DoomBook

This one’s not so much on a piece of literature, but a standard that goes into how our writing is saved.

According to Rob Weir Microsoft tried pulling some 11th hour committee stacking to approve their OOXML format for the United States and just barely failed. Roughly two meetings before the committee was set to vote on OOXML acceptance as a standard, roughly 16 new companies joined the committee of 7 members, all of them Microsoft shills.

Out of the original 7, only Microsoft itself voted for acceptance of the standard. Out of the late joining companies, nearly all voted to accept Microsofts offering verbatim.

Maybe other software companies should monitor these things a little more closely in the future, to make sure we’re not allowing MS to railroad their crap in as “standard” when it’s not qualified or ready. As users, we’ve got a vested interest in there only being mature and properly inter operable standards. RobWeir.com

Using XEN with hardware vitualization to get Windows up and running in a cute little box (where it’s harder for it to break things) should be easy. Just pop in the disk, tell it to install, and away you go, right?

Nope. Went through a good hour of tweaking and prodding the Xen install to get it kicking correctly. After which it just wouldn’t do anything when I went to install Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

Nothing. Just sat at the Starting Windows for install screen.

Turns out, you need to hit F5 before it gets to that point. While it’s displaying “hit F2″ or “hit F6″ on the screen. Then choose the top option instead of the “other architecture” default option.

Freaky. And irritating.

Scotts Miracle-Gro is suing a tiny company selling worm processed biological waste. The basis? Their logo uses a circle. And has colors.

I’d feel a whole lot better if I was making that up.

So TerraCycle, the sue-ee in this instance, has started up a website to let others see what they feel is a grave injustice. And frankly, if Scotts is suing based on a visible packaging similarity between their product and TerraCycle’s worm poop, it probably is.

Find out more at the supporting website.

Our new virtual server is live! Pound’s handling the connections and routing to the appropriate destination, Xen does the VM’ing, and Apache’s still working its server mojo.

All this being served up off a beefy (and more efficient) Red Hat Linux machine. Now I just have to get the processor power controls up and we’ll be all set.