Phlogiston

Yay!

To add to the very long list of awards they’ve already won, RE5ULT (no, I am not responsible for that dreadful website), the company I am working for here in Cambridge, have just won Shell LiveWIRE Eastern Region Young Entrepeneurs Of The Year 2005. I’ll be looking forward to them cleaning up at the UK final on 22nd June.

Well done Thomas and Sarah! (Note to self: start charging them more.)

Update: Holy crap, that picture wasn’t on that page when I first linked to it. Thomas and Sarah don’t actually look like that, in case you thought I was working for a couple of people on day release from the loony bin.

Time Magazine’s movie critics, Richard Corliss and Richard Schikel, have compiled their list of all-time 100 Movies. I have to say that there’s little to fault in their choice, although it wouldn’t quite be mine.

Drool. Nokia unveiled its Linux based 770 Internet Tablet at the LinuxWorld summit in New York. The Nokia 770 is absolutely gorgeous, and features “a high resolution touch screen with Wi-Fi 802.11b/g and Bluetooth 1.2 serving up connectivity”.

The Nokia 770

The Nokia 770 uses a software platform called Maemo, based around Linux, GTK+, GStreamer, GConf, and dbus. This is a completely open source, free software device. It is so good to see companies like Nokia, Novell, IBM and Sun seeing the light.

Nokia worked in conjunction with a number of Open Source companies on this, such as:

• Opened Hand (press release)
• Imendio (press release)
• Fluendo (there’s no press release yet, but Christian Schaller confirmed their involvement)

And as if to prove that Nokia really do get it, they’ve also issued a press release announcing that it allows all its patents to be used in the further development of the Linux Kernel.

Nokia believes that open source software communities, like open standards, foster innovation and make an important contribution to the creation and rapid adaptation of technologies.

Unlike other open standards, however, many open source software projects rely only on copyright licenses that often do not clarify patent issues. Nokia believes that the investment made by so many individuals and companies in creating and developing the Linux Kernel and other open source software deserve a framework of certainty.

I have to have one of these.

Monday saw the final stage of the ratification of OpenDocument 1.0, the Open Document Format for Office Applications by OASIS, the international e-business standards consortium.

OpenDocument provides a royalty-free, XML-based file format that covers features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents.

“XML doesn’t always mean open. You can hide a lot in a file format. OpenDocument represents an opportunity to ensure truly open file formats for productivity applications, which is why it will receive the enthusiastic support of public sector steering organizations on a global basis,” commented James Governor, principal analyst at RedMonk. “The participation of enterprises in vertical industries, such as aerospace, will also ensure adoption in the private sector. One key to success will be the royalty free status of the spec; there are no financial penalties associated with developing to it.”

“Office productivity applications and the documents they create are key to today’s knowledge economy. Information critical to the long term functioning of any organization is stored in the spreadsheets, presentations, and text documents its employees create,” said Michael Brauer of Sun Microsystems, chair of the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee. “Today, for the first time in the 25-year history of office applications, such documents can be stored in an open, standardized, and vendor-independent format.”

OpenDocument provides a single XML schema for text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. It makes use of existing standards, such as HTML, SVG, XSL, SMIL, XLink, XForms, MathML, and the Dublin Core, wherever possible. OpenDocument has been designed as a package concept, enabling it to be used as a default file format for office applications with no increase in file size or loss of data integrity.

“OpenDocument is a fine example of an OASIS Standard that originated in and continues to be endorsed by the open source community,” noted Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS.

Erwin Tenhumberg’s blog has further details.

ComputerWeekly is reporting further developments: Bristol ready to put open source on 3,500 desktops. The report not only mentions Bristol City councils rollout of StarOffice (a version of OpenOffice.org) across 3,500 desktops but also Birmingham City Councils announcement of a 1,500 seat pilot of a completely open source desktop based on Linux.

Nat Friedman’s blog consistently makes me laugh. I particularly liked his own self-diagnosis of ADD and his transcript of slacker awkwardness.

Miguel de Icaza has some further details about George Galloway’s testimony before the US senate:

• A transcript of his testimony.
• A video of his testimony.
• Some commentary by ex-UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter.

I’m heading off (now) to Cambridge again, for another two or three weeks work. As before, I’ll probably be working ridiculous hours, so I might not be that responsive to emails or comments on the blog.

Oh. My. God. This is so unbelievably cool: TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook. Apparently I have been living under a rock, as it has been out for quite some time and yet I’ve only just noticed it. (Hannu, it seems, has known about it for ages. Hannu, I hate to be mean—well, actually I rather enjoy it—but for someone who is supposed to be writing up your PhD thesis don’t you find it worrying that you apparently spend even more of your life browsing the web than I do?)

So, TiddlyWiki is a Wiki, like WikiPedia, but it is a bit different too:

A Wiki is a popular way of building collaborative websites. It’s based on the ideas of easy editing of pages and the use of special WikiWord notation to automagically create links between pages. See Wikipedia for more details. TiddlyWiki is different from a conventional Wiki because it is not based on entire pages of content, but rather items of MicroContent that are referred to as ‘tiddlers’.

Also, unlike normal Wikis TiddlyWiki is not a server side application at all, in fact it doesn’t work on a server. Even more astonishingly, it is one single file. The file contains all of the Javascript, CSS and XHTML that you need, and runs as a rich web application in your browser (like Google Maps). This one single file is both application and data.

You can use it for anything, but the obvious use would be for note taking. I can’t get over how clever it is. In fact it’s such an impressive piece of coding that my admiration is slowly turning into rancorous envy.

To use it yourself, simply download the file (right-click on the link and select “Save as …”) to your computer, and then open it in your browser. You can delete anything you like, edit what you want, create new entries, etc. It all gets saved back to the one single file you downloaded. It’s really incredibly nifty. (Mac OS X users will probably need to use Firefox, as it doesn’t apparently work very well in Safari.)

If any of you are devotees of David Allen’s Getting things Done then you will be interested to know about GTD Tiddly Wiki:

GTD Tiddly Wiki is a Getting Things Done adaptation by Nathan Bowers of Jeremy Ruston’s Open Source TiddlyWiki. The purpose of GTD Tiddly Wiki is to give users a single repository for their GTD lists and support materials so they can create/edit lists, and then print directly to 3×5 cards for use with the Hipster PDA.

Whatever you think of George Galloway, it would be hard to deny that he put on an impressive display earlier this week in front of the US Senate Committee, and I thought he stole the show (and clearly the hearts of many of the audience) on Thursday’s Question Time. As I understand it, much of the American press were impressed too. But according to tonight’s Have I Got News For You one of his best replies was curiously absent from any of the American reportage:

I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns.

I find it hard to believe that such a prize quote would have been ignored by any press anywhere. Was it really not quoted?

Some of Galloway’s other retorts can be read at the the BBC.

How did I miss this story? (Well, I suppose the fact that I don’t read The Sun is how.) Thanks to Have I Got News For You for bringing it to my attention.

I know living in Swansea is a bit grim, and having to shop in Asda is just adding insult to injury, but apparently it forced one poor inhabitant to don vibrating knickers from Ann Summers before venturing out for the weekly shopping, and half way round the supermarket her multiple orgasms knocked her unconscious and an ambulance had to be called. There’s a lesson in there. Unfortunately I don’t know what it is. I’m off to buy some myself …

Well, maybe not famous …

But Ivan pointed out that I am mentioned in the new, third edition of O’Reilly’s Learning GNU Emacs:

“Serious web developers may want to investigate some of the cutting edge development going on to make Emacs even more powerful. Check out HTMLModeDeluxe and the Emacs WebDev environment by Darren Brierton. […] Both are excellent tools for building complex web pages.” (p. 220)

Okay, now who wants to touch me? I said who wants to touch me?

Those of you who know Jonathan and Jelena may be interested to watch next week’s Question Time—which is a special EU debate from Paris ahead of France’s referendum on the EU constitution—as they’re both gong to be in the audience! Those of you who don’t know Jelena will be able to recognise her as the attractive blond haired Slovenian/Croatian ranting and raving and probably pounding her fist … probably on Jonathan’s head.

Funnily enough tonight’s Question Time was from Edinburgh and my neighbour Wacek was in the audience (he was the one who made the crack about Anne McGuire’s cerise outfit).

As reported in FT.com , The Register, and ZDNet, the EU are seeking legal advice on how to re-draft the controversial software patents directive so that patents on pure software can be excluded. This is a very, very good thing.

I’m a day late with this: yesterday was the 25th anniversary of Ian Curtis’ suicide. When musicians and film stars die tragically young, there is a tendency to create a distasteful hagiography about them, as if their death was some great romantic gesture which seals their place in the annals of genius. I don’t want any part of that. But I do want to signal the fact that I still listen to those two Joy Division albums today, Unknown Pleasures and Closer, often over and over again, and they still sound just as fresh and magnificent as they did when I first heard them when I was still at school. They are masterpieces, and there can be little doubt that Ian Curits’ haunting voice and the sheer poetry and beauty of his lyrics are a major factor in that. Cold, austere, tragic.

The BBC have a short piece about him: Remembering Joy Division singer Curtis.

I blogged earlier about the problems raised for the FOSS community by the fact that a slew of new features in OpenOffice.org had been implemented in Java.

This NewsForge article, Free Software Foundation and OpenOffice.org team up to escape Java trap, suggests that a resolution of the problem might be on the horizon. The article is worth reading both for its objectivity and balance, and because it explains the political background of the dispute and some of the differences between different factions within the FOSS community. Thankfully, it would appear that despite the differences, the community has the ability to heal these kinds of rifts in mostly the right way in the end, largely in the same chaotic, anarchic ways it gets everything else done.

Tonight, or last night, or Monday night if you prefer, I went to see The Go! Team in concert. I’ve blogged about them before. What a fabulous band, and what a fabulous live act. Bill, who came along at the last minute because James couldn’t make it had never heard them before and was duly impressed that there wasn’t a single weak song in the whole set. Perhaps a compare and contrast is in order: the support acts were abysmal, but for quite different reasons. The Reasearch had a highly developed sense of melody and harmony, and all three were accomplished singers. But they were just lousy musicians. They kney how to craft a song but just didn’t know how to play one. Dungen on the other hand, were highly accomplished musicians who apparently knew nothing about singing, melody, harmony, or even the vaguaries of constructing a song. As Adam remarked, they sounded like The Muppets doing King Crimson cover versions. The Go! Team had none of their failings, all of their accomplishments, and more: frankly dazzling muti-instrumentalism was on display by most members of the band, and all of the songs managed to have the musical simplicity of great songs combined with their adeptness in a multitude of musical genres all seemingly impossibly played at once (Sonic Youth meets The Jackson 5 as one reviewer put it). On top of that they manage to be remarkable showmen. And, least imporantly of all, their drummer is not only good (which is surprisingly difficult if you have the unfortunate disadvantage of being a girl) but a total cutie. Bang bang chicken.

I arrived back from Cambridge Sunday, and pretty much collapsed from exhaustion. Well, okay, that was a bit drama-queeny, but I was completely knackered. I’m still trying to catch up with email, so sorry to those of you who’ve emailed me recently (Ivan, Tamsin, Philippa, Ana, and many others—I’ve 94 emails in my inbox waiting to be dealt with). I will reply soon.

Anyway, Kris and Ivan both sent me related bits of information today (oh, actually yesterday as it’s already tomorrow).

First, from Ivan: The Financial Times has a nice piece about UK local authorities moving to open source: Threat to Microsoft as local authorities plan to use free open source software.

Microsoft faces a serious threat to its UK public sector monopoly from plans by local authorities to increase their use of open source software, a survey commissioned by the FT has found.

More than 60 per cent said they intended to increase their use of open source software, which is free or much cheaper than Microsoft’s products. More than three-quarters using it plan to expand their use over the next three years, while two out of five who do not yet use it plan to do so.

The survey of nearly 100 local authorities and public bodies comes as the new government prepares to announce plans to encourage more take-up of open source in the public sector, which spent £12.4bn on information technology in 2003-04.

In a similar vein, Kris pointed out Slashdot’s story: UK Schools Told to Dump Microsoft, which is actually about a story in the TES which I had managed to notice on Sunday while hanging around in train stations: Ditching Microsoft can save millions.

Primary schools could cut their computer costs by nearly half if they stopped buying, operating and supporting products from the world’s largest software company, government research has found.

The server where this blog and the rest of my site is co-located died last night, taking my blog with it. Thankfully, the database is intact, but it is quite possible that email to me may have vanished into the aether.

I am rather cross to discover that my hosting service do not back up user’s home directories, but rather rely on their RAID disk drives to protect data (which in this case they didn’t) and otherwise expect users to backup their own data. Sadly, I’m not sure if I kept a local copy of my Phlogiston WordPress theme. (The theme you are probably seeing right now is the WordPress 1.5 default theme.) Sigh. I have also lost all of the WordPress plugins that I had installed, and so will now have to re-install those by hand.

I’m still in Cambridge, and will be returning this coming weekend. I’ll catch up with my email once I’m back, when I’ll also try and get my blog back to how it was.