Is your Net connection slow? Ever wonder what the hell’s going down the wire? Here are five free and effective tools to diagnose network traffic issues.

"CSS is ten years old this year. Such an anniversary is an opportunity to revisit the past and chart the future. CSS has fundamentally changed web design by separating style from structure. It has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make marked-up pages look right—and CSS3 proposes additional properties requested by designers..."

"To celebrate the progress of GRDDL towards its final stage, and to replace the aging and somewhat unreliable XSLT-based GRDDL demonstrator, I’ve just released a brand new W3C GRDDL service..."

"It has been a couple of weeks that I have been playing around with Erlang. And I must say that my impression so far has been positive. You may wonder why? Read on..."

For a computer, software content is king. Programmable computers began the home computer revolution over 20 years ago. The modern revolution is Open Source software, giving immeasurable utility with no cost or risk. Sadly a lot goes under the radar but here are five sleeper apps really worth checking out.

Time after time we warned that with the arrival of Windows Vista comes a novel lock-in strategy. It must not be ignored. Proprietary and patent-encumbered technology will be named “open” and then gradually extended. It is a trap which is disguised by disinformation and third parties like Novell and Ecma.

Over the weekend I got into a mood to try out another window manager besides my beloved KDE. Warning! There may be some prejudice here :) I thought that if I could find a good WM to run on my aging flaky computer I might be able to squeak by until I get a new motherboard.

In a reversal, the American representative to the ISO standards body is now tentatively supporting the approval of Microsoft's Office Open XML document format as an open standard this year.