Great article about MS OOXML

Microsoft is of course still working on getting their OOXML format accepted as an open standarda at ISO. I'm of the opinion that it should never be accepted and this article is another in a long row of articles that explains why: THE DEPRECATED “SMOKE SCREEN” OF MS OFFICE OPEN XML (OOXML)

Here is a quote:

Launch Microsoft Office and try to save a file in the format specified by the draft standard at ISO. You can’t. There is no compatibility mode in Microsoft Office that limits input to the feature set specified in the official Microsoft Office Open XML draft ISO standard. Any suggestions of interoperability for anyone wanting to support the Microsoft Office Open XML specification is ridiculous, especially since Microsoft itself won’t allow its customers to write to that format.

Before travelling to the USA

Be sure to have your papers and such in order: Icelandic tourist to US held for two days, shackled, deported -- over a ten-year-old visa mistake

First person report from a CIA "black site"

This is a scary article (well a link to blog post about it) about CIA "black sites" aka secret torture sites for suspected terrorists.

Beer: Ølfabrikken 100 gram India Pale Ale

I like IPA's and this certainly isn't bad. Would I buy it again though? Hmm...If they also sold one of Mikkellers IPA's (Green Gold or Stateside IPA), I would choose one of those.

Randall Munroe (Xkcd) @ Google

Randall Munroe has done a talk at Google which can now be seen on youtube:

Beer: St. Bernardus Abt 12 60 year anniversary special edition

Tasted this the other day and I like it. My answer is still going to be no though. The reason is that as far as I recall, their standard Abt 12 is just as good (and it is *really* good) so I would probably just buy that. This version is probably pretty rare and costs more too, so why bother?

Nokia - Confusing People

Nokia to W3C: Ogg is proprietary, we need DRM on the Web.

Read that and check this part of Nokia's submission (pdf):

Anything beyond that, including a W3C-lead standardization of a “free” codec, or the active endorsement of proprietary technology such as Ogg, …, by W3C, is, in our opinion, not helpful for the co-existence of the two ecosystems (web and video), and therefore not our choice.

This is either written by some amazingly clueless people or it is money talking. My money is on the last.

KDE4 design decisions

There's been some discussions recently about KDE4, especially about Plasma. This post by Liquidat explains some of the design decisions made with KDE4. It's a good read if you are interested in KDE4 and it should clear up some of the misunderstandings.