I heard this story on the radio this morning and thought how awful on a couple of levels.  The first is that an 82 year old died while playing the role of Santa and handing out toys to the children.  However thats not what I think is the awful part.

The awful part, is which child is now scarred for life and living with the fact that they were the one that killed Santa!

no-oh-oh-oh  

The UK has a major fog problem at the moment, with airports all around the country at a stand still.  Wasn't radar invented to get around this sort of thing?

With thousands of passengers stranded at airports, the biggest hit being Heathrow, it would appear the fog is having major knock on effects to the websites of the airports, bringing them too to a standstill.

Can you see me?  

Apache Ant has released 1.7 of the popular build software.  New to 1.7 is this notion of a resource framework.

A resource is an abstraction of file-like objects, which could include zip/tar files and paths.  This lets you to treat groups of files as a single unit.

More news at TheServerSide  

Now that we are coming to the end of the year we can look back and see what was popular in terms of baby names.  According to figures we are going back to a more traditional naming, with names coming more from the 1900's than the 2000's.

With Ruby making the Top20, one wonders what other 'geek' names could sneek into the list; should I have maybe gone with Java Williamson for my new born son this year?  Got a certain ring to it me thinks!

goo-goo  

The alternative to the Innodb storage engine was released today from Solid.  According to early figures, solidDB is running twice as fast in terms of transactions per second against a 1million row database.

Released under dual licensing,  solidDB is officially supported and is free for download and use with MySQL on both Linux and Windows.  This is an important milestone considering Oracles control over InnoDB; one of the flagship engines of MySQL.

More here  

Google and NASA have signed what is known as the "Space Act Agreement" that will see Google get access to all of the data housed by NASA.  The aim is to make this data more readily available to us Joe Public.

We will get access to data such as high-resolution photos of the moon, space station tracking, weather forecasts and a large acrhive of historical images and data.

Fly me to the moon  

Imagine picking up a brand new snooker table worth £13,000 for only £5,000!  This is just one of the many bargains that was on offer over the weekend when the Hamley's online store went into melt down as a voucher scheme offering 60% off went pear shaped.

Their warehouse was completely emptied as shoppers flocked to pickup serious bargins, leaving both online and offline store without anything to sell!  Hamley's will continue to honor the vouchers but has shut down the scheme, that ran a little too long for their liking.

Where will Santa get his toys now?!?!