It seems that OOXML, the Microsoft patent-riddled trojan horse and miserable excuse of a standard (let alone an open one) has been approved by ISO, following Norway’s and Britain’s mysterious (and very suspicious) change of heart. At the same time, ‘a number of delegates from the 87 national standards groups have been loudly complaining about alleged heavy-handed tactics and misdeeds in the voting process’. Even if Microsoft products didn’t suck, that would be reason enough to actively embargo them.

C4[1] Videos, have been available on Viddler for about a month. For Mac Developers this is probably of some interest. [via daringfireball.net]

The following image says it all really:

These past few days there’s been a flurry of WebKit posts over at Surfin’ Safari about its ACID3 performance. I guess when dealing with bugs, and given the fact that Microsoft typically needs around 5 years before simple CSS1 bugs are fixed (as an aside the first and only version of Internet Explorer to date that passes ACID2 is 8 Beta 1, released a couple of weeks ago), I was surprised to see how fast the WebKit developers worked towards passing the ACID3 test. Between 20:22 and 03:51 another three ACID3 bugs were fixed, taking the score to 99/100. I guess by tomorrow WebKit will officially be ACID3 compliant. Woohoo!

By comparison, Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 that I’m using to write this post in Ubuntu Hardy Heron Beta1 scores a somewhat respectable 68/100, although I don’t think they’ll pass ACID3 before the final version is out.

Ubuntu 8.04 is coming on the 24th of April 2008. As is typically the case in the past few years, many millions of Ubuntu users across the globe are either waiting or, in some cases, trying out the pre-release software, reporting and fixing bugs.

Beta 1 of the upcoming version of this popular linux distribution came out a few days ago and, sadly, despite the fact that 8.04 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, it seems that it’s going to be — by far — one of the buggiest releases ever to come out bearing the name ‘Ubuntu’. In my tests with ‘Beta 1′, there are hundreds of major bugs involving the brand new (and largely unstable) gvfs subsystem for GNOME, application compatibility with PulseAudio and general system behaviour, responsiveness and stability. Having said all that, Ubuntu 8.04, at least in its first Beta is significantly faster than its predecessor.

Having less than a month before the ‘final’ comes out begs the question: is Ubuntu 8.04 going to be delayed so that it matches 7.10 in terms of stability (remember this is supposed to be a Long Term Support release), or is it going to be released on time with a x.xx.1 version coming later in the year? Why has Canonical abandoned the ‘few things at a time, done properly’ approach that it long had with Ubuntu since the beginning? While desktop linux is still sorely lacking the usability foundations that would enable it to compete with OS X, stability was never one of its problems; unless ‘Beta 1′ represented a codebase quite far from what Canonical is working on for release — sadly this is not the case — Ubuntu 8.04 is probably going to be a feature-rich update, but a huge disappointment in the areas where linux traditionally shines.

Several months after the writers’ strike interrupted it, TBBT is back and it’s turning out to be one of the funniest satires of contemporary geek culture ever to grace mainstream TV.

I’m sure not too many within the Facebook userbase share my disdain for closed, proprietary networks yet it is not surprising that a significant number of erstwhile facebook fanatics are getting tired of the same old pointless application craze that more or less defined the latter part of 2007 for the network. On the other hand, with OpenSocial having not made any substantial steps towards a concrete presence on the internet and Yahoo’s efforts having completely failed in terms of public adoption and awareness, Facebook remains the one, more or less universal social networking platform and by and large the one with the vast majority of third party applications and meaningful population profiles. I have written about my personal use of the network before: to me it’s merely a universal ‘phonebook’ where I can find old schoolmates, long lost friends from university or other activities and friends of friends that I never got the chance to get to know well enough, but that were somewhat interesting to merit a basic level of communication. I don’t use any of its facilities, not even the basic stuff like messaging (what’s the point? email is much better). It is, in my eyes, merely a directory of people, not a platform for communication. Yet others have used it in considerably different ways: from meeting new people, to ‘wasting’ time using pointless applications, to showcasing their photographs or communicating. The University of Bath has a short survey regarding the use of Facebook. The survey is available in several languages and can be found here. It will probably take less than 5 minutes of your time. Τhe results of this survey are going to be published online after the survey and accompanying analysis are completed.