A single slide from my talk on data recovery (XHTML)

Below is a snippet from an amusing BBC article.

One incident involved a dog that used a USB flash drive as a chew toy and almost ate all its owner’s data.

[...]

But top of the list is an old laptop containing key company data that was found filled with cockroach corpses.

It seems as though computer disasters and Darwin awards are becoming a golden source of joy to the computer literate. This could leverage tentions. People should never be humiliated for being unfamiliar with technology, but then again, this is a blog…

Similar items:

• Data Loss Humor
• iPod nano Crash Testing

Wikipedia will never collect dust on the shelves

A story that has hit many headlines speaks of Wikipedia closing a few doors, making it slightly more difficult to contribute content.

For more details, select your favourite source:

• ZDNet: Growing pains for Wikipedia
• CNN: Online encyclopedia tightens rules
• Associated Press (via Yahoo): Wikipedia Tightens Submission Rules
• CNET/Slashdot: Wikipedia to Restrict Creation of Articles

Related item: Wikipedia Statistics

Example of globe-like rotation: 30 frames, 63 colours, 200 KB in total

ACK in July, I elaborately described how animated graphics can be created in the GIMP. The GIMP is a free application, which is available for Windows, the Mac and Linux. There is also GIMPShop in the wild, which is a nifty GIMP fork for the photoshop-inclined audience.

I recently decided to change my static favicon.ico image with a dynamic sequence, having discovered that Mozilla Firefox supports icon animations. GIMP was a satisfactory (yet not perfect) tool for this task.

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OpenDocument may lead the way to Web-based office suites
(TinyMCE is shown for illustrational purposes only)

TAGED acceptance of the OpenDocument standard was discussed in the context of Massachusetts. It was also argued, with timely backing from the media, that corporate Open Source migrations are no longer the exception. Finally, IBM have big plans for OpenDocument, which they can vigorously employ and help spread.

IBM plans to support early next year the OpenDocument standard in its desktop software, a product the company intends to market aggressively in developing countries.

IBM and their occasional Open Source push gets mentioned in an article titled “Is Open Source Really Just as Good”? (Part I, Part II – published today)

While I didn’t say it explicitly, when companies like IBM, HP, Novell, Dell and even Sun are driving the adoption, deployment and support of various parts of the LAMP stack in the enterprise, it’s safe to say that the ecosystem for many open source projects is thriving…

Hotter among the gamers’ headlines: Quake4 Demo for Linux

I will not be going on vacation this Christmas, even though I did last year. I wouldn’t describe a wintry vacation as one which is anywhere near optimal. Instead, I will take my vacation in late January when flights get cheaper. The fare somehow makes up for the desire (or lack thereof) to travel.

This month I will attend 4 formal Christmas events. As usual, this proves to be the most social time of the year, which happens to incorporate a diverse professional and recreational ‘hattery’. I will be going parties involving my following affiliations:

• IT Services
• Manchester Computing
• Health Club (Midland Hotel)
• Research Division (namely Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering)

The parties are spread compfortably throughout the month of December. The celebration of Christmas, on its own right, will be quite costly this year. And yet, perhaps needless to mention, I very much look forward to it all.

Technical note: those who still use Internet Explorer (which is buggy) will have the tree rendered wrongly, position-wise. Version 6 still fails to cope with images alongside itemised lists (bulletpoints). Admittedly, I am through being kind and tolerant to Explorer bugs because they hinder Web development world-wide.

The answer is actually rather complex.

The Free Software Foundation in France argues that the French government considers a ban on free software. Taking into account the possible implications (namely controversy), I initially believed this to be an overstatement or a case of quote-mining.

Will the French be forced to use Internet Explorer (bearing in mind that Opera is now free)? I am not sure what the motive of the government actually is, but I can only speculate. Perhaps it is shielding people’s jobs — primarily in the software industry, that is. Maybe it is the realisation of that DRM and the like suffer from OSS (if not vice versa).

Clarifications soon emerged in a newsgroup that I regularly read (posted by 7):

What they are trying to say is that a new law passed in France will allow those that publish any software to access protected content will face prosecution from those that are harmed by that software. Because any software can become a target, even free software is also a target.

It seems fatally flawed, because you could publish it as two separate modules and have the thing working only when they are brought together by the user as happens now with certain codecs.

In any case, the whole world is running away from DRM because it denies mind share and contributes to elimination of public interest in a companies product, and thus eliminate their revenue!

The day is coming when DRM is burned along side the word hate in the public’s mind.

And nobody will want to touch it and instead opt to go with sharing friendly companies that allows media to be downloaded and stored permanently and transferrably on hard disks and players.

In other (and better) news, the 2008 Olympic Games aim for an Open Source migration.

Contextually-related : No Software Patents in Europe

It appears as though the “drink one glass of wine every day” advice is based on fallacies.

Any heart gains from drinking alcohol in moderation are likely outweighed by the harm, say researchers.

The findings in The Lancet suggest that drinking a glass or two of wine a day may not be such a good idea.

[...]

There was a period of time when I drank a glass of wine on occasions, sometimes daily (I was significantly younger). There is an augmented argument that any research, or even contention which people are willing to or believe, will be embraced without hesitance. ‘Benefits’ of caffeine come to mind. This is one among many recent articles, but the one I originally read was in The Independent. Last week I read about beer as a cancer treatment. Wishful thinking is probably what feeds those statements and drives (if not finances) the research.

[sarcasm] “Mind you doctor, I’ll just have some more beer, but purely for medicinal purposes of course…” [/sarcasm].

Contextually related: Coffee Beer