If Vern Yip is reading this, I still need your help. Though Sweet Home 3D tops Google's SketchUp in a number of areas, it's still not much help for someone with no design sense.

This makes it even more odd that I was so excited when I spotted Elizabeth Krumbach's post on the open source, cross platform 3D interior design modeling application. I've lived in my house for nine years -- we have shades on all the windows, but only one window has actual curtains. It's just that SketchUp is a fun little application, and it's one of the only applications I've tried to run with WINE (and failed miserably in the attempt).

Sweet Home 3D, as Krumbach says, is pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Because it's open source, there's the potential to model a structure (and the stuff that fills it) to a whole new level of precision. Perhaps the only drawback (and it could be a machine quirk, as everything's being difficult today) was its seeming somewhat crashprone on my Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit laptop. That could also be chalked up to my learning curve. But let's take a closer look.

Moblin version 2.0 video - finally, a real mobile UI for netbooks. Check out the video here for a look at Intel's Moblin OS, optimized for Atom chips.

If Oracle commits to Solaris, will IBM buy Red Hat? Oracle may offer customers attractive terms to stay on Solaris, affecting migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Can open source refuse to do business? If an open source developer doesn't like someone, can he or she obstruct usage of applications?

Internet.com launches online freelance marketplace. It's free to join, post projects, bid on projects, and seek freelance gigs.

Biomedical informatics researchers at IBM and the Mayo Clinic launch a new open source consortium. It will focus on large-scale data aggregation, and ease mining of medical records.

Oracle has released a PDF transcript of an interview with CEO Larry Ellison regarding its plans following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While the interview doesn't delve into the many questions surrounding what Oracle will do with Sun's open source products and initiatives, it does make very clear that Oracle will retain and extend Sun's hardware business, focusing on "designing hardware and software to work together." That's going to be a complicated proposition for Oracle, and, as one observer notes, it may be good news for Linux.