If you haven't heard of Magento yet, it is now time you should. The web based Magento software is a next-generation e-commerce system that puts previous open source 'shopping carts' to shame.

I have been putting the beta versions of Magento through their paces for the last 6 months, and while it is still early days, I am thoroughly impressed.

The version 1.0 release is a significant milestone, which I'm sure will make waves.

Go check it out: www.magentocommerce.com

The Creative Coast is 'the north yorkshire coast creative industries network'. Our most recent event was a Get Blogging night where we launched the Creative Coast Blogs, and helped to set up free blogs for some of the members.

I had heard of the Flock web browser before, and even downloaded and had a play with it, but since I'm not a seriously networked blogging geek it didn't grab my attention.

Quite excited about this! openSUSE 10.3 is ready to go, having had the goldmaster release announcement made yesterday. It is not supposed to be available for public download until 4th October, but for those who know where to look downloading has begun.

When it comes to office productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs) lots of people only know about Microsoft® Office - Word, Excel and PowerPoint (or perhaps the useless Microsoft® Works that came bundled with their PC).

Well, if that's you, I'm glad to be able to inform you that there is a growing number of 'office' suites, that not only provide a good alternative to Microsoft® Office but are also absolutely free!

In the last few days there has been a new release of the increasingly popular OpenOffice software (version 2.3), as well a an announcement from IBM, making the Lotus Symphony office software available for free download!

If you haven't heard of it - Last.fm is a social-networking website for music lovers. It keeps track of music you listen to and suggests other music you might like, and links you to other people with similar listening habits.

One neat feature is that it creates a personalised internet radio station, using tracks that you have listened to. I must say, I think my radio station rocks!

Have a listen and let me know what you think...

Here you will find 10 sayings of Jesus that I have collected together. Finding quotable passages from Jesus was not that easy, as most of what is recorded of what he said (in the gospel books: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) are either metaphorical stories, or Jesus responding to particular questions that had been put to him. Neither work very well when taken out of context.

I came across this interesting article the other day on the CNN website: Collins: Why this scientist believes in God, in which Francis Collins - the director of the Human Genome Project - shares his personal experience on the matter. (He also has a book out: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief).

So we have possibly the world's leading scientist of the day sharing his personal opinion and experience that it is possible to pursue scientific endeavor and believe in God while maintaining intellectual integrity.

I think that's pretty hard to dismiss, however it seems (from some of the comments) that some of the naysayers will say nay no matter what.

Well since EMI announced a press conference featuring Steve Jobs a day or so ago there have been plenty of people quick to speculate what it would all be about. Some were guessing that there would be an announcement about the availability of the Beatles music on iTunes, while quite a few guessed correctly.

I just found out from the BBC News article about it, but you can see the official press release here.

So it seems that Steve Jobs is coming good on his statement of support for DRM-free music, however my bet is that he knew this was coming and wanted to maximise on the PR opportunity.

I think having better quality and unrestricted tracks is a great result, and may even start purchasing a few tracks on iTunes!

A number of times I have been frustrated with simplistic verification of email addresses, not so much because they are incomplete, but because they actually get it wrong.

I did at one stage make a serious attempt understanding and implementing the perl regular expression for checking emails (in accordance with the internet specification RFC822) that is found in the Perl Cookbook, however after reading Cal Henderson's excellent write-up on Parsing Email Adresses in PHP, I realise why it wasn't a helpful place to start (it incorporates more than just the address spec).

So with Cal's advice there is no excuse for web developers to continue to guess at what an email address should be, just do it to the spec (RFC822)!

The original is in PHP, and others have rewritten it for Ruby, and Python...

Here is my contribution, a JavaScript version: