Here are some pictures of the ash that landed on my car due to the fires in north Florida.

Pictures taken on May 9, 2007.

"The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the
longest suicide note in history."

This is a quote from Peter Gutmann's Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection.

The original document located here:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt


I have mirrored the content here:

http://thatlinuxbox.com/static/vista_cost.txt

It was a cool day on our last trip to the zoo, so some of the animals that are normally sleeping were at least moving a little.

The Cheetah:




Don't mess with this guy:




These birds were making the strangest bellowing sounds:




Beautiful stripes:

CalDAV is the Open Standards approach to calendar sharing. It is a little bit late to the game, but adoption is accelerating. Support has been announced by vendors such as Apple and Oracle. The Open Source community has a number of projects underway to utilize this new standard.

General Articles on open calendar sharing:
http://software.newsforge.com/software/06/02/09/2140226.shtml?tid=74
http://ietf.webdav.org/caldav/home.html
http://www.educause.edu/LIVE057
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/blogs/consortium/archives/000445.htm
http://tinyurl.com/ya8b8z

Open Source Projects:
Cosmo (CalDAV server) - http://cosmo.osafoundation.org/
Chandler (PIM / CalDAV client) - http://chandler.osafoundation.org/
Mozilla calendar clients - http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Home_Page

I gave a presentation at the 2006 Florida Association of Museums Conference (FAM) in July. I gave the same talk at Denison University in October.

Summary:
Avoid vendor lock-in. Preserve your ability to access your own data into perpetuity. Adopt open standards.

The slides are posted on the web:

UPDATE 10.17.2012 - The original links fell victim to Internet Information Decay. I mirrored a copy of the presentation here:

Introduction to Open Standards and Open Source Software (PDF)


These original links to the presentation are (sadly) no longer active:

http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/omt/presenta...ndards.odp (Open Document)
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/omt/presenta...ndards.ppt (Microsoft PowerPoint)
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/omt/presenta...ndards.pdf (PDF)