I’m still not quite sure how I stumbled across this site, but it had a great review of Lord of the Rings that I thought I would share with you all. Enjoy!

Lord of the Rings Impressions

I read an interesting article just now over at LinuxWorld.com. It’s late, so I won’t comment on it much, but it addressed a lot of current issues in the Open Source universe. These are issues that I’m somewhat concerned with now that I regularly use Mozilla Firebird and OpenOffice.org.

Here’s the article: “Open Source ‘State of the Union’“

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Designs for the new “Freedom Tower”, to be built on Ground Zero, were unveiled on Friday. It’s got elements reminiscent of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, and will be exactly 1,776 feet tall to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A fairly large section of the building is simply a wire frame that has several wind turbines built in. The turbines will provide 20-40% of the building’s electricity.

Read about it:

# Freedom Tower in NYC will be world’s tallest — well, sort of.
# Architects Unveil Revised Freedom Tower Design.
# Revised WTC Freedom Tower Design Unveiled.

I moved all my stuff down to the new office today. I’ve been doing a lot of manual labor lately putting together cubicles and hauling heavy desks and computer equipment around. The new office is a bit shabbier than the old (try to imagine green carpet and cubicles with white hardware and pink fabric), but it’s far more spacious. My new cubicle has four walls that I can’t see over when I’m sitting down. I consider that a definite step up from two waist high walls and open space behind me.

The new office is at about 21st South and Redwood Rd., so it’s more convenient on days when I have both work and school. However, it’s actually farther away from my house, which makes it less convenient on days when I don’t have school (e.g. all of next semester). You win some, you lose some.

MozillaZine announced today that a branch has been cut for version 0.8 of Mozilla Firebird. They use a lot of tree terminology to describe the source code for Mozilla, so let me break it down as best I understand it.

They call the main pile of source code the trunk, but it is rarely stable as is. You can download nightly builds of the trunk, but don’t expect them to work very well. Whenever they want to release a stable version, they take a snapshot of all of the most recent trunk files and create a new branch. The trunk continues to grow, but the newest files are not added to the branch unless they are deemed critical. That way, the branch can be stabilized and made available for use.

Basically, what this boils down to is that we can expect the release of 0.8 in a couple of weeks — maybe even before Christmas. 😀

In other Mozilla news, Linux Insider just published an article about XUL. XUL is the technology (really just a set of specific XML tags) that simplifies the GUI system in all of the Mozilla platform products.