Data Circle

WordPress.com Open via Photo Matt

If you’ve ever wanted a quick and easy way to set up a blog with a relatively catchy URL, no advertisements (at the moment anyway, though I don’t know how long that’s going to be the case) and a fair simple user interface, then WordPress.com is probably the best place to go. You used to need an invite to get an account – I managed to get pwaring.wordpress.com fairly early on – but now sign ups are available to everyone, though personally I expect them to close at some point once the demand for accounts becomes too much.

Having said that, WordPress is ridiculously easy to set up on your own server, as all you need to know are the database connection details. I run several sites powered by WP and it takes me no more than fifteen minutes to set up each one, and that includes creating a new database user for each site (yes I’m paranoid like that), plus tweaking a few configuration options and installing the themes that I like to use. So if you’ve got your own server, even a shared one, you might want to try installing the code yourself in order to get more flexibility and a better URL than myname.wordpress.com, but for beginners just starting out in blogging WordPress.com is great news.

Found via Forever Geek: iDoom, a part of the classic Doom game by id Software to the iPodLinux platform.

I don’t own an iPod myself so I can’t really say how well the game plays, but judging from the screenshots it looks pretty damn cool and seeing as Doom doesn’t really stretch the graphics capabilities of modern machines I’m not surprised that someone has managed to get it on a portable device like the iPod. You can also watch videos of the game running on several different iPod models, and it seems to be fairly smooth. Unfortunately there’s no sound support at the moment but I think the original Doom used proprietory libraries that weren’t released with the rest of the source code so that may be contributing to the problem (update: it appears that the copyrighted sound library was only used for the DOS version of the code, not the Linux one).

Anyway, if you have an iPod with iPodLinux already installed (be careful about installing if it not, as it comes with no warranty), you might want to give Doom a whirl and take yourself back to the good old days when a 486DX was a top of the range machine and everything was measured in 256 colours.

Last night I was browsing the web as usual when suddenly Firefox wanted to install an update that it had downloaded silently in the background. It still marked itself as “version 1.5” and I couldn’t find anything on the Mozilla web site so I guessed that it couldn’t be the final release, but neither was there any information about a second release candidate. It wasn’t until I saw Firefox 1.5 RC2 Available on Slashdot that I realised what had happened.

Apparently the new release candidate only includes “several fixes to automated update system”, at least according to the release notes, although there are no specifics at to what these fixes are. I’m surprised at the Mozilla Foundation for putting out a new release without simultaneously putting this in their release notes and RSS feed, hopefully it won’t happen again because it’s rather confusing having a new version downloading in the background when you don’t know that one has been released.

Hot on the heels of the Firefox release candidate is the a release at the same stage in the development process for the Thunderbird mail client. There are an awful lot of new features mentioned in the release notes, although most of them won’t affect a lot of users (e.g. Kerberos Authentication).

From a personal point of view, I haven’t noticed any improvements so far, but then I generally use mutt to read my email. I hope the software update function has been fixed though, because when I tried using it to update to the release candidate I was told that Thunderbird couldn’t verify the integrity of the patch so was going to download the whole thing, then it just hung there indefinitely. In the end I just went to the Mozilla web site and downloaded it manually instead.

FreeBSD 6 has now been released.

The latest version of the most popular branch of the *BSD family (other notable members include NetBSD and OpenBSD, both of which have released new versions in the past fortnight as well) includes a lot of improvements, the details of which can be found in the release notes for whichever architecture you are using.

If you want to upgrade to the latest version, you must already be running 5.3 or later – if not then you’ll have to upgrade first to one of those releases, and then on to version 6. I haven’t quite plucked up the courage to upgrade my server yet, which is running 5.4, but I think I’ll be giving it a whirl at some point in the next couple of weeks.

Google opening Manchester office via BBC News

I never thought about working for Google as a possible career option because I didn’t want to move to London or Dublin, but now they have an office in Manchester perhaps I should give them a closer look. Admittedly it’s only a sales office at the moment so I doubt any development will be going on, but it’s a potential first rung on the ladder of one of the more interesting companies around.

The popular Mozilla Firefox web browser has its first release candidate yesterday, after two earlier beta releases. I’ve been following the development right since the alpha release (although only using official release builds, I haven’t tried a CVS checkout or even a nightly build yet) and things seem to be improving all the time. The biggest bugbear for me has always been stability on OS X, because Firefox would often go into a fit when I’d been surfing for a long time and cause the whole browser to lock up every time I switched tabs or opened new ones. Thankfully this seems to have been gradually phased out over the last couple of betas, and hopefully the release candidate will finally put it to rest.

I’m also impressed that the automatic updater seems to work properly now – not only was the new version downloaded in the background without me realising (I’m sure there’s a way to switch this off though if you’d rather Firefox didn’t do that, but personally I’m quite happy to have updates downloaded whilst my connection is mostly idle) but I was also offered the option of installing the update there and then or leaving it until next time I started Firefox. This is in contrast to Apple’s Software Update, which hangs around until you tell it to restart and this can be a bit annoying if you’re in the middle of working.

The major interest in a release candidate for me though is that it usually signifies that a final release is not too far away. Betas can go on and on for several months, but last time the Mozilla team put out a release candidate for Firefox there was a final release soon after. Obviously neither they nor I can guarantee Firefox 1.5 will be marked stable and ready for general release by the end of the year, but I’m hoping that’s the way things are going.

The release notes are, as always, available online if you want a brief overview of the changes, as well as a list of bug fixes. I couldn’t find a Changelog in my brief scan of the page, but I’m sure there is one around somewhere and if you’re interested in that level of detail you probably know where it is already.