Rasmus Lerdorf will now lead development on the programming interface for start-up WePay

Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo search and is seeking partners, including Time Warner and News Corp., to take over the rest of Yahoo's business

Rasmus Lerdorf is undoubtedly the most famous Greenlandic geek alive. Having created PHP as a bunch of hackish scripts to support his website in 1995, he turned it into a powerful, fully fledged language that's now used by millions around the world.

So Canonical will make money from Yahoo searches (really Microsoft now with Bing powering Yahoo search) to help fund their efforts.

Just a few hours after Yahoo! rejected Microsoft's $44.6bn purchase offer, the Redmond-based software giant has responded, reiterating that it "reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!'s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal."

Previously, the way to connect to Twitter using Pidgin (IM client for yahoo, google talk, msn, etc), was to use a jabber account like google chat, then add Twitter. But Twitter shut down the Jabber service. So it doesn’t work anymore. But now, Pidgin-microblog can do the trick.

Pidgin is a popular open source client for yahoo messenger and other IM protocols. Yahoo recently updated their client and older versions of pidgin will be unable to login to yahoo. Learn how to do a work around.

After several months of discussion and speculation, the Microsoft-Yahoo buyout deal is apparently off. At least, that's what both Microsoft and Yahoo announced over the weekend. There is some speculation that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made his announcement in order to topple Yahoo's share price, in order to make another offer at a lower price.

Option investors bet heavily on Monday that Yahoo might strike a deal of some sort with Microsoft Corp, spurred on in part by pressure from activist shareholder Carl Icahn.

Microsoft has proposed an alternative deal for Yahoo, a complex transaction that would include just buying Yahoo's search business, rather than a full buyout, a person familiar with the discussions said on Monday.