Mr President, you have gone to the trouble of establishing a heavyweight advisory body on technology. I beg you: talk to Mark Shuttleworth and Larry Ellison before signing the Electronic Communications and Transactions Bill.

Last week saw the Idion/DataMirror Vlok family shares saga as well as the increasingly heated row over the .za domain.

Amid the excitement of World Cup fever, a solitary piece of government-related news has been cutting a swathe through the tabloids and talk shows on this humid little isle.

Announcements over the past couple of weeks have finally formalised what many in the industry have long been expecting: the time is ripe for consolidation in the Linux market.

The debate around who should control the .za domain centres around what is really a minor technical matter. Yet the battle is also a harbinger of future conflicts and raises fundamental questions as to the structure of our democracy.

The trend this year seems to take a leaf from an older book of business strategy - bringing content management, digital marketing and e-commerce solutions back in-house for small and medium enterprises.

Last week saw ICASA and Telkom reach an out-of-court settlement regarding the tariff hikes introduced at the beginning of the year.

The comparisons with sports coaching are obvious - a dedicated person whose sole purpose it is to guide a team or an individual to victory.

The local ECT Bill, European data retention rules, and the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act are all proof: the days of a benign technical dictatorship are over. Now the geeks, disillusioned after political defeat, need to counter-attack.

Last week saw another development in the Idion/DataMirror saga, as well as a flood of local financial results.

The current ad campaign for Lucozade demonstrates just how poorly executed a cross-media campaign can be.

Answering a recent quiz on the GNU General Public Licence and the Lesser General Public Licence brought home the fact that these important open source documents have evolved to become exceptionally complex.

Idion and DataMirror may well have to talk at some level now that the Canadian company has a large stake in locally-listed Idion.