50%+ of Standards Norway Tech Ctte Resign Over OOXML Approval

Thirteen of the twenty three members of Standards Norway have resigned over its decision to recommend OOXML to ISO when 19 voted no and 2 voted yes for it (one of whom was Microsoft). The Inquirer has a rough Google translation of the letter, which says things like:

Standard Norway chose to defy their own technical committee and vote yes to a specification that is immature, useless, and unworthy of being called an ISO standard.

and the damning:

The administration of Standard Norway trust 37 identical letters from Microsoft partners more than their own technical committee.

Ars Technica describes that last issue as:

Standards Norway has defended its conduct and asserts that its vote in favor of OOXML approval was based on the outcome of a public inquiry in which a majority of the responses it received encouraged support of OOXML. The standards body has also admitted, however, that a significant number of those responses were identical submissions authored by Microsoft.

All the ex-members say they will continue to work towards meaningful standards outside of Standards Norway.

Neo Freerunner QT Extended Firmware Fixed

Kudos to Lorn from Trolltech/Nokia on being responsive to the timezone problem I blogged about this morning, he’s released a new version of the QT Extended 4.4.1 firmware which fixes the timezone issue and seems to have made the touchscreen behave properly again!

Only downside at the moment is that it doesn’t seem to want to read the battery information, which is going to make life a little hard (and might be an issue with this kernel instead), but this time I’m happy to stick with it.

Victoria has Driest September on Record

Sigh, our 12 year drought continues ever onwards..

With 12 mm for the month, Melbourne has recorded it driest September since records began in 1855. The previous driest was September 1907 when 13.4 mm of rain fell. Historically September is one of Melbourne’s wetter months averaging 57.9 mm.

Looks like we’re also set to record 12 consecutive years of below average rainfall, the previous record was just 6 years. and ss I write Melbourne’s water storages are still under 35% full as we come out of winter.

All of this makes me wonder if some of the concerns about the drought affecting electricity generation last year will start to actually happen this year.