"A keyboard. How quaint." - James Doohan

News Archive - April 2008

Humph Reaches Mornington Crescent at 86

Wednesday 30th April 2008

Category: News

The great jazz trumpeter and host of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, Humphrey Lyttleton, died at 86. He will doubtless be missed by thousands of fans, with obituaries in The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and many others, while Sandi Toksvig bids farewell in the Telegraph.

I leave you with the words of Humph himself: "As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from desiccation."

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Ubuntu 8.04 LTS; Interview with Knuth; Using Bugzilla

Saturday 26th April 2008

Category: News

First up is the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. While Ubuntu is one of the most popular distributions, it does seem to have released with a number of non-trivial bugs, such as ALSA not always working, your network connection packing up, and scheduler problems. Although this is bad enough in a normal release, this is a long term support release - it will be supported until 2011 on the desktop. A little more time bug squashing might not have gone amiss.

Elsewhere, author of the Art of Programming Donald Knuth is interviewed on subjects ranging from literate programming to parallel computing.

Finally, a look at how not to use Bugzilla.

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Microsoft's OOXML approved by ISO

Sunday 20th April 2008

Category: News

This is the news that Microsoft's OOXML file format has been approved by the ISO as an international standard, despite various irregularities, such as Norway voting yes when four fifths of their committee were against. However, there is a two month period for appeals.

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Firefox; Abiword; OpenOffice.org

Thursday 3rd April 2008

Category: News

First up is an article discussing what's to come in Firefox 4, with technology such as Prism and Weave.

There's also the release of Abiword 2.6, which has been long awaited by many. One of the more interesting features is the ability to collaborate on documents in real time. Although still called experimental, it looks promising.

Finally, a report of a rather large bug in OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 - namely, OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 doesn't represent all numbers correctly.

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April Fools 2008

Wednesday 2nd April 2008

Category: News

Plenty of Aprils Fools' jokes this year - for a comprehensive list, Wikipedia is probably your best bet. There was plenty from the usual suspects, such as BMW adding their Canine Repellent Alloy Protection to their already impressive collection. The Register, among other stories, reported how a teacher's head exploded.

Of course, Google didn't stay silent. They have plans to live on Mars in the form of Virgle, and have also been busy updating Google Books so you can smell the pages. If you live in Australia, you are privileged to able to see tomorrow's Internet today, thanks to Google's innovation. Finally, GMail has a new feature to send e-mails back in time, thanks to their e-flux capacitor.

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Government Announces Penguin-Proof Firewall

News

Tuesday 1st April 2008

Category: News

Today, government spokesman Uma Head made a startling announcement - that there were too many foreign operating systems in Britain today, and something needed to be done. She declared, "Over the past decade or so, we have seen an unprecedented rise in the choice of operating system, at the cost of our own native operating systems."

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