Just Uber

This is just a quick post to say well done to Hull City AFC for achieving promotion to the premier league!

The city of Hull is currently undergoing a period of regeneration unprecedented in it’s long history. Previously a prosperous fishing town, Hull is fighting back against economic decline and trying to etch a place out for itself in a new millenium.

Having a team in the premier league is the icing on the cake and I for one am excited to see what the future holds for both our football team and our city at large.

Hull. Things are looking up!

I just read this on Slashdot and wondered what people thought of this seemingly bizarre move from MS?

After campaigning for OOXML so vigorously, MS have now announced that they will be issuing an update to Office 2007 to add support for OASIS ODF 1.1.

This won’t be available as the default format for saving, but even so - making support available for ODF and not supporting OOXML (that won’t come until a future version) must fatally damage OOXML as a standard.

Hopefully the delay in OOXML support and the emergance of ODF support as standard in an MS Office suite will herald new support by the public sector for the ODF format.

Who knows, the next time you visit your favorite government website you might be able to grab a copy of taxreturn.odt

Some exciting news coming from the Phoronix website suggests that Valve may be porting the Source engine to Linux.

The Source engine powers many of Valve’s top titles including Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2, Day of Defeat: Source, Portal, and Team Fortress 2.

Linux support for Source is likely to increase the take up of Linux based operating systems amongst Joe Public. Lack of support for modern games is often cited as a reason for not moving from Windows.

Lets hope that the rumours are true, and that Valve are the first of many games developers to go down this route.

Want iPlayer on your telly but don’t have a Wii? Check out this very useful script for the Xbox Media Centre. The script allows you to download programs from the BBC iPlayer service to an old Xbox (or Linux or Windows PC) with XBMC installed, and watch them at your convenience.

Quality isn’t great as the script uses the old ‘I’m pretending to be an iPhone’ trick to grab an MP4 file, but it’s still fairly watchable until a better quality stream becomes available.

Because this hack is using an iPhone masquerade trick (oh, and in case you were wondering, the authors overcome the BBC’s first attempts to thwart this kind of hack), the upside is that there is no DRM on the files you download. You can grab the script from Google Code.

I suppose it just goes to prove, there’s life in the old Xbox yet!

Here are a couple of screenies for your enjoyment.