Kev's Development Toolbox

August 2, 2006

Will Ubuntu Linux be the downfall of RedHat?

If you haven’t downloaded and played with Ubuntu Linux yet then I urge you to do so, becuase it is very slick. In this article by Tony Mobily on freesoftwaremagazine.com, he descibes Ubuntu as ‘Linux done right’, and from my own experiences with RedHat 7.0 and above, Fedora Core 1 though 4, Suse and now Ubuntu, I have to say that they have the usability really worked out – it is great to use.

Mobily goes a step further to say that he believes Ubuntu may be the downfall of RedHat – RedHat abandoned the desktop to concentrate on the server platform, and in doing so most likely lost a significant part of their user base. Ubuntu has tageted the desktop and got it right, and according to Mobily, SysAdmins previously working with RedHat are already moving to Ubuntu for it’s ease of use on the desktop, and for this reason may drive future decisions of which Linux server also to Ubuntu.

August 2, 2006

x86 days are here – for the next 3 days only

Just spotted this in Slashdot – for the next 3 days only, the calendar date will represent the sequence of x86 CPUs – 2/8/6, 3/8/6, and 4/8/6.

August 2, 2006

Interview with Josh Marinacci of Sun’s SwingLabs – java.sun.com

java.sun.com have an interview with Josh Marinacci of Sun’s SwingLabs – in the interview they cover questions about favorite Swing hacks, the future of desktop Java, and the JavaOne famous ‘Aerith’ demo that blew everyone away.

There has definitely been an increasing interest in desktop client applications using Swing over the past several months, and I expect this is being driven by the growing demand for rich client applications. It’s still considerably easier to build a visually rich, full featured, interactive application with Swing than it is with a browser and technologies like AJAX, and I think this is driving renewed interest in Swing and desktop applications.

August 1, 2006

What websites looked like in 1996…

If you haven’t discovered this site yet, archive.org is a project to archive the majority of website content, and they’ve been busy storing away static copies of website content since 1996. This is a great tool if you’re looking for something that you know you spotted on a site last month (or even last year), but they’ve since updated their site and now its gone. With the Wayback Machine, you can retrieve the old version of a site.

This student has put together a link of some amusing pages from 1996 that illustrate the very best in Web Design from 1996…