The Songbird open-source media player that is built using Firefox technology and XUL Runner is now available in a early beta release.  The Songbird site is pretty overloaded right now, so if you’re interested in checking out this new player, you can find it a couple of mirrors (here and here).  What makes Songbird different from other media players is that it promises to free you from connecting to one locked store full of DRMmed goods and instead it will let you connect to any and all available music (and video) on the internet.

Dan Benjamin has posted a very complete tutorial on Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger. Recognizing this great tutorial, Newby on Rails did Dan one better, and turned his tutorial into a simple shell script that lets you intall the combination of Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL using a single command!

Don’t want to shell out your hard earned cash on Norton Ghost or Partition Magic? You can learn how to nixCraft: Resize windows Partition with Open Source Software using a Linux Live CD called Knoppix. Of course before you resize your partition using commmercial or open-source software, make sure you have a good backup!

Looking for a free, open-source alternative to commercial programs like Partition Magic, Drive Image, and Norton Ghost? Partition Logic is a hard disk partitioning and data management tool that can create, delete, format, and move and clone partitions. It boots from a CD or floppy disk and runs as a standalone system, independent of your regular operating system.

Seems like web frameworks are all the rage these past few months. Symfony is yet another open-source PHP framework that might be worth checking out. It supports features like:

• simple templating and helpers
• cache management
• multiple environments support
• deployment management
• scaffolding
• smart URLs
• multilingual and I18N support
• object model and MVC separation
• Ajax support

One thing I find interesting though, is that on the Ruby platform there is one framework (Rails) and if Python is your scripting language of choice, there is Django. On the PHP side however, there are at least 4 that I have come across. It would be nice if one PHP framework would lead in this space, to make the choice much more clear and focus the efforts of the open-source contributors to creating one great project.

System Rescue CD is a linux system on a bootable cdrom for repairing your system and your data after a crash. It also aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk.

Flickrfs is a virtual filesystem for Linux that can be mounted on your computer and then be accessed using the standard commands.

When you mount the filesystem, it will create 2 directories automatically: ‘tags’ and ’sets’. ’sets’ will automatically retrieve your photos (only metadata information, hence fast) and will show you all the photos available in your sets. You can then easily copy images to your hdd. And here comes the nicer part, If you want to add some more photos to these sets, just copy them to the folder, and they will be uploaded to the respective set.

It’s tools like these that make me want to fire up my Linux box a little more than I usually do!

Dave Winer (father of RSS) is suggesting that we should help make the Google API an open standard. Read his essay to find out why his explanation and solutions make perfect sense.

moo.fx is a new and lightweight (3k) JavaScript library for performing simple effects on your webpages. Built on top of the prototype.js, it is cross-browser/plaform compatible.

As you may have already noticed, I have just redesigned this blog. I was never entirely happy with the last redesign, so decided to freshen up the site with a new look. I hope you enjoy it!

I have also switched from Textpattern to WordPress. I was very happy using Textpattern, and it is an excellent content management system suitable for blogs. There are lots of really cool features and an excellent community of dedicated users. The reason for the switch is that in my day job, I create and maintain content management systems, so I figured it would be a great idea to familiarize myself with and learn a different CMS.

One of the greatest benefits of working with open-source content management systems, is that you can learn alot by looking at the architecture and source-code of others. It becomes a great source of inspiration in working on my own projects.