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 they caught out if you set “default_member_moderation” (new list member postings are moderated) or equivalent in the list software? Google and Yahoo Groups seem to be suffering worst. Do they even have such an option?

I’ve also caught some strange behaviour on one of the SMTP servers we run for a customer. Does anyone know what virus or worm or other nasty authenticates but gives itself away by sending RCPT TO:<MISSING*EMAIL*ADDRESS> to SMTP servers?

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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, vista and windows searches.

In the following discussion, Bev mentioned Quintura which looks like an interesting newcomer, but it’s so heavily javascript-requiring that I’m not going to use it every day. It made me think of a cross between Clusty and the now-dead SearchMe.

The other big noise lately has been the Wolfram Alpha but most of my search requests seem too esoteric for it.

As you may guess from the above, I’m still using Clusty as my main search engine (when something isn’t in my bookmarks or the ODP). What’s your favourite non-Yagooglive search?

Posted in Education, Training and Information | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

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 in a plastic bag. I also wonder about why and how it’s fairtrade, a sort of look behind the label desire.

Now Boxes of Fairtrade t-shirts are to be trialled in Midcounties Co-op stores – will it succeed and will we start to see more of this sort of packaging for ethical products? A cardboard comeback?

Posted in Education, Training and Information | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

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 a serious bug really, because the function has been deprecated (old PHP lives forever, but not so function definitions) for some time. Debian bug #491033 gives the details.

We put together a fairly quick fix using shell_exec() to call the file command (with the usual checks to avoid someone poisoning the shell – which shouldn’t happen because it’s only called on uploaded temporary filenames, but why risk it?). We could have used finfo_file but that’s not yet packaged for debian, so is it worth the cost of having unpackaged PHP classes around?

Posted in Web Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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 two projects up for association: Path64 and OSUNIX.

The big change for current members is the proposal for contributing membership expiry:

“Any contributing member who does not cast a ballot in an annual Board member election shall be considered to be inactive and downgraded to a non-contributing member.”

Yet another demonstration of how member ballots are not secret yet.

Even if they’re not secret like they should be, is it a good idea to feed the ballot data to the membership process? Should “Further Discussion” be added to the SPI board election, to give members a way to abstain? Should this dramatic change proposal be considered this meeting when it wasn’t mentioned in the meeting announcement?

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Reminder: Meeting about a Koha Foundation

2009-09-15 by mjr

A quick reminder about the meeting about forming a Koha foundation in a few hours. The agenda and information links are on the wiki. I’d really like to see everyone invoved in koha development there, or you could leave comments here for me to take to the meeting.

Someone will link a summary and the transcript from the wiki after the meeting.

Posted in Koha | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

55% of Ecommerce Sites Tested Misled Consumers

2009-09-14 by mjr

There will be an EU crackdown on websites selling consumer electronic goods which is entirely understandable when 203 out of 369 sites appeared to break the law. (first seen on BBC News)

If you’re a shop owner, the good site and bad site examples are pretty good, while local trading standards offices advise on selling online.

If you’re a buyer, see my guide on How to Check Web Shops for Basic Security.

Why is it so bad? Do companies not understand the law? Do they not bother to check the law? Do they deliberately decide to ignore it? Don’t customers prefer law-abiding web shops, or are low prices attractive enough to overcome that?

Posted in OSCommerce | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Tricky question for a worker co-op: @CooperativeWave

2009-09-11 by mjr

This isn’t a problem which many companies have to deal with. It’s simple for lots of them: ignore things like climate change except when laws or public relations (or employee relations?) require otherwise. As far as the company is concerned, the aim is to make money.

Not so for the third sector. One of the cooperative principles is to “work for the sustainable development of our communities through policies approved by our members” (taken from Statement on the Co-operative Identity).

I think climate change is real, a threat to sustainable development and can be minimised by human action. But have I got policies approved by TTLLP members about it? Nope. There’s usually something more urgent to work on.

Not so for the co-operative group. They’re supporting The Wave in London on Saturday 5 December 2009 with subsidised transport and more. Will you be there? What do you think of it?

If you’re a “young people”, you can also make your views known at Play to Stop – Europe for Climate (the EU and MTV – together at last!).

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Meeting about forming a Koha Foundation, 15 September 2009

2009-09-10 by mjr

Following suggestions by some other koha developers and with an increasing amount of silence from long-time koha community supporters liblime, we’ve called an IRC meeting next Tuesday.

We’re concerned that our community is currently not sustainable: the withdrawal of any vendor could seriously damage the project. Moving some of the core project resources to a foundation should ensure its continued stewardship.

From my own point of view, our co-op internally tries to keep its TruckNumber high and we’d like to use a foundation to make sure the Koha project TruckNumber stays high. There are several groups set up for the koha project and some that existed before: can any of them help to make Koha sustainable? Right now, I think TTLLP is the only Koha hoster which isn’t a private for-profit corporation. That seems a bit scary for a 10-year-old project. It’s time to fix this.

The agenda and information links are on the wiki. Hope to see everyone invoved in koha development there!

Posted in Koha | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Koha meetings and case studies

2009-09-02 by mjr

It’s been a fairly good month working with Koha for me. Our co-op installed Koha 3.0 for a few more libraries and had quite a few enquiries. This means our test servers still need upgrading to 3.0.3, which is disappointing, but current customers come first.

The flip side of that is that I’m probably going to take some heat during tonight’s koha General IRC Meeting and we’re facing a bit of a rush to get the direct-RFID control feature and the category of patrons editor tidied and submitted before the 3.2 feature-freeze on 6 September. The features are currently sat up on our infamous co-op 3.0 fork branch, but at least I’m currently working with that during a server migration at one library.

Also announced this week, the eIFL-FOSS ILS project case studies include several Koha libraries.

Posted in Koha | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments