The SoapVox

A few weeks ago Handy and I were talking about ebooks and ebook readers, when he happened to mention a book he had hanging around, with the strange/silly name of Geek Mafia. Being as I am a geek (not that you'd notice by reading this site :) and that my favorite book of all times is Mario Puzo's The Godfather, I had to give it a try :) This book is outside of the regular SF/F stuff I write about here, it's more along the lines of an adventure story, combined with cops&robbers, but it's still a hell of a fun book, and every geek should read it :) I had never read any of Rick Dakan's stuff before, so I didn't really know what to expect. He's actually an interesting author, with pretty good character development, interesting ideas, easy-to-read style and interesting plot twisting abilities...I'm gonna have to go look ...

Ok, ok, ok...I know it's been a while (a whole week already??) since the last time I posted anything to this place, but...I have a good excuse! For the last 10 years or so, I've been an independent consultant, helping small companies upgrade from windows to linux, and then giving said small companies the support they need in the rare occasions when their linux servers go nuts. The problem with this job is that...the support part rarely happens. Linux is such a good OS that when you set it up right, it's stable as all get out and doesn't break down. A client of mine has a server that I installed for him almost 10 years ago, and it has been rebooted 3 times in those 10 years...it's never had a single problem, those reboots where power-grid related. With that kind of stability, it's a great choice for the client...but it sucks ...

So...Microsoft tried to buy the vote on the fast track approval of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500, aka the attempt at making OOXML (.docx) a standard. And even with their warchest, they still got a No. Vote closes on draft ISO/IEC DIS 29500 standard 2007-09-04 A ballot on whether to publish the draft standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats, as an International Standard by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has not achieved the required number of votes for approval. That comes form ISO itself :) You can read the whole ISO press release, as well as Microsoft's spin on it ("Strong Global Support for Open XML as it Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process" is the title of their press release), trying to make it seem like a No is a good thing which implies strong support by the world. And ...

This is an interesting post, half funny, half warning, about how not only software viruses propagate, but also mechanical failures that multiply much the same way. Sean, at the alwaysBETA blog calls it The Tale of the Mechanical Virus, and it's a fun one. Also, read the comments for other people's tales of mechanical virus replication. Always check your pins before and after use :)

I just found a very interesting article by Stephen Walli at his Once More Unto the Breach blog, about Office Open XML Conformance (A Lesson in Claiming Standards Conformance). It's interesting because it takes MS and Apple to the wall about what Standards Conformance actually is, related to OOXML...and he's an ex-MSoftie :) The whole thing starts with his buying iWork 2008 (the office-like suit for OSX) and reading about Pages '08 (the word-equivalent) having: Pages ‘08 supports industry-standard formats, so you can easily open documents created in other word processing applications and share documents with others. Whether they’re using a Mac or a PC. Import your Microsoft Word documents into Pages ’08 with ease. Whether they’re Microsoft Office 2007 (Office Open XML) or earlier Word files, Pages will open them. Pages imports not only the text, but also the styles, tables, inline and floating objects, charts, footnotes, endnotes, bookmarks, hyperlinks, lists, ...

If you remember the post about Places to get free ebooks, you'll probably remember Chris' comment about Scribd having lots of copyrighted content that was illegal to distribute. Well, I guess the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America organization read that comment by Chris too, because they nailed Scribd with a DMCA takedown notice. Perfectly fine, right? Well...no, not really. Why? Well, because from what BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow (a pretty good SF writer himself) found out, the SFWA set itself up to be nailed on court by a whole lot of people by not doing things right. The SFWA decided that they'd send a takedown notice about all works by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg that were published on the site...so far so good...except...they didn't take the time to actually see which works by those two authors were on the site; instead, they just made a search for the names and ...

Almost two years after the Sony-BMG rootkit scandal, Sony is back on its stupid side. This time, instead of including a rootkit with a music CD, they are including a rootkit with...a security device. Yup, they sell you a fingerprint reader and part of the software that comes with it is...another Sony rootkit! So...now, if you care about security and decide to buy a fingerprint reader from Sony, your security gets busted up, how's that for a helping hand? The Sony MicroVault USM-F fingerprint reader software that comes with the USB stick installs a driver that is hiding a directory under “c:\windows\”. So, when enumerating files and subdirectories in the Windows directory, the directory and files inside it are not visible through Windows API. That comes from Mika Stahlberg, from F-Secure, who discovered the fun Sony is having cracking the security of users everywhere. In other words, you need to use non-standard tools or ...

The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England, was the site chosen by a group of Daleks to initiate their invasion of Earth this past Sunday. As the chants of "Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!" echoed through, 67 Daleks gathered, with their human beings inside, to set the record for the most people in a Dalek costume to ever get together in one place. Even BBC News took notice, and there's a very nice Flickr set of the event. For those of us who are Doctor Who fans, seeing so many Daleks together in a single place is a thing of fun and enjoyment...all hail our new overlords, until we get exterminated! Found via BoingBoing.

I don't actually remember if I wrote about it or not, but about a month ago, I got a back problem that was symptomatic in only one way...it hurt like all hell. The fun part about it was that the doctor discovered, while checking out the current problem, that I have a degenerative problem in L4 and L5, most probably due to bad posture at the computer for many years, and that I was lucky it didn't show up earlier, due to my changing my posture about 4 years ago. According to my doctor, he sees a whole lot of people with back problems resulting from a bad posture at the computer, due to the fact that most of us just don't pay attention to how our desk, computer and body interact with each other, because it doesn't actually hurt...until it's too late to do much about it. I'm talking about this ...

Here goes another of my out-of-subject posts...but...I can't resist...again :) Back in March, 43 years old Randy Couture returned from a year in retirement and took on a fighter who was 13 years younger, 6 inches taller, 42 pounds heavier, and almost 12 inches longer in reach, for the UFC Heavyweight Title...and destroyed Tim Sylvia through 5 rounds of total domination. Forward to Saturday, August 25...and Randy is back in the octagon, defending his title at age 44, against a guy who is, again, over 15 years younger, 30 pounds heavier and who just came from destroying Mirko "CroCop" Filipovic, considered by most as *the* premier heavyweight striker in MMA today...and Randy destroyed Gabriel Gonzaga through two and a half rounds, to earn a TKO. This guy gets better with every fight, and he's been fighting for ten years now...he's got 24 fights in those ten years, and 15 or 16 of ...