LibreThinking.com: Technology, News, Reviews, Tutorials and more! - Feeds

LibreOffice 3.4.4 released!

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:31:02 +0000

As announced in the LibreOffice blog, the new version of LibreOffice (3.4.4) has been released. It mostly fixes the most important bugs pending on LibreOffice 3.4 (that had many new features).

How to create advanced RSS feeds in Joomla! (1.6) in 7 steps (without add-ons)

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:47:00 +0000

Joomla! comes with RSS syndication integrated, but regardless of this, is kind of confusing to configure it properly. There is lack of documentation and when you try to look for easy ways to do RSS syndication in Joomla! you only find commercial solutions to this basic function. Well, if you have already payed to have RSS in your Joomla! blog maybe you could read this to get angry and know there was a free way to do it, but this article is mainly written to those who don't want to pay for have this vital function in Joomla!.

Gnome Pie application launcher for Ubuntu

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:39:05 +0000

Gnome Pie is a unique application launcher for Ubuntu Linux that uses keyboard hotkeys for displaying application launching menus. It has been inspired from the Opie Radial add-on for World of Warcraft game, and provides a number of skins for displaying shortcuts. The numerous hotkeys display different kind of shortcuts; control media playback, access favorite folders, launch applications and log out, shutdown or restart the computer.

Mozilla is going mobile (B2G)

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:25:52 +0000

Mozilla "Boot to Gecko" (or B2G as it's called) mobile OS project is getting closer to the goal of having this mobile OS early in 2012. As shown in the project roadmap, they have started the tests already.

Can Ubuntu win the mobile OS war?

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:19:04 +0000

Few days ago, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, the founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu will become mobile and he expressed the big efforts that his company and the Ubuntu Community has been doing to accomplish this goal. I would really like that to happen and I'm already dreaming to have my first "U-Phone", but I also have some doubts about this announcement.

Nokia and Microsoft get into the smartphone's war

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:09:56 +0000

This last wednesday were revealed the new Nokia phones to compete in a phone segment that has been losing against companies like Samsung and Apple (and in the case of Microsoft, against Android and iOS). Even when I'm not a Microsoft fan, this new Windows Phones really look nice. Also, Nokia presented their Kinetic Device, which screen can be twisted, for example, to change the songs.

Easy photo editing for non-designers

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:44:23 +0000

Sometimes we want to make a final touch to our pictures but get frustated trying to use a software to do it because we don't know which option should use, so usually we left the photo as it was originally, call a designer friend to retouch the image or we try our best to try learn Photoshop or Gimp.

Well, a canadian usability research team has released AdaptableGimp which lets users to browse the tools depending on what they intend to do.

How to sign in to multiple Gmail accounts at the same time

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:10:07 +0000

For many reasons you could have more than one Gmail account, and even you want to check it frequently both accounts. Shouldn't it be easier if you don't have to sign in and sign out constantly or sign in into multiple browsers, if you could only have a tab with a Gmail account and another tab with another one?

Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) Review: Is it a dream?

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:51:00 +0000

The new Ubuntu has arrived. Under Ubuntu development cycle there is a new version of Ubuntu every 6 months. Last one was in April (Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal) which was a major update due to the change of the default interface, starting to use Unity instead of Gnome.

I have been using almost exclusively Ubuntu for like 5 years, and I currently use the 11.04 version, so I downloaded and installed the 11.10 and made this review trying to make some comparisons between 11.04 and 11.10, and also to highlight the things that makes Ubuntu unique (for those who are thinking to try Ubuntu).

Download!: Java Certified Programmer 6 Study Guide

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:12:02 +0000

In my road to Java certification I made a very quick study guide to have the most important information I needed to accomplish the goal.

It's not well formatted but it's very useful, and you can download it from here.

This guide cover all the areas of the certification, including:

Java types
Description of Java new and some confusing classes.
Responses to many tricky exam questions
Code samples
References to sites where you can find more information.

This guide was made for Sun Certified Java Programmer 6, but surely will work for Oracle Certified Professional Java Programmer as well.

Another great mind, Dennis Ritchie, has left us

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:48:08 +0000

This week has been sad for the technology industry losing two of it greats minds. Yesterday, the Unix and C creator, Dennis Ritchie died. Here is a little abstract of its bio as expressed in Wikipedia.

Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York to Alistair E. Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist and co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits on switching circuit theory. Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center, and in 1968, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer.

Some quotes from Steve Jobs

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 23:26:10 +0000

These are some of the quotes that the talented former Apple founder had left us.

"Innovation is what distinguish leaders from followers."

"Quality is more important than quantity. It's better a homerun than two doubles."

"Some people think that design is an addon, just a decoration. For me in the future there will be nothing more important than design. Design is the soul of all made by the man."

"Design is not only how it looks, but also how it works."

"Most people doesn't know what they want until you show it to them."

"Picasso had a saying: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.' We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas...I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."

Richard Stallman vision of Steve Jobs

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:30:46 +0000

After the sadly death of Steve Jobs, the Open Source guru Richard Stallman published the following eulogy to Jobs on his blog:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die -- not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Firefox 7 is here!

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:18:45 +0000

With the big battle between web browsers Mozilla revised it development cycle, now delivering a new upgrade every 6 weeks. Without notice, has been passed 6 weeks already since Firefox 6.

Microsoft's fake validation of OpenOffice.org

cvielma@librethinking.com (Christian Vielma) — Mon, 02 May 2011 01:17:26 +0000

A recently released OpenOffice.org marketing video from Microsoft tries to highlight prospective issues for companies considering alternatives to Microsoft Office.