Author Archives: mjr

SPI October 2009

2009-10-14 by mjr

A board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 14 Oct) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted only yesterday, containing a proposal to hold a debian domain. The proposal says … Continue reading →

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FOSS Freeskilling, Bristol, 7pm Tue 13 Oct

2009-10-13 by mjr

Sean Kenny emailed us to tell us about an event in Bristol: “This week’s Freeskilling is called Who needs Microsoft? and we are meeting at the Better Food Co. Cafe, St Werburghs @ 7pm Tues 13th Oct. Ben Smith will … Continue reading →

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Koha.org Desires Poll Results

2009-10-07 by mjr

Here are the results of the Koha Foundation Desires poll. More than 75% of respondants support the Koha foundation/association doing these things:- 1. ensure the ongoing shared governance of the project = 32 out of 35 = 91.43% 2. owning … Continue reading →

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Betting on British Broadband Bugfixing

2009-10-05 by mjr

High-speed internet links are something that makes FOSS development much easier, but I’m still having reliability problems with my ADSL. A fringe benefit of moving to a more open Linux-based router is that I can see what’s going wrong in more detail. But now I have to gamble … Continue reading →

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Concentration, Community and Cooperation

2009-09-28 by mjr

I read the news about the launch of Ubuntu User by Linux New Media AG with some sadness. I believe that free software is stronger because of the informal cooperation between different distributions that usually do different jobs. It lets … Continue reading →

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Strange Spammer Sightings

2009-09-25 by mjr

I’ve seen a couple of the conversation-spams described in Misspelled nemesis club: A new twist on spam? It looks like they exploit the typically weak moderation practices of many software discussion mailing lists. Do you think they are human-powered? Are … Continue reading →

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Big Bad Biased Bing and Other Search Alternatives

2009-09-22 by mjr

Away from the Yagooglive search engines, there have been some recent changes in the search space. Bing launched a while ago, but I’ve only just read from Anglian LUG that Bing is badly biased, returning pretty poor results for openoffice, … Continue reading →

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Co-op Sells Boxed Fairtrade T-shirts

2009-09-18 by mjr

I’ve done a bit of investigating ethical Free Software T-Shirts here in the past. Even when they’re available, it seems a bit odd to buy a fairtrade t-shirt and then get it in plastic wrap and/or on a plastic hanger … Continue reading →

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PHP mime_content_type Alternatives In Debian 5.0

2009-09-17 by mjr

We were called in to help someone with a failing file upload feature on a PHP website. It turned out that we’d recently upgraded their server to debian 5.0 and the mime_content_type() PHP function was no longer available. This isn’t … Continue reading →

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SPI September 2009

2009-09-16 by mjr

Once again, the monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 16 Sep) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted and there’s a proposal for an extra bank account and … Continue reading →

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