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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Hope there was nothing older than 30 days in anyone's HotMail 'Sent' folders, because MSFT has decided you don't need it any more and deleted it for you.

posted at 10:14 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

People have been sniggering behind their hands about it for ages, but the Semantic Web begins to make sense when you read the future history of the thing.

posted at 10:06 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Anyone seen 'Wag The Dog'? This article from Truthout says that there will be a US-Iraq war this October, that the forces are already essentially committed, that it's not necessary in international terms and that it's being conducted to create the necessary patriotic fervour to get Bush the domestic political advantage he needs. Scary stuff. Not hard to believe. Michael Moore (of "Stupid White Men" (US|UK) fame) suggests Americans contact the Senate right now to get a key witness in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Oh, and the Ironic Times has a feature on How US Foreign Policy is Made.

posted at 9:26 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

I've been playing with a Canon macro ring light (MR-14EX), a flash that clips to the front of the lens to help with macro photographs. Love it so far - can't wait to get back out in the New Forest.

posted at 2:09 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

OpenOffice.Org is the free, feature-complete open source project of which StarOffice is a distribution (in the same way that Red Hat is a distribution of Linux. I am very excited by the fact that there is a rapidly maturing Mac version of OpenOffice.Org and if I was a Mac programmer I would be offering my help to the project; after all, in the present climate where the MSFT-Apple marriage is heading for divorce, a good alternative to MS Office will be needed on the Mac.

posted at 7:39 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

StarOffice is at number 3 in the Amazon.co.uk Hot 100 Software right now. A surge of popularity inspired by MSFT licensing deadlines perhaps?

posted at 1:16 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

The sort of comment that this analyst from Ovum makes really annoys me for its shallowness. His assertion is that Microsoft is "way ahead in Web services" is based on the fact that Microsoft has lots of tools for doing what they define as Web services, and that he in the UK is able to easily get hold of these tools. When I define a term as "what I do best" it is hardly surprising to find that I will be the one doing it best, and right now that's the level of his discussion. But there are other, more objective measures. I'll not assert (this time, anyway) that MSFT is either ahead, behind or level on Web services, but a definition that excludes enterprise openness and choice, transactionality, content-level interoperability and pretty much any other criterion apart from availability of tools for hacking is flawed and tiresome.

posted at 1:07 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

The BBC is reporting the use of fireflies to track cancer by a university in California. What they don't comment on, though is that as there are no fireflies native to California (at least, as far as I know - maybe you know better? I am always eager to meet the California Firefly - maybe at a great restaurant with a bunch of flowers?) they must have to import all of them from east of the Rockies.

posted at 1:52 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

The story that hit the Washington Post this weekend about George Bush and insider trading broke in the UK much earlier (I guess the Fourth of July is a great time to allow a scandal to break un-noticed), which makes the commentary ("Captain Hook calls for New Laws to Deter Plundering") in the Ironic Times all the more amusing, in a Michael Moore sort of way.

posted at 8:51 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Warning to potential customers: Pipex in the UK may offer a cheap DSL service, but they took Susanna's shop offline on Thursday evening "for maintenance" and it only came back up today, Monday, around 1pm. Pretty lousy service.

posted at 1:18 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Just to prove nothing is sacred, not even when celebrated by Flanders and Swann, it seems that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is nothing more than a bylaw.

posted at 9:06 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

The big obstacle to MSFT Palladium? Well, Dave Winer alludes to it but it's broader than he asserts. It's not just developer trust - it's everyone's trust, as Dan Gillmor points out. Palladium creates a world where only MSFT's friends can play. We can't allow that to happen. They eat their friends - spam made from Soylent Green, anyone?

posted at 8:02 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Finally we can see where crop circles come from - corporations via advertising agencies.

posted at 6:40 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

The fuss over the JPEG patent just serves to underline my growing feeling that it's a mistake to let anyone proceed with RAND licensing of any kind. OK, the miscreants in this case weren't part of JPEG, but the issue is of sleeper IP, which can come from anywhere. The cute fluffy term that RAND represents (Reasonable And Non Discriminatory) makes it all sound so, well, reasonable, but the truth is that reserved rights of any kind are counter to the very idea of infrastructure standards in a net-effect world. Rights reserved during the standardisation process restrict the ability of the participants to experiment with the ideas offered - they have no idea what rights they have or whether they could be sued. Rights reserved, even under zero royalty (today), result in the possibility of a change of the "reasonable" terms in the future. The only way to create new markets and trust is the release of rights, possibly with the protection of compatibility through some mechanism.

posted at 1:44 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Just heard from Guy Kewney - he was asking about Kyocera's forthcoming Java based PDA, which led me to reflect on the Sharp Zaurus. I own a Zaurus (picked it up at JavaOne) and actually quite like it - as a first-generation device I think they have hit a whole load of the targets, not least getting a good developer community off the ground. They do need to loop round and bring out a v2 very fast though, to fix all the second-order niggles it undoubtedly has. Right now the Zaurus sits in the lounge with a WiFi card in it as a remote control for the Audiotron.

My next true PDA will be a smart phone, but I've not seen one yet that quite fits the bill - compact, with a bluetooth headset, 3G data connectivity for always-on browsing, Java-based desktop and tri-band with data roaming.

posted at 11:52 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |