Off you go… into the purple yonder!

So you’re writing a web-based application and you want journalling: when database records change, you want to keep track of the changes so that you have an audit trail. There are many ways to do this. If your application is going to be dealing with a lot of data, it’s best to have a separate [...]

Eric Flint, a sci-fi author, published a great essay on the counterproductiveness of DRM. It’s worth a read. Now if only the content industry could get their collective heads out of the sand and start listening to this guy… He is making a nice living by publishing some of his work online for free through [...]

Yesterday, someone posted a message to the linux kernel mailing list announcing LinuxBIOS support for the Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 board. The M57SLI-S4 is a higher end desktop-class board that can be had for around $120.
This announcement was reported all over the internet, in many languages. Unfortunately there’s quite a bit of misinformation doing the rounds – [...]

Dell is looking for suggestions, and they are publishing the results as they evolve. The top request – by an almost 2:1 margin – is about shipping machines with GNU/Linux preinstalled.
Dell, are you listening? That extra option needs to be available on all the machines you sell. And there has to be a price difference [...]

Michael Crichton (the author) has a most interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times today about the folly of gene patents.
Patents are supposed to cover inventions. Genes are most certainly not inventions. They are ‘features of the natural world’, as Crichton puts it. Patenting genes is as idiotic as patenting rocks, or sunsets. There’s [...]

Apple has posted an essay by Steve Jobs, with his thoughts on music. More specifically, his thoughts on the mounting pressure from Eureopean governments on Apple to open up it’s Fairplay DRM scheme to its competitors, so that consumers could mix and match music stores and music players.
Jobs basically says that Apple will not do [...]

Have a Google account? Or more than one? Did you know that while logged in, Google keeps track of all the searches you do in your ’search history’, and makes them accessible via your Google account? Did you know you can actually wipe out your search history, and switch the automatic recording off? More information [...]