I'm a little late on this one as I've not had a good weekend, but as they say, better late than not at all.

After a very long and winding road (dum dum), the guys finally pushed out the latest stable release of Habari on Friday. Yes, this was April fool's day, but this was no hoax; Habari 0.7 has finally seen the light of day.

Full details of what's new can be found in the release notes and if you're using Habari already, there are some upgrade details too.

Great work everyone. Now lets see if we can get 0.8 out the door within a decent time frame

Here's a problem I'm trying to get my head around: how can I create simultaneous public and private Mercurial repositories that are continually and automatically in sync without revealing any information from the private repository in the public repository?

Some of my projects, like phpSmug and phpZenfolio contain files I don't want the world to see. These are primarily for automatically building the necessary public files, automatically updating websites, generating documentation and unit testing. Now these files contain passwords and other hacks which the world would love to see, but this is my magic and every magician knows he's only as good as long as the audience doesn't know his secrets.

So how do I create a single directory structure that have files that belong in two repositories, but have only have those changes destined for the public files documented in the public repo?

I've got some ideas. Time for some investigating.

For a long long time now Solaris has maintained a Binary Compatibility Guarantee. In short this is a guarantee that any application built according to recommended guidelines using documented interfaces on an older release of Solaris will run on a newer release of Solaris with minimal, often no, modification. This is one of the places Solaris trumps Linux. You won't get such a guarantee from any Linux vendor.

Anyway, with Solaris 11 this guarantee will still be valid and Oracle are now in the process of encouraging ISVs to validate their applications early by announcing the availability of the Oracle Solaris 11 Compatibility Checker Tool.

To quote the Oracle Solaris 11 Compatibility Checker Tool page...

However with every release there are a few userland commands that have changed, improved, or moved. So it is always important to know if and where your application might see changes, either because of userland changes or in places where it relies on internal APIs that are outside our guaranteed ABI.

The Oracle Solaris 11 Compatibility Checker Tool allows developers to quickly zero in on such possible incompatibilities and make the required changes. This is achieved by executing a combination of “Source Code analysis”, “Static Binary analysis” and “Runtime analysis” modules of the tool on the applications already available on Oracle Solaris 10. The Runtime analysis module will be made available in a future release of the tool.

If you're an ISV with applications running on Solaris 10, I highly encourage you to check and verify your applications as soon as possible. Solaris 11 is due out later this year and there are going to be quite a lot of changes, many of which are for the good. I anticipate customers who are testing Solaris 11 Express now (it comes with full production use support as part of your OS support contract) will be impressed with the new functionality and will be eager to upgrade. Don't get caught napping.

Someone at Microsoft with a lot of clout has kicked someone in the jacksy and finally launched the IE6 Countdown campaign encouraging the discouragement of the use of IE6.

Developers are being asked to add the following banner to their sites for all IE6 visitors...

People are being asked to educate others with the phrase "Friends don't let friends use IE6". They're almost right, friends don't let friends use IE fullstop. Enemies on the other hand are free to use what they want .

And as can be expected, they're also pushing people to harness the power of the various social networks to push the message out.

This is a great idea, pity it's taken several years for Microsoft to listen to the rest of the world and actually use their power, might and marketing machine to get people to upgrade. The 1% goal is quite optimistic and may be hard to hit as there are lots and lots of large corporations out there who have standardised on IE6 and they are not likely to upgrade without a good incentive.

I think to really hit this target, and ideally take the usage right down to sub-1% figures, they need to officially announce they will NOT be addressing any more security issues in IE6. They don't need to do it straight away, but maybe use the campaign to announce a date, eg 6 months from now. This would certainly provide the encouragement many companies need.

This campaign doesn't impact me much as I'm not a website designer/developer by trade so haven't even attempted to keep IE6 happy for several years now, but this will certainly please a lot of other developers I know.

Wow!!! That was quick. The guys pushed out Habari 0.7 RC2 last night. This is a worthwhile update as it includes several security fixes that didn't make it into RC1.

Fresh off the habari-users alias:

The first, and hopefully last, Habari 0.7 release candidate has been tagged and is available for download at http://habariproject.org/dist/habari-0.7-rc1.zip. See habariproject.org for details about the release.

This version is recommended for any plugin authors or themers, as it contains many changes from Habari 0.6. Please install it, and let us know about any lingering issues. We hope to see a very short time before Habari 0.7 stable is released.

Get downloading and testing so we can iron out any bugs before pushing 0.7 out the door.

How would you like to run Solaris, Windows or even Linux on your iPad? I know, it's sad and geeky and you probably don't want to, however sometimes you need to do real work for a short period of time with what resources are at hand, namely your iPad.

Well, if this demo of the "Oracle Virtual Desktop Client 3.0 ... the iPad Edition" (aka Sunray client software) actually becomes to fruition as an official product, you'll be able to do just that...

Now this is pretty impressive and if it ever comes to fruition, it may just be the one thing that sways me to buying an iPad... of course being able to expense it would be even better.

After a series of developer previews for 0.7 and a lot of bug fixes, Habari is finally on the final furlong towards it's next official release - Habari 0.7.

It hasn't been released yet, however it is now feature frozen so the only changes going in are to fix known bugs and may a bit of tweaking here and there.

If you're running Habari 0.6.x and plan on upgrading to 0.7, I encourage you to take some time to test a clean install and upgrade to the feature frozen nightly snapshot and provide feedback. Before you perform your testing, be sure to read the release notes, especially the first section as it details things that are likely to break when you upgrade.

The release notes provide links to various other pages in the wiki which detail how you need to implement the plugin, theme or other functionality that is likely to break with the upgrade.

If all goes well, we should be releasing Habari 0.7 in the next few weeks.

• ZFS Encryption: What is on disk? - Good explanation of is stored encrypted and unencrypted on the disk with ZFS encryption.
• Changes in Security Policies for Sun Product Lines - Well worth reading if you're wondering how Oracle plans to handle security issues in Sun products.
• Haavard - Is the removal of H.264 from Chrome a step backward for openness? - A well stated response to Ars Technica's long article on Google's decision to remove H.264 support from Chrome. I agree with this article. This is definitely NOT a step backwards.
• Secure Deployment of Oracle VM Server for SPARC - A great Oracle whitepaper on securely deploying LDOMs.
• Get 50% discount on an Oracle Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000/M8000 - Trade in your HP Superdome for an Oracle M8000 or M9000 and get 50% off the purchase price.

As time goes on, more and more of the old Sun websites and domains are being shutdown and moved across to Oracle systems and domains.

One of the things that has recently moved is the Sun Downloads (the A-Z list). The page exists and all the links are valid, however some of them don't take you to the actual product download. Instead they take you to a generic page documenting the migration.

On this page is a link to an FAQ and the general answers is: if you can't get to a download from the A-Z page, you need to use the "Advanced Search" feature under "Patches & Updates" on My Oracle Support.

For example, this is how you'd find the latest Ultra 20 M2 Tools ISO image:

You should be able to find things like Sun Grid Engine, LDoms, Java Web Console, SunMC, graphics drivers, etc within My Oracle Support.