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Archives for May 2011

GMail Desktop Notifications in Chrome

Google just released GMail desktop notifications for Chrome browsers. The latest feature will notify GMail users if they have a new email or a chat message. The new feature will alert users even though they’re not looking right at GMail. The latest wrinkle to GMail requires Chrome, and users are logged in to Gmail or to Google in general. This latest feature will not work with any other browser. Google said the notification feature is set to “on” by default, although mine was turned off. To turn it on, just follow these instructions provided by Google:

Chat notifications are enabled by default, but you can disable them in your Gmail settings. To enable or disable email or Chat notifications, follow these steps:

  1. Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner of Gmail, and then select Mail settings.
  2. On the General tab, select the option you’d like in the Desktop Notifications section. You’ll be able to turn Chat notifications on or off, and can also choose to turn email notifications off, receive notifications for all incoming email, or only those Gmail marks ‘important’.
  3. Click Save.

Twitter Set To Launch Twimg.com

Twitter is set to launch its own photo sharing service called twimg.com. The new service will compete with Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Flickr. The announcement is expected to be given Wednesday at the D9 conference at Rancho Palos Verdes, California. This is according to the Guardian. It will be interesting service since most people are already using Twitpic and Yfrog. Will it catch on?

Linux Kernel Big Jump to 3.0.0

If you’ve been a fan of Linux, you probably have seen the miniscule version changes from one Linux kernel to another. As an example, there was a recent version change from 2.6.37.6 to 2.6.38.7. The current stable version of the Linux kernel is version 2.6.39 . So, what’s the reason for the big jump to version 3.0.0?

Well, nothing. It’s just the the Linus Torvalds and his kernel development team decided to jump to 3.0.0 to coincide with the 20 year anniversary of Linux. That is all. There has been big discussions about versioning within the kernel development team. Linus Torvalds finally decided to go with version 3.0.0. Here’s an excerpt from his email.

I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0. It will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which is excuse enough for me, although honestly, the real reason is just that I can no longer comfortably count as high as 40.

The whole renumbering was discussed at last years Kernel Summit, and there was a plan to take it up this year too. But let’s face it – what’s the point of being in charge if you can’t pick the bike shed color without holding a referendum on it? So I’m just going all alpha-male, and just renumbering it. You’ll like it.

Now, my alpha-maleness sadly does not actually extend to all the scripts and Makefile rules, so the kernel is fighting back, and is calling itself 3.0.0-rc1. We’ll have the usual 6-7 weeks to wrestle it into submission, and get scripts etc cleaned up, and the final release should be just “3.0”. The -stable team can use the third number for their versioning.

So what are the big changes?

NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We’ve been doing time-based releases for many years now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one (“20 years”) instead.

Read the rest of Linus Torvalds message here.