The ISO and IEC have rejected the appeals of South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela and India against the process to vote in Microsoft’s OOXML document standard and given the green light to publish the standard.

ITWorld reports that the ISO and IEC technical boards approved the publication of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, the official name for the OOXML specification, on Friday.

The Consortium Standards Blog is also reporting the news. Consortium also has the detailed results of the voting process on the appeals.

This week’s top jobs include: support engineer, PHP/python developer and senior Java developer. Check out the jobs section for more tech jobs. And if you’re looking for staff then remember, job ads on Tectonic are free.

Dell yesterday announced a brand new range of laptops ranging from ultra-portables to high-end desktop replacement machines.

The really interesting news for Linux fans, however, was Dell’s new “Latitude ON” system which allows for almost instant-on booting when you want to check an email or something on the Internet without booting the entire operating system.

Although Dell didn’t overplay ON, CrunchGear has a few more details:

“By using a secondary processor with its own Linux based OS, the primary CPU is bypassed for instant access to a variety of functions. Think BlackBerry style. Contacts, calendar, email – that kind of stuff – opened up directly on your laptop without firing up the whole system. The dedicated sub-system should also preserve battery life by avoiding the power drain of larger applications.”

Latitude ON will only be available on the E4200 and E4300 laptops for now. The E4200 is a 12.1-inch ultra-portable laptop that weighs in at just 1kg. The bigger E4300 is 0.5kg heavier and has a 13.3-inch screen.

The Ubuntu development team yesterday released the fourth alpha for the upcoming Intrepid Ibex. Due to be released in October this year Intrepid Ibex, or Ubuntu 8.10, will have a strong focus on mobile computing.

Alpha 4 is the fourth in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Intrepid development cycle. The alpha images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Intrepid.

Intrepid tested can download the alpha 4 release from:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/intrepid/alpha-4/ (Ubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/intrepid/alpha-4/ (Ubuntu Education Edition)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/intrepid/alpha-4/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/intrepid/alpha-4/ (Xubuntu)

For those that prefer to wait for a more stable desktop to try out Intrepid, the first beta release of 8.10 is planned for October 2. The final release of 8.10 is scheduled for October 30.

Intrepid Ibex promises to have a number of new features as well as enhancements. Among these is notably faster boot times, better Flash integration and a new desktop theme that was planned for 8.04 but never made the cut. For more on what to expect from Intrepid Ibex see Intrepid Ubuntu plans out.

Software Freedom Day (SFD), the annual global celebration of free software, is scheduled for 20 September this year.

In Johannesburg, however, the celebrations will kick off early when the Department of Science and Technology-sponsored Insitex conference will host a special open source in business focus day at the Sandton Convention Centre on Wednesday 17 September.

One of the organisers of the SFD celebrations, Karl Fischer, says that this year’s event will be bigger than previous events and, thanks to the parallel Insitex conference, will attract a broader range of participants.

Some of the better-known exhibitors at the exhibition will include Red Hat, Obsidian Systems and the Freedom Toaster.

The Wednesday track at the Insitex conference will include a number of presentations on open source software in business.

Registration for the event is free on the Insitex website.

A map of Software Freedom Day events on 20 September can be found here.

Are you organising a Software Freedom Day event? Tell us about it at news@tectonic.co.za.

Students and linguists from Makerere University have translated the open source web browser, Mozilla Firefox, into Luganda at a Translate@thon held on the campus in Kampala, Uganda last week.

The two-day gathering brought together almost 200 students and allowed them to make a practical contribution to their language’s presence in the digital age.

The Translate@thon was a partnership between Makerere University, Rhodes University and Translate.org.za, originators of the Translate@thon concept.

Translate.org.za created the Translate@thon concept and the translation software that allows hundreds of people to translate simultaneously.

Researchers from Rhodes had the idea to run a Translate@thon to coincide with a conference held in Uganda.

The Translate@thon concept has been used in similar events across South Africa. It involves bringing a number of mother tongue speakers together to translate a piece of software into their language.

The students made use of a web-based translation tool called Pootle to make it possible for all 200 students to translate simultaneously. After translating key aspects of the software they spent a large amount of time correcting technical and language errors.

A lot of work remains on the translations, the use of terms needs to be clarified, technical issues need to be resolved but as it stands the product is usable by a Luganda speaker.

A beta test release of the translated software is available from:
http://translate.org.za/content/view/1817/51/.