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I am rather busy with my masters thesis these days, hence the distinct lack of activity on this blog and my other blog.

I’m afraid for various reasons, I’ve not really got the time to update the blog at the moment.

Oh and:

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Well, shockingly enough the mid-week links happened as promised.  Now on to the normal weekly Sunday post.

I’m going to go for a slightly less serious bunch of posts this week.  Mainly videos and the like.  I think my first mention must go to this Japanese toilet training video.  It is utterly hilarious.  Well worth a watch.   Second is a rather amusing video about the differences between men and women in the shower.  Very accurate and really quite funny.  Finally on the YouTube extravaganza, here is a video of a syncronised stunt driving team.  The section where they change a wheel whilst driving on two wheels is excellent!

My final link is to a trailer on the quicktime site.  It is of the movie Paprika, which is a product of Satoshi Kon, of Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Paranoia Agent and others, fame.  The trailer is again very good and shows all the hallmarks of his work.  Hopefully the finished product will be just as good.

And I’m afraid that is it for this week.  Have a good one.

Not going to be a mentally massive mid week links, more a small feeler to see how I can fit this into my evening’s activities.

Firstly I’d like to talk about Backtrack, this is a linux based security distribution, which can be booted from CD, USB key or over a network.  This distro is based on two exsisting distros Whax and Auditor Security Collection, which merged to form Backtrack.  The distribution is built on a Slackware core and is designed specifically to be used for network penetration testing.  It supports a rather wide hardware platform, has a vast range of software and quite a few nice features.  Specifically integration with the metasploit framework.

Now for a few random links.  First up is Linux MCE, a distro that combines Ubuntu and MythTV into one easy to install package.  Secondly is zcars.org a kitcar maker that makes conversion kits to put bike engines in a variety of cars.  Cool kits and a good website, with plenty of good videos.  Thirdly, peacefire.org a organisation that aims to prevent unnecessary censorship of website, specifically for young people.

Like I said this was going to be short, so one last piece:

What if google wanted to be sued when they bought YouTube?  That is the thought behind the article on michiknows.com.  Quite an interesting thought.  As the article states Google obviously wants to be a major player in the video advertising world, when it finally hits the internet in what ever form it takes.  So from that point of view having the current major player in the video world makes a lot of sense.  Especially when the second largest site is the myspace video site.  Myspace is owned by News corp, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, who I’m sure would love to have the number one video site on the internet.  Basically seems to be a bit of a rumble between the old and the new.

A good article, well worth the read.  The outcome will be interesting to see, thats for sure.

There should be a sunday links up as per usual.  Maybe another post before then, who knows.

Ok, the mid-week links were missing in action. Whoops. Oh well, this will be a more meaty post…

In an article El Reg describes how many companies who make use of open source products are struggling with new management when they are taken over. Or just as commonly, management misunderstanding open source software and taking the usual hard line against it. As they do when confronted with anything that they don’t understand. Technicians and developers often use products because they are the best tool for the job, or the one that the techie knows best. Often managers who don’t understand such products react negatively to such usage. I’m not at all surprised by this kind of reaction. This blogger predicts much more such coverage in the future as open source becomes even more mainstream and moves more strongly (as it is currently doing) into markets that it currently isn’t strong in.

In a rather neat piece of webdesign, Katherine Gallia has coded a rather nifty site that changes the design depending on the time of day. Reminds me of the shame I have of not updating this site or even re-theming WordPress.

I’ve mentioned Jacob Nielsen before on this site. His columns are generally quite interesting and this most recent one doesn’t disappoint. He makes a good point in that learning a specific UI isn’t really a particulary good way to teach children computers. It would be much more worthwhile to teach them generalist skills that will allow them to use pretty much any program, not just Microsoft Word by rote. Which does seem to be what some people consider computer education.

Plenty of good meat for rantage coming from The Register today. Another shout out to how businesses are not catching up with technology at all. To those you who work in IT, you’ll probably know that virtualisation is the new thing, here to save us lots of time, effort and money. You know, the new silver bullet. Yes, of course… Anyway, the reg article notes how quite a few IT departments out there are unsure about how many virtual servers they have out there. Potentially creating a licensing hell. Unless you use *nix. But if you use Microsoft, they are trying to limit how many times you can move a VM about, or move a license from VM to VM. What a shocker there. Microsoft in trying to squeeze even more revenue from the enterprise market.

I’ve been using the GTD Tiddlywiki for some time now. It is a skinned and tweaked version of the rather fantabulous Tiddlywiki. It is basically a single HTML page, with a large chunk of javascript to provide the dynamic content and CSS for styling. The GTD version is mainly based around the Getting Things Done philosophy. It is slanted towards generating lists and the like quickly and easily. Even if you aren’t interested that much in that sort of thing, it and tiddlywiki are both good pieces of software and well worth a dabble if nothing else.

Unfortunately, the gearbox on my car died it’s final death this weekend.  I’ve only just got back from having had the car towed back home.  So there won’t be a post this Sunday, as I’ve not got the time to arrange anything.  I plan on doing a Mid Week Links tho, so check back around Wednesday.

Well, it is a day late.  Whoops.  So again, another bit of a short one really.  Just a few links that have caught my eye over the past week or so.

Firstly, OpenID has been gaining a lot more ground recently.  Quite a fair few start-ups are using it.  If you do like the idea of a open ‘passport’ kind of system, it is well worth a look.
Here are a couple of nice linuxy blogs, that are pretty interesting.  The first one is a post about how to upgrade Ubuntu to include a lot of the things that most take for granted these days.  The second is an announcement of the first motherboard to be able to use the linuxBIOS.

And finally, is a rather interesting piece of research.  It is a image of the relationship map at a American High School.  Odd, but interesting.  Wierd job as well.

Well I’ve managed to get myself addicted to World of Warcraft.  Whoops.  This shouldn’t affect SSL too much tho.  I hope.

Personally there hasn’t been much that has grabbed me over the past week or so.  This means this post will be a bit light on info this week.  Sorry.

I think the main one was Yahoo Pipes.  I first found out about it via the O’Reilly blog.  Quite a lot of people are hyping it up as the ‘next big thing’.  It does look rather cool, but I have to wonder how many people will get into it as it is relatively technical.  Basically you can use any one of a number of RSS style feeds and formats to create your own unique feeds.  There is a lot more you can do with it, but basically it is a mashup for RSS/Atom etc.

In a nice twist on the tidy your life style sites, there is a chap who has hidden a lot of his computer under his desk.  Various things, routers, external HDDs, external DVD burners etc etc, all hidden under his desk.  Pretty nifty really.

I’m not going to be doing anything about Steve Yegge, as I haven’t had a chance to read his posts this week.  They are that massive and WoW and a community site that I run have taken up all my time.

So with no further ado, back to those two things!

Hello and welcome to a slightly more regular edition of Some Sunday Links.

The latest version of Wordpress is now out and actually, to be honest, has been out for sometime. But I’m going to briefly mention that and then try and upgrade before next weekend. Erk. Lets hope I’m still here.

For quite a while now, I’ve been meaning to throw some webcomic reviews into the mix on these sunday posts. So, for the last few days I’ve been going through the Player Versus Player archives. In the interested of research you understand? Right! Riiiiiight. Player Versus Player, or PvP as it is more commonly known has been around since 1998. It has undergone quite a few visual changes since it started back then. Black and white has been replaced by colour. The way the characters are drawn has been overhauled once and gradual tweaks are generally always happening. However, the general quality of the storylines hasn’t diminished. The comic is always good to read.

Like many webcomics, PvP started off as a mainly gaming comic, detailing the adventures of a group of journalists at a gaming magazine. Doesn’t sound like the greatest story in the world, but as I said, PvP is well written and complemented by good solid artwork. the main characters are the editor, Cole, the art editor, Brent, a senior columnist, Jade and Francis, a teenager working at the magazine, who runs the techical side of things. And there is the troll, Skull. Skull is a mythical creature from Ultima Online, he is technically an intern at the office, but is generally a mascot.

There is a rather large supporting cast, but instead of boring you with endless details, I’ll just advise you to start at the beginning and work your way forwards.

Vista? Vistaschmista! It is all about Vienna now. Yup, that’s right, Microsoft have given their next version of the Windows operating system a codename. It had previously been blackcomb, which was announced in 2000, but due to the monumental cock-up with Vista, they’ve renamed it and re-jigged it. According to Ben Fathi, the corporate vice-president of development, it is scheduled for late 2009. Thats about 2 and a half years from now. I can’t quite believe that they’re going to try and foist another OS on us that soon. They are currently having quite a battle to convince most people that switching to Vista is a worthwhile idea.
I’ve not been checking some of my favourite blogs recently so I’ve managed too miss several of Steve Yegge’s most recent posts. I’ll go through them and provide some hit and miss commentary on them next week.

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle over Wikipedia this week. If you believe the hype, Wikipedia and by extension the whole Wikimedia foundation has the cash to run it’s servers for a few more months and then poof! It vanishes in a puff of smoke. However saner heads have prevailed and a slightly more accurate quote has emerged from the darkness courtesy of Laurence Haug. A few people have commented on the usual effect of the blogosphere distorting the original quote. Noting that it is often better to quote those who were actually there and not those who weren’t. Oh well, I’m sure someone somewhere has learnt a lesson from it…

How to make your own Gauss pistol. An utterly awesome but scary thought. However to allay fears, the built gun is equivalent to a air pistol in power. It is a pretty neat project and he plans on providing kits and plans to make the gun. Currently the site doesn’t have much information about how you actually build the gun. It has a fair few pictures and a decent amount of explanation. Probably enough that you could build it if you had a pretty good handle on physics and the like. It isn’t a rail gun however, it is a coil gun.

And I quote:From HVWiki: “Coil Gun: A device that accelerates a ferromagnetic projectile using a coil of wire and a pulsed power source, usually capacitors. A large current is put through the coil, making it magnetic and attracting the ferromagnetic projectile. When the projectile passes through the coil, the current switches off and the coil loses its magnetism, allowing the projectile to keep going“.

One other rather nice website that has caught my eye recently, is the art of science website. It is from Princeton university in America and it is a exhibition of images, videos and sounds all gathered from the pursuit and research of science. The range of media is wide and quite stunning. I’ve always been a fan of electron microscope images, this one is particulary nice.

Quite a while has passed since I last updated this. I’m hoping to get back in the saddle, so hopefully you’ll hear something from me this weekend.