I've been using FireFox 3 beta 3 for quite some time and was pretty happy with it. Fired up FF today and was prompted with a nice upgrade button. They've been doing some tweaking on the JavaScript engine and its made applications that I use quite often like GMail to work lightning fast.

From the FireFox Release Notes:

[Improved in Beta 4!] Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in significant improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3 Beta 4.

I've got a great many videos that I've captured in .wmv but haven't had the time to figure out resolutions, formats and burning them to DVDs, yet.

That's all changed now that Lifehacker has a a great post on Burning almost any video file to a playable DVD using DVD Flick.

I was fascinated by ffmpeg when I first read about it a couple of weeks ago. DVD Flick combines this along with other open source tool to create a nice, easy to use package.

The very first posting to this blog from a Linux box! The lab that I'm lecturing on .NET Compact Framework development for an Advanced MSc batch has all these dual boot boxes with Ubuntu and XP, so I thought I'd give it a go.
The text is crystal clear, even much more better than an XP box with ClearType turned on.
Hmm... maybe I should run Ubuntu on the box I have at home.

Internet news reports about an announcement that Google and Sun are to make later in the day today about Google Office. What with Office 12 in the making we Office users are going to be in for a real treat.

Having seen the screenshots of Office 12 and the video on Channel 9, I can't wait till I get my hands on this baby.

   

Ever since I attended the FOSS conference a couple of weeks ago, I've been trying to figure out how viable an option Open Source is for the software industry as well as developing countries like ours.

Every trail of thought that I could think of led to the same place and today's Open Enterprise column on InfoWorld nails it. The answer is: "Without licensing fees to fall back on, pure open source companies may be limited to imitating proprietary vendors' successes".

Now that everyone has seen how Microsoft is innovating in the next versions of Vista, Office, .NET (Linq) it definitely proves Neil's theory:

Let's say this is the shape of the software industry for the next 10 years. A proprietary company comes up with an innovative idea and it's successful. The open source community scrambles to duplicate this idea. Eventually the open source version matures, it catches on, the product category becomes commoditized, and customers gravitate toward the lowest-cost option. Meanwhile, a new innovative idea has come along. Rinse, repeat.

Bill Gates told CNet, "The industry will always be a mix of free and commercial software." If he's finally fine with that, is it good enough for us, too?

[Read full article]

During lunch today I was joined at my table by Rasmus Lerdof (the creator of PHP) and Jim Zemlin the executive director of FSG (Free Standards Group). Jim is the guy who pushes the Linux Standards Base and tries to ensure that Linux doesn't fragment the way that Unix did.

Both Rasmus and Jim were enjoying their stay in Colombo and Jim was really into the Sri Lankan culinary, he was going for seconds as well which is quite rare given how spicy Sri Lankan food generally is.

The session following lunch was taken by the lively Danese Cooper from Intel. Danese has a funky unofficial title as the Open Source Diva and one of her key achievements was to lobby Sun into open sourcing Open Office during the time she was employed there.

The session that is currently in progress is by Hugo Wisidagama, the director of MNet. MNet is a local software service company that is focused on providing services based on open source service. Their unique business model is built on selling their expertise on various open source software stacks to companies.

I was able find a power socket at the end of the room where I was able to get my notebook charged again and guess what Dr. Ruwan from the Colombo University too was running around trying to get his notebook charged too.

The Prime Minister who was supposed to be the Chief Guest was a no show due to his presidential campaign (and don't let me get started on yesterdays fiasco where all the roads were blocked, it took me fours hours to get home!) instead Prof. Tissa Witharana the Minister of Science and Technology turned up and read out from a scripted note. The other speakers included Prof. Samaranayake and Manju Hathotuwa of the ICT Agency who spoke about what ICTA is doing to take ICT to the masses. I must say that I'm pretty impressed with how far reaching these were.

After a tea break the CXO conference kicked off with Dr. Sanjiva's Welcome Note where he gave an introduction to FOSS and what it was all about. Dr. Sanjiva though iterated the fact that Free software does not mean free as in 'Free of Cost'.

I'm right now listening to the Manager of the Open Source Lab from IBM, India who's going into detail on all the open source projects that IBM has been contributing to.