"WordPress is a powerful tool, and in many ways exemplifies open source at its best. It gives any user an array of features with minimal technical effort, and its extensibility and versatility are displayed by the large pool of user-designed plugins. This power and versatility extends beyond WordPress's traditional use of blogging."

A surprising move by Microsoft: "MSDN Subscriber Downloads now supports Firefox! And Opera. Funnily enough, when we were doing the initial planning for our 3.0 platform I got some pushback from the dev team on this requirement because only .5% of our old site traffic was on a non-IE browser. After we realized that they were serious we got the requirement straightened out, only changing it from 'Mozilla' to 'Firefox' since that's the predominant browser."

In ever-growing numbers, CIOs want to take advantage of the many benefits that free and open-source software have to offer their companies. But there's a snag. Their lawyers can be grouchy when it comes to open-source.

Apple has seeded build 8B1027 to Apple Developer Platform owners. This build brings Transition Kit systems up to version 10.4.2, and in-sync with the current released version of Mac OS X for 'ordinary' Macs. This build includes new tactics to prevent piracy of Mac OS X.

Customization typically offers users the ability to manipulate shiny objects, but not much real power. Wouldn't it be better to put the time into supporting a more powerful and flexible user interface?

Geeks.com were very generous to send us in one of Sony Ericsson's best sellers: the very popular K700i. We took it for a quick spin and here is our mini-review.

At Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft is planning to provide programmers with the code for an early version of Vista, as well as Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, both of which will be released in November. Vista, the client version of the next release of Windows developed under the code name Longhorn, is expected to be released next year. Screenshots of the PDC Vista build can be found here.

"Ten days of presentations, workshops, and chaotic coding sponsored by Trolltech, Novell/SUSE, HP, the local governments of Andalucia, and Malaga can only mean one thing: aKademy 2005, the KDE community's annual conference. Held in Malaga, Spain, aKademy 2005 included a Users and Administrators Conference, a Developer Conference and a Coding Marathon. Users, developers, and local visitors with an interest in open technology were treated to a display of stable desktop software and glimpses of cutting-edge innovations to come."

Julio M. Merino Vidal's Google Summer of Code Project, a new memory-based file system called tmpfs has been imported into the NetBSD source tree. See Julio's message to the tech-kern mailinglist for more details.

This chapter at InformIT covers the basic operation of PostgreSQL, including naming conventions, creating a database, and indexing.

Researchers at Imperial College London claim to have developed technology that would enable the creation of three-dimensional microchips, which will dramatically increase their memory capacity. According to their press release: "by using nanotechnology it is possible to reproduce the key functions of semiconductor electronics in microchips using only the 'spin' of electrons, which is responsible for magnetism, rather than the more conventional 'charge' that traditional microchips use."

More from Paul Thurrot today, as he reviews the N editions of Windows: "If you're wondering what the XP N Editions are like, wonder no more. I got my hands on both XP Home N and XP Pro N this week and gave them both a spin. The results were pretty uneventful. I can't recommend the XP N Editions per se, but I can report that you shouldn't be afraid of using these products at all. They're not crippled or broken in any way I can see."

"Two days before the start of Professional Developers Conference 2005, I've received exclusive insider information about the product editions which Microsoft intends to create for Windows Vista." Secondly, Microsoft has made available for download a preliminary vesion of the Vista User Experience Guidelines. Lastly, Brian Proffitt thinks Vista will be free. As in beer, that is.

"If you're planning on using Fluxbox, the key is, like everything in Linux is that you learn a little something and have fun doing it. Experiment with different styles and configuration. That is one of the advantages to this type of window manager - you can make it look like you want."