Category: General
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Freedom and copyright
A statement by John Sullivan from the FSF in the US has just been posted and sheds a lot of light on the ongoing RIAA lawsuits which the RIAA themselves said they would be dropping earlier this year. What is interesting about the article is the continued view that music, art and software, and the…
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Code/Software quality
Code quality and quality of software development/applications has always been a hot topic. The problem in the commercial world is that because code is closed source, you as a customer of a commercial software vendor, have no idea what the quality is of that application because you have no access to the code. Code could…
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Breaking News!!! – CONSEGI Declaration: 6 nations say no to ISO/IEC
The fallout from the ISO confirmation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML Specification as a standard, continues and is starting to lead to some serious consequences. The recent conference in South/Latin America focusing on free software, drew some 2000 registrants to the IT event, many of whom were top government officials. The outcome ( and declaration…
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Reiser and ReiserFS
Hans Reiser has been found guilty on the charge of 1st degree murder ( of his wife ) yesterday. From the little information I’ve read in the press, I understand that there’s mostly circumstantial evidence in this case, and the body of Hans’ wife hasn’t even been found. Based on this, I’m quite surprised with…
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Open Document Standards
OOXML has gained ISO approval even though the process leading up to this was seriously flawed. I think the following points apply: ISO is no longer an open standards organisation and are in Big Business pockets There was not enough time to go through the changes that were requested in the last round of voting…
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A SciFi legend …
has died – Arthur C. Clarke ( author of 2001: A Space Oddysey amongst many others ) died today in Sri Lanka aged 90.
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Translate.org.za
has won the pan SA Language Board award for contribution to multi-lingualism and nation building over the past decade
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US Patent process
There is an interesting project underway in the US from the USPTO which has started the Peer to Patent Project, through New York Law school. Basically it would allow public input on patent quality.
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WordPress 2.1
I’ve just upgraded to WP 2.1 and it’s fairly straightforward – no problems encountered and the new features are great – can you spell spell checking?
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Africa Aerospace and Defense false start
A pilot was killed this afternoon when his L-29 Delfin jet trainer crashed into sea near Milnerton, Cape Town. This is a sad start to the AAD exhibition which is being held at Ysterplaat Airforce Base this weekend. For more information on the AAD, please consult their website.
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PirateBay
Well it looks like after all the fuss, ThePirateBay has moved back to Sweden … they’ve got an interesting reverse DNS entry now: “hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.thepiratebay.org.” All the fuss actually resulted in a doubling of traffic which has now gone back to normal.
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Gallery
Taking the cue from 30boxes, I’ve added a new php app called Gallery to my site available here. It’s a very flexible app allowing you to upload images in a variety of ways and view them using your choice of layouts and themes. The current version is 2.1rc2 and it’s more than usable with no…
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Flickr
The site where you can share, tag, search and organise your personal photos – flickr – check out the following for my pic of the day http://www.flickr.com/photos/cameralucida/114080171/ – Photo Booth
