Ardesia is a free open source application that turns your Linux device into a digital sketchpad. You can make hand drawn annotations, figures, a quick sketch, do some artwork or just use it for fun. Drawings can be made using many pointing devices like a mouse or a pen/finger on your touch screen device.

Icinga is an enterprise grade open source monitoring system which keeps watch over networks and any conceivable network resource, notifies the user of errors and recoveries and generates performance data for reporting. Scalable and extensible, Icinga can monitor complex, large environments across dispersed locations.

Faced with a potentially large threat to free/libre and open source software from patent consortium CPTN, the two organisations have collaborated publicly for the first time. Before Christmas Open Source Initiative (OSI) wrote to the German Federal Cartel Office asking them to investigate the acquisition of Novell assets by the CPTN Group as a possibly anti-competitive move by CPTN's four members.

Debian's announcement to release "Squeeze" with a completely free Linux kernel caused quite some attention, which is actually a good thing. However, it also seems to have caused quite some uncertainty and was often partially misunderstood and miss quoted. I'll try to summarize and answer some of them in this blog post

Now that a release candidate of the installer has been uploaded and tested, a few issues have been identified and was binNMUed today. This should turn into RC2 by the end of the week. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for a release of Debian 6.0 -- "Squeeze".

The Australian Government has released a policy that mandates the ECMA-376 version of Microsoft's Office Open XML standard and productivity suites that can 'read and write' the .docx format. If you're not familiar with the OOXML fiasco, take a look at http://noooxml.org/ for the sordid details.

Last week, Google announced that it plans to remove support for the H.264 video codec from its browsers, in favor of the WebM codec that they recently made free. Since then, there's been a lot of discussion about how this change will affect the Web going forward, as HTML5 standards like the tag mature.