Somewhere out there!

From Paul Kedrosky: Dude, Where’s My Maserati?:

I can’t add much to this article that makes it any stranger or more stupidly surreal than it already is. A gloriously-named Paris-based hedge fund manager — Bertrand Des Pallieres — nearly had his rare Maserati Cambiocorsa auctioned out from under him because he forget that it had been towed from a square in London back in May, and he hadn’t responded to repeated requests from Transport for London inspectors. His excuse:

In my defence, I would say that parking in the TfL car pound is not that expensive relative to the cost of parking in central London.

VMware, XenSource, and the future of virtualisation

The XenSource acquisition opens up the possibility that virtualisation, under Citrix sponsorship, will shift into delivering full desktops–a combination of an operating system and user application set–as virtual machines that are refreshed frequently. It’s not outside the realm of possibility, say Citrix officials, that one day such virtual machines will follow mobile workers around via the Internet, converting any available PC into a personal desktop. Virtualisation so far has been mostly a consolidation play in the data center or in the developer’s test bed, where one piece of hardware can be virtualized into several different test environments.

It is interesting in the context of the above comment that an original goal of the Xen project was global mobile computing. Maybe the XenSource-Citrix link isn’t so complicated after all, and driven by strong vision on both sides.

Useful list of CA software.

From Support Forums : Accessing file based storage? …, how to actual a VHD disk image in the console for XEv4:

You will need to attach the VDI to dom0 (Please refer to “xe vbd-create”). This will mount the VDI as a device in dom0, which you can then “lomount” to get hold of the exact partition on that disk.

Standards New Zealand to run workshop on Office Open XML:

Standards New Zealand will facilitate a two day industry meeting to assess stakeholder views on the suitability of a document on Office Open XML for publication as an International Standard.

…

Standards New Zealand, as New Zealand’s national Standards body holds the responsibility to cast this vote on behalf of New Zealand.

‘The aim of the meeting is to assess and understand New Zealand stakeholder views to allow Standards New Zealand to make an informed vote on behalf of New Zealand. This meeting will be independently chaired by Ms Alison Holt, the New Zealand delegate to the international committee JTC1 SC7 Software Engineering’ said Grant Thomas, Chief Operating Officer, Standards New Zealand.
…

The meeting will be held over the 23 and 24 August 2007 in Wellington.

I will have to find out how to make a postal or email submission. We have maybe 10,000+ Openoffice documents. I’ve fixed OO documents with zip and emacs. Two official ISO office document standards, is asking for pain. Especially when it flavors one company, no matter how important they are. That HTML as an example, probably would have been no Web 2.0 if Microsoft had managed to fork HTML.

XenSource to spin off Xen project:

What does this mean exactly? It could be a spin-off, if the comments from XenSource CEO, Peter Levin, are taken literally. “We’ll be working on an independent body to take over some of the Xen project,” he said.

Something like this would help a lot to sustain the community.

I’ve been working on getting Tribox with Asterisk and Freebpx working over the last couple weeks as well.

While reading SIP debug logs today I discovered that with Freebpx and maybe Asterisk in general the outbound context is important as well.

It’s official Citrix are buying XenSource, they don’t indicate the amount in their press release but it is stated elsewhere the amount is USD 500 million.

It’s good that the XenSource guys have realised their work. Although of course that now leaves us wondering what next for XenServer as a platform.

Mark Shuttleworth call to action Emerging consensus in favour of a unified document format standard?

The way the ISO works is interesting. There are about 150 member countries who can vote on any particular proposal. Usually, about 40 countries actually vote. In order to pass, a proposal needs to get a 75% “yes” vote. Countries can vote yes, no, or “abstain”. So normally, 10 “no” or “abstain” votes would be sufficient to send the proposal back for further consideration. In this case, however, Microsoft has been working very hard, and spending a lot of money, to convince many countries that don’t normally vote to support their proposed format.

So there is something concrete you can do, right now, today, this week! Find out which body in your country is responsible for your national representation on ISO. In SA is the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) and in the US I believe it is ANSI. Your country will likely have such a body. There is a list of some of them here but it may not be complete so don’t stop if your country isn’t listed there!

Mark has a good discussion on this issue. Read it and then go ask some questions.

NZ’s rep to the ISO is Standards New Zealand. Check out the council member list and give them a call.

As I expected. It seems if you purchase a perpetual licenses by lunchtime Friday 17th August it will be maintained at the existing level. Software maintenance is set at 20%. So when your current software maintenance period expires, the XE annual fee will jump from $150 to $750 and XS will jumped from $0 to $150.

Buying XS today at $99 vs Monday at $750, is probably a worthwhile consideration if you have a small Xen project in the near future.