Paul Smith's Blog

Congratulations to John Mason on winning Glasgow East, but I hope he is planning on picking up some science books soon. Mr Mason described his win as being "off the Richter scale", the only way I can interpret that as being so weak it is undetectable, or that there is no seismic activity at all, and as such it isn't on the scale. I don't think he meant it in that way, and as such I'll remind him that the Richter scale, which is a base 10 logarithmic scale for measuring the amplitude of the largest seismic wave during an earthquake, has no upper limit, and so nothing can be off the scale....

Just a quick post before I head off to Newport, over in Texas it seems the term black hole is now a racist remark, well to some people at least. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield (white) seems to of got himself in trouble for saying that the county's collections office behaves like an area of space with an escape velocity greater than 300,000 kilometres per second. "It sounds like Central Collections has become a black hole"...

Apologies for not blogging lately but I've been a little busy over the last couple of weeks. Anyway I want to touch on a bit of Apple/iPhone/MobileMe/Exchange stuff. So as I'm sure most people are aware Apple announced "push" e-mail with their MobileMe service launched a few weeks ago which costs $100 a year, of course everyone, well those in the Apple Cult anyway, were raving about it. Apple dubbed it "...

What a rubbish article, I'm very disappointed at the New York Times for allowing this to go to print. Almost as much as the BBC giving the Free Software Foundation free access to write technology articles on their website, the equivalent of letting Microsoft have their marketing department write for the BBC. Windows Could Use a Rush of Fresh Air Ohhh that's new-age sounding, it's gotta be good. Beginning as a thin veneer for older software code...

As Google have been forced to hand over the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube. I think it's time to show Viacom that we don't all use YouTube to share "pirate" their crappy (excluding Star Trek which they canned) shows. So I've got a few suggestions, I hope Viacom love looking through my history, they'll see that I enjoy some good World of WarCraft videos now and again....

Microsoft have released their new visualisation package, dubbed Hyper-V. This effectively replaces Virtual Server 2005. Originally due to ship with Windows Server 2008 earlier this year, it needed a few more months in the oven, but it was available for download in beta and later as a release candidate form. The IT industry often gets flak from environmental groups, when you've got companies like Google adding I'd assume thousands or even tens of thousands of servers to their data centres every month, maybe they've got a point, even more so when you see statistics like the average CPU utilisation in a data centre is something like 10%, ouch that's a lot of waste....

Enough playing to the Daily Mail's readership and their imaginary "middle England". If I hear another politician saying "hard working families who play by the rules" I am going to get annoyed. Most of my work colleagues and myself aren't married nor have children. I guess that means we're all stuffed. Unemployed? Heck they don't work hard you must be stuffed. Pensioners, they may of worked hard all your life, but now you don't, I guess they're stuffed too....

Good question Grimmer, just when are the Parliamentary Labour Party going to act to stop the relentless march of the Labour Party to electoral oblivion in 2010? So where did Gordon get it wrong? 1. Ensuring there was no contest for the leadership 2. Ensuring there was no-one in the cabinet from the left-of-centre 3. Inviting Tories like Digby Jones and Quentin Davies into his "big tent" and excluding the left-of-centre...

When Microsoft announced that it would ship Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 in August, the IE team also reminded web developers to ensure their stuff works by then, and supplied a couple of quick-fixes that can be used to tell IE8 to render a page in IE7 mode, which can be specified per-page, or even server-wide. This was done so that web developers could maintain their normal development cycle, so they wouldn't have to re-engineer their websites based upon IE8's release, they'd just need to add one line of code on any pages that might be effected, or change a setting on the server....

Well it's been an interesting few days in the aftermath of the Counter-Terrorism Bill. Here's the list of the Labour MPs who voted against the government; Diane Abbott, Richard Burden, Katy Clark, Harry Cohen, Frank Cook, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Cousins, Andrew Dismore, Frank Dobson, David Drew, Paul Farrelly, Mark Fisher, Paul Flynn, Neil Gerrard, Ian Gibson, Roger Godsiff, John Grogan, Dai Havard, Kate Hoey, Kelvin Hopkins, Glenda Jackson, Lynne Jones, Peter Kilfoyle, Andrew Mackinlay, Bob Marshall-Andrews, John McDonnell Michael Meacher, Julie Morgan, Chris Mullin, Doug Naysmith, Gordon Prentice, Linda Riordan, Alan Simpson, Emily Thornberry, Bob Wareing, David Winnick and Mike Wood....