I’ve swapped to a new theme called Atahualpa which looks quite nice and has a lot of configuration settings to tweak, as well as being a variable width three column theme. As usual if you spot any problems please let me know!
Monthly Archives: August 2008
Microsoft goes back on IE8 standards promise for Intranet sites
So much for Microsoft promises, according to El Reg:
The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.
The icon they’ve selected for standards compliant pages is also a little odd.. 
I do prefer El Reg’s idea that they use the ACID2 test image instead..
OOXML more complicated than the CERN Large Hadron Collider
Matt, a friend of mine, paraphrasing a comment on Slashdot:
All the documentation on building the LHC has gone online – at 1600 pages of documentation, it’s easier to build your own LHC than it is to write an OOXML translator.
Roll on September 10th!
IPv6
Glen Turner has a nice blog on th what was going on at AusNOG, well worth a read if you’re a fan of the end-to-end connectivity model.
Back from AusNOG. It’s now clear that allocations of new IPv4 addresses will cease in 2010, so a lot of the conference was about NAT and IPv6. […] So it’s going to be “carrier-class network address translation”. That is, your ISP will run NAT (and if you are the average customer, you will run NAT on your ADSL router too).
This will give the ISP’s far more control than they have now (forget net neutrality) and so if you want to escape from these potential walled gardens you’re going to be needing IPv6 to continue to enjoy what you currently have access to now..
Scalable Informatics looking for HPC people in Michigan
The ever helpful Joe Landman at Scalable Informatics is looking for good HPC folks around the South East Michigan area, contact info and a bit more information is on their website.
Breakin – stress test and hardware diagnostics for Intel and AMD systems
At the start of August Jason Clinton from Advanced Clustering Technologies Inc. posted a link to the “Breakin” tool that they created (and open sourced) for hardware stress-tests and diagnostics. He wrote:
We have a tool on our website called “breakin” that is Linux 2.6.25.9 patched with K8 and K10f Opteron EDAC reporting facilities. It can usually find and identify failed RAM in fifteen minutes (two hours at most). The EDAC patches to the kernel aren’t that great about naming the correct memory rank, though.
If you read the website though you’ll find it does a lot more than that, which is pretty cool. Be aware that it does use the Intel and AMD closed source maths libraries though if you’re sensitive to non-free software.
MythTV Electronic Program Guide HOWTO for Australia
Chris Smart has written an excellent little guide for getting a decent program guide into MythTV in Australia. It walks you through how to go from scratch through installing and configuring Shepherd to getting the data into the MythTV database. I’ve just used it on my Mythbuntu box and it’s looking good!
Next step – get it to record Time Team every time it appears.. 😉
Normal Service Resumed
An unfortunate clash between some old .htaccess rules for the WPG2 plugin and WordPress resulted in all subpages of this blog being unavailable for over a day! 🙁
It’s fixed now, but apologies for the inconvenience..
RIP Bob Humphreys, BBC Wales Sports Reporter (retired)
When I lived in Wales, or visited my folks after I’d left, I’d always end up hearing Bob Humphreys on the BBC talking about the rugby. He was a familiar sight and sound and so it was sad to hear that he’s died at the age of 56 of lung cancer. The WRU also has a tribute up for him.
ISO rejects appeals against OOXML
So OOXML, the spec that nobody implements, not even Microsoft, and which isn’t even publicly available in its final form has had the four big appeals against it rejected. 🙁
A triumph of lobbying, committee stacking, hidden agendas and special interests over common sense and due process. I think ISO has just made itself irrelevant to future standards.