I am very proud of announcing you that the second alpha of PyHP has been released.

What is PyHP? It is an Apache module called mod_pyhp, used to preprocess scripts written in Python programming language. The goal of the PyHP project is to mix the power and flexibility of Python with the style and “ease of use” of PHP in the generation of dynamic web pages, all speeded up by the fast internal backend written in C.

I am one of the founders of the project and I think it has great possibilities.

Hope you’ll try it and find it usefull!

As usual, my webcam in Sony Vaio VGN-AR51E didn’t work with the new Ubuntu 8.04 out of the box.
I got used to it: it seems that Sony is not able to have some Linux-compatible hardware on its laptop.
Shame on you, Sony.

But I was able to have it working. If you don’t have the same Sony Vaio mode, it could be possible that my suggestions work for you, anyway.
First of all, execute this command from a shell:

lsusb

if you have one line similar to the following one, then you can try my suggestions:

05ca:1839 Ricoh Co., Ltd

Preparation

First of all, make sure you have the following packages installed on your Ubuntu: build-essentials, subversion.

Once these packages are up and running, then you can download the latest driver for your webcam here using this command:

svn co http://svn.mediati.org/svn/r5u870/trunk r5u870

now, type:

cd r5u870
make
sudo make install

the webcam should now be visible from the next system reboot.

If you need more info, you can have a look at the official author of the drivers website, here:

http://wiki.mediati.org/Installation

Enjoy!

I think I was one of the first installers of the final version of Ubuntu 8.04: I have monitored all day the download page waiting for the “Release Candidate” message to disappear and promptly started the download as soon as that event happened.

My Sony Vaio VGN-AR51E was nominated for a reformat (I don’t lose any data, since I write everything on my /home and it is a different partition I don’t format) and, after about 30 minutes, my laptop was up and running with the new Ubuntu 8.04.

My first impressions are extremely positive: the system is fast and responsive, but I have some regrets:

• I don’t like the choice of installing Firefox 3.0b5: too may Firefox extensions still don’t work (especially FireBug and many other development tools) and so I was forced to remove Firefox 3.0b5 and manually revert to my custom Firefox2 installation.
• As usual, many Vaio hardware do not work out of the box, so I think I’ll spend some time googling around to find solutions to my hardware incompatibilities problems.

Anyway, as usual, the new Ubuntu is a great distribution — don’t miss it!

The SMP (symmetrical multi processing) is now part of our lives, thank to Intel Core DUO that gives us a “multi processor” in its new chips.
Now, many times you don’t simply use all this power because your software does not support it.
One of the most CPU intensive task is data compression, and I have found a valid replacement for both gzip and bzip2.
The first one is mgzip and the second is pbzip2. Both these software uses your SMP processing power and for the pbzip2 there is also a package for Ubuntu in the standard universal repository.

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Accordingly to this web site, it seems that Windows Update is fetching and installing some updates without end users’ consent. To make the story short, Windows Update alters files on users’ systems without displaying any dialog box to request permission. Microsoft is patches files silently, even if auto-updates have been disabled. So Microsoft is bypassing the normal automatic update control without the users being aware of it.

They talked about it on Slashdot and on Skype forum: by reading this post message, it seems that Linux version of Skype is reading personal information on your PC.
Among the files Skype is reading, apparently without any need to work properely, there are: /etc/passwd and user profiles in /home/*/.mozilla/firefox folders.

No “offical” answer has been posted yet by Skype, but this just another point against closed source software and how it could contain spyware functions.

By reading the post on Skype, I discover that the application reads Firefox bookmarks, installed plugins and their configurations, and so on.

I think that the same behaviour happens on the Windows version of Skype, so, my advice is quite simple, but effective: stop using Skype right now, the company has betrayed its own users by spying against their will.

Crap like this does not deserve being used. Drop it now!

Yahoo has released the YSlow, a Firebug add-on that helps you find what’s slow in your web pages.
You must have Firebug installed before installing YSlow.
Great tool!

I have just stumbled upon this website, where you can see a complete Lemmings game implementation written in DHTML
It is just amazing!

According to this page:

Survey: Windows loses ground with developers | InfoWorld | News | 2007-07-02 | By Paul Krill

Microsoft’s Windows platform is losing traction as a target for application developers in North America.
A survey this spring of more than 400 developers and IT managers in North America found that the number of developers targeting Windows for their applications declined 12 percent from a year ago.
Just 64.8 percent targeted the platform as opposed to 74 percent in 2006.

The survey, featuring developers at enterprises and solution providers like system integrators, covered both client and server application development.