There are few certainties in life. Death, taxes and Microsoft FUD are three of them—and the fact that, sooner or later, upgrading Firefox is going to break one or more of your killer extensions.

Ever since I first fired up KDE on openSuSE, I’ve been in love. The KDE interface just swept me off my feet. But there’s always been one nagging thing. Firefox and Thunderbird stick out like two sore thumbs. They don’t look like KDE apps (see figure 1 and figure 4), they don’t work with KDE programs (like KPrinter), and they just don’t feel like they belong in KDE. Luckily, since both of these apps have support for add-ons, it is easy to remedy this.

As you may know, Debian 4.0 stable ‘Etch’ is almost out. As expected from the Debian project, it will be a very stable, feature-ladden if slightly outdated OS.

What you may not know, is that it will come without Firefox. Nope, no fox trailing fire on your Debian desktop, no sir.

Instead you’ll get Iceweasel.

One of my tasks at work is to write, enhance and maintain a small website for my boss. Having been given free reign, I—of course—decided to host it on a LAMP server. No trouble here. Not wanting to use outdated technology that would require extensive rewriting after a few years, I decided to stick to standards—and I learnt XHTML 1.1.

Break a leg, or break a page.

I would like to recount if I may an experience I had earlier this week. I think it’s an example of the importance of software companies having to eventually accept the free-as-in-speech software business model, and the danger of alienation if they do not. First though, to set the scene…