The outage on Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing platform that caused the government's G-Cloud service to go offline was the result of a calculation error caused by the extra day in February due to the leap year. Writing on the Azure blog the firm's corporate vice president for service and cloud, Bill Laing, said while the firm had still to fully determine the cause of the issue, the extra date in the month appeared the most likely cause.

MINIX 3.2.0 stable is released. Major features include: Asynchronous, multithreaded virtual file system (VFS) server, Better reliability, Better virtualization support, and much more.

Raspberry Pi project leader Eben Upton talks about the state of Raspberry Pi, and tells us that yes -- finally -- they now have distributors in the U.S. and other countries instead trying to ship every unit from the U.K. Even better, instead of buying a batch of boards, selling them, and only then ordering another batch, the new distribution agreements mean they can keep a steady flow of orders coming in and going out.

Back in September 2011, the Haiku project sponsored a Google Summer of Code student (Mike Smith) to develop guest additions for VirtualBox. The project was a success and was submitted to the VirtualBox project. The unofficial Haiku Google+ group just reported a Mailing List post by an Oracle engineer mentioning a "Haiku Port": "The biggest pending change is waiting for build tools integration, and this is simply time consuming. The quality of this contribution is very high." Lets hope this may be a sign that VirtualBox may officially run *under* Haiku at some point. On the other hand, this could just mean a "Haiku Port" of the VirtualBox guest additions. Judge for yourself.

A detailed comparison of two novel approaches to developing web apps : Node.js and Opa. Both technologies are open source, allow writing "Hello world" web app in just a few lines and both focus on the Web rather than on generic programming. However, Opa seems to be much more concise, is strongly typed and by design makes most popular security threats void.

I'm swamped with real-world work at the moment, so you'll have to settle for this quickie: the consumer preview for Windows 8 has been released. Go get it and report in what you find!

Current computers use SATA disk drives. Pentium IV's and earlier computers used the IDE drive standards. How can you intermix SATA and IDE disk drives? This article discusses the options. It is the next in my series of articles on computer refurbishing.

Linus Torvalds on requiring the root password for mundane tasks. "So here's a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace 'my kids' with 'sales people on the road' if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place." Yes, it's harsh (deal with it, Finns don't beat around the bush), but he's completely and utterly right. While there's cases where it makes sense to disable certain settings (public terminals, for instance), it is utterly idiotic that regular home users have to type in their root password for such mundane tasks.

Apple has announced an iPad event for March 7 - iPad 3, obviously. The invitation clearly shows a high-resolution display, and some argue it's missing a home button (we'll see). If this really has a 2048x1536 resolution... What do you mean, leap-frogging the 'competition'. So, anybody want to buy a relatively pristine iPad 2 with grey smart cover? Comes with the box and warranty and everything?

The just released version 12.02 of the Genode OS Framework takes the first steps to carry out the plan to turn the framework into a general-purpose OS for the daily use by its developers until the end of the year. It features a new ACPI driver, the first bits of a device-driver manager, support for using the fork syscall in GNU programs, and a PDF rendering engine. The most significant point of this release, however, is the way it was conducted. It represents the first version carried out using a completely open development process.

And even more news from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Mozilla has announced a partnership with Telefonica and Qualcomm, which will bring Mozilla's Boot to Gecko HTML5-based mobile interface to devices later his year. This is a huge boon for the fully open source environment.

There's a lot of news coming out of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, but since we can't compete with the well-funded gadget blogs, I suggest you read up on the details at The Verge (or Engadget). One thing stood out to me, though. While the entire industry is moving towards more cores, more megapixels, more gigahertz, more display inches - Microsoft is doing the exact opposite. Windows Phone has been updated and optimised to run on slower hardware.

Metro is beautiful and elegant. It works wonders on my HTC HD7, and I'm pretty darn sure it's going to work just many wonders on tablets later this year. However, Microsoft also expects us to use Windows 8's Metro on our desktops with mice and keyboards - and in that scenario, I can't really see it work any wonders. The Verge user Sputnik8 decided to see what Metro would look like applied to a more regular desktop. The results are... Stunning.

"Microsoft appears to be killing off two of its key user-facing brands with the upcoming Consumer Preview release of Windows 8. Windows Live applications have been rolled into preinstalled apps that work as the core 'Windows Communications' applications for Windows 8, and this lack of Windows Live branding is only the tip of the iceberg. 'Microsoft Account' will replace Windows Live ID in Windows 8, and the software giant has also removed traces of Zune from its Windows Store, Music, and Video applications, although Zune Pass functionality remains." They're actually getting it. Amazing.