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 lean meeting, though I guess that’s understandable when the run-up included holidays for most people.
What do you think SPI’s new year resolutions should be?
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 Engard writes that VLC for Mac has no more developers. I don’t like or use MacOS and definitely don’t have the skills to maintain VLC on it, but if you do, can you try to help it, please?
The Tool Factory closed its doors on 31st December 2009.
As you may remember, our co-op is one of few LLP co-ops and we mentioned 2amase LLP in our case study as one of the others. 2amase were closely linked to The Tool Factory LLP.
Their goodbye message lists multiple reasons for the closure, but a key part seems to be a dispute between members about the copyright of their proprietary Business Plan Writer tool. I think there’s a strong resonance between cooperative principles and free and open source software, so I’m not suprised that proprietary software development has contributed to failure of a co-op, but it’s still a shame. Goodbye and best wishes for the future to The Tool Factory workers.
I hope to promote links between cooperatives and free software more in 2010. New Co-operatives UK head Ed Mayo mentioned it in his first speech, so the time seems right. If you’d like to help put on some co-op FOSS events, leave a comment here or get involved in this open co-op discussion, please.
The Koha Community Blogs was broken over Christmas. It’s now back online and using the same collection of feeds as the microblogging services.
A full list of Koha Social Networks is on the wiki.
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, which probably contributed to the relatively high reader numbers. I feel like I get criticised often for commenting about business ethics, but it does seem to attract a fairly big audience.
The repost of Tribute to Richard Rothwell came a fairly close second. Again, not something that the mainstream tech news covered. “the world is a sadder and lonelier place without him, and the rest of the world has lost one of its brightest stars.”
Top-placed technical item was HOWTO Apache httpd 2.2 PAM Authentication Modules which was a distant third. It was posted in late 2008, but I suspect that will keep getting viewers until everyone’s upgraded. It’s currently the top recipient of search engine traffic for the site.
Other technical stories in the top ten were Windows 7: Released with known critical bug in fifth, ssh security in sixth and Top 8 J2ME MIDP Applications in tenth place.
The only completely non-technical topic was the Cooperatives-SW Board and Housing Enquiry in ninth place.
Cross-over topics complete the ten with 2009 Software in the Public Interest Board Election in fourth place, New #ukgovOSS Action Plan in seventh and Meeting about forming a Koha Foundation in eighth.
Finally, I think the strangest three search phrases ending at my site this year are “spi bike week”, “request free t-shirt” and “will britannia building society demutualise“.
Happy New Year! Found any easter eggs in your web stats?
Contained in the recent billionth-spam report from Project Honeypot is the revelation that “The volume of spam drops approximately 21% on Christmas Day and 32% on New Year’s Day.” (Thanks to Raphael for the pointer.)
Happy Christmas to those of you who celebrate it…
My personal site’s copy of this blog and some of my other sites moved servers last week. A few differences in Apache configuration between 1.3 on the old server and 2.2 on the new server tripped me up and it was Monday morning before some missing pages were back where they should be. By the time you read this, the dynamic pages should also be back. Sorry to anyone whose viewing was interrupted.
The old server was the last one built by TTLLP still in service, I think. In the end, rising power prices and improved power efficiency have seen it replaced by younger, greener hardware, so I’m not that sad to see it go.
This is a bit of a silly note for a Saturday while I’m currently working on translating the co-op’s web pages into Esperanto. The old site was translated, but the new site launched as English-only. I’d like to have other languages too, but I’ll start with the one that’s easiest for me as a test case to get the internationalisation working again. That means that I’m currently lost in django-blocks language settings.
Apparently both our co-op and Google speak Esperanto. Facebook is mostly translated. Most Plone-based sites have some translation, but often it’s only the standard Plone parts and any customisations remain in English, which looks a bit odd.
Have you seen Esperanto on other major websites where you weren’t expecting it?
Advance notice of WordCamp UK 2010 on 17-18 July 2010 in Manchester. Ticket sales expected in early April 2010.
I voted for the Portsmouth bid, so of course Manchester won(!)
I’ve passed the event details to our co-op for consideration. Do you think we should go and if so why? If not, why not?
