When I became interested in cycling again in the late 1980s, Robert Millar was for me the big name in the professional peleton. Only being peripherally involved in cycling at that time, I was really unaware of the Millar's full career at that time. Richard Moore has written an excellent account of Robert Millar's rise from Glasgow club cyclist to arguably Britain's finest professional road cyclist.
cyclingnews.com reports that Iban Mayo's B sample has been retested and found to be EPO positive.', '
What's interesting here is that following the A test positive, the B tests performed in a lab in Gent were "inconclusive". The B samples have now been re-tested at the the French national anti-doping laboratory (LNDD) in Chatenay-Malabry. This lab is the focus of the Landis appeal - as far as I can tell not on the basis that the test results were wrong, but on procedural grounds - so i can see this one run and run. For my views on why EPO tests can be hard to interpret see my posting on EPO and EPO testing.
There are enough procedural uncertainties here that this story is very likely to run and run, particularly if Mayo is suspended or banned as a consequence. It's not good that these cases get prolonged while the protagonists argue the toss over procedural irregularities. Athletes have a capacity to lie over their guilt for a long time before evidence forces them to come clean - see for example the sad story of Birillo.
Opera tries to force IE into W3C compliance with EU complaint; Firefox's success may work against it (report at ArsTechnica) - The internet browser company Opera has filed an antitrust action against Microsoft. The complaint is about the bundling of Internet Explorer in Windows and the alleged breakage of international web standards. There's another analysis over at Groklaw, of the usual high standard.
Ars Technica's belief is that FireFox's success will undermine Opera's case somewhat- but the case seems to go beyond merely bundling IE, but the inability to remove IE should you wish to, and the well-known MS attitudes to international standards.
A child's view of the $100 laptop - Here's a report on the BBC describing the first experiences of a UK 9 year-old child with the XO laptop from the OLPC project. I think what's striking here is the ease with which the laptop's software is explored, and all of a sudden he's communicating with kids on another continent!
Give me rice, but give me a laptop too - A very strongly worded pro-OLPC opinion piece from Bill Thompson, a journalist and regular on the BBC World service.
Dutch government threatens to sideline Microsoft - here's a report from macworld (and the original Dutch report which i cannot read). One of the important feature about open file formats is that they are open. The consequence is that the contents will always be accessible in the future, even when the software that was used to open, edit and save those formats is long gone. Now despite Microsoft naming their new file formats OpenXML, the file formats are not open. In fact despite their efforts to pack ISO committees world-wide, Microsoft have so far failed to get their 6000 page partial description of the OOXML standard approved. If you are interested in a detailed description of MS activities, and issues to do with OOXML, here is the GrokDoc Dirty Tricks page and a summary of links (Groklaw).
What is evident is that there are half-truths being peddled, and MS are seeking to maintain user lock-in to their popular Office suite of applications: Office 2007 uses the new OOXML formats (e.g. docx). However the Open Document Format, being open (!), does not lock the user into any specific software package. It may, of course lock some packages out until such time as the software writers add odf filters.
It is reported at cyclingnews.com that the Kazakhstan cycling federation has imposed a one year ban on Vinokourov. He'll be banned from ProTour racing for four years, though, and this seems to have forced him into retirement. Vino, you may remember was busted at the 2007 Tour de France when, after an astounding recovery from injury and some really bad days in the saddle was found to have blood doped. I, along with many others I suspect, was rooting for Vino. he was at that point the underdog, and had a track record of combative riding (though some would call it a lack of tactical sense).
It's darkly amusing that Vino is represented by Maurice Suh, who also represents Floyd Landis (stripped of Tour de France victory following a positive testosterone test)
Note also that
GRAMPS is a database software package for collating and assembling genealogy data. I have been using it since December 2006 to prepare my family tree.
Written originally for Linux systems, it's also available for Windows.
Bibus is a fully featured bibliographic application, that can integrate with OpenOffice.org. It's available as a deb installation file, which makes installation much easier than in the past. I use it on my Linux PCs, but it's also available for Windows, and can be used with Word.
I can only think of Pros (no Cons). It integrates really nicely with wordprocessors, and bibliography fomatting is very flexible. You can choose one of two databases - MySQL or SQLite. I've only ever used the latter.
The Laptop That Could Change the World - A news report from Fox, about the excellent One Laptop per Child plan...nearing reality, and if you're in the USA you can contribute by a buy one, give one programme.
MS Word edit history snares Scottish Labour on donations - In which the beleagured leader of the Scottish Labour Party is undone by invisible comments in a Word document...sadly amongst the IT-challenged among the great and not-so-good, this isn't a rare occurrence. See this example from archFUDsters SCO, in their Bleak House-style comedic legal case aimed at destabilising Linux. Check out groklaw for the whole saga.
The first day of our tour began sunny and bright, though a little cool at first. We left Tayport at about 8.30 am. Because this was the first day riding with full panniers, we decided to detour via St Michael’s crossroads, for a bit of bike practice, which turned out to be a good idea. Unfortunately the roads were quite busy at times as rush hour approached. Rather than traverse Dundee’s new traffic system, after crossing the Tay Bridge, we headed out along Riverside, and out through Invergowrie, Kingoodie and Longforgan, where we crossed the main A90 at the Longforgan underpass.
In 2006, we decided to have as change from touring, and rented a cottage in Lochcarron (View Map) on the west coast of Scotland, taking the tandem and one of my solo bikes. A chief attraction (for me, at least) was that the famous climb over to Applecross (Bealach-na-Ba) was a short ride away. This worked out more social, as our friends Will and Cath were staying within reasonable range for a walking trip. Additionally, the weather turned out on some days to be completely disgraceful!
Stage 1: Tuesday 27th May Ullapool to Lochinver
Stage 2: Wednesday 28th May Lochinver to Durness
Stage 3: Thursday 29th May Durness to Altnaharra
Stage 4: Friday 30th May Altnaharra to Ullapool
Stage 5: Saturday 31st May Drumbeg coastal circuit
Stage 6: Sunday 1st June Ullapool to Poolewe
Stage 7: Monday 2nd June Poolewe to Shieldaig
The first ever Oor Wullie annual, first published in 1940, has just been reprinted in facsimile edition.
Another in D. C. Thomson's reissues of Dudley D. Watkins' classic comic books, which I received for my birthday this year. Thomson published The Broons and Oor Wullie strips in the weekly paper The Sunday Post, and compiled annuals from the strips - The Broons and Oor Wullie annuals appeared (and still do) on alternate years. Personally, I far prefer Oor Wullie - I think The Broons tends to use very repetitive story lines.
KeyJnote A rather neat alternative to PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org Impress for organising and delivering presentations. It uses pdf files or collections of images, and makes use of OpenGL for some quite nice transitions. I'll be trying this out live and for real in January - watch this space!
Pros - It's open source. Easily installed from the Ubuntu repositories, which simplifies the installation of dependencies. A KDE GUI, KeyjnoteGUI, is available, which streamlines startup considerably.
Uses either a pdf file, or a directory of images - I've used the latter.
I recently bought a copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte (Graphical Press LLC, Cambridge, USA). Tufte's website gives quite a bit of information on his publications.
Edward Tufte has written several books, generally on the effective graphical display of data. This volume is the first of a series of four, and was originally published in the late 80s (I have the second edition, fourth printing, 2006), before the appearance of Microsoft's PowerPoint application.
BackupPC This is a very flexible backup system. I'm presently using it to backup a WinXP and two Ubuntu 7.10 laptops on a daily basis to my home server. It's pretty easy to configure, especially following this guide.
