A company called SpecOps is developing a new compatibility layer between Linux and Windows. It is supposedly a completely new method of running Windows applications seemlessly on Linux. They did a demonstration which seems to show that it works; whether it really does or not I don’t know. A healthy dose of scepticism is needed for programs that seem to promise the world.

If it did work flawlessly and was a truly new method of solving this problem, it would be an exciting development indeed. Whilst I may not be a believer yet, I hope they do succeed. Best of luck to them!

I’m going to try and post a song each week, because I like seeing what other people like. I find it a great way to find new bands as well. I’ll try and post some of my reasons for the choice with each song. I’ll probably leave the songs up for a week or so, depending on what sort of bandwidth drain it seems to be.

So, without further ado, this weeks song is:

Ah, now I remember what caused me to write my little post below on using web standards. This rather ill-informed article. I knew there must have been some reason.

On the “standards don’t seem to be standard” — a.k.a always appear the same in all browsers — issue: I designed this site without once looking in KHTML or IE. A couple of weeks later I thought I really should check out what it looks like in those browsers. You know what, it looked identical.

Via Antipixel, an article on the extent of the looting of archaeological sites in Iraq over the past year.

In modern times, however, these seals have become highly desirable collectors’ items, which often sell for astronomical prices at auction. Many of the seals from the Iraq Museum could end up in the hands of collectors worldwide, never to be seen again.

Quite how someone who calls themselves a collecter can simply take one of these items, very likely knowing it was looted, and hide it away for their own personal pleasure eludes me.

Around and about the place, you often see people maligning “new” web technologies such as CSS and XHTML as “harder to learn and use” than hacky, workaround techniques in old style HTML.

It might be true that the new technologies are harder. I don’t think this is because they are being designed by out-of-touch geeks sitting in a room somewhere, disconnected with “real world” design (as some people suggest): it is because the web is coming of age and we are starting to use (and need) more sophisticated techniques to take full advantage of it.