Software Cooperative News

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 us see what’s growing in our neighbour’s garden. I’m a debian developer, [...]

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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 they caught out if you set “default_member_moderation” (new list member postings are [...]

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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, vista and windows searches.
In the following discussion, Bev mentioned Quintura which looks like an interesting newcomer, [...]

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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 in a plastic bag. I also wonder about why and how it’s fairtrade, a sort [...]

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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 a serious bug really, because the function has been deprecated (old PHP lives forever, but not so [...]

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