Category Archives: SPI

Software in the Public Interest

SPI January 2010

A clear announcement went out in plenty of time and the meeting agenda is already posted for Wednesday’s SPI board IRC meeting which will be at 2100 UTC (an hour later than recently). As I write this, it’s a pretty … Continue reading

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Anyone with TLC for Mac VLC?

VLC is free and open source portable media player software that supports a lot of formats and inputs and can also convert and stream. I think it’s been pretty useful for users who didn’t like MPlayer for whatever reason. Nicole … Continue reading

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2009 Top 10 Software Cooperative News

Amazon Kindle Un-selling Books was the most-viewed news item on my blog this year. Once again, a lock-out/bad-business story takes the top spot. I don’t think that one got as much coverage in the mainstream media as they usually do, … Continue reading

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Do you think Directgov Delivers?

Directgov is the Government’s official website for the general public. As both a member of the public and a parish councillor, I use it fairly often to look things up. Sometimes it’s surprisingly good, but much of the time, it’s a frustrating page-hunt and leaves me going around … Continue reading

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SPI November 2009

An announcement for this meeting just dropped into my inbox with “Apologies for the lateness of this announcement; some crossed wires”. It will be in #spi of irc.oftc.net as usual, at 2000 UTC. The agenda is available online and someone … Continue reading

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PDF: how can we avoid over-using Pretty Difficult Files for citizens?

With the more political/government side of my work for our co-op, I often send emails like this:
“Please can you resend the information as plain text, ISO OpenDocument, html, PDF or something else standardised? OpenOffice.org can load most Microsoft Office and save as ISO OpenDocument and PDFs. If you’re stuck … Continue reading

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Windows 7: Released with known critical bug

The debian project defines a critical bug as “makes unrelated software on the system (or the whole system) break, or causes serious data loss, or introduces a security hole on systems where you install the package.” FSF Europe reported that … Continue reading

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Final Decision Time: Koha Foundation Options

Thomas Dukleth writes in: “Remember to vote for your choices in the final Koha foundation forming election before the poll closes on the 25th. Turnout in the final Koha foundation forming election is lower than in the previous preliminary poll … Continue reading

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SPI October 2009

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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Betting on British Broadband Bugfixing

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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