Author: Leonid Mamchenkov

Fedora 19 alpha is a Go

Fedora 19 alpha version will be released next Tuesday.  I’ve been busy with other things recently, so that was a surprising announcement for me. Is it that time of the year again?  Apparently.  We are still a good three month away from the final release, but it’s still good to hear that there is progress.  Looking over the features for this release, I find these interesting:

  • Bind 10 – completely rewritten from scratch, and bringing both DNS and DHCP in one handy package.
  • Developers Assistant – the description is rather vague, but overall it sounds useful.
  • KScreen – finally I won’t have to reconfigure the second monitor every time I reboot the laptop.
  • MATE Desktop – I loved Gnome 2.  If Gnome 3 and KDE 4 won’t get significantly better by the time of the release, I will probably switch to MATE.
  • Node.js – I wanted to play around with it for a while now, but never got the time to get it on my box.  Maybe now I will.
  • PHP 5.5 – new PHP is better PHP.
  • Replace MySQL with MariaDB – that’s an interesting move. I wonder how much trouble this will create with MySQL still being on the servers.
  • Ruby 2.0 – Similar to Node.js, this just makes it so much easier to try new things.

So, this looks like a busy release.

Reinvent payphones

Via this Habrahabr post (in Russian), I’ve learned about a Reinvent payphones initiative, which I think is pretty cool.  According to the article, the contract for provision of payphone services for the New York City expires in 2014.  So the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has started the initiative to figure out what would be the best use for such a vast infrastructure (around 11,000 booths throughout the city).  Some of the ideas are really cool, for example:

  • Free WiFi hotspot
  • Power socket for recharging mobile devices
  • Weather and air quality censors
  • Location and other information (“you are here”, places around, etc)
  • Ad-supported free services

Here are some of the project suggestions: beacon, NYFi, smart sidewalks.  Also, read more here.