CNNIC recently updated its rules about who can register a .cn domain name. Basically only registered companies in China. OK. This was on 11 December 2009. GoDaddy wait until 5 February 2010 until they send an email to registrants with details of a list of paper work that must be submitted by 12 February 2010. That is, they give us one weeks notice. Here’s the thing. They don’t say in the email where the paperwork is to be submitted. Or if it has to be paper. Or if scans are OK. Only it is to be submitted. Duh!…

When I wrote about the PsiXpda I made a snarky reference to the long time it was taking for Nokia to release Symbian as open source. Well, what do you know? As soon as I write about it they go open source. Apparently ahead of schedule - though that seems a bit arbitrary since (if I recall correctly) when they started there was no schedule. And the Symbian Source page says… “Not all of the code is yet available under open source licences.” Odd that.

This sentence contains a link to the excellent guide on how to write an incendiary blog post from Chris Clarke.

China has been in the news a lot lately. Not all of it good. But here is some good news. The New York Times is reporting on China’s rise in renewable energy industries - already World leader in wind turbines and solar panels. And The Guardian is reporting that, in the wake of the US plans to scrap moon missions, China could be the only country remaining with the goal to place men on the moon. Good luck to ‘em it will be a marvellous achievement.

After the introduction of the iPad last week a lot of hackers (in the Hackers and Painters sense) published a lot of blog articles bemoaning its closed nature - e.g. Tinkerers Sunset. They sound like the Four Yorkshiremen from Monty Python.