Jumping Bean exhibited at the Software Freedom Day celebrations held by the South African government's Department of Science and Technology at their offices in the CSIR building in Pretoria.

I attended the SABS technical committee's meeting today, which was tasked with coming up with SABS position vis-a-vis recommending OOXML as an ISO standard. In case you are waiting with baited breath for the outcome, after much debate, by a vote of 13 to 4 it was decided to "disapprove with recommendations".

Well Steve Balmer's been at it again. Even since the Novell deal members of the open source community have speculated that it was only a matter of time before Microsoft pulled the last card from its deck. The patent card.

At the moment Microsoft is only bluffing hoping that everyone else just folds. Their assertion that there are unspecified patent infringement in open source technologies might frighten some but most are keen to see Microsoft's hand.

Spammers and how to beat them

I don't know about you but our mail server receive tons of spam each day. Its used to be a constant battle to ensure that the tide of spam didn't drown out the real business mail. We decided to do something about it and get on with business instead of worrying about overflowing mail boxes. Before detailing the final solution we settled on here are some of the strategies we tried in the past.