Zing, the company that created the Mono-based Sansa Connect has been acquired by Dell and is now offering at a discount price.

They have released a new product for listening to Satellite Radio with Sirius in the US. The Stiletto 2.

My friend Nat Friedman is raising funds for the Obama Campaign. If you are an American Citizen or a permanent US resident, please consider donating to Obama's campaign through Nat's fundraiser page (all the money goes to Obama, and you help Nat with his personal fund raising goal).

Although am myself a Kucinichista myself, I also supported Obama's campaign by donating to Nat's fundraising effort.

As readers of this blog know, am not a fan of the policies of the last seven years, and as an extension, not really a fan of the republicans.

On the democratic side, I just can not agree with Hillary on anything.

I have been personally bothered by Hillary Clinton since this March 2003 incident in which she walked out on the Code Pink girls and was parroting the administration party line.

These days those that voted for that disastrous war claim that they were "tricked" into voting for it. But like some comedian said recently, "All these democratic candidates claim that they were tricked into War by President Bush. [...] but if you are a person that can be tricked by President Bush you are not presidential material".

This Flash animation from November 2002 turned out to be prophetic and right on the spot.

Chomsky turned out to be right: September 2002 interview.

Fisk turned out to be right: September 2002 interview.

The French and the Germans turned out to be right as well.

The facts were there for anyone to see.

Nat recently pointed out that Obama did not rush to "support the President" like every other drone did. He made a conscious decision at a time when it was not popular to oppose the crooks and liars at the White House.

Despite the writer's strike, both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report have been fantastic these last two weeks.

The first couple of days, Stephen seemed to have fall out of shape after this long break, but by the end of last week he was in full Colbert swing.

They have both been fantastic, and am even more impressed now with John and Stephen. They truly are masters of their domain.

Still, a few things are missing here and there. I miss "The Word" segment very much.

Brian Jones posted two great news today on his blog.

Microsoft has agreed to:

• Publish their file format specification for the .doc, .xls and .ppt and do this under their Open Specification Promise.
• To simplify the understanding of the mapping between the old binary formats and the new ones, they will start an open source project to generate OOXML files from the old binary file formats.

These specs and projects are scheduled for February 15th.

The full details are on Brian's Blog. These are great news for all third party implementations that need to interop with those documents.

Some cheering is in order.

Long time Mono contributor Joseph Hill (also an early advocate of Boo, and its integration and use in MonoDevelop) joined Novell today as Mono's Product Manager.

Joseph will be my peer in the PM organization at Novell.

Joseph blogs at Beyond Focus and is currently based in Dallas, but will soon be moving to Boston.

David has setup a web site for Gnome DO, my new favorite app. The one that is helping me move away from the shell.

See some screenshots or his latest screencast.

For Banshee and Evolution integration, you need to download the extra plugins from here.

Brad Taylor has announced the first release of the Mono Accessibility stack:

UI Automation provides programmatic access to most user interface (UI) elements on the desktop, enabling assistive technology products such as screen readers to provide information about the UI to end users and to manipulate the UI by means other than standard input. UI Automation also allows automated test scripts to interact with the UI.

Mono's Accessibility Framework is an implementation of UI Automation. The same API that is available for WPF and the framework is used by Silverlight and Windows.Forms.

Client Code: The initial launch of Mono Accessibility adds accessibility support to applications built with Windows.Forms to be accessible.

Backend Code: The code has a bridge that talks to the existing ATK framework on Linux.

In the future the Mono Accessibility framework will be used in our own Moonlight 2.0.

Check the release notes, install from source or use OpenSUSE's 1-click install.

My good friend Robert O'Callahan discusses Silverlight on his latest blog entry, in particular, he asks the question:

No matter how good Silvelright is or how bad the alternatives are, Silverlight domination will be a really bad thing for free software so I question why Miguel wants to push in that direction.

Robert, it is very easy.

I have been using Linux as my main desktop operating system since 1992 and endured every missing feature, every broken driver, every broken X setup and every missing application since I started.

I did so because it was free software, and I had decided that I wanted to run my entire system with free software. I felt that dogfooding Linux and improving Linux on a day-to-day basis would help improve this OS as opposed to improving a proprietary OS.

Sure, using a proprietary OS had its benefits: more consistency, more QA, more applications, lots of support, latest video drivers, but they were not free. So I stuck with free software. Today the only proprietary software that I use on my desktop is Flash (I have acrobat installed, but I use Evince instead, keep it for those cases where Evince has a bug).

From my perspective, it is crucial for Linux to have good support for Silverlight because I do not want Linux on the desktop to become a second class citizen ever again.

Robert, you are asking those of us that use FOSS operating systems to "take one for the team" by not endorsing Silverlight, but yet, you are not willing to live among us. If you are going to preach, preach by example.

The core of the debate is whether Microsoft will succeed in establishing Silverlight as a RIA platform or not. You believe that without Moonlight they would not have a chance of success, and I believe that they would have regardless of us.

In fact, I believe strongly that it is part of Microsoft becoming more open and adapting itself to the multitude of shifts in this industry (open sourcing IronPython, IronRuby, the DLR, the JS library for ASP.NET, the MS-PL, the MS-RL, opening up their code, and so on).

Ever since I met Benjamin Zander am a hopeless romantic, and believe in a world of possibility. I find myself to be happier this way than joining these ranks. And what better way of bringing Silverlight to Linux than to work together with Microsoft: they are giving us specs, they are giving us their test suites, and they are providing technical assistance. Its been a pleasure to work with them, and everything we write is open source software, I for one, could not ask for more.

Now, regardless of the strategic discussion about endorsing Silverlight, there are technicalities about Silverlight that make it a fascinating platform. I personally want to write cross platform web applications using C#, Boo, Python and Ruby. And that matters to me, and matters to others.

And I have loved Silverlight since it embedded the CLR runtime. Nothing new there, you can read the gory details of my fascination from back then.

You advocate using standards that are implemented by multiple vendors. But what if none of those vendors is providing what I want? What if the vendors do not care about my opinion?

What we got here is a case of an underserved market.

This is why competition is good. Now Microsoft is providing something that none of the existing web vendors had provided and some of us want. I liked it so much, that I did not hesitate for a second when a journalist asked me whether we would do an OSS implementation of it. "Can I quote you on that?" he said during the coffee break at Mix "Yes, you can".

You talk about Microsoft's control over Silverlight.

What prevents anyone from taking the Moonlight source code, embracing it, extending it, innovate with it, prototype with it, and enter the same cycle that Linux, or web browsers have entered? Or someone turning it into a standard?

Nothing.

The only thing preventing it is lack of imagination.

Wow.

Barack Obama just won in Iowa.

It was nice to see that Dennis Kucinich endorsed Obama on the second Iowa ballot.

I love it! Go Obama!

Obama speech at Youtube.

The guys at Codice Software have just announced the release of their Plastic 2.0 Preview.

Plastic is a cross-platform, distributed source code control management system that has a few interesting features like visualization and it integrates into a number of IDEs.

This is a Windows.Forms application that was originally built for Windows and they have created their own look and feel across multiple platforms. Here is Plastic running on a Mac with our new native drivers for OSX:

And this one is showing their diff tool on Linux:

We are very excited to see a happy Mono user making their software available on new platforms.

For a full tour of the new features see their blog entry.

You can test drive Plastic with their VMware image.

The Plastic guys are great in that they provide great bug reports and are working with our Windows.Forms team to iron out some of the wrinkles in our Windows.Forms implementation.