Monthly Archives: September 2009

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 →

Posted in Education, Training and Information | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

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 →

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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, … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Koha | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments