Michael Henley

This is based heavily on Daniel Sirz’s useful piece for using Analytics with MT which can be found here. I found that it was missing one or two little bits which had me scratching my head for a while and so have rewritten it for the most current version of MT. This will include the Analytics code into the header template, so that it is included in every page of the blog.

Ensure that you are managing the blog, and not the global MT install. From the Dashboard, navigate to the Templates section:

Scroll down to the Template Modules section, and select Create Template Module:

Copy your Analytics tracking code from their website, and then create a new module called ‘Google Analytics’:

Save your changes, and then navigate back to the templates by clicking ‘List all templates’

Click the HTML Head Template to edit it:

Click the line below the last one currently present, and enter:

<$mt:Include module="Google Analytics"$>

Once you save, you should see this:

Head back to the main screen by again clicking ‘List all templates’. The final step is to rebuild your blog to include the new code. To do this, click the ‘Publish Blog’ button in the cross bar:

Tell it to Publish all files, and then wait while it rebuilds. When it is done you will see a box telling you that it is complete and how long it has taken. If you now go to any page on your blog and check its source, you will see that the analytics code is being included in the header and so will report back the stats.

This guide continues from a previous post which can be found here, which details the steps required to download, arrange, and set the permissions required to install MovableType onto a NFS-hosted site. The same disclaimers as posted there apply to this post.

In a web browser navigate to http://domainname/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi , where domainname is the domain name of your blog.

Here you will be presented with a box where you will configure the static path of the MT installation:

As with the page URL, replace domainname with the domain name of your blog, then click ‘Begin’.

If everything is as it should be you should see the following screen:

Continue to the Database config page.

Here, select MySQL Database:

Once you have selected the Database type, the window will expand to give you more options. At this point we must set a few things up on the NearlyFreeSpeech end. Don’t navigate away from the MT set up page, but in a new tab log into your NFS member area, and then click the ‘mysql’ tab. If you already have a MySQL process set up then we can just use that. If you do not, then click ‘Create a new MySQL Process’ and follow the on screen instructions.

Once created, click ‘open phpMyAdmin’ and log in with the details emailed to you by NFS when you created the process.

I like to create a new user for each database I create. This helps to keep it more secure. From the main page, click the Priviledges tab:

Then click ‘Create a New User’, and you will be presented with the new user window:

I am going to give my MT installation the username ‘moveabletype’ and have generated a secure password for it. Take note of the username and password you create as you will need to enter these into MovableType later. Select the ‘Create Database with same name’ radio button below the user credentials, and then click ‘Go’ at the bottom right. The page should refresh showing you a colourful box at the top informing you that the new user has been created. If you were to go into the databases tab of  phpMyAdmin you should also see that a new database has been created called, in my case, ‘moveabletype’. You can now log out of phpMyAdmin and head back to the MovableType installation page.

Once you clicked MySQL Database some new options will have appeared. You must fill them in as follows:

For Database Server, you must enter the process name you created at NFS. If you did not take note of this, it can be found on your NFS mysql page, and is listed as DSN. Fill in the other fields with the info you entered in phpMyAdmin when you created the new user and database. The click ‘Test Connection’. If everything goes as planned you should see the following window:

After clicking Continue, you are presented with the Mail configuration page. At this time I have not figured out how to make this work with Google Apps where I host my email on michaelhenley.co.uk, and so have chosen to skip this step simply by clicking continue. My issue is that Google Apps requires me to authenticate before they will pass on email, but the MT installation does not present me with a way to enter user details. I will update with a plugin later if I find one to make it work.

Simply clicking Continue allows you to skip this step.

[Update]: Thanks to commenter Kevin Doyon for informing me on how to make this work. Select the option to send email via sendmail, and set the path to

/usr/bin/sendmail

The test email will now send correctly even from a GoogleApps Address. If, like me, you had already skipped over this step then follow the instructions here to configure sendmail from outside the wizard.

If you have done everything correctly your MovableType installation should now be set up and you will be presented with the following window:

Once you click Continue you must set up a user for yourself:

Click Continue, and then enter your blog title, and change the paths so they point to the ‘blog’ directory:

Once you click ‘Finish install’ you will see the system initialise the database, and then you will see the Installation Complete! Screen:

Congratulations! You have now successfully installed MovableType onto your NFS-hosted site. I hope these two guides have been useful.

A few credits:

I have put this guide together based on information found at the following sites:

1. http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2007/01/28/writing-files-in-php/
2. http://wiki.movabletype.org/Main_Page
3. http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/installation/quick-start.html

I host this blog and the rest of the michaelhenley.co.uk domain on NearlyFreeSpeech and have yet to have a problem with them. However, while in California @alexmuller and @zethraeus were trying to set up the back end for MiscellanousGeekery, the tech blog which they are running, and at first decided to try to use MovableType instead of WordPress. After they spent a day getting nowhere at it they decided to go with WordPress instead and that was that. I had attempted to offer a helping hand while there, but being completely unfamiliar with MovableType and no sort of expert at configuring these things anyway I was about as much use as a chocolate teapot. This afternoon however, resolving not to be beaten by a piece of CMS Software, I decided to have a bash at it myself and see if I could make it work. After a few hours poking, proding, shouting and screaming, I finally managed to make it work.

Below is a step-by-step guide to how I made it install and run. I must preface this with saying that I am no sort of expert, nor do I claim to be. This is simply how it has worked for me and how it will hopefully work for you. Some things to note:

1. I use a Mac and as such my main tools for interfacing with NFS are terminal SSH and Transmit. I will keep Transmit to a minimum to try to make this as universal as possible.
2. The only configuring I will do is to install the blog.
3. I found things a lot harder to approach than WordPress. While this is not surprising as WordPress is a little more dumbed down, this guide is the product of much Googling and I owe pretty much all of this to various guides, manuals, wikis and blogs. I will try to give credit where I can
4. I am trying to make this as comprehensive as possible. Skip over any explanation you don’t need.
5. Only enter commands in black. I am including the prompt in grey for clarity. The idea is that before you hit return to execute the command you should see exactly what is written on each line of the guide.
6. This shouldn’t break anything, but if it does, please don’t sue me You are undertaking this at your own risk.

In your NearlyFreeSpeech control panel, create the site where you are going to install MovableType, and take note of the credentials you will require to connect to this site over SSH. If you are simply adding to an existing site then ignore this step.

Head over to movabletype.org and copy the URL to the latest distribution of MT (4.31 at time of writing). Open up the terminal and SSH into your site, and enter your NFS password when prompted:

ssh nfsusername_sitename@ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net

You should then be presented with a prompt similar to this:

[sitename /home/public]$

From here you can download MT directly to the site using wget. Replace the URL with that obtained from the MT website for the latest release:

[sitename /home/public]$ wget http://www.movabletype.org/downloads/stable/MTOS-4.31-en.zip

You can follow the progress of the download on screen, and after a short while it will have downloaded. Next unzip it:

[sitename /home/public]$ unzip MTOS-4.31-en.zip

Once this is completed, if you enter the ls command at the prompt you should see that the public folder contains one file and one folder. The file is MTOS-4.31.en.zip, and the folder is simply MTOS-4.31-en. The folder contains the unzipped contents of file downloaded from MovableType.

Create a folder in public called cgi-bin, and then a folder called mt inside of it:

[sitename /home/public]$ mkdir cgi-bin

[sitename /home/public]$ cd cgi-bin

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ mkdir mt

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ cd ..

The contents of the MT download have to be split between the cgi-bin/mt folder and the public folder. At the prompt enter the following:

[sitename /home/public]$ cd MTOS-4.31-en

[sitename /home/public/MTOS-4.31-en]$ cp -rf mt-static ../

[sitename /home/public/MTOS-4.31-en]$ rm -r mt-static

[sitename /home/public/MTOS-4.31-en]$ cd ..

[sitename /home/public]$ cp -rf MTOS-4.31-en/* cgi-bin/mt

[sitename /home/public]$ rm -r MTO*

To summarise, these commands have copied the mt-static folder into the public directory of this site, and have copied the rest of the contents into the mt directory we created inside of cgi-bin. The final command is simply housekeeping to remove the downloaded zip file and the folder to which its contents were extracted.

One of the differences between MT and WordPress is that it requires the server to have the ability to write to certain folders. NearlyFreeSpeech limits how this can happen and so the permissions for the folders and files to be written must show the group as ‘web’ and allow the group to write. It also requires the blog to have its own subdirectory within the domain. I am going to assume that this directory will be ‘blog’, but if it is not then simply substitute ‘blog’ for your chosen name in any commands. Finally the world must also be able to execute files within cgi-bin/mt.

[sitename /home/public]$ mkdir blog

[sitename /home/public]$ chmod -R 775 blog

[sitename /home/public]$ chgrp -R web blog

[sitename /home/public]$ cd mt-static

[sitename /home/public/mt-static]$ chmod -R 775 support

[sitename /home/public/mt-static]$ chgrp -R web support

[sitename /home/public/mt-static]$ cd ..

[sitename /home/public]$ cd cgi-bin

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ chmod -R 775 mt

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ chgrp -R web mt

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ cd ..

At this point we should have completed pretty much everything which needs to be done in the terminal and via SSH. To disconnect from the server simply enter

[sitename /home/public]$ exit

This completes part 1. In the next part I will walk through how to configure your MovableType installation and set up MySQL database which it will use through phpMyAdmin. This can be found here.

I am at home this evening, and so I decided to update both my parents iPhones to version 3 firmware. My mum has the 3G and my dad has the original EDGE iPhone. While using my mum’s iPhone after it’s set up, I noticed something which they had commented on since she got the new iPhone – it isn’t very fast. I had never heard that the iPhone 3G was particularly slow but I really did notice how sluggish it seemed. With that in mind, and the fact that anecdotally my iPod touch 1st Gen felt faster, I did a side by side comparison using the DSLReports Mobile Speed Test over the home wifi. With the proviso that our home internet connection is appallingly slow, I found some interesting results:

iPhone Download Speed

iPod Download Speed

I was pretty surprised by these results. I am not sure why this iPhone 3G is so sluggish but it is much slower than the 1st Gen iPod touch.

I am sat in Caffè Nero on the High St in Oxford. Having paid in a cheque and been fitted for a ball suit I have popped in for a spot of brunch. While eating my meatball and mozzarella panini and drinking my latté I am keeping up to date with the news on my iPod touch. The guy at the next table is from college and is doing much the same but he is reading the dead tree Times. Over the past few days I have been fairly heavily revising for my prelim exams in a week and a half’s time and so I have been spending large portions of time in the Radliffe Science library. V easy place to work with the advantage of being undergroud and so there is no mobile reception. I periodically check Twitter on my iPod using their Wifi or access the online book database to find the Dewey reference of a text book to supplement my notes. It works perfectly.

Were I carrying around my laptop I would probably be crippled by the weight by now, but I can’t justify buying a netbook yet because my laptop is (kinda) portable and does more than I need despite being 2 years old. Looking at the new Asus Seashell I find myself very tempted but I keep thinking ‘it would be nice if it ran OS X’ (though I’m not sure how much that would change). This isn’t fanboyism, but more that I have a routine established there. I know how to make drive imaging work perfectly and jungledisk backs up my homefolder hourly to S3. Despite how beautiful Windows 7 is, and it really is. You know it’s good when @alexmuller with all his MS hating bile says it is the best netbook OS.

So what am I trying to say in all this. Something, and nothing. Partly I just really wanted to write something that wasn’t related to Biochemistry or Organic chemistry, but I also realized just how little I need something netbook- or even tablet-esque. The iPod is doing everything. It isn’t powerful enough and the frequentish keyboard hangs are getting a bit frustrating but if this had more power and a much bigger battery of would be the perfect computer in my pocket. If I am spending the day writing an essay then I will bring out the MacBook Pro if for no other reason than staring at this for prolonged amounts of time strains my eyes and 15″ screen is easier.

Would an OS X tablet/netbook be nice? Hell yes. Would I buy one? Honestly? probably not… I am not sure I am happy with the middle ground at the moment. My MBP may be heavy, but I bought it for some good reasons which still hold true and so if I am using a laptop I want that. A netbook or tablet won’t fit in my pocket for me to pull out, look up a reference, and then slip it away to dash off to the shelves. Make this iPod/ iPhone better or indeed bring out a competitor that has a similar app infrastructure and availability and then maybe we can talk. Until then the money is staying in NatWest, even if the eye candy is tempting.

I know, I know, I am *so* late to the game on this one, the game has in fact finished and the stadium is in darkness.. but despite that, I have decided to post a little something about Nike+ and an iPod. As I mentioned yesterday, my big gripe with this system is that Apple have decided to totally skip out the iPod touch 1st gen from supporting it. It frustrates me that I have to have and manage two iPods. As @hotdogsladies would say, totally a first world problem, but still a bit annoying.

This term I decided to try out the whole ‘being a bit healthy’ thing, and it isn’t too bad, but exercise truly is the most stultifyingly boring portion of my life. It is right up there with Statistics lectures. Yes. *That* boring. Therefore any little bit of shiny technology to distract me from this might just do the trick. What’s more, I have also learned something from looking at the past few days of records:

Screencapture of Nike+ site for last run

The info is uploaded the the website, and from there you can track progress over the past few days, weeks, months or years. Turns out that I can keep up a decent pace for ~1mile, but then start to drop and fluctuate my pace wildly. Something to work on perhaps.

Is the Nike+ a neccessity? Nope. Is it quite nice to have and use? Definitely. If you have a nano or touch 2nd gen then I would recommend spending the £15. You’re out in the rain if you have an iPhone or touch 1st gen though. While I was reading before buying one I found some great apps for the iPhone 3G which use the GPS to achieve a similar thing. Seemed quite useful so maybe I’ll give them a go in October.

Well I think I finally found something I could write about – a general brain dump of the past few months and my useless opinions on them. Nothing spurs me on to do something useless better than the impending threat of collections in just over a week, and pretty much nothing done in preparation so far.

I started at Oxford this October as many of you know, and I have to say that the term, although only eight weeks long, has been incredibly intense. I was of course under no illusions that Oxford would be easy, but a essay being set during Fresher’s week set the tone for how the rest of the term was going to go. That being said, and while I do find myself working to the exclusion of almost everything else (except Spooks of course. iPlayer saves me again), I have really enjoyed the experience. As I am sure everyone says wherever they are in the world, be it Oxford or Bangor Tech, the people are great and the environment is fun. I never got the ‘Oh My God I am at Oxford’ revelation moment I expected, but I did find myself quietly grinning to myself at times. Although I have signed myself up for another four years of intense work and a life going at a pace that is constantly a little faster than I would like I am happy with it – experience tells me I will never pick the ‘easy’ path for myself, and so if I am going to be killing myself for these years I might as well be doing it in somewhere like Magdalen and Oxford.

During these few months the world has again changed. We saw Obama elected. Despite my cynicism around the elections about the timing of his family tragedies, I am very excited about the prospect of having someone who can string a coherent sentence together in the office of ‘the leader of the free world’ (said in suitably appaling American accent and mocking tone..). That title really does annoy me – it is self-appointed and arrogant. If the Americans were leading by any sort of example then maybe it would be justified, and maybe Obama will justify it, but time will tell. There are a few things which scare me about the US in general. The expansion of the borders to include everywhere within 100 miles of a border, thus allowing illegal stop and search in a large swathe of the US – the so called ‘constitution-free zone‘. The bringing home of marines to help operate at DUI checkpoints in California and elsewhere. Then there is Obama’s proposed citizen militia – many have drawn parrallels to Brown/Black shirts, and the dogs in animal farm. I just think of the finger-men from V for Vendetta. Time and time again it has been shown that if you give a man a badge, they assume authority and get drunk on it. You only have to look at the security people in airports who bark at you as God in their own domain to know that what little authority people think they have will make them feel superior and in the right.

No blog post of mine would be complete without the compulsory tech-related comments. The final Apple appearance at the Macworld show is this year, and the keynote tonight will be given by Phil Schiller. I am actually quite excited as I hope he won’t present it with the same smugness that Steve always did. Don’t get me wrong, the man is justified as being heralded as turning around Apple and making it what it is (I write this of course from my MacBook Pro), but the smugness and arrogance of the presentations sometimes made me feel a bit sick to my stomach at times. The question really is whether this heralds the end of Macworld as an event. Sad as it is, I feel that it does. I know that for me and some other Mac-centric friends Macworld is pretty much only about the keynote. We will follow it on twitter or engadget, and then forget about the other two or three days. I would love to see a show of hands in the Moscone theatre of who would have come to Macworld if there were no Apple keynote. My money would be on very few hands being raised.

As I write this, the final thing which springs to mind, mainly because it is a ‘breaking’ story, is that twitter was hacked. I wonder if it is coincidence that this has happened as the publicity of twitter has spiked recently. I saw a Daily Mail story lamenting how the celebrities share the minutiae of their days via tweets, and a few weeks back they were whining about Jonathan Ross having the gall to enjoy his suspension and to tell people about it. They had the stock indignant Tory MP saying that if he was enjoying himself so much then maybe it should be made permanent, yada yada, but the point is that twitter is being noticed. Barack Obama used it during his campaign, although since it has gone almost dead since the election, I reckon people’s hopes of tweets from the Oval Office along the lines of ‘Off to meet Vladimir. Oh Joy! *sarcasm*’ will not be happening. As twitter becomes more and more popular, not only will it be plagued with even more scaling issues like those we have become so used to with unacceptable downtime etc, but just like as the Mac platform gains Windows ground, they will become a bigger, juicier target for people wanting to have a bit of a laugh and gain some kudos with their friends. The recent twitter hack was achieved by gaining access to the twitter admin tools, as confirmed by @netik in a video interview with Leo Laporte. While I am very encouraged by their transparency on the issue, it is a pretty serious breach for something which is becoming so popular, used by many ‘big names’ as a platform.

Hopefully this toe-dipping back into blogging will spark me to write more stuff, but in the mean time, I hope all had a good Xmas and New Years, and that 2009 isn’t as much of a blackhole as it is looking like is it going to be.

Well iPhone day has come and gone in the UK and Germany. Here it launched at 6:02 (why, oh why, did they make that joke?!) on Friday 9th, and seems to have been quite well accepted. I have had a fair bit of personal experience with the whole process thanks to both of my parents getting one this weekend. Activation is relatively painless, although having to wait a few hours for O2 to get their act together on this before you can really use the device and learn its intricacies was rather annoying.

As with most Apple products I have experienced, the experience as a user is lovely. The interface is revolutionary, and I don’t foresee a resurgence of buttons after this. Even the doubters are coming around to some extent once they use it. It is such a natural way to interface with your device, and comes into its own when something like a mouse or other cursor-based input device is not available. Of course this is not the first touch device on the market, and it won’t be the last, but combined with the hype that Apple products seem to generate purely by existing, and the fact that everyone who seems to use it can get to grips with it very quickly, means that I expect this will be one of the most famous, for a while at least. Indeed, my own mother, who by her own admission does not like technology, has come to, at the very least, not loathe this device. The big numbers of keypad dialling seem to be a big hit, and the simplicity of the SMS features have gone down well too. A QWERTY keyboard makes a world of difference it seems, as does auto-correcting typos.

Settings is relatively intuitive, although I am not sure why Bluetooth is in ‘General’. Took me a few minutes to find to pair the respective headsets to the devices. Speaking of which, I really like how the iPhone deals with headsets. When a call is made, it gives access to an ‘audio source’ list, from which the desired device can be chosen. This is especially useful when it is used to connect via bluetooth to a car hands-free, where some conversations need to become private quickly, and can be transferred seamlessly to the phones speaker and back again as need be. Again this is not a new feature, but like so many things, it is made easy to achieve, and so might as well be!

I am not going to do a feature by feature review, because these already exist all over the net in a much more polished form than I could accomplish. Suffice it to say that for most users this seems to be a very good choice of phone provided you don’t mind O2, and don’t mind being seen with this device. That said, for someone like myself, I still think my reasons for not wanting one are valid – 8GB is too little storage, and EDGE is old tech and is in fact a step backward for Europe. Like the loss of Concorde, and so the effective cessation of commercial supersonic flight, this kind of backtracking is pretty unacceptable. If and when there is a 3G/HSDPA iPhone with more storage, then I might consider getting one. Until then it is a toss-up between a Blackberry and a Nokia N-series. Suggestions?

Recently a lot of what I have been hearing about, reading about, and discussing, has been based on peer-to-peer and/or ‘copyright infringement’. First we saw tv-links.co.uk shut down and its founder arrested. He called it a hobby, and claimed he did not think he was doing anything illegal, and while this may well be true, The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) claims that it allowed users to access “any one of a large number of films and television programmes directly via the website. This is illegal under UK copyright law”. I look forward to FACT raiding Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Ask.com, etc and taking them down, considering they act in much the same capacity depending on the search criteria. It looks like a lot of sabre-rattling, and FACT having to act once told to by the US studios. Whether they would have acted independently we will never know.

Soon after this we saw OiNK, the hugely popular invite-only BitTorrent search engine and tracker, taken down and the owner/operator arrested by UK Police. Again it is a grey area, in my opinion, as to whether these people do anything wrong when not hosting any actual content. What I have found more amusing, and yet worrying, is the massive amount of misinformation that seems to have gone out with this story. Many of the quotes, from IFPI, BPI and Cleveland Police, imply that OiNK was a subscription service which users had to pay for, or that it was run for profit, both of which are untrue. The worrying lack of proper research into this, and the then misrepresentation, means that to the lay-person, the site and the community around it look much worse. Anyone who is not tech savvy, and even some of those who are, do not know how these things work, or what they are, and so when an organisation like the police is quoted as saying that the service was ‘lucrative’, this is taken as the truth. As far as we can tell, all donations to OiNK were used for the upkeep of the site, and key members of the community have stated that it was not run for profit. Who to believe? Both sides have an agenda here, and so it is your call. As a side-note, I called it a community for a reason. While the site has been taken down, the community has reformed in several places online, and I doubt that they will be kept back for very long. Another site, formed from the same users and philosophies, will launch before long and they will simply upload their content from OiNK to it. However, CEO of the IFPI, Jeremy Banks, is quoted as saying that sites like OiNK are “not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure.” At least I will now have no qualms lending a friend a CD for pleasure! The possible backdoors a statement like this opens for a file-sharing community could too be interesting.

With all this in the press, and the obvious political slants to it, it was inevitable that ministers and officials would wade in, under pressure from the record industry. One such minister, Lord Triesman, the parliamentary Under Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, is quoted as saying that Labour would legislate if ISPs did not clamp down on file sharers. The record industry is pushing for such users to be automatically disconnected from the net, which seems like a bold move for the under secretary for innovation to be backing, especially considering the main demographic of file-sharers is those of University age, who are also the greatest hope for future innovation! Another example of the government sending mixed messages. While they make good points about the importance of availability of, access to, and investment in the Internet, they are trying to appease the industry, mainly because of the tax revenue it brings them, and in doing so alienates the users and contradict themselves. While it is understandable that record companies want to look after their profit margins, they do not seem to be able to push a policy which doesn’t cast them in a terrible light and make them even more hated. Along with artists dropping their labels left, right and centre, this would suggest that the industry, in its current form at least, is on its last legs.

Ultimately laws follow what is common practice. Actions are not currently in line with the legal situation, and this leads to these kinds of conflicts. Eventually of course the laws will change to reflect how we, the people, do things, but until then those with a vested interest in keeping it the way it was in the good old days will continue to use them to attack the easiest targets and make examples of them.

WOW. This week I was in Wales for a Field Trip for the first part, and then have been ‘blobbing’ since then – doing and achieving very little, but enjoying it. Just thought back on the events in Tech of the past week. We have seen TV Links being shut down, with the 26 year old owner arrested for the technological equivalent of ‘aiding and abetting’ piracy and copyright infringement. A sad day I think all will agree, and the implications of this decision may be more far reaching than we would like to think. It was said that would, for example, I also be guilty of this if I linked to TV Links, just as they linked to the sites which hosted the content? We will see but I hope this is overturned.

On a lighter note, we saw The Pirate Bay getting hold of IFPI.com, the domain similar to that of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI.org), and establishing the International Federation of Pirates Interests. According to El Reg, they claim that they were given the domain and so are using it as they see fit. Never ones to miss an opportunity to ‘stick it’ to the lobbyists for the record industry et al. TPB are enjoying themselves.

We also saw Steve Jobs announce the SDK of iPhone and iPod touch (did somebody say U-turn?). Suddenly Apple realises that 3rd party apps won’t destabilise the platform after all, provided they sign off on every little bit of code that is (and take a cut from it?). Russell Beattie has put together a fantastic dissection of this official note from Steve on his blog, and it really cuts out the rubbish and spells out what we cynics see when we read the typical marketing bullshitese!

Ubuntu ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ 7.10 was released for download, and looks good. I am yet to download this release, but used Tribe 5 in VMWare Fusion on the MBP, and it seems good. I traditionally have used Ubuntu to breathe life into old hardware, such as my old Toshiba Satellite 2450-101 Laptop, which (provided you prop the screen open) works well enough. The Windows installer even seems to tax it now, but Ubuntu usually flies along. I look forward to playing with ‘Gutsy’, and eagerly await the name of the next Ubuntu incarnation (Crappy Cow?…)