The future of C++ as seen by Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup

Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup is credited with creating the ever popular C++ programming language. While there are pure object oriented programming languages such as 'smalltalk' for instance, it was C++ which shot the object oriented programming paradigm to popularity.

In this video interview, Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup answers a number of questions such as the following ....

• Do you think you'll ever design a new language from scratch?
• How long after the standard is out do you expect to see a production compiler?
• Is it possible to do garbage collection cleanly and efficiently in C++?
• How soon after you created C++ did you see it start to take over the industry?
• Is there any particular naming convention you subscribe to?
• What's your opinion about the Microsoft implementation of C++?
  

Very interesting questions indeed... which ask for equally interesting answers from Dr Bjarne Stroustrup. Watch the video.

Free Software Sticker Book - free download

Are you looking for that exact sticker to stick on your machine, on your car's windshield or anywhere you fancy, in order to proclaim to the world that you support GNU Free software ? Then look no further because a group of three people have compiled a book featuring hundreds of stickers of various hues and shapes and which is made available for free download as a PDF document.

So all you have to do is to download the book and print out your favorite sticker from the lot. And then you are ready to advertise your personal preferences as far as computing is concerned. For all you know, you might even be able to persuade people close to you to try out the Free software in the process. Here is a screenshot of a subset of the collection of stickers you will find in this very beautifully compiled book.

Fig: A sample of the variety of stickers you will find in this book.

You can download the book of stickers from the following link.

Tip: Download Accelerator for Linux

How do you download files in Linux ? You can use the download manager of Firefox which now supports pausing and resuming downloads. For files of small size, the inbuilt download manager of Firefox will do the job. But what happens when the file you want to download is huge - such as a movie or the latest Linux distribution ISO ? Many times the files I am downloading via the Firefox download manager have gotten corrupted or have hung mid way through the download. And I had to start downloading all over again.

Oxygen wallpaper contest

Oxygen is the team behind the beautiful icon sets you will get to experience in KDE 4.0 when it is released sometime this year. The goal of Oxygen icon set is to create a set of icons for use on the desktop which are beautiful, support usability and accessibility and in a way, better fulfill the needs of the users.

The Oxygen team has announced a contest. Put your creativity to task and create a wallpaper. The wallpaper can be of jpg jpeg bmp gif png svg svgz formats. The theme for the wallpaper you create can be any of 3D art, vectors, photos, and pixmaps and it can be of any standard wallpaper dimension but bigger the better.

Fig: A sample set of Oxygen Icons

Once you have created the wallpaper, upload it to their website. If you are lucky and your wallpaper is selected, it will be included in the wallpapers that will ship as default set in KDE 4. More details here.

Google phone based on Linux in the making ?

After getting tired of all the iPhone hype one saw in diverse media, now the rumor is that Google is planning to roll out its own branded Phone. And one can find sneak peaks at a prototype (See photo below). No details of the specification of the phone are yet available.

The phone is supposed to be an ad-supported phone which means the consumers ie the end users can look for a free lunch by way of heavily subsidised call rates which cost next to nothing (again a rumor). And Wallstreet Journal is reporting that Google has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its cell phone project and is courting U.S. and European mobile operators.

And most obviously the Google phone (for now nicknamed GPhone) will be powered by Linux. Check out this prototype of a GPhone which is floating on the net.

Fig: A prototype of GPhone [Courtesy: VOIP blog]

Poll shows majority favor Vi as their editor of choice

Two weeks back, this blog had run a poll which asked which was your favourite editor. The poll was open for voting roughly for a period of two weeks or 14 days. And nearly 750 people participated in the poll.

Guess what ? Over 50% of the people that is well over 375 people said their favourite editor is Vi or its equivalent such as Vim, GVim and so on. And I find this a pleasant surprise because I am myself an avid Vi user.

Fig: Pie chart representation of usage of the editors

The second place goes to GEdit - the default text editor in Gnome followed closely by Kate and Emacs. One thing worth noting is that perhaps the people who participated in the poll might have a programming or system administration background which could be why Vi editor fared so well over the notepad equivalent editors such as Gedit.

Or it could be that most Linux and Unix users are predominantly hard core techies who do programming or system administration for a living and who have already mastered the fine art of editing using Vi to appreciate its true power.

While GEdit is a far second in the poll having garnered just 13% of the votes, I suspect that it is quite popular with non-techies who use Linux since it is the default editor in Gnome. Many times I myself have reverted to Gedit when I couldn't find GVim on a Linux machine.

Finally, while I listed some of the most widely known editors, I forgot to include an 'Other' option in the poll and so the poll fails to indicate the percentage of Linux/Unix users who favor an editor not in the list.

New features in Amarok music player - Sneak peak, pretty playlist, raw plasma

Amarok is a versatile music player for Linux/Unix platforms. A couple of months back I had reviewed this versatile music player which has a lot more features than just playing music.

The next avatar of Amarok is Amarok2 which is going to see a number of enhancements such as :

• A better integrated play list
• Artists can be associated with more than one genre
• Purchasing from Magnatune now supports using gift card codes as an alternative to credit cards.
• A OpenGL support for album selector - I may add that anything related to OpenGL at present requires you to install the proprietary graphics drivers of Nvidia or ATI depending on the graphics card you use.
• The big central area has just been switched to using Plasma, the new desktop and widget technology in KDE4.
  

Courtesy : Amarok blog.