And I'll start with more Haiku Code Drive 2008 news. As of this moment, the total of donations has reached USD $5262.97. Now that's just awesome. In a week or so, the community has come together and donated over five thousand dollars (which comes to about €5 at the current exchange rate ;) ), which shows this OS and its community's strenghth. The poll is now open and you, after you login, can vote on your favorite project. The voting will end May 29th, 23:59 PST (04:59 GMT). So get your voting hat on and make your choice.

Midweek, stippi posted a status update and named it, rightly so, "Steady Progress towards Alpha 1". He mentions two important milestones in order to reach this goal, which were just now overcome. First, Ingo and Axel have squashed bug 2059, which would send the user to a trip down KDL lane, after some intense disk activity. Second, they reached a steady build system for a mixed GCC2/GCC4 Haiku environment. This was started by another coder extraordinaire, Michael Lotz, and recently, with the help of Ingo, this goal was reached.

Everyone involved in the project deserve a huge "thank you" and recognition for their hard work, both coders, testers, users and community members. I think there's little doubt, at this pace, that Alpha state (and who knows if higher still) will be reached before this year is up and I for one can't wait for it. Now if only someone got a NDIS wrapper working, for some WiFi loving ;)