February 2007 Entries
So Oscar night is approaching and Sky are broadcasting the whole shebang in HiDef. Now we'll finally see whether or not the zitmarks and subtle imperfections of Cameron Diaz et al are visible in the new format. Oh wait. What will Cameron be doing at the Oscars? My mistake.
Will have to grimace through the whole pre-show show looking a Fearne Cotton instead wondering how body dismorphic you have to be to have your legs disappear between the pixels of a 1080p display.
Technorati tags: Oscars, Oscars 2007, HDTV
It's been an interesting few days thanks to the rather large denial of service attack on the internet's root servers. Although all thirteen servers were nominally hit, the attack had less effect on the net than the 9/11 attacks when anyone online simply swamped the net looking for a news feed. Which is encouraging.
What interested me more was the amount of information provided by the maintainers of those servers who fared better than others on how their root server works and how it coped. For those interested, have a look at http://www.isc.org/ops/f-root/ for details of just one and this presentation...
This time last week, we got 8 inches of snow dumped on us in 12 hours - which for South England is a lot - our cars wouldn't get out of the drive and even our 3G card stopped connecting (which may or may not have been anything to do with the cold, but hey). Of course, it's all gone now save for the remains of a really big snowman and we'll remember that for a while. I wonder what would happen if this hit us.
Skiers are going to be talking about the Valentine's Day Blizzard of '07 for...
I note with no little sense of irony that the W3C has finally ratified XQuery 1.0 and its related standards such as XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0. I guess that when we wrote Early Adopter XQuery back in 2001, the bleeding edge was less a flowing vein and more a vague sense that there was some beetroot juice on the edge of a knife in the general vicinity.
I am a LINQ Guinea Pig like Julie and am looking forward to try the Orcas Feb CTP which Scott wowed us with at WebDD which was great and I took photos at. Mark Seemann wonders how LINQ will affect DB 'best' practices meanwhile - worth reading.
Technorati tags: WebDD, LINQ, Orcas
Scott may or may not be testing Windows Home Server at the moment and asks what everyone else has beta'd for it to die on you. I developed and co-wrote this book only to have it become irrelevant about three days after it was published. For those with long memories, MS also started something called Chrome which died a death as well. Must have been those Pentium 3's it needed to run in those days. Still, it used .x files which in those heightened times of Mulder and Scully was kind of fun.
These days I get to play with nicer...