I was listening to the Radio 4 comedy quiz show banter on the way home last night and it struck me that this weeks programme was actually pretty geeky. I can only put this down to the influences of Dave Gorman of Googlewhack fame and Will Smith a self confessed Sci-Fi and Bergerac!? fan.

One of the rounds asked the guests to name their top 3 websites and the usual suspects Google, Amazon and eBay were mentioned. Dave Gorman was a bit more original and suggested http://www.wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.com/. Back at University I tried to get http://www.dot.com but unfortunately it was already taken.

Another round asked guests to name their top 3 robots Metal Mickey, Marvin the paranoid android and Twiki were all mentioned as well as R2D2, at which point Will Smith launched into a rant about inconstancies between the original Star Wars episodes and the new ones.

The geeks are taking over, be afraid, bring back Quote…Unquote before it’s too late!

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Sharepointblogs.com has the most comprehensive list yet of what features are likely to be in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services V3.

The important ones for me were

• 100 percent use of ASP.NET framework
• Out-of-the-box facilities for blogs, with comments
• ‘Richer’ calendars, surveys, discussions and email integration
• Enhanced email alerts, more informative, with filters
• Facility to submit postings to WSS discussion boards via email
• Recycle bin for deleted items
• Support for spell check, tables, and stylesheets in Content Management
• Ability to create both browser-based and client-based InfoPath forms
• Two-way synchronization capabilities with Outlook
• A vastly improved backup and restore model
• Content can be syndicated via RSS on a per-site or per-list basis
• Better support for non-IE browsers
• Ability of CSS developers to do direct editing of a site’s CSS stylesheets
• Item-level permissions in all libraries and lists
• Improved authentication — no longer bound to NTLM
• Simultaneous LDAP & Windows authentication

It’ll be interesting to see how the products develop.

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According to the BBC a Japanese television company has produced a remake of the television drama Monkey.

I’m getting sick of re-makes hasn’t anyone got any imagination any more? Surely someone can produce something original?

The article on the BBC’s website says

Monkey purists may be disappointed by the new version. The opening scene of each old episode that retold the legend of his birth from a stone egg on a mountain has been dropped.

The scene where Monkey achieves immortality by gorging himself on 9,000-year-old peaches will also not be included.

Now that’s both imaginative and original. I wonder how many people would describe themselves as a “Monkey purist”.

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I notice VMware are now offering a free beta download of their new VMware Server. Better still they’re allowing you to download pre-built virtual machines from Novell, RedHat and ubunto as well as virtual machines pre-configured with applications from IBM, BEA, MySQL and Oracle. There’s also a long list of Community built virtual machines, fortunately there is no sign of the mythical Microsoft Bob.

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I mentioned in an earlier post that I was building a Windows Media Center PC. Well I’ve finally managed to get most of it working.

The system is based around my aging Biostar 200n which has an Athlon XP processor, 512mb of RAM and 2×60gb SATA hard disks which are mirrored using RAID 1.

I’ve bought two digital freeview tuners a PCi Blackgold card and a USB2 Hauppauge WinTV NOVA-T. I’ve also ordered a Microsoft Media Center OEM remote control and receiver.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get the Blackgold tuner working but the NOVA-T works a treat. The MCE interface works well on my 28″ widescreen CRT and the picture quality is as good from the NOVA-T as it was from my old freeview box. DVDs aren’t bad either but they look and sound much better when played using my dedicated Denon DVD player.

I’ve had a couple of problems whilst using Windows Media Center. It has crashed several times interrupting recordings, the noise from the fans in the PC is distracting and I’ve had some problems getting hardware to work correctly.

As I’ve already mentioned the Blackgold card doesn’t work despite having drivers for MCE 2005, the onboard graphics card didn’t work, I ended up buying a new card and I have a Dazzle Digital Video Creator 90 which I couldn’t get working either.

It’s been an interesting experiment but if you have the money, I suggest your get a dedicated PVR or a pre-built MCE PC. I would recommend the Sony RDR-HXD 710 or the Panasonic DMREH60D both have large hard disks, DVD recorders and freeview tuners. At the end of the day it’s less hassle and you get more reliable results.

I’ve never been one to take my own advice so next I think I’ll try MythTV an Open Source equivalent to Windows Media Center based on Linux.

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• ExtremeTech is suggesting that Apple’s trademark of the phrase “Mobile Me” is evidence of their intention to produce an iPod phone. This strikes me as a sensible direction for Apple to move into, especially given the success of Sony’s new Walkman phones. Read more here.
• If you don’t like RSS readers you may like this new service from Squeet. Basically it allows you to receive News, Blogs, or any RSS or Atom feeds in your email.
• eWeek are reporting on potential Security and Performance Risks of using AJAX.
  

  “…malformed messages can disrupt server performance due to excessive parsing and exception handling; and XML messages can consume more than double the bandwidth of traditional binary data formats, leading to system wide performance degradation.”

  This raises the importance of firewalls which can provide support for XML content filtering and content acceleration.

• Ajaxian has an interesting article on how to Optimise your Ajax and CSS code by using gzip to compress the file sizes and reduce the number of HTTP requests.
• And finally Linux Insider is reporting that Red Hat plans a Linux distro for the MacBook Pro. Hopefully we can have a triple boot system when it eventually arrives.

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It is occasionally useful to be able to hide images or text in your web pages. The following CSS achieves this very nicely and works in most browsers.<style type="text/css">
.hidden
{
position:absolute;
left:0px;
top:-500px;
width:1px;
height:1px;
overflow:hidden;
}
</style>Then simply enclose the code you want hidden in the following div tag.<div class="hidden">Hidden Text</div>

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