matthew.kurowski.org

“while the BP world energy report confirmed that Germany made one of the world’s biggest cuts in nuclear energy last year, with use falling 16 per cent on 2006 levels, it also revealed that oil and gas use was slashed too.” (Read the full article here at expressindia.com.)

Go Germany!

Considering Germany’s role as a major (lightly-militarized) world power, it’s especially thrilling to see such radical reduction in energy consumption. For a country that has gone through major upheaval so much (e.g., reincorporation of West Germany) it shows a serious commitment not only to the German people and immediate partners but to the global community. Cheers!

Now I hope it doesn’t affect their wonderful beers’ production levels… That would be a shame and call to question the whole “green” thing for me.

Full Microsoft Article here.

I’ll list a few highlights – I wish I were making these up, but I’m not. Microsoft does make this product better each time, but I feel like I’ve been beta – er, alpha testing it since it’s release.

Highlights of this Critical Update:

•Stability is improved.

This update fixes an issue that causes Office 2008 applications to exit unexpectedly when you open or use Office 2008 applications.

•Spaces between words are preserved.

•Macros are preserved when you save a document that contains macros.

•Font size is preserved for text in tables.

This update fixes an issue that causes the font size to change unexpectedly for text in a table that

is formatted with a table style or with the Autoformat feature.

•Reliability is improved when you calculate or edit a formula.

•Stability is improved when you wake the computer from sleep.

•Excel workbooks and Microsoft Word documents open correctly when you double-click them or when you download them from a Web site.

How nice…

The Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS) Project was a solid, feature-rich Linux volume manager with a plug-in architecture supporting the key filesystems and software RAID. All this in one set of tools (CLI, curses, and GUI).

Well it seems certain that the project will die off like a war hero in an extended-care facility. While my personal SuSE Server still officially supports EVMS (the March Service Pack specifically), there seems to be no interest in its maintenance or development.

Key points of support for my conclusion:

• The last release is now over 28 months old
• Code dependencies are on the old gtk 1 libraries

Since most of my Linux systems are now CentOS and Ubuntu, I did a quick query to confirm that there were no supporting packages.

So why doesn’t the EVMS project seek to close itself out? Did IBMs loss in this to lvm2 hurt that badly that they can’t even spare some professionalism here for the good of the community?

Oh well, she’s dead, Jim.