January for me was an interesting and varied month. Here is a quick look back at what I got up to in the month.
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Over this weekend (Friday evening and Saturday) while watching the AFL Finals I got to work building a script to convert the standard Joomla! 1.6 beta packages into a format that would work with Microsoft’s Web Package Installer (WebPI). Early Sunday morning I managed to get everything done to the point that a Joomla! 1.6 package is automatically converted, stripping out the install and sample data scripts on the fly and reprocessing them as well as updating a WebPI feed XML file that you can use.

The long and the short is if you want to test out the latest Joomla! 1.6 beta release (beta 9 at the moment), all you have to do is add our own custom feed to the Web Platform Installer!
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One of the nice things about Linux is the smooth way that the package management system operates. It just happens. The problem with Windows is that it doesn’t really happen – which is a painful experience.
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When I went through high school we had three segments for our maths and physics exams: we had the basic knowledge part that tested if we new a given fact and could apply it to a straight forward problem, we had the understanding part that tested if we could understand a fact and apply it to a slightly more complex problem and we had a complex reasoning section of the exam which tested a combination of the items we knew and took a large number of steps to get to the final answer. Today I’m hunting around to look for file system permissions and I’ve read something that makes me wonder if there should be that distinction.

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I must admit reading the article this morning on Slashdot about how Microsoft is building their own “App Store” really did sound of Microsoft copying yet again. Now I don’t believe that everything Apple has done is necessarily new or unique, they’ve got their own photocopiers somewhere but you have to wonder after Steve Job’s WWDC keynote comparing features of Vista to Mac OS X you start to wonder where Microsoft is really innovating. A lot of its infrastructure to be honest is copied from previous implementations and there rarely appears to be something new coming from Microsoft. When I look at the Vista desktop is a mashup of what I have available from Compiz Fusion on Linux, parts from Mac OS X and some parts from a Sun research project called ‘Project Looking Glass‘.

But if you look at an old Gizmodo article you’ll see that Apple have been cheeky for a long time now, even suggesting two years before Vista’s release date that Tiger was it. Funnily enough by the time that Microsoft got around to releasing Vista for retail in early 2007, Apple had already released Tiger in April 2005 and was on its way to Leopard already releasing a beta of it at WWDC2006 and a feature complete edition for WWDC2007, releasing later in 2007. Apple haven’t stopped there and are already releasing betas of Snow Leopard at WWDC2008 with new and interesting features, some of which copied themselves and some interesting approaches at doing things as well as interoperability features including primitive Exchange support.

And now we’re seeing Microsoft push forward their plans for “Windows 7” which from all accounts appears to internally think that its Windows 6.1 (you can Google for comments on the general confusion on which Microsoft appears to determine that this is version “7” of their product as well as people doing the maths and not finding ‘7’ as the number). With any luck we’ll see Snow Leopard and Windows 7 come out at around the same time and we can do a comparison between the two without much difficulty.