontpage. They want other geeks to whisper as they come in the room at conventions. They want everyone to want their story to be on their site.

Wait. Not only is thus ultimately futile, but is it truly worth doing? Re-examine what you are spending your time doing. You are not going to be slashdot. Forget it. Be happy with your digestible bits.

Once, someone told me that they were going to run a geeky weblog and didn’t want to even hint at trying to be slashdot for fear of the ridicule.

mod_foo is the anti-slashdot. Not out of giving up, but from wanting to do something different. Trying to become slashdot is a lost cause. Accepting it as so is liberating, and has given me the clarity of thought to come up with the idea behind mod_foo.

Where slashdots (they) are quick digestible bits of news, mod_foo will be deeper, where they aim to kill servers mod_foo will make mirrors and torrents, where the discussions end with a downed server mod_foo can continue the discussion, where an editor biases the news mod_foo will embrace the wishes of its readers, where they want as many readers as possible mod_foo will seek a better, fuller story.

In the wise words of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, let it be.