Tell Us Something We Didn't Know!

Reasons for the decline in music sales include, they suggest, “poor macroeconomic conditions, a reduction in the number of album releases, growing competition from other forms of entertainment such as video games and DVDs – video game graphics have improved and the price of DVD players and movies have sharply fallen – [and] a reduction in music variety stemming from the large consolidation in radio along with the rise of independent promoter fees to gain airplay”.

From The Register

Fedora

It’s a pain that Fedora comes with MySQL 3.23.x. I ended up compiling MySQL, Apache, Perl, mod_perl and a million and one Perl modules in order to get RT working. I started by trying to get mod_fastcgi working, but I couldn’t get RT to work with it reliably, so went the mod_perl way.

I was marginally suprised how easy it all was, even if it did take a while. Now all I need to do is patch Fedora to the latest versions :)

Garage Tidy

Spent most of the day sorting out the garage and putting some stuff up in the loft. We have a charity coming round on Monday to take away furniture we don’t need which will really clear up some space in the garage. There’s still lots of boxes in there though which will take a while to sort through!

In other news, we have the complete planning forms for the exension sorted now, just need to post them and wait!

Security patches via dial up…

If AOL can blanket the entire world with free CDs for their dial-up service, Microsoft can do the same with something a bit more useful like a Security Update CD.

The Register has an interesting article about security patches with a dial up modem. When you think about it, it’s quite obvious why noone bothers: 102MB to update Windows2000? Just can’t be done on my dial up!

It’s bad enough having to patch SWG and I want to do that one cos I play the game :)

Abusive Monopolist

“Abusive monopolist” is how the EU competition people have described Microsoft according to this article.

The funniest bit is:

Microsoft claims that it should not be fined at all because it did not know its behaviour would breach EU law.

I bet we all wish we could use that defense!

Project Central

I was using Microsoft’s Project Central today to try and feed back information to our production director and it’s a dog! It’s a good idea done so badly! I can only assume that it was for this reason that it’s been dropped and replaced with Project Server :) So now I’m on a quest to improve my task tracking software so that it can replace the little bit of MS Project that we actually use…

The Nightingale

We ended up at The Nightingale pub for lunch today and very very nice it was too! It was very busy what with being Mothers’ day and all that, but the service was fast and friendly. The food was also really good and I especially enjoyed my spotted dick with custard!