We're back from a very enjoyable vacation (more on that in a later post.) With the exception of about two hours, we were without phone and internet service most of the trip so I've got some catching up to do :-)
From reading the comments here and a quick skim of my email, it looks like a lot of interesting things have happened in the last week.
First, on the Mars front, Opportunity has driven free of the sand dune that's had her trapped for some time. You can read the good news over at Steve Squyres' weblog. In addition to the great news about the MER, it's also come down from NASA that the 2007 Mars Pheonix Lander has been green-lighted. I mentioned this project back in January (also mentioned in my NASA briefings coverage here, here, and here.) This is an interesting project because it's built from components and ideas originally designed for earlier missions. The lander will arrive at Mars in mid-2008.
On the Firefox front, Deer Park Alpha 1 was released (Chofmann, Chase, Marcia, Tracy, Sarah and Jay, you guys ROCK!)
Also, Firefox is PC World's Best Product of 2005, Brendan's got some updates for the Roadmap, and the 70,000 employees of the US Health Department now have access to Firefox and support via Novell.
In general news of interest to me, and maybe you, C|Net has added an Open Source category to its C|NET Networks UK Technology Awards, XYZ Computing says that the browser wars are back, Google announced the Summer of Code, and Yahoo is beta'ing a new kind of search.
Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention that Microsoft announced that IE 7 will not be available for Win2K. This comes as no surprise to me. For the 200+ million users of pre-XP systems: Microsoft has abandoned you. It's time to Get Firefox!
Tomorrow I return to work and more regular blogging.
