splee.blog

I’m trying to work out if this is just me. At the moment, the general concensus is yes; I’m a wierdo.

Does anyone else dance when they’re bored? I’m not talking John Travolta or Fred Astaire here, just a little boogie, mainly involving the upper body. The sort of boogie that can be succesfully accomplished in one’s chair. Only extreme boredom brings on fancy footwork.

Anything can bring on the Boredom Boogie (assuming it’s boring of course - the clue is in the name ;) ). A good example today was waiting for php5 to compile on a development machine here at work. It took ages. And I boogied.

The thing is, I don’t even notice I’m doing it. I’ve never noticed that I do it, until a few days ago when one of my colleagues pointed it out. I’m trying to work out if it’s a recent thing or if I’ve always done it and people have just been polite and pretended not to notice.

Also, as I don’t notice I’m doing it, I wonder what subconcious music I’m dancing to. That’s definately something to think about. I’ll have to find out if it’s R’n'B, Pop, Disco, Cheesy-old-skool… wow, the possibilities are limitless.

So, does anyone else have a Boredom Boogie? In fact, does anyone have any odd idiosyncrasies that surface when they’re bored? Last, but not least, am I odd because of this? I’m starting to think that I am.

Microsoft, in their usual “must-have-fingers-in-far-too-many-pies” fashion, are re-inventing Bit-Torrent. Guess why?

No, go on, guess.

That’s right, DRM (Digital Rights Management). While this is not a bad thing per se, I see it as a bad thing when MS are in charge of it. Instantly I can foresee sky-high fees and rediculously complicated licencing schemes to milk the largest possible amount of money from publishers and, as a knock on effect, us users. I would have absolutely no objection if it were almost any other company, but MS have a habit of being greedy.

In my opinion, if MS were less greedy with ALL of their products they would be seen in a better light. There would be less piracy if Windows XP cost half of what it does currently. Lets face it, it’s not like throughput is an issue.

Another thing I can’t understand is Microsoft’s utterly irriversable stance to Open Source. With a userbase like Microsoft’s, Open Source becomes an amazingly viable business model. They could Open Source the next version of windows and charge for support and for corporate licencing, as many businesses want accountability. Businesses will happily pay for support by the software vendor so when a bug occurs it can be delt with by Microsoft themselves quickly and the fix is then available to the masses.

You would also have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of skilled programmers with their beady eyes on the code to help fix and improve the code as they need with the bonus that these changes can go back to the main codebase and benefit everyone.

The problem would be in Microsoft changing their programming practices and entire company structure. Of course a shift such as this could not happen over night. It would take years of change to get to the point where anything coming out of Redmond could be considered open source, but it can happen. Sun have done it; Solaris is now open source and, from what I can gather, is flourishing. MySQL, RedHat and SuSe (amongst others) are all evidence that companies can do well from Open Source products and end up with better products because of it.

Here’s to hoping that Microsoft see the light. I’m not holding my breath.

This is just plain class. An interesting take on a dig at Windows, no?

I’m now running this site on lighttpd and PHP5.

In theory there shouldn’t be any noticable difference between that and apache2, except lighttpd shouldn’t eat all available memory and hose the server when the sites I’m hosting get hit hard. I’m not 100% convinced about the speed of page generation, but that could be due to my php5 compile… I think there are a few things I’ve left out.

My main clue to this is that my wordpress dashboard is missing when I load my admin area. I’ll have a little look around tomorrow to see what is causing it, as it’s not essential and all the other sites work properly.

If anyone knows off the bat what bit of php5 I’ve neglected to compile in, feel free to leave a message. :)

Update: Ok, it’s not my php5 install that’s causing the problem. Apparently the Wordpress Dev Blog is broken which is why I’m not getting my Dashboard updated.

I play online games. I know how much time they suck up when you really get hooked on a particular game. However, if someone sold in-game equipment that I’d lent them, I don’t think I’d end up killing someone over it like this guy.

That’s just taking things too far.

Meh.

That’s my verdict on the film. Simply “meh”.

Once you cut past all the flashy lights and soppy/wooden acting there’s not much flesh on dem bones. In fact, other than the awesome duel between Obi-Wan and Anakin/Vader, the only pertinent bits are at the end, the tying of the overall plot’s loose ends.

The phrase “not overly impressed” springs to mind. Unfortunately, it’s still better than episodes 1 and 2.