I really should have got round to blogging the new bike earlier. My largest purchase from that global car boot sale that is eBay. It’s a Suzuki GSX1100F from 1989, and is just a little bit scary fast. I need to take some photos of it to put up soon, when the weather gets slightly more amenable to biking, then I’ll take it out somewhere nice and take some photos.
Sony sued over copy protection root kit.
Sony has been under fire for using “root kit” techniques in copy protecting some of their CDs.
Sony’s digital business division boss “Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”
Now there are class actions being filed.
BBC news
This one’s gonna run for a while.
Pain in the butt
Went to do a little more archery practice to let off some steam this afternoon, and took my longbow along – I was shooting it only a couple of weeks ago at home and getting some good groups – much better than I’ve been getting with the compound.
Anyway a couple of people were admiring it, and I drew it – “crack” the back of the lower limb had splintered – not a single arrow off it today, and now I’m going to have to look and see if I can find a nice replacement for my beautiful Albion longbow that I’ve had for about 15 years.
The closest that I can seem to find with a quick search is the AW special longbow from Archery world, but I’ve not managed to get in touch with Severn Products, which is where I bought it from in the first place – I just hope that they still do the Albion, as I’m rather partial to mine.
Still, it really does put me in a great mood for writing exam questions – knowing that to replace it is going to cost about £250!
Googlebot and phpiCalendar
I installed php iCalendar a few weeks ago, it was really nice being able to publish some of my iCal files from Sunbird on the web, and students could see whan I was free without me having to print out a paper calendar every week and stick it on my door.
I got a message today though, for some reason the system network usage had shot up, and my web server was consuming something like 6.4MB/s.
It was traced to Googlebot indexing my calendar file, as there are so many links, and technically the calendar can keep going forever, the bot had got a little out of control.
I have now put a robots.txt file in the correct place, but I’m still not sure that it’s going to solve the problem – it’s still generating a request every second or so, and eating bandwidth.
Microsoft – “We share your Pain”
A nice article on Ars Technica on a new bug reporting system called WE-SYP called “We Share Your Pain”. There is a very amusing video linked from the story too.
Yes it is a joke, but it would be so nice.
Aarrgh!
I just watched Episode 5 of series 2 of lost, and now I find out that there’s 3 weeks until the next episode :-O
Aaarrrghh! No more lost until 9th November 🙁
Why do they do this to us – and what is so important that it displaces Lost for 3 weeks?
These are important questions, and they deserve answers – on a postcard please.
Buy your way into British Politics
I know it’s not a new concept, but this time it’s in the reach of your average student loan!
The MP3 Party have put themselves up for auction on ebay as they appear to have lost interest in the concept after registering themselves as a political party.
Of course, it was probably just a publicity stunt in the first place by Audio Books for Free and they have probably failed to make any money from it.
Something else on the iPod
I was looking for this the other day –
a classic Joy of Tech Comic about the new video iPod
Exhausted
I spent the weekend at the Outward Bound sea school at Aberdovey where we took half of the first year. The other half will be going in a fortnight, and I’ll be off again for the weekend then. One particular student thought it would be fun to hit a few of the staff with cream pies and got me whilst in the toilet
A busy few days.
Wednesday was quite interesting, as IBM announced that it was donating a subset of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and a lot of software tools to support it to the open source community. It has apparently proposed that the Eclipse Foundation take it on as another project.
Then Apple drop us a bombshell with the new iPod that will play video – I’m sure that Steve Jobs said something about it being an idea that wouldn’t work, just like he said that Apple would not build a flash memory based player, and then 12 months later launched the flash based iPod shuffle.
And of course today, in a few hours time, the new James Bond 007 will be announced – everyone thinks they know who it will be, and Daniel Craig is in the frame, and he probably is the new Bond, for the remake of Casino Royale.