I find these numbers staggering, but this story over at silicon.com details how the MoD has written off a project which has so far cost £130 million! They will be keeping the hardware they already bought for £12.2 million, resulting in a write off value of approximately £118 million.

The Defence Logistics Organisation (DLO) – the MoD’s internal buying arm – canned a single common inventory project called Defence Stores Management Solution (DSMS), which would have enabled more accurate tailoring of stock holdings, after executives found the benefits did not outweigh the costs.

The department estimates £130.5m was incurred on DSMS, although £12.2m of hardware was retained for future use, leaving £118.5m written off without the system ever seeing the light of day.

As a result of this they will be overhauling their project and risk management. Hmmm, yes that may be a good idea!

World Wide Web Consortium Presents US Patent Office with Evidence Invalidating Eolas Patent

bq. W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTML and the web, today presented the U.S. Patent Office with prior art establishing that the Eolas patent is invalid and should be re-examined.

Hat tip: Jeffrey Zeldman.

Oh no! It seems emails to (one of) my zed1.com account(s) have been bouncing because I had exceeded my quota. I didn’t even know I had a quota! (at least one which wasn’t included in my hosting quota) but I do. It is 50MB and yes, it was full. I have managed to delete all the virus/worm generated emails with binary payloads and released over 40MB of space. Ouch! that’s a lot of mail!
So if anyone has sent me email to my personal zed1.com account in the last 24 48 hours you may want to send it again.

This struck me as smirkingly amusing…

(click for larger version).

I’m a little slow with the news, but version 3.0 of A List Apart has just gone live. It features a completely new look, standards compliant of course, a selection of XML feeds and a fabulous article on a sexy new UI technique: Douglas Bowman’s Sliding Doors Method.

Image-driven, visually compelling user interfaces. Text-based, semantic markup. Now you can have both! Douglas Bowman’s sliding doors method of CSS design offers sophisticated graphics that squash and stretch while delivering meaningful XHTML text. Have your cake and eat it, too!

Sweet!

Do you remember that I was ranked 14th in a google search for ‘mike’? Well, now I have improved to 12th place out of approximately 31 million. Which is great, but that’s only moving up two places in more than three weeks. I am about to make a change to this blog, which I hope will increase that ranking much more rapidly. We shall see…

Update: I’m number one now!

Unfortunately my server is being very, very slow at the moment 🙁
There must be something wrong with it as it keeps gettting restarted (uptime at time of writing is 18 minutes!). I can’t seem to get anything out of my hosting support people at the moment.