A little corner of the Empire on the web.

07 March, 2008

Open Parliament

Dad's organization (OFE) are organizing a petition to convince the European Parliament Government to change their IT systems over to using open standards.

Head over to www.openparliament.eu to sign up and show your support

Citizens and stakeholder groups should not have to use the software of a single company in order to communicate with their elected officials or participate in the legislative process.

All companies should be given the chance to compete freely for contracts to supply ICT services to the European Parliament.

I am a citizen of the EU, and I want the European Parliament to adopt the use of open standards and to promote interoperability in the ICT sector.

We believe that the current situation, where the European Parliament’s ICT runs on proprietary software that is not interoperable with that of other vendors, where therefore citizens and stakeholder groups wishing to participate in the legislative process are forced to use the products of a single company, is in conflict with the first article of Chapter 1 in the Treaty of the European Union. An example of this is the live Web streaming from the European Parliament's plenary sessions – aimed at improving communication with citizens and insight into democratic processes – which will only work with Windows Media Player.

Go on, head over and sign the petition.

04 March, 2008

EveBerry

This post's been sitting in my queue for a while, sorry!

Vlad (of Mozilla and Firefox fame) posted to the EVE-Online fourms a while ago about his new EveBerry tool, that can be downloaded here: EveBerry -- a BlackBerry EVE Character Monitor:.

It's similar to EVEMon and market monitoring apps, but for your Blackberry smartphone (assuming you have one, I do) and is very, very cool and very, very useful.

That's all!

I CAN HAS BOTZ

Since my last set of Lol Bots images (featuring Red Dwarf's Kryten, Ghost in the Shell's Tachikoma and Fritz Lang's Maria), the site seemed to go quiet for quite a few months. Luckily over the last few weeks rstevens has grabbed the editorial reins back and posted a slew of new images, including two more of mine.

I started off a little late for Valentine's with Kryten and Camille:

(It really was E5 A9 08 B7, no need to spell it out)

And finally got a bit of my favourite geekery in with 3PO:

(Metal body: 1, Fragile Skin and Bones: 0)