Being a little behind with things because of my diploma thesis, I just installed KDE 4 with Plasma.

All I can say is that I'm totally stunned - it's great. If you haven't already, give it a try yourself!

cool.

[via MAKE]

Quick link of the day: lolcode.com.

Almost as good as whitespace.

Yet another release of Tag the Bird is available. Version 1.2 should fix the long known problems on Unix systems.

Tag the Bird 1.1 just got approved by Mozilla.

Changelog:

• Tag the Bird is now compatible with Thunderbird 2.0
• Added French locales
• Added support for IMAP accounts - finally! :)

And while waiting for approval of 1.1, I almost finished work on 1.2, which will be fixing the current UNIX related problems! Stay tuned.

For all of you, who don't know Papermint: basically that's Second Life on LSD. And it's from Austria.

Because the Evolver currently features an article about Papermint I decided to give it a try (though I'm still convinced that only very sick people pay any money for a waste of time like that - personal oppinion only, of course).

The application itself seems to be well designed and pleasing for people who like such things (besides performance issues in fullscreen and one crash I experienced, which certainly will be fixed soon). But nothing special on the other hand. Been there, done that.

What really caught my attention was their update strategy. They use Tigris' SVN for that. It's open, it's proven and there's an out-of-the-box Java library available. Quite a smart move, right?

Wrong.

SVN stores 'working base' copies of all versioned files into a hidden .svn directories (which the crappy windows installer of Papermint doesn't even flag as hidden). That's because SVN was meant to be much more than an "update only what has changed"-client for files. It's because a developer want's to be able to make diffs, revert changes, etc. without being connected to the repository server - but that's a different story and it's not needed for Papermint's update strategy.
And that's the point! The Papermint Installer and the Papermint installation directory are almost twice as big as they needed to be. Without any benefit, without any reason except that an improper technology was chosen.
Even though disk space is relatively cheap these days - In my oppinion this is a total no-go criteria for a software tailored for "normal" users.

Actually I only created SMYC, a commenting tool for MySpace, because I wanted to play around a little with windows applications in .NET, but wanted to do something useful at the same time. I asked around what kind of application could be needed and a friend of mine came up with this.
When I was finished Once it worked (you're never finished with such things), I realized that more and more people were interested in SMYC, so I made it available to the public now:

SMYC - Free MySpace Commenter

I wonder how long it's gonna take until MySpace deletes SMYC's Space and/or adds captchas to their forms.

Last weekend I launched the all new version of evolver.at, Austria's first webzine, which had it's 10th birthday last year.

I completely dumped the old PHP based source (a long-held wish of mine) and wrote a new application from scratch (which allowed me to especially focus on and support the workflows being present in a professional editorial environment). Well not from scratch really, for it is the second successfully deployed project that is topped on my new and yet unnamed web framework (which in turn is based on Helma).

Christopher Clay did a great job on HTML, while the design originated from the hands of Ernst Meyer.

Link of the day: a couple examples of how to use Google Code Search to find vulnerabilities and other (funny) software oddities.

[via Bruce Schneier]

My friend the Softwaretailor showed me a project he's currently working on, where he makes use of telerik's r.a.d. controls. All I can say about these is, that you have to check out their code-including online demos yourself. It's just amazing how much you can do with so few lines of code.