port7 – co – uk

So after reading the Metaversed post, I thought I would have a wander over to the Scout Jamboree SL Island. Being a Scout myself many years ago I had a sort of slight interest.

It seems the island is being funded by the Scouting Association, but most of the build is being done by Ynot Fenua, a Cub Leader from Suffolk. I managed to catch up with him while he was in the middle of building a replica of the RL Jamboree Clock Tower. It seem’s he has done all the building on the island, apart from some boats. I was quite impressed with the build, while not a Rivers Run Red, or Melting Dot’s, I like the layout. As I said to Ynot, it compels you to explore, which is a good thing I guess.

It also has a nifty fairground ride type thing, you know those ones where you sit in them and they just shoot you straight up in the air. What he did say is that there is quite an issue at the moment in Scouts, where they are woefully short of leaders, and this is one of the attempts at getting leaders interested. I would be happy to help out but my hands are full at the moment still getting used to being a father!

Got a strange task today, was asked to review a Satelite Internet Thingy for the owner of the company I am currently assigned at. Basically this guy has a boat and wants to access the company VPN and do Video Conferencing from the boat.

So while doing this we thought we would have a look at the boat it’s going on. Some people just live in a totally different world! This thing is bigger than my house!!

So we got the new car, eventually went for another Impreza, just a newer one, its an estate with the turbo boost

I see FSF Europe have weighed in on the National Archive / Microsoft / Open Standards discussion. They are mirroring my thoughts of basically ‘thats rich coming from Microsoft‘, albeit in a much more eloquent way.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6291124.stm

Good response from them, if a little long and wordy…

So we are considering part-ex’ing our Subaru Impreza, we have had it from new (2001) and fancy a change. It’s the wife who drives it mostly now and so she wants something slightly bigger for carting Niamh and all her stuff round, she wouldn’t mind a Subaru Forester, though I am inclined to look for another Impreza but an Estate version.

Anyone had or driven both of these and can give me the low-down on what they thought the differences were?

Just got back from Lugradio Live 2007, I was only there for today (Sunday 8th), so a few highlights for me

• The chance to catch up with old friends, great to see you all!
• Pablo’s talk on the migration to a Linux Desktop by a Spanish Savings Bank, as an Enterprise Architect in RL, its good to see how other people approach these things
• Neuro’s bit in the Hour of Power around SL, and it was cool to chat to him about his thoughts on SL
• The Neuros Audio thing was very cool. I may take up the offer of a Lugradio Discount
• Some KDE bits, it has given me the push needed to give KDE another go

All in all it was a great day, I only wish I could have been there for the whole weekend! So a big hand to the Lugradio team and all the people who made it possible!

Is this a first? A lawsuit in SL?

As mentioned in a previous post I created a petition to the Prime Minister to make the PCI: DSS standards a legal requirement. This has now been approved, so I ask everyone to sign it and get others to do the same, the petition can be found at…

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/pci-dss-legal/

There is an interesting article over on the BBC News Technology website. It about Microsoft and the British Library warning us of a ‘digital black hole’ because of the amount of data that is stored in old proprietary formats. And how we need to move to Open Standards such as Microsoft’s ‘Open XML‘

I thought thats rich coming from Microsoft, who would like nothing more than for the whole world to be storing data in formats dictated by Microsoft. For those that don’t know a few years ago a new format for office data files was created by a independent group of companies and organizations called the OpenDocument format. This standard was eventually made a ISO standard format. And since then various companies, organisations and goverments round the world have declared that they will be moving to this format as their standard.

In response to this, Microsoft came up with an alternative ‘standard’ called the Open XML format, and have since been pushing to get that adopted, it has not yet got ISO accreditation, but I understand they are working towards that.

So as the BBC article states, why couldn’t they just have adopted OpenDocument? Maybe they think that it would not be in their commercial interests? I don’t know, but they didn’t and they are now trying to defeat the adoption of OpenDocument wherever they can.