Xubuntu 12.04 LTS and Xfce 4.10 releases have missed each other by a whisker. But you can easily get the the newer Xfce using this ppa. Beware that Xfce 4.10 bugs will not be considered in the Xubuntu 12.04 support scope. But knowing Xfce, I don’t think it will be a big problem.

A good side-effect of this is also that we can then defer the choice of technology for development of the Web site till we are clear about the idea.

For discussing Web sites, I usually choose WordPress. WordPress has gone beyond blogging, it can be used as a CMS for different types of Web sites. Some advantages are:

• It is open source and easily available. As a developer, availability of the source code is a big benefit.
• WordPress is extremely easy to install, even on inexpensive shared hosts.
• WordPress Pages and Posts are basic content types, but they can be quickly hacked, along with categories, to represent different content types.
• With its templates it is very easy to generalize or specialize different contexts. You can literally build an entire Web site with just one theme file.
• It already supports authentication. Using the inbuilt roles and capabilities, it becomes very easy to test change of behaviour based on authentication.
• Permalinks, that is SEF URLs, can be quickly configured.
• The themes use standard techologies. You can choose to create the markup and CSS such that they can be reused with other CMSs or frameworks. This saves a lot of time and effort. This also makes it very effective to share ideas with visual designers, since they can easily use their tools – minimal PHP, HTML, CSS and JS to work on the theme.
• Quick availability of functionalities through its plugins.

But the killer feature is WordPress is very easy to use, as a developer or a user.. You can see the ease of use as a basic feature across all its advantages. This is the biggest ability you need in your prototyping tool – no time wasted in setting it up for our use.

The added benefit is that you gain a good lead if you continue to use WordPress even for development for a lot of Web sites.

I will also mention my other favourite tool, Django, which can be quickly used to build prototypes. But WordPress wins in the department of availability of inexpensive hosting and ease of deployment.

The source code never lies.

Reading source code is not easy. But you can find out what is wrong with your software or the underlying stack to solve the problem and control the environment, if you have the source code. If you are thinking of building something, try to choose open source stack as much as possible, and follow this advice. You will see the advantage.

This means that I can run the browser in one column. In the other column I can run my editor, my debug window and log file in stacked mode. Or I can have two browser windows tiled in the browser column, and the terminals stacked in the other. I am sure this can be done in xmonad, but i3 makes it easy to achieve this.

There are some differences, but they can be ironed out with the configuration at our finger tips. I am going to give i3 an honest try, without trying to make it behave like xmonad, and see if it works for me better than xmonad.

I am also keeping tabs on qtile because it uses by favourite programming language.

Both Gnome Shell and Unity want to maximize the working area by reducing the homepage clutter (no pun intended) by:

• removing desktop launchers, replacing them with a launcher overlay
• supporting maximized applications better, through default maximized modes, removal of minimize button and global menus
• separating the task management from the desktop by delegating it to the dock/launcher
• being minimalistic on the desktop

I think they ought to do one more thing to really achieve their aim – become tiling window managers. They do support tiling windows, but not the automatic management of window layouts like the organic tiling window managers. This will make it easy for users to manage different windows in different layouts, handle not minimizing windows much better and make it easy to maximize or rearrange the windows depending on what the applications are. And this will work great on large as well as small screens.

What do you think?

OGPL is a joint product from India and United States to promote transparency and greater citizen engagement by making more government data, documents, tools and processes publicly available. OGPL will be available, as an open source platform. By making this available in useful machine-readable formats it allows developers, analysts, media & academia to develop new applications and insights that will help give citizens more information for better decisions.

In using an open source method of development, the OGPL community will provide future technology enhancements, open government solutions, and community-based technical support. OGPL has become an example of a new era of diplomatic collaborations that benefit the global community that promote government transparency, citizen-focused applications, and enrich humanity

So, OGPL is:

• a platform to access information programmatically
• open source so that others can contribute, in terms of solutions
• community-supported

There is some more information in features:

OGPL product has following 4 (four) main components:

• OGPL Web site – Module for Governments and their agencies to publish datasets, documents, services, tools and applications collected by them for public use.
• Data Management System (DMS) – Module for user management of various agencies who can upload datasets which will be available on the front end website.
• Content Management System (CMS) – Module for managing and updating various functionalities of the OGPL frontend.
• Visitor Relationship Management (VRM) – Module for collating and disseminating viewer feedback on various datasets.

As an Indian open source enthusiast and advocate I can start celebrating. But the current information severly lacks details. If this was published yesterday, I would have wondered if this was an April fools joke. I hope this really catches. Nothing better than this to liberate information from gatekeepers and middlemen.

I agree about the problem, but not the cause.
Authors try to make their commands do everything under the sun to make them work in a standalone mode and reduce dependency on other programs. This, I think, violates the Unix way of doing one thing and doing it well. If we can stick to the original Unix way, commands can be as reusable as functions using text-and-file interface and standard Unix tools.

I also have a feeling that adding any more semantics will create its own problems. The text-and-file interface is as simple as possible. I can interact with the human user and programs using standard Unix tools. With more semantics, the focus will be more on programmability than the end user.