A hacker from Malaysia has used the game-centric PPL programming language for PocketPCs and has created a replacement of the "Today" PPC screen that closely resembles that of the iPhone's. His clone is still under development, although it is already impressive what he was able to do with a few lines of code. He was even able to recreate the iPhone's scrolling effect. Nevertheless, a nice toy.

During FOSDEM 2007, a live CD using the Etoile desktop environment was demonstrated, and this live CD can now be downloaded (screenshots inside the link, boys and girls). Etoile is a desktop environment based on GNUstep. "This is the 0.2 prerelease that we worked on at FOSDEM 2007. There's still quite a lot of problems on it (check the bugtracker), so we expect the final 0.2 release in about a month. In the meantime, feel free to download the iso and to play with it."

"Except for a financial analysts event in July, Microsoft's incoming chief software architect has been decidedly quite. His last blog post was April Fool's Day. This morning, Ray Ozzie finally broke his silence. Ozzie answered questions, many of them leading, at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium. There's a saying about talking much but saying little. While Ozzie shed some light on Microsoft's services - or software-as-a-service - strategy, he offered more vagaries than specifics. Still, by piecing together the little he said with the much we know about Microsoft, the hour-long Q&A illuminates Microsoft's services direction."

Tom's Hardware has benchmarked Windows Vista, but somehow we missed it (we're a month late). Our apologies. "We are sure that mainstream users will appreciate the improved usability of Windows Vista, and the average office/multimedia user will likely never notice the lack of OpenGL. However, a chapter on the overall performance of Windows Vista requires more dedication."

WPA2, the wireless security thing, is not available on Windows XP x64, and for the 32bit version, it is not a mandatory download. "We know Microsoft is serious about security and they don't appreciate the lack of it on Windows any more than we do, but it's things like this that make people wonder. How hard would it be to label this as a recommended download via Windows Update for all x86 users - and to roll out a version with x64 support before Windows XP x64 SP2 comes out, years from now?"

"On Friday, the KDE Project released the third in a series of development previews for the upcoming KDE 4.0 release. Dubbed 'Kludge', the 3.80.3 release includes the Sonnet language library, the new Dolphin file manager, and the Solid hardware library." Read on for an overview.