And then this:

“The point of the study was actually to eliminate the FUD about Linux’s alleged legal problems by attaching a quantifiable measure versus the speculation,” he said. “And the number we found, to anyone familiar with this issue, is so average as to be boring; almost any piece of software potentially infringes at least that many patents.”

Who said that? Dan Ravicher of OSRM - also known as the guy who wrote the report Balmer is quoting.

Via The Inquirer

Update: This dates from November 2004 (eWeek). As far as I know Ballmer’s still quoting the same report.

James Turner is pissed off about Microsoft’s patent sabre rattling - as we all should be.

At the end, there’s only one thing left to say. For shame Microsoft, for shame. You’ve twisted competition into a thuggish debacle that ranks right up there with the worst of the great robber barons. How ironic that Bill Gates is trying to reinvent himself as the great philanthropist. Andrew Carnegie took much the same route late in his life, as if it could wash away his sins. We can only hope that in a few years, Steve Ballmer will look as much a fool as Daryl McBride does today.

More here.

I’m posting this here just to give it a little more Googlability in the hope that people might find it more easily than I did.

If you install Ubuntu on a HP 510 or HP 500 laptop you’ll find that the touchpad doesn’t work. Then you’ll find this page which details a fairly crufty kernel hack to get the touchpad working. It also explains how to select the native 1280×800 screen resolution.

Having done that you’ll reboot and find that the WiFi isn’t working. If you’re really lucky you’ll then find this thread that explains how to fix the WLAN.

Or you could just follow those links. Now if I could just get DHCP working on the WLAN I’d be happy…

The Inquirer has news of a new Linux based phone, the OpenMoko. It looks pretty good and, apart from a couple of device drivers the software is completely open.

What’s really surprising about the story is that at the time of writing a Google search for OpenMoko returns no results. Nada. Have the INQ got the name right? If so how the hell have FIC kept it so quiet? And why?

Still, it looks interesting and the $350 price makes Trolltech’s tag of $695 for what appears to be a similar device look a bit sick. Evidently Linux phones have to be green. Who knew?

Here’s the current situation - just in case it isn’t entirely clear from the item below. Windows Live Local currently has an issue for some people who are using Firefox on Linux. Steve Lombardi and Stephen Stchur of Microsoft confirm that this combination is absolutely supposed to work (it’s something they’ve put considerable effort into) and believe that there may be a problem with their browser sniffing code. They’re aiming to get a fix in the next release of Live Local - in around a week.

In the meantime you can work around the problem by

1. Downloading User Agent Switcher for Firefox
2. Importing User Agent Switcher options from this file
3. Instructing Firefox to fake Firefox 1.5 (Windows XP)

Thanks to Steve and Stephen for getting on the case so promptly and to everyone who reported results.

Where’s Windows Live Local gone? It used to be at local.live.com but now all I get is a search interface that seems to lead to maps but no aerial photos. Strangely I can still see the aerial photos (which for my area are much better than Google’s) via flashearth.com but all the links to Windows Live Local now redirect to intl.local.live.com - “Live Local Search”.

Update: It’s back. Maybe somebody pulled the wrong plug :)

Update 22/09/2006: It’s still not working on Linux (tested with Firefox 1.5.0.5). Working fine on Mac Firefox. Can we have a show of hands from people who’ve previously been able to get it working on Linux?

Update: This item (dated Sept 12) on http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com states that it does work on Firefox Linux (my emphasis):

You have control over line thickness, fill color, line color and line pattern. You can draw multi-segment lines or complex closed shapes. While its not exactly Adobe Illustrator, it is quite an impressive set of basic drawing and editing tools all implemented in Dynamic HTML; No plugins required, and it works very well in Firefox 1.5 (Windows, Mac, Linux), IE6, and IE7. Here’s a Collection I am working on of the major neighborhood boundaries in Manhattan.

Update 24/09/2006: Steve Lombardi from the Windows Live / Virtual Earth team (that’s his blog linked above) tells me that this is definitely not intended behaviour and is now investigating - thanks Steve.

I’ll post more information as soon as I have it.

Stephen Stchur writes (hoisted from the comments):

This is definitely a browser sniffing problem. VE is absolutely designed to work with Firefox (on all of Windows, Mac, and Linux).

Download the Firefox extension (User Agent Switcher). Then switch the User Agent to be IE 6 for Windows. Then try browing to local.live.com. It will work.

A crappy solution, but at least it’s something until this gets fixed.

I’ve just tried that and it seems to work fine.

Update 25/09/2006: Spoke too soon - faking IE 6 prevents the redirect - but the map doesn’t actually load. I was having connectivity problems when I tried it and assumed that’s why the map hadn’t loaded - but Stephen confirms the same problem.

What does seem to work is faking Firefox on XP. That’s not one of the default User Agent Switcher options - but if you download uas-ffxp.xml and import it to User Agent Switcher you should get a Firefox/Windows XP option that will work with local.live.com.

Steve and Stephen hope to have a proper fix in the next release and asked me to pass on thanks to everyone who submitted reports.

I’m looking for someone to take over maintenance of pam_abl. It doesn’t look as if I’m going to have any time to work on it over the next few months. The urgent task is to get it working on 64 bit systems. I don’t think that will necessarily be hard - but I don’t have a 64 bit machine here to test on and although I’ve had a kind offer of a box to use I don’t really feel inclined to try debugging code that can easily lock out your ssh connection over an ssh connection.

If you’re interested in taking it over let me know. Grab the code and have a look at it before you commit to anything.

This is one of the best bits of software news I’ve heard in a while - and pretty much entirely unexpected. Xara Xtreme is going open source with Linux and Mac versions licensed under the GPL.

If you haven’t heard of Xara it’s one of the finest vector drawing programs ever. Its roots are in a product called Artworks which ran on Acorn RISC OS machines. The first version of Xara I owned ran snappily on a 486, did real time anti-aliasing and basically knocked spots off anything else. My venerable copy of Xara X is the main reason I boot up a Windows machine these days.

Xara (the company) started out as Computer Concepts and they produced the first piece of software I ever bought - the WordWise wordprocessor for the BBC Micro. Legend has it that Charles Moir wrote it at his mum’s kitchen table. About fifteen years ago my company and Computer Concepts briefly collaborated on a hardware product and, frankly, I can’t wait to have the chance to work with these guys again - they’re an excellent company who have been producing top quality software for twenty five years.

I’m rambling now… Just so excited that not only will I be able to run Xara on my Mac and Linux boxes - I’ll probably be able to help get it there.