The Symbian OS is now open-source and free for all under the Eclipse Public License. Symbian was all the buzz when Nokia used Symbian OS for its smart phones, especially the Nokia Communicator and the Nokia 6600, and Sony Ericsson used it for the P800. Symbian provided an SDK for the development of both Java and C++ applications for the OS.

(Source: Mashable)

The latest in the Toyota models possibly affected by faults is the Toyota Prius, which could have brake failure under certain conditions. The necessary fixes have been made for the Prius models manufactured since late January but a recall has yet to be announced for vehicles that have already been dispatched.

(Source: Yahoo! News)

If you have tried to access the Sun.com website, you’ve probably noticed that it now redirects you to the Oracle.com website. It probably means that we might see all of Sun’s products re-branded to Oracle since they are no longer maintaining Sun as a separate entity. Look forward to seeing the Oracle Java SDK, the Oracle Solaris (no alliterations here), and the Oracle Sparc (still no alliterations).

This tip was suggested by Andy Skelton on the wp-hackers mailing list. If the WordPress upgrade scripts frequently timeout for you and you don’t want to do a manual copy-and-replace operation, you can simply check out the source code from the WordPress SVN and perform an SVN switch to the new tag whenever a new release of WordPress is made.

The repository for WordPress 2.9.1 is located at:
http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9.1

According to an article on the software development times, Facebook may have hired the core PHP development team to re-write the PHP runtime to improve the performance of PHP execution.

The PHP runtime produced as a result of their development efforts will also be released as open-source, thus giving back to the development community.

(Source: SDTimes)

An application that I ran on my localhost looked and ran perfectly, but the moment I took it onto an intranet host, the styling appeared to have been changed. I decided to give it another try by deleting all of the files from the intranet server and copying the files over again, but it was in vain. I then used the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar to determine what the issue was and the different between the two environments was that Internet Explorer would render the pages from the local environment with the document mode for Internet Explorer 8 standards and would render the page on the intranet with the document mode for Internet Explorer 7. This might have something to do with trying to maintain compatibility with old applications that specifically targeted Internet Explorer 7 (or older).

The solution was to get Internet Explorer to render the page in Internet Explorer 8 mode using the following meta tag:
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE8″>

Ideally, I should be going back to the guy who provided me with the UI template to get him to fix the markup for Internet Explorer 7, but to get things working as quickly as possible I had to troubleshoot the problem and use the above quick fix.

Apple’s iPad differs from the iPhone in that you need to provide it with a micro SIM card, which is smaller than the regular SIM card that you would use in your cell phone. The smaller form factor, however, can be achieved by cutting the larger SIM card to fit as the additional area of the card consists solely of plastic. Want to know more about the iPad’s incompatibilities? Check out the article on Wired.com.

The Apple iPad is not a new product for the Chinese because they’ve had a device that looks almost exactly like it since August last year. The Shenzhen Great Loong Brother Industrial company has been manufacturing the P88, which is slightly thicker and heavier than the Apple iPad but has higher spec components and a shorter battery life.

(Source: Yahoo! News)

Just days after Toyota’s recall of its vehicles (Avalon, Camry, Corolla, Highlander, Matrix, Rav4, Sequoia, and Tundra) over a sticky gas pedal, which may or may not be related to the presence of floor mats, Honda has announced its recall of vehicles (Fit, and Jazz) over a power window defect that could cause vehicle fires. Both firms discovered the defects in an investigation after the death of vehicle occupants.