So why hasn't the UK appealed ISO/IEC DIS 29500 - the attempt to get OOXML, Microsoft's 6000 page "open" document format through ISO?

The Norwegian story, in summary at


here
or

Steve's own blog account


Is, quite frankly, shockingly disgusting.

I wonder how many sysadmins spend some time looking at the logs on their internet-connected machines. I have several such machines and I can guarantee someone is knocking at the door whenever I choose to look at the log.

The other night, a nice Chinese machine was running through a script of silly login names, getting rejected. The day before, a Japanese machine was doing the same thing. They're all wasting their time, because the machines are well locked down, and run only what they need to.

Do you know what ports are open on your net facing kit?

Seven builds on Vista's "solid foundation?"

Well, shucks. Windows, it seems to me, has at least two problems. The first is that it won't scale - either up or down. It runs on chunky AMDtel hardware, and that's it. My HP iPAC (WindowsCE) never ran windows (and, incidentally, is confined to the WPB now - it won't run WPA encryption)

Boys, it has to scale. And to get that to work, you probably have to rewrite things in a modular way from the bottom.

http://wubi-installer.org/

The easiest way to experience Ubuntu Linux.

Dropped it on my laptop. Installed, added itself as a boot, and even my WPA wireless worked.

It was a flashy looking Fujitsu-Siemens Server, with LSI Megaraid and other tasty bits of hardware. I couldn't be bothered to rootle through the manuals.

Within 20 minutes I'd configured the 4 mini-160GB drives into a RAID array with one hot spare, installed Ubuntu Server 8.04 in an LVM Virtual Volume, installed MySQL server and rebooted.

The whole thing just worked. Another 10 mins and it was populated with data.

Fabulous.

I have to say that I think splashtop ( http://www.splashtop.com/index.phpis about the most exciting idea I've read about for many years. An instant-booting "desktop" mini-os that provides you with a browser which works.

Don't bother booting your OS - just start this one.

Well, here's a way to post something, even when I haven't written it.

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12444054231136344423


Newsy stuff from the RSS feeds I read.

Not that I was about to upgrade to Vista, or anything (the 2710, a film/slide scanner doesn't work on Vista) but the installation process, even on XP, was hard work. The ASPI layer had to be there, which meant a genuine "Adaptec" SCSI card, and it always reported itself as an unrecognised device.
I've just moved over to Ubuntu Gutsy for my main workstation setup. I spent a happy hour installing an Acer flatbed, which worked perfectly in xsane - indeed, even better than before on XP.
I put the SCSI card in. I plugged the FS2710 in. I downloaded vuescan from www.hamrick.com - and, lo and behold, it just worked. And the software is far better than Canon's own. I get real, archive quality scans

Cunning photo-filch

Nice email on my flickr account arrived this morning, from a firm setting up an online guide, like, I guess the Rough Planet ones. They were after photographs.

It sounded as if I was about to win a competition. The small print, however, proffered what looked like a contract - I signed away my rights to my image, world-wide, indeed, whether or not I "won".

But they weren't paying.

I withdrew the image from the "competition" which I hadn't entered in the first place.

Harrumph!

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The Stile

The Stile
Originally uploaded by Mark_Twells

Caer Caradoc. An HDR (High Dynamic Range) image, a composite of five bracketed shots.

tops

tops
Originally uploaded by Mark_Twells

More Wild Shropshire.

Stiperstones.

D40

My daughter has just bought a D40. I bought a D50 as a first foray into digital SLR sometime ago, and was pleasantly surprised at what was tucked away, underneath a veneer of beginner-friendly green modes - bracketing, and it even AFd with my mechanically coupled older lenses, like my 55mm Macro-Nikkor.

The D40 has none of that. There's nothing to help the user grow. No bracketing, the Macro-Nikkor won't AF, so the only lenses which will are the electronic focussing ones. Read expensive.

Shame. Nice camera, but a bit limited.

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Les bateaux, Vassivières

Les bateaux, Vassivières, originally uploaded by Mark_Twells.

Minimal. I like it.

HDR

A Windmill, originally uploaded by Mark_Twells.

This has been manufactured out of 5 separate shots - the technique is often referred to as "HDR".

I use 5 shots, separated by 1EV each - 2,-1,0,1,2 EV. I take these ona rigid tripod. These are blended in photomatix (www.hdrsoft.com) into one photograph having "high dynamic range". Only it's too high to display, so the next stop is to tone-map these into a standard image. This is the end result. I often manipulate it a bit further in photoshop too - maybe a little saturation, or a contrast increase.

The end result can be quite dramatic, or quite subtle. This one is somewhere inbetween the two extremes.