chrisbray.co.uk

The Register is today running a story on how the BSI will face a high court action from the UK's Unix & Open Systems User Group over it's controversial u-turn regarding the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML as an ISO standard.

The BSI reversed it's decision to oppose this "standard" in March this year after Microsoft failed to fast-track OOXML into the ISO and will face action in the High Court backed by a number of British advocates of open techology include the Open Source Consortium.

If you ask me it's the right thing to do, the BSI reversed its decision for no good reason other than pressure from Microsoft or one of their cronies. OOXML has no place on the ISO standards roster, especially when the ISO already have a perfectly good, openly developed, standard for office documents! The more the BSI know they've done wrong the better.

If you wish to support this action, and at the same time earn a number of other benefits too, you should consider joining the UKUUG.

I just stumbled across an interesting site.

This site suggests the the www. prefix used for so long on website domains should be treated as deprecated and we should move away from using it.

Why you ask, well http://no-www.org states:

And I think it's an interesting idea, had we not grown up with the www. prefix we wouldn't assume to type it, and there are plenty of sites that do not use it, but deprecated? I can't help but think that's a little bit harsh!

Does anybody have any comments on the use of a www. (or the specific non-use) with respect to search engine rankings?

Personally all of my sites conform to "Class A" of the no-www compliance standards, the same site accessible both with and without the www. prefix.

It would appear that someone was listening when I was amongst the people calling for the ISO committee that was voting on it to Vote No To Office Open XML since it failed to meet the criteria set out by the ISO for adoption as an International Standard.

Microsoft put their typically positive spin on this citing it as a milestone towards the adoption (press release can be found here) but the fact is that this is a blow to the ill thought out and technically flawed format.

Hopefully there will be more support for the far more open and truly cross platformODF format suggested by OASIS which has already been implemented by many office suites.

Spent half the night last night trying to get my works laptop connected to the office via my (admittedly positively aincient) Netgear WGR614 wireless router however once Vista got as far as "Checking Username and Password" it would just hang and fail to connect.

I finally gave up last night, assuming I was using the wrong credentials or something and headed out. Only when arriving at my destination did I think "Just one more try"... Lo and behold it worked, so I *was* using the correct password!

Back at home now, googling frantically for "Netgear WGR614 GRE PPTP" and the like and I came across this very useful forum post illustrating that unless the Stateful Packet Inspection firewall is ENABLED the Netgear router won't pass the right packets, since I'd been running with the firewall DISABLED (all the permenantly connected machines run Linux and they're NATed anyway) it wasn't work.

Enable the SPI Firewall in the routers control panel and voila, perfect.

Except it's not, because enabling the SPI firewall means the router finds it prudent to drop all DNS query packets, so the cacheing DNS server running on the LAN side of the router recieves no requests rendering it useless. Great.

Any suggestions on how to disable the SPI firewall completely and make this router just route packets, without any inspection or filtering, just route every packet irrespective of content, a task I would have thought as simple as breathing to a router...