Good documentary on the absurd state of software patents and its impact on new business and therefore growth.

Nice cup of tea and a biscuit? There’s a standard for that. British Standard 6008 available from the BSI for a mere GBP 32 or for free on Scribd and from this Hacker News thread. But wait, British standards are not enough. It is also an International Standard - ISO 3103. It turns out ISO have a whole range of tea related standards. Good to see our taxes being put to good use.

Last night, at my local DVD store, I purchased a Blu-ray disc for RMB 80 (USD 12). The same disc on Amazon costs USD 17.50 (down from USD 35). It is safe to assume, just like every other title in the shop, it is a fake. When Blu-ray was introduced there was doubt as to its viability due to the rise of Internet delivery and competition from HD-DVD. But the appearance of fake discs means Blu-ray has arrived as a standard. It must be viable because there is a big enough market for pirates to be shipping discs. Therefore, I…

Adobe have posted a blog “explaining” why Flash can not be made open source:

You need to be using an up to date versions of either Firefox, Safari or Chrome to view the above video.

When developing web sites, one of the things we often have to do is put fixes in the code to work around bugs in Internet Explorer. This is getting better with IE8 and IE7 but IE6 still has a large market share and it’s the worst damn browser in the world for standards compliance®. Typically we make a lovely site, then test in IE6, bang head on desk, fix, test and repeat. Oh the joy. But all of this is nothing, nothing I tell you, compared to the travesty that is the HTML rendering in Outlook 2007.…

Dear Web Developer,

In response to my comments on the CER EVD article there’s a new post on the CER IT blog and a corresponding one on Gareth’s personal site in which he defends the original post. Good for him. He also misinterprets what I wrote. In the spirit of a blogging conversation I respond below.