OpenID looks very promising and maybe WordPerss can play a part in it if the work is put into it.
It’s certainly something that would benefit WPMU. A community of users could post comments on each other’s blogs and bias any moderation rules in favour of the posted data getting through.
It doesn’t address trust however, but in a blogging community that can be solved in other ways (ie. when you register, the user has to click a url in an email.)
Interesting times ahead.
The EU Software Patents Debate
Niall Walsh is transcribing yesterday’s debate in the EU parliament. Unfortunately his post to the ILUG hasn’t appeared in the archive yet, but Justin Mason’s reply includes Niall’s email.
Niall transcribed Brian Crowley’s speech in favour of patents. It’s a good read, and unfortunately ill-advised as he seems to think the patent system provides protection for small business. Who’s to say that large foreign companies don’t come into Europe and patent everything in sight? They already have the IP lawyers! Ciaran O’Riordan met Mr. Crowley later and explained one of the ammendments to him and he said he’d support it so perhaps it’s a case of explaining the issues properly to them.
Kathy Sinnott’s reply is much better and reasoned. She urged, “deputies to support every amendment that retains freedom from
patentability.”
“How much innovation do you think will occur if that lone programmer needs to contract a team of patent lawyers.”
I’m glad I voted for her now.
Update! Looks like this round of s/ware patent reform has been defeated! 🙂
Spreadsheet Templates
Every now and again I need to dig into Open Office to create a document, be it a report, or a spreadsheet.
Thankfully Linux has been able to read Word and Excel files for some time as that’s what the world and it’s dog use!
Anyway, I needed an invoice template, and came across these Open Office extras listing lots of templates for Writer, Calc and Draw. Several very useful examples there too!
Here’s a few sample reports in PDF format. Obviously it’s harder to edit, but at least they’ll provide for inspiration when creating your own documents!
XMOVIE – uncompressed movie player
My Panasonic FZ5 creates uncompressed quicktime movies. Unbelieveably Mplayer can’t play them!
Thankfully Xmovie does!
BTW – the Panasonic records at up to 30fps, and is great for recording snippits of concerts like I did last night! 🙂
GHH – The "Google Hack" Honeypot
GHH looks awfully interesting. The signatures listed on the front page show a frightening number of vulnerable hosts!
The Google Hacking Database has even more! *gulp*
The Gypsy Kings in Cork!
We went to see the Gypsy Kings play in Cork last night. It was a great concert but we were slightly disappointed that they didn’t play their older stuff that we knew better. Still, they got the crowd hopping, and I’ve never seen such a mix of young and old at one concert!
Statler & Waldorf review movies
GIMP Preview – the why and what of it
A recent thread on the GIMP User mailing list asked about why previews are so small, and why the “main window” preview isn’t available everywhere.
Replies were soon forthcoming. It seems that plugins can’t preview their changes in the main window, but built-in tools can.
Carol Spears even offered a small tutorial explaining how you can increase the preview size in plugins very easily!
Seagull
First of the RAW images I took over the weekend at Sherkin Island. Forgive the grain, this was shot at ISO 400 under difficult light and the gull was flying directly outside our hotel room!
So far I’ve imported a few photos into the GIMP using UFraw and to be honest I don’t think shooting in RAW made much difference. I’ll reserve final judgement until later when I’ve had more experience with converting.
I ran into the same trouble I had before with corrupted shots. Looks like one of my CF cards is fscked. I’ll write to 7dayshop where I bought the cards, whatever good that’ll do me.
Running fsck.vfat returned lots of errors about clusters. I formatted and I’m running a test for bad clusters now. It didn’t find anything but I’ll run some more tests over the next few days. Meanwhile, here’s some more info on compact flash break-downs to digest.
I copied about 900MB of data back and forth to the CF card without a hitch. It might be a camera problem? They’re Viking Interworks 1GB cards. Anyway, I found two places, here and here that have reasonably priced cards.
Wideangle lenses for small sensor APS-C DSLRs
Good overview of wide angle lenses available for DSLRs. Expensive though, anyone want to buy the Canon 10-22 for me?