Status Net 1.0 is coming

A few days ago the author of this article attempted to log in to their status net site and was informed that it was down for maintenance.
I was however offered an "exclusive" invite to be among the first to check out the latest production release of the Open Source Microblogging software.
A few design changes were also noted on the status net website including a bold new orange theme.
The good folk at Status Net have promised the author that Status Net 1.0 will be "awesome". We await with bated breathe.

From the who-needs-twitter dept

New VLC out

The developer team of everyone and their little sister's favorite media player VLC has announced the release of VLC 1.1.8, a minor release of the 1.1.x branch. Small new features, plenty of bug fixes, updated translations and solutions to security issues also made this release.

Notable improvements include an updated look on Mac, a new Dirac encoder, new VP8/WebM encoder, and numerous fixes in codecs, demuxers, interface, and subtitle auto detection, protocols and platform integration.

Source and Windows and MacOSX builds are currently available.

From the i-care-about-my-movies-too-much department

Awesome.sh Script automates video file Conversion to .flv

Local Linux wizard and Software Engineering student Ibrahim Ngeno aka Eebrah The Hustla has just announced the release of a shell script that automates conversion of flv video files to webm. The script is easily converted to handling any format ffmpeg can handle.
Ngeno was implementing some GUI features even as he emailed our news room. The GUI features will however sadly be available for Gnome only.
The script is available via email upon request. Get in touch with him at twitter.com/eebrah or identi.ca/eebrah

From the screw-flash dept

GNOME 3.0 released.

On April 7th after two years of development the Gnome projected announced the release of Gnome 3.0.
GNOME 3.0 is a major milestone in the history of the GNOME Project. The release introduces an exciting new desktop which has been designed for today's users and which is suited to a range of modern computing devices. GNOME's developer technologies have been substantially improved for 3.0. Modernized and streamlined, they will enable developers to provide better user experiences with less time and effort. And GNOME 3.0 comes with the same GNOME applications that users know and trust, many of which have received significant enhancements.
GNOME 3.0 follows the project's predictable release cycle and comes six months after the last GNOME release, version 2.32. It is the culmination of three years' planning and development and is the project's first major release in nine years.
3.0 is the beginning of a new journey for GNOME. The 3.x release series will continue with the project's predictable six-month development cycles, and promises to build on the trend of innovation seen in 3.0, delivering significant enhancements to the GNOME user and developer experiences.
The full release notes are available here http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.0/