Now that BT’s DNS service has been reviewed by a Court and the newzbin2 site been deleted, can I assume that all sites within the DNS database are permitted by the copyright holders and courts?
I feel that we as the ISP’s customers need some “certainty”. …
While researching another blog article, I was pointed at the ONS’ Statistical Bulletin, “Internet Access – Households and Individuals, 2011“. This reports that 77% (up from 73% last year) of UK Households have internet access, and 79% of internet users think they can protect their privacy. (Yeah right!)
They ask those who do not have the internet “Why not?” and the reasons are, price of equipment, lack of skills or lack of need. I’d be interested in those who find the cost of connection too high? …
I had reason to revist some of the thinking behind my book on Software Migration, the key lesson of which is that the drivers and hence the tactics for software migrations vary. I worked with colleagues at Sun Microsystems in writing a book, which while called “Migrating to the Solaris Operating System”, and thus maybe past its best, it had a tag line of “The discipline of UNIX-to-UNIX Migrations”. It’s available to buy on Amazon, or possibly available on the.net, the link I published in 2011, seems to have gone. The rest of this blog, highlights the super strategies and lists two gotchas. …
So I went to hear Richard Stallman speak at an ORG meeting. He was late, and couldn’t be contacted because he doesn’t use a mobile phone, or not one that you can make calls to.
He started with the recording rules and distribution rules. Any films must be open format friendly, and published under CC-ND terms. There are to be no pictures posted to Facebook, of him presumably, anyway his advice is to “Unfriend Facebook Today”. …
Delicious, the social bookmark site was taken over by avos.com during the week. They have rapidly refreshed the javascripts used for storing one’s bookmarks directly from the browser and are communicating with their new users via their beta blog. There remain some problems with the Firefox Addin but the Chrome extension seems pretty solid now. 4th Oct 2011 …
I changed my mobile phone recently and like most people there is a period between getting it and being able to do what you want and I have been struggling. The new phone is an HTC Android, provided by Orange. Orange have put a mail client app on the phone, which you can’t uninstall and want to charge me £5.00 per month to use. Given that there are free mail clients on the Android Marketplace and one comes free with the phone from HTC who is going to pay this outrageous tax?
This attempted scam has undone (some of the ) two years worth of great support and service that I have had. This has not been helped by the fact that the Orange Technical Support have a shit script when speaking to them about this. It took me 4 calls over 30 days to find someone who knew that to avoid this fee, you just need to avoid using the app.
I know it’s not just Orange though. …
In August, earlier this month, Vince Cable announced the Government’s response to the Hargreaves Review aka the Google review into intellectual property law. Some of the UK’s IT companies, including Google together with many economists, strongly believe that the current intellectual property laws in the UK inhibit innovation and growth and persuaded Cameron to launch a review into the intellectual property laws. The review was chaired and directed by Professor Hargreaves and it published its report “Digital Opportunity, A review of intellectual property and growth” earlier in the year. This article looks at the Hargreaves Review’s recommendations and reactions to the report and comments on Cable’s speech which de-committed the Government from pursuing the web bocking clauses of the Digital Economy Act. …
About owning the WordPress install and using 1and1 hosting services. I am preparing to change the look and feel of this blog, and have a shadow blog. This is installed using ftp of a wordpress distribution. …
I had some problems geting this blog to use the self updateing tools.
An install of WPtouch failed.
It seems that my wordpress blog needs to access PHP5 and I spoke to 1&1 to work out how to do this. I have inserted
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
into a fresh new .htaccess file. The updates and add new theme dialogues now work on this blog. I have also added Simon Phipps flying gulls, which I have CC right to use.
I have installed the WPtouch theme and so this blog can now be accessed using small screens as well. I have tested this using an iphone. …
In my last piece of work, I needed to create some box charts using excel 2007. I have always planned to document this for the world, (or my little readership at least) but when my colleague Jim Barrett showed me the button in the Sparklines menu that does them in Office 2010, I decided to get this done in a hurry. As I said in my last blog article on Excell, I am losing track off Open Office, but this technique also works in Open Office 3.2.1. Most of this article is about making it work in Excel, but I have described how to set error bars in Open Office. …