Agronesia

After a very long wait, finally the cool Mono guys released Mono 2.0! It is the open source implementation of the core .NET platform which of course includes the C# compiler. My litmus test is no other than FractalSharp which uses PropertyGrid and quite some System.Drawing stuffs. (Actually since 2.0 beta FractalSharp can be run without problems)

A C# 3 compiler is included there. Oh LINQ and lambda functions… I haven’t learned any new C# language features since the 2.0 generics.

Kudos to the Mono team (read their blog aggregator here). Now go get it! (I myself won’t rush, limited Internet quota here)

The latest stable release of Gnome, version 2.24, has been released. Read the release notes for feature highlights and screenshots. I think the focus in this release in Gnome mobile, which enables developers to roll out application on mobile devices.

I prefer the Gnome to KDE. Quite a lot… The look is elegant, and the user interface is simple but very functional. (The looks of KDE is a bit too gaudy for my taste :)) Also, internationalization and accessibility has always been their top priority. (I do dislike the detached-windows model of The GIMP, but hey it’s just one naughty app)

I don’t mind the KDE fans, but I kind of despise the state of Indonesian Linux media in which Gnome is bashed a lot with full sentiments, thinking that the whole Indonesian population are all KDE fans. They use inappropriate words and always try to brainwash potential new Linux users claiming “KDE is superior technologically and visually, GNOME sucks hard” in every chance. I think both are great and its just a matter of preference. Linux journalists and writers, please rewrite your sentence so that it won’t be insulting. We’re all supposed to be friends, not enemies, you know…

Yes, Google will release its very own new browser! If you have time, do read the entertaining 38-page comic licensed in Creative Commons illustrating it.

The highlights are:

• It will be fully open source. It’s not surprising, being Google which uses lots of open source technologies itself and supports open source through means like Google Summer of Code.
• The rendering engine will be based on WebKit which also powers Konqueror and Safari. Why not Gecko, the one powering Firefox? Google claims WebKit is fast, easily runs on mobile devices, and is very easy for new developers to learn.
• Each tab will run in its own separate process. Therefore, one tab crashing won’t affect the whole browser. The Chrome UI will also allow you to analyze the resource consumption of each tab which is a very sweet feature. Closing a tab will completely release all resources associated with the process just like closing a normal application, preventing memory hog.
  
• A JavaScript engine designed from scratch designed by the Google V8 team at Denmark. It will be designed from ground up to run big demanding applications like GMail with blazing-fast speed.
• Google Gears will be included by default. This is the JS component that can make web applications run in offline mode and other stuffs that are supposed to make apps easier to develop.
• Address bar will be below tabs. Well, it’s kind of logical but… Well, big deal…
  
• Privacy mode like IE8 in which nothing of your browsing activity is recorded. Aka pr0n mode.
• Address bar, or Omnibar as they christened it, autocomplete like Firefox 3 but with additional entries like popular sites based on what you type.
• Opening a new tab shows the list of 9 sites you open most just like Opera, with the addition of search engines you might want to immediately use on its right.
  
• Pop up blocking and anti malware/phising features. the browser will continually download list of malicious sites. Kind of a must have in today’s browser anyway.

It’s nice to see Google playing nicely by making it a free software. What I have high hopes most is in the JavaScript engine. The comic actually goes quite a great length explaining many of its technical details in comparison with other engines with simple languages (for a programmer of course), so again read it :).

As a (would be lazy) JavaScript programmer, I’ve got IE7, FF3, Opera, and Safari installed anyway (I believe I have Amaya installed at one point too). Another one in the neighborhood won’t be such a shock.

PS: www.google.com/chrome should have a content appearing soon.

After a day’s worth of PHP hacking coupled with some swearing, I’ve finally finished a rudimentary ad manager! What does it do? Well, basically it rotates through a pool of ads. A life demo can be seen here. Refresh the demo page several times and see the ads magically rotating.

It’s called Yumeko AdManager because… Well, probably because it will be used on my Japanese learning site Yumeko. Because Google AdSense still don’t allow us to use it on Indonesian web sites.

This program is licensed under GPL 2 and you can download it here (there’s a documentation, yay!). I even made a special page for it here in case I’m inclined to update it.

Here are some of its features:

• Relative appearance rate of ads can be set
• Tracks appearance count
• Tracks click count
• Expiry date for ads can (uhm… must) be set

What’s obviously lacking is an interface to add and manage ads. Yes, you need to play around using tools such as PHPMyAdmin to add the database rows. But anyway it’s all explained in the documentation :).

Other than PHP, I’m also interested in learning more about this black horse JavaScript to make… ah, let’s call it “interactive programs”. But alas, there’s only so much hours in a day…

Here are some stuffs that I did for my WordPress installations. The plain installation, left alone, is just plainly not good enough :)… I use version 2.5.1 btw.

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I use Notepad++ for my text editing need. To write my blog entries, I’m even handcoding my HTML using it!

It has neat features that makes it superior to Notepad such as a tabbed interface, internationalization (Unicode support and UI translations), and lots of text manipulation tools (HTML escaping, to name one).

One essential feature I miss when editing HTML using it is the tag wrapping functionality. That’s what the buttons in Wordpress’ HTML mode do:

After asking around in the forum, I finally found the plugin I needed for Notepad++, WebEdit.

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