For an excellent summary of Microsoft’ anti-competitive history, read this document and discussion at Slashdot. It’s an very well-written and fully referenced article, and also very readable.

Where do I start? This blog post has been simmering within me for ages, but I’m finally writing the thing up… I’ll try not to make it ramble too much. Bad things: Ever since 11.09.2001 and, in the UK since 07.07.2005, new laws and initiatives curtailing freedoms and personal privacy have been flooding in; Specifically,… (read more)

This may or may not be a hypothetical question. Let’s say I don’t trust my ISP. Let’s say that I don’t want any traffic at all to pass in the clear across my broadband connection. No DNS, no SMTP email, nothing. Let’s also say that I have control of a server Out There On The… (read more)

For the first time in over ten years, I entered a chess tournament this weekend. I used to play a variety of competitions, quickplays and club matches. As the tournament was taking place locally, I thought it was worth a go. Round One: White against player graded 140 (broadly equivalent to what I used to… (read more)

For the last few days it has seemed like it was a nation-wide wind-up that there was snow, seeing as everyone all around us in the country was claiming to have had loads of snow, yet we had hardly seen a thing. This morning, however, it arrived. About 4 inches, I think. Not 10cm, because… (read more)

I’m sure I’ll regret this, but this week I finally began using Twitter. Yes, yes, I know. Anyway… If you haven’t used it before, or seen the results, then the simplest way to explain it is to compare it with this weblog: here, I send out reasonably well-thought-out ‘articles’, of perhaps a few paragraphs in… (read more)

It occurs to be, with the advent of 2009, it is approaching twenty years since I first started using email. This began in my first week of my undergraduate degree at Exeter in the autumn of 1989, aged 18. Here’s a bit of computing nostalgia for you… My course was MSOR: a combination of statistics,… (read more)

New Year Honours List sees a knighthood for Terry Pratchett. Splendid. I’ve got a number of Pratchett-related items from Santa this year (latest novel, quiz book, folklore book etc.) and have been a major fan of his work for around 20 years. Oook, Sir Terry!

BOFHlet #1 painted a ceramic coaster with the Ubuntu logo for me for Christmas: of course, she used shades of pink instead of yellow/orange. Well, she’s 7 years old: what did you expect?

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, please read about rickrolling. Don’t you just find the recent batch of (UK) Christmas Number One Singles uninspiring? So let’s get Rick Astley to Number One this Christmas, thus playing the ultimate rickroll on all those X-Factor/Pop-Idol-buying drones. Download Rick Astley’s “Never… (read more)