I just noticed my blog has turned one year old, hurray! Well I guess it’s time to think about the past year, and try to re-think my intentions and goals of the blog…

Originally the blog was intended to be non-personal, because I wanted to get co-writers to join in. But I decided to keep it personal with the option of spawning new blogs in the future with other people.

I wanted to share the great stuff I find on the net, and after years of hesitating I finally created this blog as a platform for that goal, and as such I have succeded very nice indeed, I love this platform so much that I have almost dropped making my own blogging system, as was the original intention - WordPress basically works like a dream (can be a bitch to setup, when you go to the more advanced areas) and I am generally amazed and crazed about the technologies that the blogging communities has created or actively promoted (Technorati, Flickr, BlogLines, GeoURL, Podcasting (Audio Blogs), FeedBurner, Creative Commons, XML / RDF / RSS, and tons of other stuff!).

In total there are currently 444 posts by me, and 20 comments posted by readers, including my responses (not mentioning the hundreds of comment-spams I recieved while franticly trying to create and configure solid filters), so I’m guessing people aren’t too chatty and debateful while reading this blog, either that or nobody is reading it!! haha
Well, the actual fact is that I mostly post other folks posts, mainly from slashdot.org and other sources I visit for news and info about stuff that matters in any way or form. I will try to write more myself, but sometimes I sacrifice it in order to deliver more important news, since as I said before, my goal is to inform about stuff that happens out there, it has never been my goal to be a reporter, I see it more like a messenger of coolness, or info-filter of boredom and info-overload.

I have learned much in the past year, and I feel prepared to bring my log into another year of glory, and urge you all to contribute with comments, questions and what else you come with. I have planned to make a new WordPress Theme and ofcourse it will be dark purple with sparkling anim-gif stars all-over!!! ( Coz that’s what a real theme is about! ) Or maybe it will be mind-blowingly cool in other ways, wait and see, hopefully I will be friendly enough to publish it in the CodePit.

The existing theme originated from my first edition of this blog running Moveable Type, but I decided to look for a system which was licensed under a true open source, and which was not written in Perl which I have little experience with. Then I found WordPress and hacked my existing look into it, improving on it as I went along. Finally this spring WordPress 1.5 was released which featured a real “Theme System API”, which allows you to easily switch the complete look and feel of a WordPress site.

On the personal side, no radical changes this last year. I got a new job at Valtech in may, so I’m back from the mobile Internet business into the good old Desktop Internet business with big screen systems and mozilla/firefox/safari etc. to play/mess around with, working on some large corporate website portals, that I couldn’t possibly mention here, but it’s Java Enterprise and Web Standards based so I’m basically a happy man on planet earth.

If you actually (omg!) read this far, well congratulations, now post a comment full of ideas and praise!

Ok! Why did I not know about Inkscape before today??! It looks amazing and it’s said that the new version is a major feature update, and although I haven’t tried it out yet, from the screenshots it’s pretty easy to see that this tool is also for the big boys, it works with SVG which makes even more happy, since I was about to begin some SVG experimenting anyways soon, and it’s soo boring to draw complex vector drawings by handcoding, believe you me!!

Here’s the intro text from the Inkscape Website:

Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to
Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG). Some supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, and grouping. In addition, Inkscape supports Creative Commons meta-data, node-editing, layers, complex path operations, text-on-path, and SVG XML editing. It also imports several formats like EPS, Postscript, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Inkscape’s main motivation is to provide the Open Source community with a fully W3C compliant XML, SVG, and CSS2 drawing tool. Additional planned work includes conversion of the codebase from C/Gtk to C++/Gtkmm, emphasizing a lightweight core with powerful features added through an extension mechanism, and the establishment of a friendly, open, community-oriented development process.

* Inkscape.org - Draw Freely

* Slashdot | Inkscape 0.42: The Ultimate Answer

Pretty neat stuff, I haven’t spent much time on portlets, but I’m quite sure this is the first open source portlet runner I have come across, I am looking forward to evaluate this product.

Open source Portlet-compliant Liferay 3.5 has been released, this new version adding hot deployable themes, portlet instancing (portlets appearing more than once on a page), built in support for Sun JSF and MyFaces, friendly URLs, and more.

Liferay is designed to deploy portlets that adhere to the Portlet API (JSR 168). Many portlets are bundled with the portal (Mail, Document Library, Calendar, Message Boards, to name a few). Liferay is appserver and database agnostic, and was originally designed to support ASP’s by having one server/db instance serve multiple independent domains. Liferay integrates with Spring, and has been around for a while and has a number of notable real customer deployments.

Jing Xue also blogged posted his first impressions.

* Liferay open source portal 3.5 released

ZDNet UK is reporting that the next major release of Mozilla Firefox has been delayed and will now be known as Firefox 1.5 rather than 1.1. The upgrade is now set for a September release.

The Firefox Roadmap was updated on Wednesday by lead engineer Ben Goodger. It changed the plans from calling for an increasingly unrealistic 1.1 release this month to a 1.5 release in September. Firefox 1.5 Beta is now set for an August launch.

Read the full story here:
* MozillaZine | Mozilla Firefox 1.1 Delayed, Renamed to 1.5

/. deepexplorer writes “Japan wants to gain the fastest supercomputer spot back. Japan wants to develop a supercomputer that can operate at 10 petaflops, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 73 times faster than the Blue Gene. Current fastest supercomputer is the partially finished Blue Gene is capable of 136.8 teaflops and the target when finished is 360 teraflops.”

* Slashdot | Japan Wants to Build 10 Petaflop Supercomputer

* CNN | Japan to build world’s fastest supercomputer