Disclaimer: don’t take this video seriously.

On the 24th of September 2010 Microsoft posted a video showcase titled “A few perspectives on OpenOffice.org”. Here’s the page with the video: http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/US/details/faaf9eb8-77c6-4bed-bc08-c069a7bfbb04. It asks to install silverlight, and if you don’t want that – look for the Watch as WMV direct videostream link.

Just a single quote from Glyn Moody, Computerworld UK:

The criticisms made in the video are not really the point – they are mostly about OpenOffice.org not being a 100% clone of Microsoft Office, and compatibility problems with Microsoft’s proprietary formats. The key issue is the exactly the same as it was for the Mindcraft benchmarks. You don’t compare a rival’s product with your own if it is not comparable. And you don’t make this kind of attack video unless you are really, really worried about the growing success of a competitor.

See also what Savio Rodriguez (Infoworld) has to say about that video.

Enjoy full-screen.

Aurora Borealis timelapse HD – Tromsø 2010 from Tor Even Mathisen on Vimeo.

Update 4: there are claims that these HEAD-attacks were coming from a malicious dewlance.com customer, and have nothing to do with dewlance itself.

Noticing weird narrow spikes in server load graph, I decided to investigate the most recent one – at 03:50 GMT+2 on Nov. 6, 2010.

The reason was simple: someone issued a few hundred HEAD-requests over a 30 second period to a PHP-based web-application.

All the requests were coming from IP 109.169.59.139, which belongs to the IP range of thrustvps.com:

inetnum: 109.169.58.0 – 109.169.59.255
netname: ThrustVPS_1
descr: Thrust::VPS
country: US
admin-c: RF5058-RIPE
tech-c: RF5058-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: RAPIDSWITCH-MNT

However, it is the referrer string which is more interesting: in all those requests, decorated with varying UserAgents and even operating systems, there was only one referrer – www.dewlance.com.

Initially I thought that was a test of a new DoS attack – really, who would issue dozens of HEAD requests to the same page over a few seconds? However, after seeing that “referrer” string, I now think this is a cheap, blatant, poor and ugly SEO performed by dewlance. It relies on some sites displaying a box of ‘recent visitors’, sometimes including their referrer URL as a “page where this visitor came from” – this would give dewlance.com some free link-love. Or maybe dewlance.com expects administrators to investigate log files, notice that referrer string, and happily order some services from dewlance? No way

I’ll file a complaint with thrustvps if I see that kind of misbehaviour again. All that started on Nov. 4, so there’s still hope people behind this dumb SEO implementation will get fired.

Update 1: they do this every 4 hours since November 4, 2010 (Thursday). This results in loads up to 22, with ~50 apache processes struggling for a few CPU cores:
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ask.debian.net is a StackOverflow-like Q&A website built with OSS Shapado.

That’s my first encounter of Shapado, so it was interesting to read Shapado authors’ justification and a related question on meta.SO.

Find out more about the depicted office. That would be a nice setup for flight and/or space simulators, I guess.

TinEye Firefox extension helped finding more nice workplaces.

And Stefan in his office description provided some more links to multi-display workplaces – Mitch Haile’s and Kevin Connollie’s among others.

You should already know that my preferred city vehicle is VentureOne (now called PersuHybrid, and still far from mass production – while Carver One, the original tilting three-wheeler, is now bankrupt/dead). It might be more realistic to go for Campagna’s T-Rex, which is in production since 1996.

Now, welcome the Terrafugia’s Transition transformer flying car! It can drive as a car (and is sized as a car with wings folded), and it can fly as an air-plane! Now your trip to anywhere looks like “drive to the airport – fly – land – drive to gas station – repeat as needed”. Terrafugia claims that (on average) there’s a suitable airport every 60 miles in the US. And you can fit Transition into your average garage!

That doesn’t (yet) feel like something from the future – and maybe that is why their prototype already had test flights, and they plan mass-production for 2011, and already have over 80 pre-orders.

If only it had vertical take-off…