Developers » TECHGEEK.com.au

Former MySQL head leaves Sun

By Terence Huynh on February 7th, 2009 No Comments

The leader of the open-source database group, MySQL, has announced his resignation from Sun Microsystems, and has said that he will be leaving the company at the end of March. The MySQL database group is one of the fastest-growing businesses at Sun.

Marten Mickos, who was chief executive at MySQL AB before being bought by Sun, will leave current role as senior vice president. He explained in a letter sent to other employees, “It’s a personal decision that I made without anyone influencing me one way or the other (except perhaps my wife).”

“I feel that together we have accomplished the task set by the owners in 2001, and I am now stepping aside to let the strong managers of the group take over and continue the ambitious business ramp-up,” he added.

His resignation comes as the two co-founders of MySQL, Monty Widenius and David Axmark, announced their resignations as well.

Sun has also announced that it would be combining its database group with its software infrastructure unit to form a unified open-source product group that will be led by Karen Tegan Padir, who will become the vice president of MySQL and software infrastructure.

10 WordPress themes you should stay away from

By Terence Huynh on January 26th, 2009 1 Comment

wordpress-10stayaway

WordPress is a great CMS and blogging platform, but theming for it is not equal. Like web designing, for every good or beautiful design, you will always have a design that we say that you should stay away. However, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t download them – we’re just saying that they suck, and that people would dislike your site even more.

So, here are the list of the top 10 worst WordPress themes that you should stay away from:

iPhone Theme

The design is supposed to resemble the iPhone, but it does a poor job of doing it. Why putting the icons of a few apps when they don’t even work, nor the one where “Navigation” looking like an app icon makes any favours. The sidebar’s background image is too small, as you can tell from the words going through it, and I still can’t believe it has been downloaded by over 2,000 people.

10 WordPress themes to get your blog started

By Terence Huynh on January 25th, 2009 1 Comment

wordpress-10themes

WordPress is a fabulous CMS and Blogging Tool, however, its default theme might not be giving your blog that “wow” factor that you want to impress your friends. You could always develop your own theme, but that would be silly if you have no knowledge on how to design one.

So, today, we will be bringing some of the 10 themes that we liked that you may want to use. And yes, all of them are free.

Cellar Heat

cellar-heat-light-screen

Coming in a light and dark version and designed by Evan Eckard, and released with Smashing Magazine, it brings a more grunge-style motif to your blog. It is a widget enabled theme, meaning that you can use WordPress widgets, and it is also supports Gravatars – so people’s comments will have a single avatar, no matter what blog they write on.

“Improvise” – WordPress 2.7 gets its debut!

By Terence Huynh on December 11th, 2008 No Comments

TECHGEEK.com.au has already upgraded to it, and so you should too. WordPress has unveiled version 2.7, or codenamed “Coltrane”, which contains a massive overhaul to the WordPress administrator functions, as well as some new features, including the ditching of manual updates and FTP uploads to plugins and the entire blogging platform itself, thanks to an automatic update system – which makes it a bit more attractive to first time users.

Like I said, there is a new administration design (which I reviewed when it was in beta), and all of the features are the same, including movable panels at the dashboard, sticky posts, etc. As well, since this is the newest version, it also brings in more template tags for those who are into designing themes for it, like me (which is great, because now I can fully integrate new things into the theme).

But what happened to WordPress 2.6? Well, because of a fake version of WordPress out there calling themselves as version 2.6, the creators of WordPress decided to jump to 2.7, to avoid any confusion and any problems with people downloading the fake version. But this does not stop there, there are also plans to tackle things in how WordPress handles audio and video, and integration on other Automattic (the owners) projects:

That said, we couldn’t be more excited about the future with regards to features. Now that we’ve cleared out more basic things, we are looking forward in the coming year to really tackling media handling including audio and video, better tools for plugin and theme developers, widgets, theme updates, more integrated and contextual help, and easier integration with projects like BuddyPress and bbPress.

Video is below (after the jump).

Python update breaks backwards compatibility, starts over

By Terence Huynh on December 5th, 2008 1 Comment

Developers of the Python programming language have released the final version of Python 3.0, also called Python 3000 or Py3K, which also sees a major reworking of the language, including making it intentionally incompatible with the Python 2 series of code, according to the founder Guido van Rossum.

The new changes was to simplify the development of the code and to remove the complexity that has been built up over time. Saying in a Linux.conf.au keynote in Melbourne, Anthony Baxter said that the release was “where we break all your code, but we’re doing it for a good reason…Pretty much every program will need changes."

Some of the changes in the new version include:

The print statement has been replaced with a print() function, and with keyword arguments replacing the special syntax of the statement.
Unicode will be the default encoding in the code, so no more mixing non-Unicode and Unicode strings.
Altering the models used for division and switching symbols for “not equal”.
Some modules have been renamed or no longer have capital letters.

However, Python 2 will not be given the axe just yet, and will be maintain the version as long as there is some interest and need for the version of the language.

Review : WordPress 2.7 Beta 1

By Terence Huynh on November 6th, 2008 1 Comment

WordPress, the most popular blogging tool out on the web, has released the first beta of its latest version, WordPress 2.7. While the full version was supposed to go out on November 10th, it was delayed – but they managed to give out a beta version of the software for everyone to try out. So, I took that opportunity to find out what has changed and what has been removed.

But first, I have to tell you that all images were taken on my local server and not on the main server. This was done to make sure the site is still up, during the review process.

More Windows 7 News – we can’t help our selves

By Terence Huynh on November 4th, 2008 No Comments

While we enjoy the occasional news about Windows 7, we found a bounty today. And since we are getting ready to get back to work because of the long holiday that we usually get out of the Melbourne Cup, we decided to merge the entire thing in one post.

First off, Download Squad has found out that Windows 7 can now burn ISO images to a CD/DVD disk. While we are reluctant to get rid of Nero, Ashampoo and the other burning tools we have – this would be an easier way for people to get Ubuntu and switch. While the interface is basic, it would be easier for those who are not into technology to get started burning ISO files.

Secondly, Microsoft has added a feature to make your desktop into a slideshow, meaning that you can switch your family snaps on your background every 10 seconds. This neat feature is like the Dreamscene feature on Windows Vista Ultimate, but just remove all the heavy processor use and the nightmare to get a video up on your background. Also an interesting feature is that you can do a similar thing with feeds, meaning that if you get an RSS feed that is mainly has images – you can make that as a slideshow.

Lastly, lets talk about what has been removed from Windows 7. Windows Mail (or Outlook Express, if you haven’t switched to Vista), Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker have all been removed from the operating system. While all three will be released under the “Windows Live” branding, it could be Microsoft’s answer to solve many of the anti-trust issues. And while Mac and Linux bundle similar applications, Microsoft is mainly the target.

But you will be happy to know that Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player will still be bundled with Windows 7, meaning that Microsoft will still have those anti-trust lawsuits – from the European Union.

New Features, New UI in Windows 7

By Terence Huynh on October 29th, 2008 2 Comments

Showcased in PDC 2008, Microsoft announced several things about the successor of Windows Vista – Windows 7. And while Microsoft has said that it will not change the architecture of 7 as it is based on Vista; it has made several user interface changes – including to the classic task bar and start menu. Among the changes, we will also see a new UI for Paint, and the Windows Sidebar will be ditched in favour of desktop gadgets, similar to that found in Yahoo Widgets.

Windows Live to support OpenID

By Terence Huynh on October 28th, 2008 1 Comment

OpenID, the login standard that allows you to use one account to login to different sites, has gotten a huge boost after Microsoft announced that its over 400 million Windows Live IDs will now be part of the initiative, mainly from its Hotmail and Messenger service). This basically follows in the footsteps of Yahoo and AOL, as both have supported the standard before the announcement.

While this may not mean anything to you, you will now be able to login to TECHGEEK.com.au and have your comment instantly bypass our filters. While the feature is expected to reach in 2009, you can test it yourself, thanks to the team over at Windows Live. However, your current account will not be able to access this feature since it has not been implemented, so you must create a new “INT” account.

The Windows Live ID INT environment is separate from the main Production environment, and is for testing purposes only. If you have not already created a Windows Live ID user account for testing in INT, you can do so at https://login.live-INT.com/

After you have your Windows Live ID account in INT, go to https://login.live-int.com/beta/ManageOpenID.srf to set up your OpenID alias on that test account.

NOTE: INT accounts are for testing purposes only and are NOT intended to be permanent user accounts. They do not allow access to Windows Live services in Production.

Snow Leopard to have Cocoa-based Finder, Exchange support

By Terence Huynh on October 18th, 2008 No Comments

AppleInsider is reporting that the new Mac OS X 10.6, also known as Snow Leopard, will feature a massive rewrite of its Finder application to be on its Cocoa environment, similar to most applications that Apple and other developers have been using to write applications. On Leopard (OS X 10.5), it still uses the old Carbon environment.

New features include the support of Microsoft Exchange in Snow Leopard’s versions of iCal, Address Book and Mail; and a new, third option for disc image-based installations called ImageBoot, which allows you to set up any number of installations on a secondary partition, or even an external hard drive.

Microsoft introduces installer for open-source web applications

By Terence Huynh on October 17th, 2008 1 Comment

Microsoft has announced that it will ship popular ASP and PHP open-source projects, among other components, for its Web Platform for developers – for free. Basically this installs your choice of the projects, .NET Framework 3.5, IIS7.0 and Extensions, IIS FastCGI, Visual Web Developer 2008, SQL Server 2008 Express, SQL Server Management Studio, ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight Tools.

The open source projects includes Drupal, WordPress, osCommerce, PHPBB, DotNetNuke and Graffiti, with more being added soon after being evaluated by Microsoft. However, while certain applications need PHP and MySQL, like WordPress, Microsoft has not added that, but chosen to give you links on how to install it.

The software doesn’t actually have the project’s source files, but will merely just retrieve it from the source repository and install it for you via this installer.

The software is only available for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 users.

First Look : Firefox 3.1 beta

By Terence Huynh on October 15th, 2008 1 Comment

Mozilla has announced that it has made the first beta of Firefox 3.1 available to the public, a big stepping stone before releasing it to the masses. Firefox 3.1 is said to be a big improvement over Firefox 3, and includes minor tweaks to the user interface. However, while it may look that they barely made any changes, most of the changes are in its coding.

Among the changes in the new version include the new Gecko engine 1.9.1, added support with CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, and that you can restrict your search with special characters on the “Smart Location Bar” (also known as the “Awesome Bar”).

The beta includes the new TraceMonkey Javascript engine, which is said to give a massive power boost that hopes to make it faster than its Google’s Chrome engine. This, however, has not been enabled by default, so you will need to find “javascript.options.jit.content” in the about:config.

Silverlight 2 gets Windows, Mac, Linux support; adds more partners to use it

By Terence Huynh on October 14th, 2008 No Comments

Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 has been released, with Microsoft saying that it has made it easier for developers and designers to make accessible and secure user interfaces with Silverlight. It will also add several built-in controls, and will allow you to program it with a wide range of programming languages, like Visual Basic, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby.

Silverlight 2 will also be supported on Windows, Mac and Linux; and will support Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari browsers.

As well, it also announced several partnerships to use Silverlight; including CBS College Sports network, Blockbuster’s MovieLink, the Home Shopping Network, Toyota, Yahoo Japan and the Hard Rock Hotel and Cafe. It also said that 50 million unique visitors viewed the site from NBCOlympics.com. As well, it also said that Olympic broadcasters in France (France Televisions), The Netherlands (NOS), Russia (Sportbox.ru) and Italy (RAI) used the Flash competitor in their online coverage.

Developers are mainly flocking to it since it has a higher bitrate than Flash, since it is capable of having bitrates up to 1.5mbps for high definition videos.

Windows 7 is to be … Windows 7?

By Terence Huynh on October 14th, 2008 No Comments

Microsoft has announced in a blog post that the successor of Windows Vista, which was known as Windows 7, will be known as Windows 7. Confusing? I know.

Windows 7 is expected to be given out at PDC and WinHEC as a “pre-beta developer release”, giving those attending the conferences a preview of what Windows 7 will be. According to several screenshots, much of the interface will remain from Vista’s Aero theme.

“The decision to use the name Windows 7 is about simplicity,” Mike Nash wrote in a blog post. “Over the years, we have taken different approaches to naming Windows. We’ve used version numbers like Windows 3.11, or dates like Windows 98, or "aspirational" monikers like Windows XP or Windows Vista. And since we do not ship new versions of Windows every year, using a date did not make sense.”

“Likewise, coming up with an all-new "aspirational" name does not do justice to what we are trying to achieve, which is to stay firmly rooted in our aspirations for Windows Vista, while evolving and refining the substantial investments in platform technology in Windows Vista into the next generation of Windows.”

But we all hope that it would be better than Vista, even though it uses almost everything from Windows Vista.

Silverlight 2 to be released on Monday?

By Terence Huynh on October 11th, 2008 No Comments

CNET News.com is reporting that Microsoft will be announcing that it has finishing developing the next version of its Adobe Flash competitor, Silverlight, on Monday after scheduling a conference call for 9am (PDT).

In June, it offered up the beta version of Silverlight 2.0, and a release candidate was released to developers last month.

« Previous 1 234 5 Next »

TECHGEEK.com.au

Sections Go to Archives »

Topics View More Topics »