Paul Smith's Blog

So this is what I've been waiting years for. A device the same size as my XDA Mini S, that has a VGA screen. I was meaning to blog about this on Tuesday when HTC made the announcement, but things got in the way. My Mini S is feeling pretty dated now, over two years old now, I upgraded it to Windows Mobile 6.1 a couple of months ago, been over-clocking it to try and keep it fresh, but I've been itching to update it, the XDA Stellar caught my eye, but it still has a QVGA screen as have all the 2....

Although things look pretty gloomy - at least for the New Labourites, in Venezuela we continue to make progress. This May Day the minimum wage was increased 30% in Venezuela, and not only that but public sector wages were also increased 30%. Taking into account the food subsidies, this will mean the minimum wage in Venezuela will be twice that of the average wage in Latin America. It also seems that the six hour working day is back on the agenda (which was packaged with last years' defeated constitutional reforms)....

Nationally the share of the vote looked like this: Tories 44% Labour 24% In London, with a socialist candidate the share of the vote looked like this: Johnson 42% Livingstone 36% Grimmer mentions their candidate, Janet Oosthuysen, falling short of ousting the Lib Dems by 53 votes, they campaigned on a slogan of "Vote Labour - Get a Socialist". I think there is a message here for the Labour Party and somewhere in it is the 'S' word....

I saw a post on Slashdot titled "Coding Around UAC's Security Limitations", which pointed towards this. The whole angle of the post on Slashdot is trying to make it seem that UAC doesn't do anything and is worthless, the iReboot developers certainly have that angle too, in what I'm sure some would call a childish tirade. iReboot is an application that sits in the tray, and allows you to select an OS you want to reboot into....

Out in the technical communities I still see a lot of people telling people to use msconfig (Microsoft System Configuration Utility) to stop applications running on startup with Windows. Now this was a fine tool - back in the old days (it first shipped with Windows 98), but it hasn't changed much since then and is geared towards technical users. Windows Defender is often overlooked as being a simple anti-spyware application....

The International Astronomical Union recently released a trailer for the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Here's the YouTube version: They've got higher quality versions on their website in a mix of MPEG formats. I've taken the liberty of re-encoding their 1080p video to VC1/WMV, so that people who don't like installing 3rd party software can still watch it (yes ideally WMP should support H.264). I'll be hosting it here, for a while it weighs in at 86MB, if it gets too much traffic I'll have to pull the download and stick it somewhere else....

John Wiseman, the prospective parliamentary candidate for Westmorland and Lonsdale has picked up some attention for his recent entry on Labour Home where he made a plea to Gordon Brown to reinstate the 10p rate of tax. He's running into a lot of flak, some of it to be frank quite ghastly with plenty of ad hominem attacks thrown in against him too. He has also picked up a lot of support too, with for example Grimmer weighing in on this issue too....

I saw an article over on Universe Today on the whole star naming scam. This has been one of my pet peeves for a long while - private companies conning you into thinking they're naming a star for you, when they have no such authority with which to do so. The article goes into how the International Astronomical Union is the only organisation who has any authority to name stars etc....

Although I was meaning to post something back when the Office Open XML format was approved by the ISO despite lobbying by the likes of Sun and IBM, I never got around to it but it looks like the issue is back in the news. I was some what amused to read that the Linux/Open Source aka anti-Microsoft crowd have been protesting, yes actually protesting outside the ISO committee meeting in Norway recently....

First off, hat tip to the Stroppyblog for bringing this to my attention. To quickly quote from the Daily Mail: Lillian Ladele has launched proceedings against Islington Council in North London, claiming that to officiate at civil partnership ceremonies between same-sex couples is incompatible with her religious principles. Her refusal to supervise such unions has brought her into conflict with the council, where she has worked for more than ten years....