Its a Friday & its joke time. These courtesy of @stephenfry on twitter.
Q) Whats the first sign of Madness?
A) Suggs coming up your driveway.
and
It seems Suggs is marching against racism and homophobia. I mean, its just madness gone politically correct.
As I alluded to the other day, I have found a great new blogging tool from a little software company going by the name of Microsoft (Bah, nothing will ever come of them) called 'Windows Live Writer'. This software is a free download which is part of the Live Toolset @ get.live.com.
So, you're probably asking, what's so good about it? Well, its basically a MS-Word for blogs, so everything is WYSIWIG. You can add text, pictures, links, maps and video all from the main edit screen and they will all be automatically uploaded when you post your blog, so no faffing around with uploading and linking. Its also aware of the style sheets and templates active on your blog, so there's no worry that what you type won't appear correctly when its live.
A useful feature is that you can compose your thoughts 'offline', then publish them when you have a network connection, meaning that as and when 5 minutes allow, you can add a paragraph here and there, and once you're happy, make it live. Plus, with the spell check feature, your SPAG should be a little better :).
But the killer feature for me is the ability to publish to different blog services. For example, I have configured my WLW to access my sharepoint blog on mysite, and my external blogspot account meaning that I can publish similar stories to one, either or both. The only thing that I will have to be careful about is making sure each post is suitable for its target audience, e.g. revealing sensitive corporate information to the outside, or putting profanity on the Internal Site. However, this shouldn't be too much of a problem, and I try to keep things fairly anonymous anyway.
In conclusion, anyone keeping multiple blogs upto date should checkout this software, its actually one decent tool to come from the house of Gates.
Good news everyone! Apple are now selling DRM free tunes via iTunes, bringing them in-line with the other competitors in the industry, notably Amazon and 7digital. Whilst its not the entire back catalogue yet (8 million tracks, out of 10 million), this is a welcome step towards getting rid of DRM. However its not a total 
At the moment, there still seems to be a fair few ifs and buts, however, I shall watch this one with interest. Whether existing users will choose to pay the extra 20p PER TRACK to upgrade their existing music to DRM free remains to be seen, but this is defiantly a step forward. Well Done Apple!
One thing I really hate about Linux - non-packaged applications which must be self compiled.
I have been coming up against this a lot over the last few weeks, trying to build newer software versions than are found in the repositories. Unlike Windows, where you can just download and run an executable file with no hassle, with Linux, you're expected to do some of the hard work yourself. This has its benefits in that the software is customised and optimised for the specific distribution and libraries that you're using, but has the disadvantages that often, the compilation tool is looking for and expecting certain components, calls or versions. If your 'make' fails, you have to read through the errors, fix whatever's broken, then try again. Which is fine if its just one module that needs updating, but more often than not, that module requires a dependency issue resolved, and then the next one has issues and so on and so forth, ad infinitum it seems.
All this is the reason why I choose distro's with decent package support - Debian based Distro's simply use 'aptitude install packagename' and RedHat Style Distro's use 'yum install packagename'. Aptitude seems to be a little better at resolving dependencies than Yum, but both seem to do a similar thing. However, the issue with the package repositories is that it relies on someone compiling an application for your distribution and confirming that it works, and then submitting it to the repository. This can lead to significant or non-existent delays between software updates, meaning that for a lot of 'bleeding edge' applications, a certain amount of hacking, head bashing, blood, sweat and tears is required to get the Penguin to do what you want.
Anyway, Back to trying to work out why ntop 3.3.9 won't recognise lib_pcap properly. Grrr. Any idea's anyone?
Wow, two posts in one day! Well, this is a venture into the unknown, composition wise, as I'm using Windows Live Writer (Get.Live.Com/Writer) to put this together. Whilst blogger provides some good tools for composing my thoughts, comments, questions and idea's, its a pain in the butt to synchronise this between my blogspot and my work sharepoint 'my site', which isn't visible to the world as a whole. Now, I can't test this yet, as I don't have access, but at least I can verify that blogger publishing works OK.
Right, nothing else, but watch this space for more news...
