Category: tech

A slight case of synchronicity. Yesterday we had a discussion about what we would do when people stop making VCRs. We have hundreds of video tapes, both bought and recorded from the TV, and it would be a pain to not be able to watch them again once our last VCR hits the dust. The… Continue reading Death of the VCR

Normally I’d be happy if my web sites got high Google ratings, but this is a bit weird. Many years ago I bought the domain ars.org.uk. I used it to host an Agency Rating System where IT contractors could share opinions about recruitment agents they had worked with. After a few years of operation it… Continue reading Weird Googling

There’s another piece about Firefox in this weeks Guardian Online. Once again it emphasises the fact that Firefox is only one of a number of pieces of open source software that organisations should be investigating. The significance of these developments becomes clear from research published in August by the British Computer Society. Among those Britons… Continue reading More Firefox Press

Ben Hammersley talks about a new kind of comment spam that he’s been getting. I’ve been getting exactly the same thing here and my theories run along very similar lines. I’ve been nuking them.

Today’s Guardian leader has a very nice piece about Firefox and how it’s slowly but surely eating away at IE’s market share. Firefox deserves to succeed, but even if it does not it will have highlighted the astonishing success of open source, well known inside the web community but not outside. Among other services, it… Continue reading Firefox in the Press

Like many of us, my friend Dave has a number of photos on his web site. Recently he started to see a large number of requests for this photo. On further investigation he discovered that this forum was using it as a background image. Without asking permission and without taking the obvious step of taking… Continue reading Stealing Bandwidth is Bad

Michael Cross (no relation) reports on the announcement of a shift in the UK government’s attitudes to Open Source software. The Treasury’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC), set up to get better value from government procurements, will today announce that open source is a “viable desktop alternative for the majority of users” and that it… Continue reading Open Source in Government

According to a report from Netcraft it appears that Dubya’s campaign web site is refusing connections from servers outside of the US. I just tested it and they seem to be correct. From a machine in the UK I get a “connection refused” message. But from a machine in the US I can connect without… Continue reading A Local Site For Local People

Synchronicity at work. Yesterday I posted a comment on Simon Waldman’s blog which included a link to a Wikipedia article. Today the Guardian publishes an article about Wikipedia written by Simon. It’s an interesting article, it mentions Wikipedia’s roots in the Open Source movement tho’ it stops shop of discussing the whole wiki phenomenon. Simon… Continue reading Wikipedia

If you’re reading this thru some kind of RSS aggregator thing (and if you don’t know what that means then you almost certainly aren’t) then you might be interested switching to my new feed from FeedBurner. It combines elements from davblog, my Flickr photostream and my links page at del.icio.us. The address to use is… Continue reading Feedburner