Bah, the Dapper Drake Live CD still panics on my machine with an Adaptec 2100S card – they’ve still not fixed bug 17897 that’s the result of it wrongly loading both the dpt_i2o driver and the I2O subsystem. 🙁

This is fairly old news now but MIT have developed a US$100 laptop that runs Linux for distribution to schools in the developing world via government programs. MIT has a website for the laptop (which is not yet in production), but the pictures that are available show it in a rather shocking luminous green colour!

The specs are (according to the FAQ):

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop that will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data. This rugged laptop will be WiFi-enabled and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.

There is no “Why that colour ?” question in the FAQ unfortunately..

This looks like rather a nice tool if you’re curious as to what the black hats are up to at the moment – mwcollect simulates an insecure system and, when attacked, works out whether the exploit is trying to download some remote code and obligingly fetches it for you and quarrantines it for later inspection.

Or at least that’s what it says on the site, I’m blogging this as a bookmark so I can have a play at some point..

From the LWN kernel page discussing implementing support for the IBM “hard drive active protection system”:

The theory of operation here is that a user-space daemon will be monitoring the status of the system, as reported by the accelerometer. Should this daemon note that the laptop has begun to accelerate, it will quickly write a value to the protect attribute for each drive in the system. The drives will respond by parking the disk heads, and, in any other possible way, telling the drive to crawl into its shell and prepare for impact. Once the event has transpired, the shattered remains of the laptop can attempt to resume normal operation.

Thanks for the laugh John!

Just found this via LWN (subliminal: go there and subscribe), a Wiki page of the major changes between kernel releases. LWN says:

The entries go all the way back to 2.5.1 (released almost four years ago) and provide a list of relevant changes for each release.

Dan Bricklin has put up a blog entry with his thoughts on the MA ODF meeting along with 3 audio files containing a total of almost 4 hours audio for the meeting.

From Groklaw – a blog of notes from the Massachusetts ODF Meeting where some pollies registered some displeasure of having not been involved, and sounded like they’d been reading too much misinformation from Microsoft. 🙁

There does appear to be at least one valid issue, and that is disability access, though sadly I’ve not seen details of what this exact problem is. Personally I would thought that to be an implementation issue rather than a document format issue, so I’m probably missing something there because Andy writes:

The disability issues are real, and the ITD seems to have been caught off guard on this. They should have been all over this issue a year ago, but seem to be going in the right direction now. Still, a bad tactical — and ethicall — mistake.
(sic)

These two quotes in particular from Andy’s blog are quite telling:

Senator Pacheco doesn’t understand the difference between open source and open standards (and certainly doesn’t understand the difference between OpenDocument and OpenOffice). More than once, he indicated that he thought that the policy would require the Executive Agencies to use OpenOffice, not realizing that there are other compliant alternatives.

The hearing was stacked against the positive, in that although Quinn and ITD General Counsel Linda Hamel were given plenty of opportunity to speak and answer questions, no one else who was in favor of the new policy was permitted to give testimony (I know of at least one major, supporting vendor that tried and was refused), nor were any questions from the audience allowed.

Update: Scanning through Andy’s real-time notes shows another interesting little factoid:

the new policy applies only to the Executive Agencies. It does not apply to the Judiciary, although the Judiciary is actually way ahead of us, with over 2000 desktops already ODF enabled.

So James has written a very enthusiastic & spot on piece about Annodex, the open source technology from CSIRO that allows you to annotate and index multimedia files (using patent and royalty free codecs, though legacy non-free ones like MPEG-1 are usable in the short term).

I was lucky enough to be at both the presentation and fixit session for Annodex at LCA 2004 and have to say it sounded like an excellent technology, one that is long overdue and badly needed.

The ability to hyperlink into a given time range of a media file and then have just that segment sent to you (rather than having to get everything up to that range, or even worse, the entire file) is, I believe, perhaps its strongest feature.

I made a heap of notes in the presentation, but they’re at work and I’m not, so I can’t make any more comments about what occurred to me about it’s other possible uses..

If it wasn’t bad enough that Microsoft had a patent granted on Apple’s wheel thingy on the iPod after the iPod was on the market now a company in the US is claiming to have patents that cover XML for the transfer of “data in neutral forms”.

The ray of light is that there is a good chance that the patent could be ruled unenforceable in a court of law, as the report points out:

Patent lawyer Bruce Sunstein, a co-founder of Boston-based Bromberg & Sunstein, viewed Scientigo’s patents and concluded that the company will have difficulty in enforcing claims over XML.

Sunstein noted that XML is derived from SGML, which dates back to the 1980s. SGML, in turn, is based on computing concepts from the 1960s. If Scientigo’s claims were ever litigated, the company would have to address all the prior work on data formats.

Update: Groklaw now has a report on these patent claims.