Due to a total lack of time on my end, we didn't have a Week in Review last week, but now I'm back, ready to summarise the news of the past week. Obviously, the week was dominated by Apple's WWDC and Microsoft's announcement regarding Internet Explorer, but in between all that, we had a lot of news on alternative operating systems.

With the growing "mobile, mobile, mobile!" craze, many groups have been working strenuously to develop slimmer, easier to use mobile operating systems and applications. At the forefront of these innovating developments are various Linux branches, Android quite possibly one of the most popular and most hoped to come preinstalled on netbooks. In the humble shadows, however, a new mobile OS is emerging and just may have the viability to cover some hefty ground in the market. Meet "Xenon," the new mobile OS.

Well, this is interesting. We already have a Mono item ruffling some feathers on OSNews today, but here we have the apparent news that Tomboy has become a default part of GNOME on Squeeze, the next release of Debian. Wait, what now? Update: I've updated the article with Fedora's position in all this. Read on! Update II: Josselin Mouette replies.

A Mono developer responds to a request for "a calm presentation of why Mono is desirable, why it is not a threat, and why it should be included in Ubuntu by default" answering the three questions individually, then attempting to address general anti-Mono sentiment.

Google has quietly announced Fusion Tables, a new online database designed to sidestep the limitations of conventional relational databases. Fusion Tables, announced on Google's Research Blog, has been built to simplify a number of operations that are notoriously difficult in relational databases, including the integration of data from multiple, heterogeneous sources and the ability to collaborate on large data sets, according to Google. Under the hood of Fusion Tables is data-spaces technology, a concept has been around since the early 1990s and that Google has been developing it since it acquired Transformic in 2005.

Yesterday, Microsoft dropped a bomb by announcing that all versions of Windows 7 released in Europe would ship without Internet Explorer pre-installed. This was in answer to the EU antitrust investigation currently under way regarding possible illegal bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. The first reactions to this news are coming in, with Opera and the EU both lamenting the move.

"Although OS X is relatively new, it is built on top of technology that has been under development since Steve Jobs founded NeXT in the mid '80s. Erik Buck, author of Cocoa Design Patterns, has been working with this platform for over two decades. His perspective on the development of Cocoa, from its beginnings in NeXTSTEP and its evolution through the OpenStep specification, provide some interesting insights."

In a move to basically outflank the EU antitrust investigation, Microsoft has announced that all version of Windows 7 shipped in Europe will not include Internet Explorer 8 by default. This is reminiscent of the Windows XP N editions, which did not include Windows Media Player, but the difference here is that Microsoft will not ship versions of Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8 in Europe.

The second beta for KDE 4.3 has been released. The highlights of this release are the integration of many new technologies, such as PolicyKit and Geolocation services, new window animation effects, a more usable run command popup, many new and improved addons in Plasma, Many bugfixes and improvements across all applications, and more integration of features coming with the KDE 4 platform.

Fedora 11 comes with many improvements in package management including a update version of RPM and Yum that reduces memory consumption and performs faster. Fedora 11 also includes the presto plugin for Yum that downloads the binary deltas for updates and typically saves over 80% of the download size. Linux Mag takes a look with some interesting benchmarks that show modest improvements overall.

With Snow Leopard finally been given a release date and a price, the comparisons with Windows 7 are starting to pop up all over the place, especially focussing on the price aspect of things. While Apple's move to price Snow Leopard at 29 USD for Leopard owners is a very welcome one, the move doesn't mean that Microsoft is getting a price beating from Apple.

This series is aimed at programming language aficionados. There's a lot of very abstract writing about programming languages and a lot of simple minded "language X sux!" style blog posts by people who know next to nothing about programming. What I feel is sorely missing is a kind of article that deliberately sacrifices the last 10% of precision that make the theoretical articles dry and long winded but still makes a point and discusses the various trade offs involved. This series is meant to fill that void and hopefully start a lot of discussions that are more enlightening than the articles themselves. I will point out some parallels in different parts of computing that I haven't seen mentioned as well as analyze some well known rules of thumb and link to interesting blogs and articles.

"Let's take a look at SquashFS. SquashFS is a read-only compressed file system that has a variable block size. The primary intent of the file system is for constrained block device/memory systems. The classic example targets SquashFS for embedded systems but there are other uses for it that fall outside of the embedded world, and could surprise you."

Futurama is coming back! The animated series, loved by many geeks, is the second show in the history of television to be brought back to life after a cancellation (the other one's Family Guy, also by Fox), mostly due to strong fan demand and very good sales from the series of direct-to-DVD films. Comedy Central ordered 26 new episodes to be made, and airing will start in mid-2010. Matt Groening, one of the two show's creators, said: "We're thrilled 'Futurama' is coming back. We now have only 25,766 episodes to make before we catch up with Bender and Fry in the year 3000."