One of the biggest threats to small software businesses and freely available open source software is the threat of software patents. Software is already protected by the current copyright laws, patents are not needed to prevent people stealing other peoples software. The big problem is that software patents could be applied to very generic terms, […]

The free office suite OpenOffice.org has now reached version 2. This release standardises on the new opendocument format and adds even better support for reading and writing Microsofts proprietary document formats. The office suite is fully functional including: Wordprocessor: Writer Spreadsheet: Calc Equation Editor: Math Presentations: Impress Vector Drawing Program: Draw Database: Base Some of […]

Unfortunately there was a server outage yesterday morning, affecting both watkissonline.co.uk and firstaidquiz.com. Due to some maintenance work by NTL my web server was allocated a new IP address. Whilst the DNS entry was updated at lunchtime depending upon how the entry was cached on other DNS servers it may have taken a while to […]

Once again I have seen another failed DOS attack against the firstaidquiz.com website. This occured at approximately 2pm today. The attempt took the form of a large number of logins at the same time. This was from someone using various names including “Nick”, “Bob Marley” and “Some randome[sic] crack head”. I believe these to be […]

We had decided that we were going to stay at a caravan park and we booked with Keycamp Holidays at the La Croix du Vieux Pont Site near Berny-Riviere, Paris. We booked last minute and so our holiday details were sent to us straight away. We were out when the details were sent and had […]

Linux World Expo 2005 as a conference delegate on Thursday. The trade stand area was smaller then I expected having attended the InfoSecurity show in the past, but it was still worth a trip to London for the event. The show itself was free, which included a few free seminars, but to attend most of […]

The trip was arranged as a birthday present for my mother-in-law. We had originally decided to go on the trip before finding out that we were to become parents, but fortunately hadn’t booked anything. We would have been travelling during the month before our baby daughter was born if we had booked it. Whilst we […]

It’s been about a week since I posted an entry to the blog, quite a bit longer than normal. The reason for this is that we’ve been on holiday for the past week staying at a Caravan site near paris, and including a day trip to Paris and two days at Disneyland Paris and Paris […]