The latest Gimp release has several new improvements that make it more comparable to Adobe Photoshop.

Gimpusers has a great summary of new features and enhancements with Gimp 2.4.

The UI is a little cleaner, and now uses the “Tango-style” icons present on most operating systems.

The selection tool has been cleaned up a bit.

Text-to-path has been improved, allowing for curved text and shaping.

Preview in plugins and filters has been improved to allow for panning and zooming.

Color picker has been changed to allow a spot-pick from anywhere on the screen (not just the current image in Gimp).

Ever find yourself having to lookup up which CPU chipset you have installed on your PC? Forget?…too tired to take apart your PC?…or simply threw away the box? There’s a great little program called “cpuid” which divulges information about the guts of your CPU.

I find myself having to look up receipts on Newegg from time-to-time in order to ascertain which driver my hardware requires, especially with Linux-based operating systems, where a handy Windows Installation CD is useless.

With Gentoo Linux, there are many build flags that are available to you as well as Kernel config settings (w/all Linux distros) that can take advantage of your specific hardware.

Once installed, you’ll find a wealth of information as in this sample output of a few relavant lines from ‘cpuid’:

$ cpuid

CPU:
   vendor_id = "AuthenticAMD"
   version information (1/eax):
      processor type  = primary processor (0)
      family          = Intel Pentium 4/Pentium D/Pentium Extreme Edition/Celeron/Xeon/Xeon MP/Itanium2, AMD Athlon 64/Athlon XP-M/Opteron/Sempron/Turion (15)
      model           = 0xc (12)
      stepping id     = 0x0 (0)
      extended family = 0x0 (0)
      extended model  = 0x1 (1)
      (simple synth)  = AMD Athlon 64 (Winchester DH8-D0) / Sempron (Palermo DH8-D0) / mobile Athlon 64 (Oakville DH8-D0) / mobile Sempron (Palermo DH8-D0) / mobile Athlon XP-M (Winchester DH8-D0), 754-pin, 90nm
...
   extended processor signature (0x80000001/eax):
      generation     = AMD Athlon 64/Opteron/Sempron/Turion (15)
      model          = 0xc (12)
      stepping       = 0x0 (0)
      (simple synth) = AMD Athlon 64 (Winchester DH8-D0) / Sempron (Palermo DH8-D0) / mobile Athlon 64 (Oakville DH8-D0) / mobile Sempron (Palermo DH8-D0) / mobile Athlon XP-M (Winchester DH8-D0), 754-pin, 90nm
   extended feature flags (0x80000001/edx):
...
   brand = "AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3000+"
...
  (multi-processing synth): none
  (synth) = AMD Sempron (Palermo DH8-D0), 754-pin, 90nm Processor 3000+

As of this writing, ‘cpuid’ has yet to become an official ebuild, but you can download the test ebuild script and follow the Gentoo-specific instructions instructions for using local portage ebuilds that have are still in the testing phase.

Here are the simpler installation procedures via apt-get for Debian-based systems:

$ apt-get install cpuid

Coming soon: Instructions for installing 3rd party ebuild scripts on Gentoo.

Today, the W3C announced CSS 2.1 as a “candidate recommendation”.

W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of “Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.1″ to Candidate Recommendation. Implementation feedback is welcome through 20 December. CSS is one of the Web’s most widely implemented languages. By separating the presentation of style from the content of documents, CSS simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance. CSS 2.1 is derived from and is intended to replace CSS Level 2. A snapshot of usage, the specification brings the language in line with implementations, fixes errata and adds a few highly requested features including the inline-block value for the display property, the color orange and the values pre-wrap and pre-line for the white-space property. Visit the CSS home page. — W3C

For those who are unfamiliar with CSS it is a basic set of design rules that can control the “look and feel” or design of a web page. When used properly, CSS can radically simplify front-end markup, removing all “design aspects” such as position and coloring from the HTML markup itself.

Some of the benefits are a smaller page size and easier redesigns. Today’s web developer and designer should have CSS experience on their resume.

More info can be found at the spec and the CSS explanation.