Microsoft director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow is quite frankly a jerk. He thinks that a person, organization, city, state, nation, or continent, can't take advantage of open source unless they can code it. I've added a few extra items in the list, but I'm just extrapolating his idea, which is ridiculous. The reason is simple. Microsoft doesn't allow you to code their operating system or applications, yet he is asking you to use them. How silly is that? One system allows you do jump in and code away, if you have the skills to do it, while the other system keeps their crap bloated code to themselves whether you have the ability or not. I can't help but find it funny that Matusow can't see the irony in his complaint.

I think that they should put their code with their mouth is and open everything up to South Africa. Make all of their software truly free and open source just to apologize for Matusow's ignorance. I know that won't happen. But hey, it would be a fun experiment. Oh but that won't work because no one in Africa can code right? 

Someone better tell that to South African Mark Shuttleworth who started Thawte and then created the Ubuntu Linux Distro. I wonder where he learned to do all that?

Microsoft Supporting ODF? -- Close, But No Cigar - I wish I could wholeheartedly applaud the Microsoft announcement about native support for ODF, but I can't. Of course, it's better to have native support for ODF, no matter what motives may have influenced Microsoft's announcement, and I'm glad about that for the sake of end users. But it hasn't happened yet. Was the word 'vaporware' not coined for Microsoft? In any case, I'm in the "I will believe it when I see it" category when it comes to Microsoft. They've earned my caution.

And I see danger signs for FOSS I'd like to share with you, so you can consider them. Once again, the problem is software patents. Internet News indicates that commercial Linux/FOSS vendors, and the GPL license that Linux comes with, will be excluded:

Microsoft, however, frames its latest moves as part of fulfilling a company-wide interoperability initiative that it announced in February.

Uh oh. Remember this from February, when Microsoft announced the availability of APIs?

Microsoft has officially pulled is Yahoo offer. In my mind furthering their already huge plunge into the dark waters of irrelevancy. No large company in their right mind would want to merge with Microsoft at this point. Firstly, Balmer is no Gates. Balmer reminds me of an angry junior high school teacher who is trying to make himself feel important by bulling the kids. Well this time the kids stood up for themselves.

I don't even understand why Yahoo was attractive to Microsoft in the first place. Anything useful from Yahoo would be killed by the Microsoft's culture. You can't "borg" Yahoo. It just wouldn't make any sense for a "Windows Only" company to take over a company like Yahoo that has used so much open source to fuel its features. While I'm not exactly a Yahoo fan either, I think their open source usage and support is to be commended.

I don't think Microsoft's leadership is capable of understanding Yahoo's technology choices or supporting them after a merger. If they aren't buying them for their technology, what else would they buy them for? If its for their users, then they would be in for a horrid shock. After killing their services with "Microsoft" technology and idiotic marketing shams, how many users would be left? I guess the scariest thing is that Microsoft's leadership actually thought this was a remotely good idea. It just shows the complete level of delusion of its leadership.

Finally! At long last I will be able to ditch horrible Windows for broadcasting on uStream! I am a member of the Lords of Tyr gaming group. I broadcast our games live over the internet using uStream on the Lords of Tyr Channel. Its not really for others to watch, although they are certainly welcome to. Really uStream is used as a remote gaming tool for members can cannot join us in person, and as a way to record sessions online in case we ever need to review something that happened in an earlier session.

uStream is awesome, but I was forced to use Windows, because it uses Flash. Flash for Linux does not support Video for Linux 2 (V4L2). Instead it uses the completely dead V4L standard. Yuck! So guess what? I couldn't use my USB camera or my Sony Digital firewire camera in Linux for uStream. But now all that is going to change! I haven't try it yet, but I just found this new project call The Flashcam Project.

It creates a loopback and forwards frames from V4L2 to V4L devices. Something I thought would be possible, but haven't the time to figure out for myself. Thank you for making this awesome little app Oliver! I'm going to give it a try tonight to make sure it works before our game tomorrow afternoon.

Summary

Tools used: 2 Kubuntu 7.10 PC's, Gizmo VOIP client, Gizmo VOIP conference feature, Icemat Audio headset and usb card, Audacity audio editor, Podsafe Music from http://music.podshow.com,

Process:

1. Use only SIP compliant VOIP clients (iChat, Gizmo, Ekiga) so that everyone can use the Gizmo VOIP conference call number.

2. Use two Gizmo clients on your end. One to participate in the call and one just for recording. The PC that is recording with Gizmo should have its speakers and mic turned off. Otherwise strange echoing or feedback will occur.

3. Everyone call in using the full phone number that you get from Gizmo (It should look like 1-222-xxx-xxxx). Using other methods doesn't seem as reliable.

4. Record the call. Everyone will hear a message that says that the call is being recorded. Make sure that at the end of the call everyone is off mute and you record about 10 seconds of “silence”. This is for later on when you use the noise filter feature in Audacity.

5. Hold your podcast session

Even Gartner, who I have always thought as company that has over-hyped Microsoft, has come to realize that Vista was a horrible horrible mistake.

The entire Windows eco-system is collapsing because it is too big and not secure enough. So much of the corporate expense of Windows is not just the Microsoft licenses, but the huge cost of management and security software. This cost also includes massive hardware costs that are incured by every system that needs to run that software.

I think the tipping point is here. Look at the success of hardware like the Asus Eee laptop. Apple! Are you listening? Blot is out and you are next on the chopping block if you aren't careful! 

I was just messing around with my Zaurus PDA this week. I've been installing Android, the gPhone software. I also installed a full debian distro on it called Titchy Linux. Then I installed Angstrom, which is also a Linux distro based on the former OpenZaurus project. 

Lifehacker.com is an awesome site. I've found a ton of tips and tricks on the site. My favorite was an article on Easy Ways to Live Greener. That is where I found out about gDiapers.

My wife and I had been using the horrible landfill choking disposable diapers up until then. Now we use biodegradable diapers that are made with renewable resources. Of course the site is mostly technology focused with suits me perfectly.

Check out Lifehacker.com or just use the RSS feed to the left. 

Ars Technica has reported that the OOXML document format is now an ISO "standard". I find it ironic that this was announced on April 1st. I'm still hoping that its really an April Fool's joke, but it is not.

I find it pathetic that no one has even implemented this standard yet. Not even Microsoft. Usually there are a number of groups that begin implementing a hot standard before it is even ratified as an ISO standard. But not here.

I don't trust Microsoft to do the right thing for its customers. They do a good job of doing the right thing for themselves. The Microsoft track record of even doing the right thing for themselves isn't very good lately either after the total disaster that is Vista. They are cleary willing to make an inferior product just to implement nasty terrible anti-consumer things like the DRM that is built into Vista.

I imagine that they can't wait to fool governments around the world with their new ISO document standard to lock everyone into expensive, bloated, proprietery Microsoft products. Buyer beware!

From Engadget: Live from Apple's iPhone SDK Conference

"Hopefully they love it and buy it -- but that's not possible today,
even the big developers would have a problem getting their app in front
of every iPhone user. It's called the App Store -- and we're putting it
on every single iPhone on the next release of the software. This is how
we're distributing apps to the iPhone."