I just noticed that KDE 3.5.3 was released today. KDE 3.5.3 is a maintenance release which normally means bug fixes, with no new features. This time around, it appears that that "no new feature" restriction was loosened somewhat for this release. Needless to say, bugs were fixed. In fact, something like "800 minor issues" were fixed. In addition the start up time was improved, and Akgregator (RSS Reader), Kmail, and KAlarm got some new features.

While I was poking around trying to find out more details, I saw this little nugget:

Coverity...a project initiated with funding from the United States Government.

Following the link, this is what the Coverity page says:

In collaboration with Stanford University, Coverity is establishing a new baseline for software quality and security in open source based on the analysis of over 30 of the most critical and widely used open source projects in the world. Under a contract with the Department of Homeland Security, we apply the latest innovation in automated defect detection to uncover some of the most critical types of bugs found in software.

It goes on to say that the results are being shared back to the open source community, which is how KDE identified and could fix the 817 bugs identified by Coverity. The list of project covered is pretty amazing....KDE, Gnome, Apache, Postresql, Mysql, open office, python, samba, etc. It is like a who's who of open source software.

Some recent open source news.

KDE 3.5.5 Released

KDE 3.5.5 was released yesterday. I saw the news after I had already updated my desktop! ^_^;

According an article on Linux.com, there were more than 1200 updates. See the changelog for details on some of those changes.

To be honest though I haven't really noticed much difference at this point.

I am running edgy which is why I automatically got KDE 3.5.5, but if you are running Dapper it is available per this announcement.

Eudora Bird?

Qualcomm announced that Eudora is going Open Source. Specifically, the next version of Eudora will be based on Mozilla Thunderbird. While this is great news, I think, for Thunderbird and Open Source, I am not sure what it means for Eudora. Does anybody use Eudora anymore?

NTT Data Releases Text Search Software for PostgreSQL

From Japan, NTT Data has released Ludia, a text search engine for PostgreSQL. Ludia is released under the LGPL and is available via Sourceforge.jp. NTT Data is one of the "big 5" of NTT; NTT East, NTT West, NTT Communications, NTT Docomo and NTT Data. Of course, there are 300 companies that have NTT in the company name.

Edgy

I updated my laptop to the bleeding edge of Kubuntu. It has a new boot up system which seems to be vastly faster than the traditional sysinit that has served for Linux for so long. I haven't actually timed it or anything, but it really seems fast. But that also may have to do that with the exception of my home directory, I did a complete re-install and don't have a bunch of servers(apache, mysql, etc) starting up anymore.

One Laptop Per Child

According to the TheRegister, Libya has signed up for the One Laptop Per Child program, joining Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, and Thailand. Supposedly this new order has put the program over the minimum orders of 5 million for moving to actual production. Production looks to start next year.

Something for MTB?

Saw this thing over at Linux Devices.com. To purchase the box, costs $2000 apparently, but you can download the ISO image for free. Wonder if MTB could use it. Probably not, but a thought anyway.

Linux Journal has released its annual Editor's Choice 2006 for Open Source software. Linux distribution of choice? Ubuntu. Desktop? KDE. Open Office, Thunderbird, Firefox and more. Check it out.

KOffice 1.6.1 has been released officially for Kubuntu. Here is the announcement. 1.6.1 is mostly an upgrade release to address bug fixes.

KOffice is a comprehensive office suite for the K Desktop Environment and includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, software as well as others.

Ever here of Last.fm? I have. In fact, I set up an account on it back in 2004, and then promptly forgot about it until whenever I re-installed Amarok, my music player of choice. Even so, though, I don't think I actually every logged into the site other than to confirm my user name and password.

Well, with my recent fixation on Identity 2.0, OpenID and Microid in particular, I took a renewed interest in Last.fm when I saw this post that suggested that Last.fm now supports microids. I created a microid which I then pasted into my last.fm profile. I was able to verify it using my claimid account. (Claimid is a separate post altogether I think). Even so, I wasn't really paying attention to last.fm itself.

And boy, what was I thinking?

I eventually did start poking around the site. One of the first things I noticed was the ability to include your most recently listened tracks on my website. If you see the the following image on the left in the About This Blog box, that's what it is - the import of my most recently tracks as reported by Last.fm

I had never thought about it much, but all this time Amarok has been submitting the music to which I have been listening to last.fm. So while the play list is kind of a neat, gee-whiz that's cool type of thing, what turns out ot have been really cool about last.fm is the streaming radio capability. I wasn't aware of this until I noticed in poking around to setup my playlist import, that they actually have a dedicated player.

Whereas Amarok is for playing music files on my system, the last.fm player allows you to listen to streamed music. As is it seems is true with all 2.0 things, you can tag music allowing you to pick a radio, i.e. a stream, based on those tags. So for, example, I picked my "personal radio" which streams music similar to what I have been playing on Amarok. As I was listening, I all of sudden got Spits(spelling?), a Japanese band coming across my player;

They picked up the Japan side due to the one or two Japanse music cd's I have encoded to my system. Last.fm took the Japanese music that Amarok had been submitting and picked a couple of Japanese songs to stream to me. I knew of Spits but don't think I had ever listened to them before this. Struck me as a great way to find new music which I would like since they are picking songs based on what I have, whether I tagged a song as a "loved" song, or not, etc.

What I really found I am enjoying is finding the oldies but goodies, more than the new ones. Over the years I have had lots of music most of which has bitten the dust. Most recently, all but one or two of my CDs bit the dust in our move from Okinawa. (Errors on the back up dvd....sigh). So finding Led Zepplin, Pat Metheny, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison , The Doors, ad nauseum is great. Takes me back, plus I get the music I want to listen to. In fact, it has gotten to the point where I have actually taken out the headphones I bought for skype, and I feel like a teenager in his room with the headphones on ignoring/unable-to-hear Mom calling from downstairs. Ah, the joy.

Not suprisingly, the music isn't always something you like so the player has a skip button as well as a "ban list". I would assume that once you start "banning" things the selection of music streamed gets better. Or one would hope anyway. I have not really banned anyone yet, since I am still enjoying it all.

Some other advantages to last.fm. The site is bilingual; www.last.fm and jp.last.fm. This may be in part due to the fact that Joi Itoh is a board director, but regardless it is really handy for English/Japanese speaker such as myself. (I notice they are hiring with a focus on some other languages, but for now it seems that it appears only English and Japanese). So you can see my user pate in Japanese or English, but the music tracks and info is based of the same data.

Couple of other things I noticed is that there are groups, say Pink Floyd Fans. You can have friends, which can recommend music tracks to you, or you to them. And they track where you are so you have neighbors. One handy feature of location tracking is that you can go to an events page that lists all the concerts in your area. Or at least the one's that last.fm knows about.

Hattip to liquidat. You know that Mac commercial? My first reaction to it why does the commercial assume that because I use a PC I therefore use windows? I use a pc, but not windows and haven't for 8 years now. But I like this response better:

Since I am a KDE user, I thought about this one:

But I like the first one better. These are created by pollycoke and are under a cc-by-nc-nd license. There are a couple of others too.

Are you yourself?