The IBM tax laid bare, from a promotional spam Amazon sent me: The hourly prices for Amazon EC2 running IBM are as follows: Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Express - starting at $0.38/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Workgroup - starting at $1.31/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Express - starting at $0.38/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Workgroup - starting at $1.31/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere sMash - starting at $0.50/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM Lotus Web Content Management - starting at $2.48/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere Portal Server and IBM Lotus Web Content Management Server - starting at $6.39/hour Interesting prices. How could it possibly be that WebSphere + Lotus Web Content Management is worth $6.39 per hour? Who could justify that price? It’s really inconceiveable, though I have to admit I don’t know enough to judge for sure. My bullshit meter is pegged at 11 though, and it’s pretty reliable. ...

Wow. Here’s an incredible inside view of the piracy business. What’s incredible is that NPR’s Channa Jaffe Walt managed to get a CEO of a shipping company on the phone and hear the inside story of the negotiations. Here’s what’s really interesting. The first thing the CEO says is, “I never thought for a moment that I wouldn’t have to pay anything. The only question was how much, and when.” Channa asks him why and he says, “Look, there’s no one to turn to, we’re on our own out there and that’s all there is to it. You pay.” ...

Overheard here in England (which was, last I checked, a European country): I found a really interesting partnership we could join, but we’d have to make friends with a bunch of Europeans. Insert sound of my jaw dropping the floor here…

This is an interesting story by a BBC correspondent, which pulls no punches. Easy to see why he was left feeling bitter. There are two sides to every story of course, and I’m sure the military folks would tell you about security rules, zero tolerance for violation of force protection imperatives, risk asessments, etc, etc, etc. But that’s all missing the point. When you are doing counterinsurgency work, you have to be close to the people. You have to earn their respect by finding out what earns respect in their culture and then finding a way to do it inside of your own culture. They, in turn, will come to know you and, if you deserve it, you’ll earn their respect in return. ...

Posterous does the heavy lifting. Nifty. You have to give Posterous access to your blog. It would be nice if Wordpress had a delegation feature, where I could make a user with a low privilege level for this.

I am a Slashdot addict, and one of the reasons are gems like these. The geek sense of humor is omnipresent: Police in Norfolk, England already have tracking units, The Automatic Vehicle Location System, installed in their cars that allow a control room to track their exact locations. Later this year a similar system will be attached to individual police radios to allow controllers to monitor the position of every frontline officer … the system will allow the force to home in on “shouts” to within yards. The system also lets operators filter a map showing the location of its vehicles and constables to reveal only those with the skills needed for a specific incident, like the closest officer with silver bullets during a werewolf attack. ...

What are the economic effects of the repair vs replace decision? Interesting question, that. If you missed “more local employment of the blue collar type”, go read this: There is a slight diversion of purchasing strategy, repair rather than replace. This feeds a blue collar industry in the local region. It used to be, when money was loose, replace with new was the norm. If the repair was 75 percent of the cost of replacement a new motor was ordered, the old motor was scraped, and the country of origin (Mexico, China, Taiwan) benefited. These beautiful USA built, 50 year old, 200 horsepower motors, were going to the scrap heap. ...

I am working on a new project. The result will be a document. I want to publish it in several formats, including HTML, PDF, and Word. (Hot tip: if you rename a RTF file to end in DOC, you’re done. Don’t make DOC files, they suck. Make RTF files, which any editor can read. You just have to trick your users and Word into using RTF’s by renaming them.) The accepted standard these days for formatting a document into PDF, RTF and HTML is DocBook. In fact, the modern implementation of DocBook is just “XML + XSL (+ FO)”. You could do pretty much the same thing with XML and XSL yourself, but then your document would not be compatible with someone else’s formatting instructions, and you’d be redoing a bunch of work other people already did. ...

I have a mobile from 3. It has Skype on it. It is the second worst mobile phone I have ever owned. The worst was the Danger Hiptop, a phone with a software bug preventing it from ringing. (You can’t make this stuff up.) The third worst phone I ever used was a Motorola. And while we are on the subject of crappy phones, ZTE makes cheap phones for Africans with prehistoric UI – but they are learning fast and will come eat Nokia’s lunch some day, mark my words. But that all wasn’t supposed to be the content of this post… ...

Does anyone out there know why xsltproc and the DocBooc stylesheets are so stuuuupid? When there’s a processing error, they just keep going. OK, fine, maybe useful. But then there’s no return value to say that there was a problem. The man page for xsltproc says it has return values, but it always returns 0 for me. And I’ve found the place in the DocBook stylesheets where the error is emitted. It looks like this: ...