Dissociated Press

In case anyone’s interested, Gaim 2.0 beta 3 is out. I have a build of Gaim 2.0 beta 3 for Ubuntu Breezy, amd64 that you’re free to try out. Remember, it’s a beta kids — so if it eats your data, or blows up your computer, or generally does weird and unpleasant things to your computer, not my fault. Use with caution. (For the record, it hasn’t done any of those things to me but your mileage may vary.)

I’ve been a bit too busy lately to post, so I wanted to catch up a bit. Last week I went to BrainShare, at least the first few days, in Salt Lake City. Day one and day two coverage are up on NewsForge.

I also wrote a review of the Linspire “Koobox” PC that went up over on Linux.com this week. I’m not terribly impressed by the unit, but for a budget PC it’s not bad. Linspire and I will have to agree to disagree over the emphasis placed on creating normal user accounts rather than allowing users to run as root by default.

Another interesting development this week — Don Marti and a few other Linux luminaries are putting together a “shadow” conference in Seattle right after Microsoft’s WinHEC — this should be interesting, and I hope it’s a major success. The story is on NewsForge.

And, finally this week, it looks like security concerns have scuttled the acquisition of Sourcefire by Check Point software. The story is over at NewsForge.

I spent a bit of time playing with wikiCalc a few weeks ago, and wrote up a short review for NewsForge. It’s still rough around the edges, but it could be pretty useful in the near future.

Just FYI, I’m doing a bundle of traveling through March and April, so posts and updates will be infrequent. If you leave a comment, it might take me a few days to get ’round to moderation. If you leave comment spam, it will be jettisoned appropriately.

The feeling that you’ve edited this file before.

I’m getting heartily sick of forums and websites that require a login simply to read content, particularly when the content is indexed by Google just fine. I shouldn’t need to create yet another login just to read half a page of text. Case in point, I was just checking the Second Life site for the Linux client, and wanted to peruse the bugs and known issues page.

I can understand restricting logins to prevent comment spam — and I have no problem with that. But it’s really annoying to be asked to register just because you want to read about a product’s requirements.