I’ve found that loading a Flash applet in Firefox will cause Firefox to lock my whole system’s audio playback. Audio and video in Totem don’t even start to play when this happens. Until Firefox is closed, the only application that can play audio is Flash.

What's the next best thing for Linux users who can't attend an open source community conference in person? Online workshops like last week's Ubuntu Open Week, where upwards of 300 participants per session showed up to learn more about the popular Linux distribution, the community, and its teams.

Your computer screen’s menus and icons disappear, slipping beneath a wall of funereal black. The computer still works, but it will not work for you.

The OOXML document format war is over, and the good guys lost. The world will be a worse place because of it, for a long time to come. After being a lobbyist for many months, it was a great relief to get back to being a Samba coder. At least that's something I feel I have some competence in. The jury is still out on my lobbying career.

SCO is definitely beyond this Web site’s scope, but recently there has been a great deal of Novell in that saga. There are things there which have future implications on Novell, SUE Linux [sic], and other GNU/Linux distributions. We covered some of the latest in last week’s cumulative report, so let’s look at more recent articles and consider portions of them.

A colleague of mine at the office has just told me that Microsoft is scanning the Registry files to ensure there’s no Wine in there. Wine has just reached RC of the highly-anticipated version 1.0 [*], but the issue was brought up an hour ago for other reasons.

In this continued pursuit for identification of attacks on GNU/Linux we spot some other (old & new) intrusion vectors. We previously mentioned the push in the UK to crack down on — or at least expose (in the transparency sense alone, i.e. no action) — heavy corporate lobbying activities, which are akin to bribery that’s legalised, no matter how questionable this analogy may seem.