Microsoft's chief software architect recently returned from one of his fabled "Think Weeks" full of ideas on mesh networking, unified networking and more, says eWEEK. Elsewhere, the Internet firms riding a 'mini bubble' said Gates. Update: Another one with Bill: "Hardware to Be Nearly Free in 10 Years".

"My team and other teams within Novell continue to develop and use Gtk as their toolkit (recently open sourced Simias/iFolder for instance) and all of the Mono GUI development tools. The only use of Qt that am aware of today is SUSE's recently open sourced YAST" said Ximian's Miguel de Icaza replying on Heise's recent article on standardization of Novell on Qt.

Creating a popular new computing approach always seems to bring with it a familiar catch-22: security issues. And Web services is no exception.

The Independent Qt Tutorial has been updated with a new chapter on the Qt canvas module. It consists of examples and in-depth discussions. The Independent Qt Tutorial is a book introducing the different areas of Qt step-by-step with task orientated chapters rich on examples and a detailed discussion of the different areas of the Qt toolkit.

Test 2 of Fedora Core 2 is now available. You can download it from here or, if you want maximum speed, you can grab the torrent from the Duke LUG. BitTorrent info can be found here. Update: Great. Just spent 4 hours downloading the 4 Fedora CDs (md5sum'ed) and the first CD won't boot on a machine that is fully compatible (apparently it is a new bug, there is already a bug report about it). Fedora's poor testing before the distribution (even for a beta) continues to amaze me each time a new version is out.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 is a new bug fix release. Release notes are here.

With the release of kernel 2.6, Linux now poses serious competition to major RTOS vendors, such as VxWorks and WinCE, in the embedded market space. Linux 2.6 introduces many new features that make it an excellent operating system for embedded computing. Among these new features are enhanced real-time performance, easier porting to new computers, support for large memory models, support for microcontrollers and an improved I/O system.

This article covers interoperability between the Microsoft.com Web service, built with Web Services Enhancements 1.0 SP1 for Microsoft .NET, and a Java client. See how the WS-Security specification and implementation can be used to validate a Web service call from Java to Microsoft .NET. GLUE 4.1.2 Professional from webMethods will be used to enable WS-Security functionality for the Java client.

2CPU.com has an article posted comparing the performance of Linux kernels 2.6.4 and 2.4.25 under a variety of server-oriented benchmarks. Their Apache and MySQL results were especially interesting. It's a good read for those of us debating whether or not to update our production machines from 2.4 to 2.6.

March's LinuxGazette.net and 100th issue includes interesting articles like "Programmer's Toolkit: Profiling programs using gprof", "Python Generator Tricks" and "Fvwm and Session Management".

IronPython is a new implementation of the Python language targeting the Common Language Runtime (CLR). It compiles python programs into bytecode (IL) that will run on either Microsoft's .NET or the Open Source Mono platform. Elsewhere, "A Byte of Python" is a free book (or free tutorial) on Python. It is meant to be a guide to anyone learning Python.

This document is the result of various discussions with Mono and MonoDevelop users on their needs to build, package and distribute their software by using Mono Develop. Elsewhere, Eclipse 3.0 M8 has been released. It features many fixes, improvements and new features inlcuding a minor UI facelift.

Sun Microsystems posted some new screenshots of its Java-based Project Looking Glass.

Macworld goes undercover to reveal 40+ Mac OS X 10.3 Tips and Tricks here. Elsewhere, if you work in an environment where you need to manage a large number of Macs (such as in a classroom), you might want to take a look at Apple's Remote Desktop. Using this pricy but effective software, you can easily control and manage all of the Macs on the network. Also, MacOSRumors details some of the planned features and marketing points for Mac OS X 10.4 (preliminary code-name "Merlot").