If you are really in a hurry, you can already do an update, but be aware that it will take quite some time. I did the upgrade yesterday evening (GMT+2) and it took me more than 5 hours to download all packages.

I must say that there is no visible *big* change, appart from tabs in nautilus.

You will also notice in this screenshot the eject icon on removable devices, really usefull and time saving.

One of the best thing to me is better support for my DVB-T Tuner and integrated webcam. This means I don’t need to install additional drivers for my DVB Tuner and it won’t break my webcam.

Here is a short list of changes for this version:

• Kernel 2.6.27
• Xorg 7.4
• Samba 3.2 with ipv6 support and secure transfer
• Network Manager 0.7 – works much better than previously
• Firefox 3.0.3
• Gnome 2.24
• Improved Shutdown screen

One of the things I don’t like is it doesn’t integrate OpenOffice3.0.

Stay tuned as I will give you more feedback when I’ll have tested it more throughoutly.

They said that this move will will allow to simplify their system administration.

Wikimedia has around 400 servers running and this is a major move for Ubuntu and will give the distribution the credibility it needs in large scale environments.

Indeed, Wikimedia server manage more than 10 Billion pageviews a month and peeks can see 50 000 hits per seconds.

Wikimedia is a rapidly growing technical environment as during their first 18 month they got for 15 server to 200.

Canonical prooves again the popularity and stability of their distribution, after releasing the first server edition in 2005.

Note that the new edition of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) will be released at the end of October.

So I first needed to create the DAL.

The DAL must stay : easy to use, coherent (meaning no differences between different DBMS) and with no useless features.

So the first thing to do was to create a generic class encapsulating every aspect that will be generic enough to be DBMS not specific. This class is dna.database.class. It also allowed me to define the behavior and structure of inheriting classes.

Talking about inheritance, for now there are only four classes. MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite 2 and Oracle. Yes this means that the DNA-Framework will have support for all of these systems and probably more when I’ll create an ODBC class

So, briefly, I started the creation of the class system monday and today, the four classes exists and are able to :

• Execute SQL queries (anything)
• Select and browse through results
• Export as SQL or CSV result of a query
• Import from SQL and CSV
• Fetch various states (queries / dbms)

Below is an example of the same code executed on 4 different DBMS.

MySQL

SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> anthony@mysql.com
    -> toto@mysql.com
INSERT INTO MS_User (Email) VALUES ('test@MySQL.com')
SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> anthony@mysql.com
    -> toto@mysql.com
    -> test@MySQL.com
DELETE FROM MS_User WHERE Email='test@MySQL.com'
SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> anthony@mysql.com
    -> toto@mysql.com
PostgreSQL

SELECT * FROM "MS_User"
    -> Anthony@PostgresQL.com
    -> toto@postgresql.com
INSERT INTO "MS_User" ("Email") VALUES ('test@PostgreSQL.com')
SELECT * FROM "MS_User"
    -> Anthony@PostgresQL.com
    -> toto@postgresql.com
    -> test@PostgreSQL.com
DELETE FROM "MS_User" WHERE "Email"='test@PostgreSQL.com'
SELECT * FROM "MS_User"
    -> Anthony@PostgresQL.com
    -> toto@postgresql.com
SQLite

SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> anthony@sqlite.org
    -> toto@sqlite.org
INSERT INTO MS_User (Email) VALUES ('test@SQLite.com')
SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> anthony@sqlite.org
    -> toto@sqlite.org
    -> test@SQLite.com
DELETE FROM MS_User WHERE Email='test@SQLite.com'
SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> anthony@sqlite.org
    -> toto@sqlite.org
Oracle OCI

SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> toto@oracle.com
    -> Anthony@oracle.com
INSERT INTO MS_User (EMAIL) VALUES ('test@Oracle OCI.com')
SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> toto@oracle.com
    -> Anthony@oracle.com
    -> test@Oracle OCI.com
DELETE FROM MS_User WHERE EMAIL='test@Oracle OCI.com'
SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> toto@oracle.com
    -> Anthony@oracle.com

Personalized products are also available and will allow you to sell products with specific options.

Magento 1.1 features a new Webservices API that enables you to integrate with third parts applications.

I’m happy to see that magento is very well accepted because the software has already been downloaded more than 400.000 times and they recently received the Best New Open Source project award as the 2008 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards

In fact, Google gears is a product you can install on your computer to “cache” files onto you computer and simulate they are located on the internet. Meaning that any file cached through Gears will not be downloaded from the net, but directly from your computer, therefore, they are loaded nearly instantly.

How does it work ?

First, you have to install google gears, to do so, just go to gears.google.com and click on the install button, as shown below:

Once this is done, just go to the whole process, in the end, you’ll have to restart your browser so that it’s properly installed.

After restarting your web browser, just go to your wordpress dashboard and click on the Turbo button in the top right corner:

1. Turbo mode will then ask you to activate Gears

2. Accept Gears to access this site

3. And downloads files needed

After all these steps done, your pages will load faster than ever, because any css, js and gif files will be loaded from Gears and the rest from your webserver.

This option is more than just usefull and will save your time when writing articles, believe me !

This new version introduce some functions like post revision (modification followup). This will allow you to have more control over modifications done to your posts and checks what have change since the creation of an article. Very handy when you have multiple writers on the same blog.

Google Gears support, will allow you to fasten administration page display via the caching of CSS and JS files.

And finally, theme preview. This will allow you to make sure your design looks good before to apply it. It works the same way as WordPress.com’s feature.

You will find the complete changelog right here.

One final note, due to the possibility to move your wp-content directory, some plugins may not work until they are updated to take this into account. But zdstats and zdmultilang are fully compatible as I tested them without moving these folders.

There are many solutions existing out there to display charts into your pages. Indeed, whatever your reason is to include dynamic charts, it’s often necessary to use third part applications.

It’s never easy to generate them all by yourself, save it as an image and then upload it on your server.

That’s where some applications will come to help you with this problem.

Applications

There are lots of applications / scripts to allow you to do this. Most of the time you will need experience in programming might it be PHP or XML. Most of the solutions I’ll present here are OpenSource, or at least free for personnal usage.

1. PHP/SWF Charts or XML/SWF Charts
This application will allow you to generate Flash based charts, which has the advantage to make them look better and much more dynamic. Nevertheless, it’s necessary to know some PHP or XML to use this solution. One of the drawbacks of this solution is, it’s not fully free. If you plan to use the free version, you will have some features missing, and some links back to the author’s page. Even if this solution is great, these limits made me look for another one.

2. Open Flash Chart
This application is OpenSource, and free, which makes it more attractive. It can also generate very good looking charts. But you still have to know PHP or XML to be able to use it. But that’s worth it. I must say I’m very pleased by this solution as it’s the one I included in ZdStatistics to generate dynamic charts.

3. pChart
This application is quite new and do not generate flash based charts. Instead, it will create png images dynamically as long as you have PHP with GD support enabled. Even if they are not flash animated charts, they look more than good. I must say they really are gorgeous. You can have a look at what can be achieved with it right here.
I must say the project looks very promising and I’m looking forward to include it in zdstats instead of OpenFlashChart.

Services

1. Google Chart API
I must say this service is probably the most efficient. It allow you to generate dynamic graphs with no knowledge of programming. All you have to do is to follow the online documentation to generate nice charts like this one:

Online documentation is well written and reading it will allow you to include your first charts quite fast.

Many other solutions can be found here on Smashing Magazine.

It’s been awaited for so long, but even though it’s been used by many people to play games or run their Windows Apps under GNU/Linux (such as Photoshop, MS Office, etc…). But for the past monthes, the project had accelerated their development thanks to the Google Summer Of Code.

Of course, there is a long way to perfect compatibility, but none the less, we can keep this day as a great day for us Linux users because it’s Wine that gives us the chance to use applications for the other world

As long as editors like Adobe will refuse to publish their software under GNU/Linux, we will have to use Wine.

Gamers will be happy with this release because most of the bugfixes are games related.

Anyway, let’s wish all the best to this great project and of course, to GNU/Linux

Let me introduce you some of the new features that I can’t live without and some plugins I use everyday.

Features

Multiple selection : While maintaining the CTRL key, it is possible to select multiple lines on the same page.

Password saving is now easier to do as the popup as diappeared and has been replaced by a simple form on top of the window. This allows you to save your password after the authentication. Therefore saving you time if your password is not the correct one.

Zoom has also been modified as it’s now possible to zoom the page with images or without images. This will help people with visual disabilities to view their pages with the design of the page kept.

Plugins

FastDial is a plugin giving you the same functions as Opera has. Showing you a phone dialer like window with selected pages. Therefore you will be able to choose visually the page you need to load.

GooglePreview is enhancing Google search results with page previews for the given results. You will never go on a page without seeing first.

AdBlock Plus, doesn’t need to be presented, but to me this one is necessary if you want to surf without being annoyed by unwanted ads.