Testing YAPB plugin for Wordpress. Wordpress is the Blog software that this blog runs on, YAPB is “Yet another Photo Blog” plugin for Wordpress to help one manage photographs. After this one test post, I’m not really that sure how much more useful it is?

Update: I just realised that this posting was posted with the time-stamp of the photograph! Updated with a more recent timestamp.

I took this a few Sundays ago, the same day we saw this hawk in the trees.

Went to see “Spirit of Uganda” at Berklee. Very enjoyable, inspiring, and entertaining. If they’re playing in your city or part of the world I’d recommend going to see them.

Some news coverage at the following sites:
http://www.patriotledger.com
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.villagevoice.com

That Pizza being pizza.com! Some lad bought the domain name in 1994 at the “dawn” of the internet age, and has owned it ever since. After seeing how much vodka.com sold for (about 3 million dollars) he put Pizza.com up for auction and got 2.6 Million US dollars!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7331042.stm

In January, Mr Clark decided to sell it after hearing that another domain - Vodka.com - was sold for $3m in 2006 …
“If someone’s willing to pay that much for Vodka.com, maybe there’s more interest in pizza.com.”

The online auction was launched on 27 March. The first bid was $100, jumping to $2.6m a week later.

Having accepted the latter offer, Mr Clark hopes to get his windfall in a few days’ time when the transaction is completed.

He said he now regretted not buying more domain names in the 1990s.

I remember when I started at college at UMass Boston, I was a student lab operator in the Unix lab (support staff) and me and a workmate (and friend) Josh started joking around looking to see what Domain names we could register. This was in 1999 or 2000 and any word in the English language we could think of was already registered as a domain name. Wish I’d gotten on this internet lark in the early 1990’s and purchased a few domain names too!

Regularly drinking coffee may help prevent or reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7326839.stm

And binge drinking can affect memory recall (at least in young drinkers):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7328863.stm

Ubuntu Linux to be certifiied on some of Sun’s hardware:

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0236534620080402

A lot of Linux enthusiasts have taken to Ubuntu, and all of its versions are freely available. I think that this can only help them squeeze into the Enterprise space, as it’s helped them gain mindshare.

Red Hat, for example, is separated into their commerical offering, RHEL, which wasn’t cheap the last time I looked at their prices, and the freely available Fedora.

Fedora is free and open source like Ubuntu and is used by Red Hat as a testing ground for new features and technologies, but isn’t exactly the same as the “for fee” versions. I think this could hurt Red Hat in the long term; the enthusiasts helped bring Red Hat to where they are, but if they can’t easily (or cheaply or freely) get the enterprise products they won’t be using them nor introducing them into companies, instead they’ll be using Ubuntu or even Novell which offers a near complete version of their product for free.

And I’m surprised that VMWare’s market value has dropped by $30 billion, yes that’s billion dollars in six months supposedly due to competition that will arise products that Microsoft has in beta:

http://www.marketwatch.com

The market already seems to have voted. VMware’s stock, which debuted at $29 a share in August, soared past the $125 mark by late October. The shares then sharply reversed — no doubt helped by a general downturn in technology stocks — and have since sunk back below the $50 mark. The stock closed at $51 on the day of its IPO.

But, man I wish I’d gotten some of those share at $29 or $30 and sold and 125 bucks! However, work doesn’t allow us to invest in IPO’s. US financial companies have rules in place to prevent conflict of interests, and there are also Federal Laws in effect. However, it’s not like most of us Techies get any knowledge that would help us in the markets anyway, but I guess they pay us fairly well to make up for this.

OK, back to the point, maybe I should really be surprised that VMWare’s stock price increased so much, from $30 to $125 is a 400% increase. With all the other competitors in the market it would only be a matter of time before any market share they would gain, or gained, would be infringed on.

And with free offering, such as Xen on the server side, and Qemu for virtualisation on the Desktop, and a multitude of other competitors on the desktop side, it’d be hard to take and keep market share.

However, the VMWare folk are a smart bunch of lads and I’d expect some innovations from them in the future.

The Taoiseach Bertie Ahern resigned, reminds me of this photograph I took while home in January:

I’d guess some people think he’s lying!

The first George the President:

Taken on a cool night with a full moon. I don’t like how my Panasonic takes nights shots, they seem to noisy (specklie) to be. I still think my 6 year old Canon S200 did a better job at night, and overall!

A pic I took today when walking home along the Fens in Fenway after having the Irish breakfast at the Squealing Pig:

Later in the day while walking the Dog along Commonwealth Ave, we saw this hawk in a tree:

Drat! Seems those energy efficient CFL’s (Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs) contain just enough lead that the bulbs could be a problem when they’re put in the rubbish (link found via Slashdot):

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23694819/

The amount is tiny — about 5 milligrams, or barely enough to cover the tip of a pen — but that is enough to contaminate up to 6,000 gallons of water beyond safe drinking levels, extrapolated from Stanford University research on mercury. Even the latest lamps promoted as “low-mercury” can contaminate more than 1,000 gallons of water beyond safe levels.

And at the moment, there are few places where one can dispose of them properly:

In fact, qualified places to recycle CFLs are so few that the largest recycler of of fluorescent bulbs in America is Ikea, the furniture chain.

Even breaking one and breathing the resulting dust could be bad for you, and especially bad for children. Children can suffer severe long-term learning disabilities from lead poisoning, and it’s takes smaller doses of lead for children to be poisoned.

On the other hand, CFL’s are so much more energy efficient than regular incandescent light bulbs, that they might result in less overall pollution because less energy is needed which means less oil and coal are burned. But, with millions upon millions of CFL’s being sold, and few people aware that that CFL’s shouldn’t be put in the trash, then we may have a problem.

Consumers bought more than 300 million CFLs last year, according to industry figures, but they may be simply trading one problem (low energy-efficiency) for another (hazardous materials by the millions of pounds going right into the earth).

However, an even more efficient light bulb with more natural light may be on it’s way, and it should be easier to dispose of. See a video at ZDnet (with a really annoying commerical at the start):

http://news.zdnet.com/2422-13568_22-192842.html

Weird and unusual news! Italian police are looking for a man supposedly hypnotising people and making them hand over money:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7309947.stm

In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: “Look into my eyes”, before finding the till empty.

In the latest incident captured on CCTV, he targeted a bank at Ancona in northern Italy, then calmly walked out.

A female bank clerk reportedly handed over nearly 800 euros (£630).

The cashier who was shown the video footage has no memory of the incident, according to Italian media, and only realised what had happened when she saw the money missing.

CCTV from the bank showed her apparently being hypnotised by the man, according to the reports.

Update March 31st: Some interesting commentary on this on Bruce Schneier’s blog:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/hypnotist_thief.html