Il sistema operativo in sé è un Linux riadattato e tarato appositamente per i netbook, quindi adatto a schermi piccoli e senza troppe pretese hardware, ed è già stabile e ricco di applicazioni: si possono scaricare e installare con ben due clic del mouse un sacco di applicazioni “classiche” (da Firefox a GIMP passando per OpenOffice, Pidgin e VLC), una marea di programmi Web-based (a partire da Dropbox, Evernote e tutti i media player dedicati allo streaming) e un po’ collegamenti diretti a siti come Facebook e Twitter (un po’ alla maniera di Fluid, per i maccari) da aprire in un browser ad hoc.

Jolicloud è inoltre già compatibile con un buon numero di modelli di netbook oggi sul mercato senza bisogno di driver aggiuntivi. L’installazione si può effettuare a partire da un lettore CD o (ottimo, dato il particolare target del sistema operativo) da chiavetta USB: sul sito ci sono tutti gli strumenti necessari per copiare il file ISO su chiavetta.

Se volete dare un’occhiata per capire più o meno di cosa si parla, sul sito c’è una breve presentazione a questo indirizzo.

Il link per il combo update (come di consueto, qualche centinaio di MByte in totale) è qui.

Today Microsoft let us know that the real RTM of Windows 7 will be instead the internal build 7600.16385. The same build leaked and available on torrent networks since 15 days.

Hey, what a wonderful world.

Aptana Studio comes in two versions: a community (= free) version and a Pro one. The pay version has some feature more than the free one, and the most interesting (for me) is the support for Secure FTP protocol.

Ok. I paid my 99 bucks two years ago, I downloaded and installed several times Aptana Studio Pro (there’s some plugin that can be activated only with a reg code) without any effort. It was Aptana Studio 1.0, and it soon became 1.2.

Now Aptana has released the brand new Studio 1.5. Wow. I read on the website that, if I want to use Pro version, I only (?) have to renew my subscription for 79$. It’s a fair price, but my Aptana Studio 1.2 can be enough for me.

But now that I’m reinstalling all my software on my Windows 7 RTM (7600.16385.x86), I had a bad surprise: I can no longer download the 1.2 plugins from Aptana Website. This means that I can no longer install Aptana Studio 1.2 (and I have a Pro license!), I am forced to download and install Aptana 1.5.x.

And, of course, my license so far is the free one.

Not good, my Aptana friends. Really not good. 79$ is not the price of DreamWeaver, ok, but this is not a correct way to behave with your customers.

Of course, if I am wrong, if this is only a misunderstanding or an issue of my PC, I will be happy to change my mind.

Here’s my (very) quick compatibility list, i.e. what development tools am I gonna say “goodbye” today, according to compatibility with Windows 7.

UltraEdit-32 Text Editor
My old and beloved release cannot install on top of Windows 7. Agh. I do not want to buy another copy, please! I think I’ll look at some free editor: I already tried PSPad but I did not like it, I think I’ll give Komodo Edit 5 a chance. After all I have been using UltraEdit for years, maybe it’s time to try something new… huh?

Visual Studio 2008 SP1
All seems working fine. Uh, I am not surprised at all, anyway.

Visual Basic 6.0 SP6
Uhm. After some troubles, it seems to work: I had a 5-minutes panic moment at setup time, when the VB6 installer window froze… I just had to wait, and it came back from the limbo where it was stuck, right while I was searching the Web for some good idea to get rid of that. Someone, on the Web, reported that in 64-bit releases of Windows 7 this window freezes without any chance to have it back: I am going to try 64-bit Windows 7, and I will discover it myself. Uh, once installed VB6 I also had to check a “run always administrator” checkbox: else, VB6 was unable to see any ActiveX/COM components when i launched a .vbp file with a double-click. These are the only issues I noticed so far. And I hope I’ll not notice anymore…

Aptana Studio 1.2
Working fine, nothing to say.

(And more to come, I’ll edit this post as I install some other development tools…

So I am going to upgrade my good old Windows XP –a very good OS, that I am using since its day one- to this brand new Windows 7. Tomorrow (or tonight?) we should see the final RTM: many people in forums and blogs are saying that it will be the 7600 build, if you want to seek for it on the Internet, you will need to know that the file name should be 7600.16384.090710-1945_x64fre_client_en-us_Retail_Ultimate-GRMCULXFRER_EN_DVD.iso. I’ll download it from MSDN, tomorrow (to be honest, I am already using, since some days, the 7264 build, and it works very well for me…)

See you soon, I hope, after installing this brand new OS (or from my Mac OS X Leopard, if something goes wrong…).

I would like to say also that:

1. http://www.haswindows7rtmed.com/ is definitely the most funny site about Windows 7

2. The screenshot that many sites are publishing tonight (you can see it below) was declared as fake by many sources.

3. Some MS guy are declaring that “Win7 RTM will be out in july”, but it’s not sure whether the date will really be 13 july or not. Someone speaks also os july, 24. Who will be right?

This widget (based on the open source project MagpieRSS) has a not-so-user-friendly caching system, and even if you notice a too slow feed refreshing, there’s no effective way to configure it by the wp-admin interface.

If you want, you can actually manage the RSS cache, but you have to do it directly by modifying a variable into a php file. Ow, yes: there’s some plugin that should help, but I have not seen any of them actually doing its job!

The variable you have to touch is $cache. You have to open the /wp-includes/class-simplepie.php file and change the value:

/**
 * @var bool Enable/Disable Caching
 * @see SimplePie::enable_cache()
 * @access private
 */
var $cache = true;

to:

/**
 * @var bool Enable/Disable Caching
 * @see SimplePie::enable_cache()
 * @access private
 */
var $cache = false;

Please, remember: you are not changing a database stored value, but an effective piece of WordPress code. If you upgrade your WordPress (2.8.1 was released just today!), you’ll have to change this value again.

Edit: please, use this advice carefully. If you included many RSS feeds into your sidebar, remember that caching may speed up significantly the page loading times. Maybe you just need to shorten the refresh time rather than disabling the cache system. To do this, you have to set the $cache_duration value, you can find it in the same file, at the line 476: the initial value (in seconds) is 3600, i.e. one hour, you may try and lower it a bit…

My apologies: it won’t happen again

I was reading, these days, some articles about developing and selling WordPress Themes. WordPress’ success is growing, and many designers can see in this blogging platform an unique opportunity for their work.

And I thought: all over the Web you can find plenty of free (or pay) themes, suitable for every kind of blogs (and not only for blogs). Any WordPress theme is also easy (too easy?) to modify: you need only to change some lines in style.css, and to upload some new logo/background bitmaps… and (almost) none will recognize the old theme!

I was just wondering, so: are we sure that, for a "standalone" freelance designer, the WordPress Themes business (i.e. the "I create a theme and I publish it on the Web"; the "I have to build a site, then I’ll use WordPress with a self-created theme" is another world…) is really a good opportunity?

Whatever, if you want to try it you can apply (at the moment the bar is in private beta): the invitation should come in less than 24 hours. The installation is easy: you configure your toolbar in the Wibiya pages, then you can download the code for your blogging platform: there’s a snippet for Blogger, a plugin for Wordpress and also a generic “embed code”, that lets you put your toolbar in almost any web site.

The code itself is nothing but a call to a php script on the Wibiya server: by activating your plugin you will simply see a new row in your HTML, “http://toolbar.wibiya.com/toolbarLoader.php?toolbarId=XXX”, where XXX is your Wibiya ID. You can do it with your own hands too

As you can read on the Dailymotion Blog, this site is starting an experiment: streaming video without flash or silverlight, but just by using the W3C standard <video> tag. No proprietary technology, only open standards (the videos are OGG-coded).

<video> tag is unfortunately supported so far only by Firefox 3.5 beta, if you are using another browser you’ll be redirected to a flash version of the same video. But it’s only matter of time, to see every other browsers line up on the same way.

Goodbye, Rajeev. Without you, and without your efforts in search field (that brought to the Google algorithm), the 2009 world would be different.

A bit worse, I guess.

Rest in Peace.

(* “bing & decide” is the official bing’s slogan, you already can see it at bing.com)

Come on, Redmond people! You already are old sailors in Search Engines sea… are you sure that another competitor in this (full?) market is really what we need?

And especially: Live Search sucks. Bing won’t be worse (how possible?). Will it really be better?

Btw, bing (recursive definition: bing = bing is not Google, like GNU = GNU’s not Unix) will not be a Search Engine. It will be a Decision Engine. Uhm. It will help you to find the best hotel in town, a manual for your car, air tickets… Does it mean that we’ll se a “morph” between Google search and Wolfram Alpha pages?

In the meantime, here is some link (for developers too)…

• A post on Live Developers Blog
• A twitter news account
• The Live Search Official Blog
• An explanatory website (there’s a video too)
• Some API documentation (about project Silk Road, aka Live Search 2.0)

And you, will you bing?

Update: I am trying to use Bing right now. Uhm. Maybe I am wrong, maybe I am searching for the wrong terms and in the wrong way. But actually I am trying some “standard” query (my city, my programming language, my favourite music) and I cannot tell the difference between Google-style searches and Bing-style searches. I can tell no difference but the old one: Live Search Bing still sucks.

What a mess.

I installed Gears to open Google Calendar when I’m offline (uhm… although… if I think… my PC is online almost every time I use it!), since I am trying to dismiss Outlook… Anyway: I installed Gears in Firefox, and I could no longer upload images to my blog. I *did not* add support for Gears to the blog admin pages. I just installed the plugin.

The solution? Just uninstall it. Or disable it from Firefox config tools. Maybe the bug will be soon fixed, but who can tell?

If you ask Windows, the answer you’ll have will be your LAN address; but you need your WAN address (i.e. the address that people must use to connect to your PC), and not the router-generated one.

Ok. If you need it, get it: open in your app the URL http://tools.danielemarino.net/myip/?mode=p and you’ll have a simple text string, containing only your actual IP address. Unlike other services, you’ll get no HTML clutter, no image to click, no redirect, no ads. Just your IP.

Feel free to use it as long as you need it: I already use it