Category Archives: Uncategorized
Bored of Windows or Mac OS X and want to try something new just for fun? Or perhaps you want to try an operating system that your friends are talking about?
Or maybe you just want to learn something new. The free alternative
operating systems on this page give you a wide variety of systems that you can install in your own computer. They range from cutting edge (even
bleeding edge) systems to the very old but popular platforms that you thought were long extinct.
Check them out. They're all free.
A new DVD and CD burning software (ie, a program that lets you create CDs and DVDs from files on your computer) has been added to the
Free CD and DVD Burners and Copying Software page. This
software, called AmoK, supports multisession CDs/DVDs, and can also create movie DVDs/CDs and audio CDs. The program is portable in the sense that you
can place it on your USB thumb drive if you wish.
I was very excited last week to learn that WordPress has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. This is a landmark for us, as it is the first time we’ve won this award, and it marks a shift in the public perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS. No small contest, the Open Source CMS Awards received over 12,000 nominations and more than 23,000 votes across five categories.
As Hiro Nakamura said when he first bent time and space to land in Times Square: “Yatta!”
In addition to winning in the Overall Best Open Source CMS category, WordPress was named first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. This is significant because we weren’t even in the top 5 last year, and now we’re #2, ahead of Joomla! As is stated on the Award site, “WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.”
Every day thousands of new people are embracing WordPress to power not just their blogs but entire sites and communities without compromising on usability or scalability (as would be the case with a legacy CMS). Every member of the WordPress community, from core developer to beginning user, should be proud to be part of this momentum: congratulations to us all!
WordCamp NYC was last weekend, and it was crazy awesome to have so many WordPress users and developers together in one place (final numbers to come, but looks like over 700). One of my favorite moments was right at the end, when someone suggested getting a picture of the core contributors (I’d asked them all to stand so people could applaud them when we were doing the closing remarks). Some of them were camera shy and kept out of the happysnap, but here’s a handful of the people who make WordPress what it is.
From left: Matt Martz (sivel), Jeremy Clarke, Shane Froebel (^BuGs^), Jane Wells, Matt Mullenweg, Mark Jaquith, Beau Lebens, Andy Peatling, John James Jacoby (jjj).
Photo by Chris Cochran.
The new system programming language from the legendary Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer, currently named "Go", has been added to the
Free Compilers and Interpreters for Miscellaneous Programming Languages
page. Unlike the other commonly used system languages today, this one has built-in support for concurrent programming, a must with today's
multi-core processors, and communication between concurrent processes. It is designed to be lean and mean, and have very fast compile
and link cycles. Lovers of C and other lean systems programming languages should really take a look at it.
For those who like to store their passwords, telephone numbers, serial numbers, etc, in a text file, the newest entry in the
Free Secure Password Managers and Password Savers
page lets you do so in a portable yet secure way. Your passwords are encrypted, and the entire file can be placed anywhere (a USB flash drive,
your main hard disk, a floppy disk, whatever). No installation is needed and the whole program is extremely small. And free.
2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges. If you have untrusted authors on your blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.
The first problem is an XSS vulnerability in Press This discovered by Benjamin Flesch. The second problem, discovered by Dawid Golunski, is an issue with sanitizing uploaded file names that can be exploited in certain Apache configurations. Thanks to Benjamin and Dawid for finding and reporting these.
Get WordPress 2.8.6.
Install a web-based file manager on your website so that you can manage the files on your site simply by using a web browser. These
PHP web-based file managers let you do things like
upload/download files, create directories, rename, delete, move, copy files, change file permissions, etc. Some of them
even let you do things that you can't do with a normal FTP
client, like extract files from archives (eg zip files, tar files) directly on your web server.
Just in case anyone forgot, the first of the November bug hunts for version 2.9 is now in progress, and will last another day. If you’ve got a dev environment set up, please consider pitching in to run some tests and help get us closer to the 2.9 milestone release.
Exciting news: Unreal Engine 3, the game engine used by lots of games, has now been added to the Free Game Engines, Game Programming Libraries and Source Code page.
Both the engine and its associated tools are available in the free development kit, although you can use them only for non-commercial and educational purposes. Now you can take advantage of the game engine used by professional game developers to create your own
games, complete with a realistic game environment, artificial intelligence (AI) for the computer controlled characters, 3D location-based sound effects, and so on.
It's all very exciting. And I almost fell off my chair when I found out it's
available. If you've not heard of the Unreal Engine, chances are that you don't play many FPS (first person shooter) games.