3D desktop effects in Linux

Here is a nice video on Youtube that shows some effects on an Ubuntu Edgy Eft desktop with Beryl added. It should be available in the next Ubuntu release which should be ready for download sometime in April.

Hardware manufactures listen up!

The list of excuses for not providing Linux support is getting quite small since Linux Kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman just posted this great offer to develop Linux drivers:

Free Linux Driver Development!

Yes, that's right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to do.

All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to answer questions every once in a while. A few sample devices might be good to have so that debugging doesn't have to be done by email, but if necessary, that can be done.

MS OOXML as an ISO standard?

I'm not much into how new standards are getting made at ISO, but the much discussed MS OOXML are now on track to becomming an ISO standard unless there is too many protests and problems with the format. I hope that it will get rejected by ISO because it is a bad format. The specification is HUGE and it is simply not possible for others to implement it! What good is a standard then? Furthermore, we already have a perfectly good standard called ODF which is already widely supported, but MS of course don't want to support that because it wants to keep the lock-in it's got on the marked. Here is another post about it:

The answer is to game the system. As part of this, the company has created (by itself, unlike Open Doc) a proposal for OOXML that is six thousand pages long, and then put it into the fast-track approval system with very minimal time for discussion and objection.

Schneier on choosing choosing passwords

Here is an article about choosing good passwords that is worth reading. It contains some quite interesting facts about password guessing. And then there is the ending comment that makes you a bit depressed:

The easiest way to guess a password isn't to guess it at all, but to exploit the inherent insecurity in the underlying operating system.

More on Microsoft's Office Open XML

Here is another article about how bad this "standard" is. It contains quite a few examples that really shows why it is bad and that it will be very difficult for anyone but Microsoft to implement it. Here is a nice quote:

This is not a specification; this is a DNA sequence.

Lawrence Lessig speech

I admire Lawrence Lessig a lot - he has done a lot to make the world a better place. I just saw this video of one of his speeches and it is another great one. It is long, more than an hour, but it's very much worth watching.

Link: Lawrence Lessig - On Free, and the Differences between Culture and Code

Airport security stupidity

Great article about the amazing stupidity of current airport sercurity practices.