OK, I spoke too soon, I’m back running the 4.3.3 snapshot due to people complaining about echo on the phone. Oh well! 🙁
Author Archives: Chris Samuel
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.
Qt Extended (Qtopia) 4.4.1 on the Neo Freerunner
Just upgraded my Neo Freerunner to the new Qtopia, er, Qt Extended release (4.4.1) and I’m now downgrading back to the 4.3.3-snapshot I fortunately kept around. I can’t change my timezone and the touchscreen has become overly sensitive, so I’m going to wait for the next release I think.
Hey ho!
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.
Google Chrome
At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.†While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome.
The Wikipedia page has more info, apparently it’s based on WebKit. Expect the Windows beta in the next day or so, with Linux and OSX to come. Open source of course.
Next Debian release name announced
Squeeze
If you don’t recognise the name from Toy Story, here’s a small hint.. 😉
Image courtesy of Jean-Etienne Poirrier under a CC license.
New theme – Atahualpa
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!
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!