There are times when an issue can gnaw away at your internals to the extent that it starts bothering you. And you can't prevent feelings of guilt arising when you are constantly reminded about something or the other, something which you have and others, in distant lands, do not.

Microsoft's pledge to truly interoperate with the rest of the planet, including open-source developers (both commercial and community), leaves two clear victors in the Linux camp: Red Hat and Ubuntu. While Novell capitulated to Microsoft's early demands for a patent stooge, Red Hat and Ubuntu stood firm.

Canonical chief Mark Shuttleworth has revealed the name of the next Ubuntu release - Meeky Meerkat. Er, well, it's really called Intrepid Ibex and will likely arrive in Oct. as Ubuntu 8.10.

As you can see in the photo, we are doing a little Home Improvement - new flooring. My tiny laptop has been a life-saver through the chaos. The big Mac is boxed up to protect it from the dust and debris until this is over so the EEE is both our primary entertainment and news source.

Yesterday I had a chance to catch up with Doug Judd, principle search architect at local search specialist Zvents, to get some insight into Hypertable, the new open source massively parallel database software project.

When I first entered the Linux world a decade ago, my desktop experience was pretty was pretty abysmal: just xterms started by running the 'startx' command. It wasn't until much later, late 2000, that I started using KDE. I was in love.

"The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation with grassroots action for promotion of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general. The DFD was initiated and is supported by a group of organisations and companies, including, but not limited to, the Free Software Foundation Europe, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, Inc. On 26 March 2008, the Document Freedom Day will provide a global rallying point for Document Liberation..."

Let's be absolutely clear about this: it's difficult to recall a Microsoft product that has been so universally disliked - but MS is determined that you - yes, you - will use it whether you like it or not. But - perversely - we opine that Vista is the best thing to happen to the PC industry.