Another viable option for mobile development is to use a framework like Titanium or Phonegap to quickly build out an app using Javascript.  I've been looking at Titanium a lot lately and digging into its API.  Seems like you can build anything short of a game using its API and there's a real buzz when you compile the same (or nearly the same) codebase to run on both Android and iPhone devices.

Looks like my favorite PHP wiki has some really cool plugins for it. 

During the last few weeks I wrote a few new DokuWiki plugins and updated some old ones.

I have to confess that delegating software installation to Debian and Ubuntu's apt command is what finally converted me to Linux.  I stillhave a bias against .rpms and building from source based on disastrous experiences hunting down obscure .rpms or figuring out why make would not work.  If you're trying out Ubuntu or another Linux distribution, you should stop and read download squad's Package management 101. 

Jamesr on Column Two sets the bar pretty high when he observes that it costs $5 million to write a CMS.

Nokia's N770 and N800 tablet PCs were developed with a conscious decision to use as much open source software as feasible.  This decision had tremendous benefits in cost savings, code quality, flexibilty, and zero licensing costs.  You can read the white paper    HT: Stephesblog.

Once again, there's something rotten in Denmark. From Gates vs Denmark on Groklaw, via BoingBoing it seems Bill Gates is close down 800 IT Jobs in Denmark if the country doesn't support the software patents directive (what a star trek-y title by the way). Let's hope Denmark's politicians don't cave in to this threat.

ACM today released a survey of IT/software development projects to identify the most common causes of failure and developed a tool to assess what the risk of failure for a given project is.

Jason has discovered the goodness of APT for managing installed software on a Linux box. You gotta respect a tool that lets you upgrade pretty much your entire distribution with one command: apt-get dist-upgrade .

A new version of Sharpreader is out, grab it from sharpreader.net. It's been my Windows RSS Aggregator of choice and uses the 3-paned outlook style UI to display feeds and items. Best sounding improvements: Systray popup notification and reduced memory usage.

I've just finished upgrading my sister's pc, which we use to share a dial-up connection, to Mandrake 9.1. ( Yes-dialup, I'm 2 miles from AOL's headquarters and the closest to broadband that I can get is wireless or satellite.) I can't say that the install was a piece of cake - the installer crashed on me a couple times until I ran it in advanced mode, and although I did an upgrade first I had to go back and do a complete install for the distribution. Upgrade pains aside, the KDE 3.1 desktop looks very nice and polished, and the system feels more resposive.