Herbert's resignation demonstrates why GNOME doesn't ship flags at all. Herbert is a reasonable guy, who lives only a few kilometres away from me in Sydney, and happens to have a more personal, deeply-held perspective on the China/Taiwan issue than many of us. I guess I don't share his belief, but it should not affect our shared vision here — the progress of Free Software.

If your Free Software project only has a single, global release — and that's pretty much all of us — you should strongly advocate the removal of flags and other national symbols. These are not logical right-and-wrong debates. They're personally and nationally held beliefs that we simply can't solve as Free Software contributors.

Live on, fight the battles you can win.  #

Computer World gives GNOME the thumbs up: "But I'm finding that Linux, especially with GNOME, is a lot more user friendly than the Unix I remember. [...] There are probably people in your organization right now who could become more productive with Linux and GNOME on their desktop. Maybe you need to find out more about it."

IBM is expanding their Linux Technology Centre in Canberra. More geeks in our capital city is a good thing.

Hooray, Tridge is toking the LDAP pipe! First things I think about when hearing this are Evolution and GPE... "As many of you know Samba now has a new database system called 'ldb'. ldb is like a half-way house between LDAP and tdb. [...] Of course, ldb can already act as a front-end to LDAP, presenting a LDAP database via the ldb API, so admins will have a number of flexible options for how to configure Samba."

Both Luis and Seth found this summary of Fedora's first year worth pointing out. When Fedora was first announced, I was so excited - I thought Red Hat had their strategy sorted, and were going to roll out the project like a blitzkrieg red carpet... But it seems they're still struggling. I hope they can pull it off.

I only have a few name-clones around the web, and I certainly have the best Google-juice of the lot, but here's one particularly surprising Jeff Waugh I found on Google Images. A beefy afro-american footballer... If he's not Bizarro me, I don't know who is. Hi, Jeff!

In February, the ACS came out with a hasty and ill-conceived response to the US/Australia Trade Agreement, but has come to its senses after consulting with the OSEG crew. The Australian picked this up with ACS flip-flops on FTA. Hopefully a bit of PR stick will encourage them to be more informed next time.  #