This feels like it really should be a joke, but allegedly it's real.

Microsoft Sphere currently includes a "send to dark side" feature, and obligatory Pong game! Who comes up with this stuff, and how do I get to work there?! Sounds like a place where much jollity occurs coming up with ideas.

Full article: Microsoft's Sphere display in action

Quite suprisingly Donington Park is to host the British GP from 2010 - more here. I never guessed the speculation would actually turn into a reality.

And on the same day, Bernie also announced he's gonna stop badgering Melbourne to host a night race for a few years which should be music to Pete's ears!

Another strange one that we've just come across which seems to have no useful online help about is why certain Property definitions are marked as ReadOnly when you drop an OCX into .Net...

Read the full OCX wrappers for .Net - The joy of AxInterop entry on theogray.com/blog.

Crap... Max Mosley wins FIA vote

For those that don't know, I recently had the honour/pleasure/daunting task of being a judge at the Miss Bedfordshire regional heat of this year's Miss England competition. It was great fun apart from the mad rush of trying to score the contestants in up to 5 different categories at a time during the 30-40 seconds that they walked up on stage, posed, and walked off again! For those eagle eyed readers, you may even spot this judge sporting a healthy pint of Guinness!

Congratulations to Hayley Sams who won the title of Miss Bedfordshire 2008. The photos are starting to come in now, with shoots by Chas Spradbery and Joshua Cornejo.

For all the follow up articles and pictures, keep an eye on the Miss Beds website!

I had to check the date on this one, but apparently it's been confirmed and everything! If the Secret Diary of Michael Schumacher is anything to go by, we could be in for a very cringeworthy movie!

My Friday afternoon has just been made great - just spotted the BBC's Internet Blog using the Owl logo that took minutes to load from tape before making comedy beeping noises in the good ol' BBC Model B days.

Just spotted MySong (includes video and demonstration results). Looks like a fun app to have a play with if it gets released.

Pretty good results with the basic piano backing track as long as the artist sings in time with the click track!

What is actually going on behind all the smoke and mirrors of these "new" things the government is trying to force on the country?

One minute they're "consulting" on the idea, the next we're told that ISPs must do something to snoop on their customers, or have legislation forced on them, and that this is coming regardless of what anyone says during the consultation.

ID cards suddenly spring back to life with a new spin put on them, but with no change to the idea of storing people's personal data and biometric information in a system that "only the privileged will be able to access", and we're told that they are now definately happening regardless of what anyone thinks; last thing I heard nothing concrete had been decided about all of the additional data. A couple of days before, articles about NPfIT data being purposefully made available to trained receptionists just because no one else could be bothered to do an admin job, even tho the government promised that this would not happen, don't seem to even make it to BBC news.

And then there's all the other mini stories of the past few months along similar lines, but seemingly unconnected at the time.

What is the government really aiming for with all this?

I don't very often bother to read the comments on Techdirt, but was interested in what the sensible folk might have to say about Another Look At The 'Does File Sharing Equal Stealing?' Question. With most of the commentors missing the point of the article about as badly as those of The Dilbert Blog, I soon got bored, but luckily this little fable cheered me up:

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a very rich man who liked to whistle. He was actually very good at it, and would make up elaborate tunes that he would whistle as he strolled through town with his bodyguards. One day, he heard a shopkeeper whistling, and realized the song was one of his, the rich man's, tunes.

This outraged the rich man. His creations belonged to him and only him, he decided. If someone else wanted to whistle them, they would have to pay him a fee. When confronted with this demand, the shopkeeper merely laughed and kept on whistling. And so the rich man ordered his bodyguards to beat the shopkeeper, smashing his face until his lips were so bruised and torn that whistling was impossible.

As it turned out, this shopkeeper was not the only person in town who liked whistling tunes that the rich man had composed. Whenever the rich man heard other people engaging in such unauthorized whistling, he would send his bodyguards after them. But of course there were too many people in this town for such a strategy to be widely effective. The offensive whistling continued more or less unabated.

But being a clever fellow, the rich man realized there were better ways to go about enforcing his will. He went to the town council and suggested that tunes created by any individual should be legally protected. If someone was caught whistling someone else's tune, the town constable and his deputies should force that person to pay the tune's originator a fee.

When the town council wondered, quite reasonably, why they should spend public time, money, and manpower on such a trivial matter, the rich man had a very reasonable answer. He invited the entire town council to a lavish banquet at his mansion, plied them with fine foods and rare wines, and then explained his thoughts:

Didn't they like listening to whistled tunes? Didn't they want to encourage the creation of as many tunes as possible? Further, didn't they want town trade to prosper from the legal sales of a new items, such as whistled tunes?

Well, of course the town council wanted all of these things. And the rich man's arguments seemed all the more reasonable for having been presented after a splendid meal and excellent drink. The council members immediately held an impromptu meeting and voted in a new law exactly as the rich man had proposed.

And while the rich man would've preferred that everyone lived happily ever after at this point (and always told the story that way), this was not the case. Every time someone was beaten and fined by the constable's deputies for whistling an unauthorized tune, town citizens began to dislike both whistling and the rich man just a bit more. Everyone became very aware of what they were whistling and who was listening to them, and so whistling -- all whistling, authorized and unauthorized -- occurred more rarely, only quietly, and usually in private.

When the rich man noticed the relative lack of whistling in the town's streets, he began to suspect something dishonest. He sent his bodyguards out in disguise to spy on citizens, and discovered the covert unauthorized whistling, both of his tunes and possibly other people's tunes. Clearly this was a serious problem, and so he persuaded the town council to work even harder to enforce the laws that they had created. New deputies were hired and sent out in disguise to punish unauthorized whistling.

Eventually, townspeople stopped whistling altogether. Instead, they started to hum tunes. The rich man heard this newfangled music-making and was outraged.

And the whole story happened again, and again, and again.

How to spend a few hours fighting with a new server. Thought I'd post this to help out any other poor soul that's stuck with the same problem.

The Setup
Exchange Server 2007 SP1 running on Windows Server 2008, and having users trying to run Outlook Web Access (OWA).

The Problem
Only users that are members of the Administrators group can connect to OWA successfully.

The Resolution
Ensure that all users that need to use OWA are at least members of the Builtin\Users group.

Sounds simple right! Well for some reason, Microsoft have kindly changed the default permissions on the %windir% directory on Server 2008 so that "Authenticated Users" no longer have Read access as they used to on Server 2003. This means that anyone not in any of the other groups that has access by default can no longer read the ASP.Net ISAPI filters; so when the user logs in, IIS responds with a 401.3 to say Unauthorized: Access is denied due to an ACL. "Domain Users" do not have any permissions on the directory either, so newly created users in an AD domain will not have access by default (if OWA is running on a domain controller; hopefully they'll get this right when SBS 2008 finally comes out later in the year).

    This is too good to hide away on the fun wall!

Sooo... enjoy Straight No Chaser - The original members of Straight No Chaser perform their comedic version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" at the Musical Arts Center, Bloomington, Indiana. December 7th, 1998.

More here:

• Facebook Stalkin'
• Africa
• Stand By Me
• Love The One You're With
• Superhero
• 29 Ways
• Bless The Broken Road
• This Is How We Do It

This year's annual Charity Christmas Puzzle has now been posted, and is available to download.

This, the 17th annual Puzzle that Gordon Gray has set, has a theme designed to help completion and will appeal to people who enjoy doing Crossword puzzles, such as in the Daily Telegraph (though it is not a Crossword puzzle). Puzzlers have plenty of time to find the answers and Puzzles should be returned, with donation, by 27 January.

Four winners will each receive a £25 prize.
Everyone who enters will qualify for a £25 prize draw.

So what are you waiting for, give it a go and download the Christmas Puzzle now.

Just when you thought it was safe to watch something else!

Uncancel your plans for the future - Futurama is back! In this all-new feature-length epic, evil nudist aliens send Bender on a rampage through time, forcing him - slightly against his will - to steal all the Earth's priceless historic treasures. Will the heroic Planet Express crew save the planet? Will Leela find true love? Will the ancient and terrible secret of Fry's buttocks be revealed? Find out when you watch Bender's Big Score, the greatest adventure of our time, and also the greatest adventure of several other times! In the words of a certain beer-fueled robot... "We're back baby!"

Go buy it now! It even comes with a futuristic ('80s) 3D holographic cover!
Note: Currently available as a Region 1 DVD, but play.com says "coming soon" for Region 2.

If you've seen The Simpson's movie, don't worry, Futurama have managed to pack in enough jokes to fill the whole film, plus some extras, including a full-length episode of Hypnotoad - "The future's most popular TV program!" - and a great Futurama Maths lecture  plus lots more!

And there's another three feature-length episodes on their way sometime soon...

Update: If you want a proper review rather than my "Go buy it now", look here.

Well I've had a fun few hours finally getting to grips with Ajax, and with the help of the zXml library and Professional Ajax from Wrox, it's turned out relatively easy to hook everything together . Admittedly I'm supposed to be on holiday, but with no car due to a completely dead battery which won't charge, and the only other choices being housework or walking in the rain, I thought it was about time I get on with a few things that have been hanging around in my head taking up space for so long.

So Eaton Bray now comes with ajax comments (oh, and a major overhaul of the design too!) Now to see how the spammers get on trying to get past the checks - fingers crossed I've done enough this time to make sure they don't get their grubby links through.

So, if you're bored, please go break Eaton Bray for me.

via Pete; more info at Right Brain v Left Brain.

This is great, whenever I blink she changes direction; how does she know?!

Which way does she spin for you?

Source: crash.net

Well at least he's finally come out and said that the FIA favours Ferrari - "decisions were made from an entirely neutral standpoint" while " ‘protecting' Ferrari's vulnerability" doesn't sound like a statement that makes for very fair FIA decisions as far as other teams are concerned. And why only protect Ferrari when there are other non-British teams in the paddock too?

Over the years, I was a fan of Ferrari, especially when they started the season very much as underdogs a few years ago and fought their way back up, and I stayed that way until the middle of the 2006 season; but since then they have just been making the sport look stupid. Whether Max liking Luca more than Ron is the only reason Ferrari get preferential treatment I have no idea, but on top of what the FIA have put everyone through this season this seems a very bad time for Max to be putting out statements like this.

Is Mosely about to be turfed out as FIA president?

OK, so I got bored today and added an innocent line into Someone's hosts file...
   195.60.3.137 www.facebook.com

Which very innocently (and quietly) displays Facebook...

Watching Someone's face as they tried to get round it rather than go cold-turkey was immensly funny.

I know I'm gonna pay for this at some point, but it was worth it!

A doughnut-brandishing Homer Simpson was painted next to the Cerne Abbas giant on the hill above Cerne Abbas, Dorset, to promote the new Simpsons film.

Read full story: Wish for rain to wash away Homer.

Update: And for those that like a bit of donut tossing: Homer Scores!.

I didn't exactly become a mac fixer overnight (it's been 10 years since I last did anything with Linux and fiddling was just too hard), but after a full reinstall everything works again.