Oh Yeah? Fork You!: Pidgin, the IM client, forked over — get this — a resizable text entry window.

The developers, for whatever reason, dug in their heels on this one and refused to budge. You can read through some of the commentary on the bug ticket to get an idea, but the general tenor was combatative bordering on hostile. The bug was eventually closed as “won’t fix”.

The community’s response was swift: Oh yeah? Fork you!

Jeff points out the possible outcomes:

The fork dies […] The fork merges […] The original dies […] Both original and fork survive

None of those sound great to me. I hate forks.

Is this the moment desktop Linux proponents have been waiting for all these years?

This story came up in the “On This Day” section in the sidebar this morning, and I got to wondering about it. I had never heard anything else about it, and I thought, “Was that just another stunt press release about the mythical ‘Linux on the Desktop’?”

So, I went looking at Dell’s site, and I’m happy to report, that, sure enough, here are the Dell Ubuntu computers. They have four models — three laptops and one desktop. I went through the configuration process for the high-end XPS laptop, and you can apparently pimp out a Dell Ubuntu machine quite handily.

Nice going, Dell.

And what is this Windows Live Mesh?

It’s a way to synchronize files.

Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.

[…] It’s Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

Whatever happened to Groove, anyway? I used to use it.

Dell’s going to report a Vista sale to Microsoft, but deliver an XP box with Vista upgrade DVD to customers. (That sound you just heard was a million accountants sighing in appreciation.) The program will be available for Latitude, OptiPlex, Precision, Vostro, and XPS systems (some with a minor fee), and Dell says it’ll keep going as long as Microsoft supports the “downgrade” license option, which could be forever. Looks like June 30 just got a lot less scary for XP fans, no?

Adobe on Monday announced that its venerable visual Web site creation tool GoLive has been discontinued. The company has ceased development and sales of GoLive effective Monday, April 28, 2008.

Freedom is an application that disables wireless and ethernet networking on an Apple computer for up to three hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. At the end of your selected offline period, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal.

Freedom enforces freedom; a reboot is the only circumvention of the Freedom time limit you specify. The hassle of rebooting means you’re less likely to cheat, and you’ll be more productive. Not rebooting is why we bought Apple computers in the first place. When first getting used to Freedom, I suggest using the software for short periods of time.

Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners said Thursday it and unnamed Middle Eastern partners will fund The SCO Group with up to $100 million to take over the financially beleaguered Unix company, move it out of bankruptcy protection, complete its controversial and unsuccessful Linux litigation, and take it private.

The Megaphone desktop tool is a Microsoft Windows application distributed by the World Union of Jewish Students and other pro-Israel organizations, […] it delivers real-time alerts about key articles, videos, blogs, and surveys to subscribers so that they can voice their opinions and work together to support Israel on the public opinion front.

It can even auto-vote in a poll.

The Megaphone Desktop Tool gives the user the option of going to a particular site with a poll, and if the user chooses to go to the site, the software then casts a vote automatically, when this is technically feasible. The vote is chosen by the distributors of Megaphone.

Today we’re happy to announce that the Urchin Software from Google beta is now available for download at urchin.com. Urchin Software from Google is a web analytics product similar in scope to Google Analytics, except you install and manage the software on your own servers.

Reading the change logs of these programs is like traveling back in time. Way back. Latest changes in JDarkRoom 8: Undo / Redo. Seriously. Version 8, and they now support undo. No offense, but what the […]

They’re intended to allow you to concentrate more, but Mark calls BS on all that and tells you to just use the view tools and full screen option on your existing text editor.

Opera wants the EC to hold Microsoft’s feet to the fire when it comes to the company’s promises of better standards compliance. The company argues that IE’s “unilateral control” over some standards requires developers to expend significantly more in the way of time and money to get their sites to render correctly in IE.

Opera is now my best friend.

As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose.

Wellington, Fla.-based Devil Mountain Software ran several versions of XP and Vista through a test simulating common desktop computing tasks. It found the original Vista performed 50% to 100% slower than the prevalent XP Service Pack 2, or SP2.

Vista SP1, due out in the first quarter of 2008, barely improved the operating system’s performance.

But XP SP3, scheduled for the first half of 2008, did improve on XP’s earlier performance, running 10% faster than SP2.

Thus, I’m starting a Drupal company whose current working name is ‘Acquia’. Acquia’s software products will include a number of Drupal distributions — for community networks, digital media properties, corporate websites, and others. In addition to providing Drupal distributions, Acquia will build the Drupal-tuned analogue of the RedHat Network, over which we can deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites. An example such service is an automated upgrade/update service, an uptime and performance monitoring / reporting service, a configuration management service, etc.

Bryan at CMSReport puts it well:

Does anyone else see the irony in Drupal’s founder not beginning his first Drupal startup until seven years after releasing Drupal publicly? Think of all the developers, IT leaders, and companies that have prospered over the years from Drupal. In all that time, Dries has been very careful to not benefit more than others in the Drupal community. All in all, I think Dries has shown the highest respect for open source as well as loyalty to the Drupal community.

Implement a site-specific preference service that lets callers get and set arbitrary preferences on a site-specific basis.

I complained about this over two years ago.

Here’s what I’d like to see for upcoming browsers: customized browser settings on a URL-by-URL basis. I think it’s time to admit that different sites sometimes require vastly different browser settings to work optimally.

I’ll be interested to see what settings can be tied to a specific URL.