FLOSS News

You may recall the now infamous “open letter” [link] to Lance from the CentOS community back at the end of July.

You seem to have crawled into a hole … and this is not acceptable.

At the time it seemed rather coincidental as we were having difficulty trying to get hold of the company we originally used to register several of our domains… Guess who’s the owner/manager of UKlinux.net? Yep. Lance Davis.

We have asked repeatedly for information from them/him but are being met with silence.

I just noticed that I hadn’t posted anything here for what feels like ages – since August the 15th.

So I thought, hmmm, better write something.

But what? A quick update on what’s been going on perhaps? That’ll do…

I’ve been working quite a bit with the brilliant free and open source vtiger CRM recently. Looking at some of the less widely used features and updating our training materials for the recent 5.10 release. I’ve also just submitted a small patch for the Customer Portal feature, to do with its web layout and have been thinking about how best to improve this, and the Webforms modules, to make them easier to customise.

It seems, unfortunately, as though my experience with Amazon was not common place.

Neil Wilson left a comment this morning explaining that his request to Amazon did not meet with the same response as my own…

We are not in a position to offer a partial refund for this product. You can of course return the laptop to us for a full refund if you wish

A couple of evenings ago we were invited to come and talk about what we do with the team who put together the Ubuntu UK Podcast.

It’s well over a week now since I started using the Miserware MicroMiser software. I have it installed on all the Ubuntu PCs we have at home and on two laptops too. I have noticed no adverse effects from running the software. In fact you really do forget it is there.

Remember when, back in late February, the Cabinet Office released their “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan”? Myself and many other FOSS commentators were obviously heartily encouraged and have talked about it and examined the policy in some detail.

I’ve been meaning to do this for some time now. It is time for a small face-lift.

I spend quite a bit of my time doing work for clients on Joomla! including building clean templates from a graphic designer’s images. But I haven’t needed to build a template (theme) for Wordpress before which felt like I’d been missing out on something.

It’s that time again

Fortunately, Mono is still quite trivial to remove and has not, apparently, increased its infiltration of the Ubuntu/Gnome code base as one might have been led to believe if you’d read this on the 1st April:

As you may have read previously, I was approached by Packt Publishing to see if I would like to review their new book on AGI Programming by Nir Simionovich. Time has conspired against me to actually use it for a real project so instead I resorted to choosing it as my bedtime reading for a few days.

Recently I received a flattering email from Packt Publishing telling me about a new book entitled: “Asterisk Gateway Interface 1.4 and 1.6 Programming” - by Nir Simionovich. The author of the email refered to this blog and asked if I would like to review their book for my blog. Very flattering indeed.

I was, of course, already familiar with Packt. They do produce lots of books on Open Source technologies. What I wasn’t aware of, until I looked, was this (from their “about us” page):

This post by Matt Assay discussing how we got to a competitive browser market got me thinking. (Dangerous I know, but bear with me.)

… I suppose the truly intriguing thing is not that we have a competitive market for Web browsers again, but how it happened. Baker told me recently that Firefox is “an anomaly” because it managed to beat back overwhelming Microsoft market share. Can we do it again?

As anyone interested in the politics and wider adoption of FOSS will know by now, the Government recently released an updated policy statement regarding “Open Source and Open Standards”. I made a brief comment on it when the news broke, but have now had more time to consider the document and air my thoughts on it.

Firstly, It’s quite minor but nevertheless a shame that the pdf document was issued using Arial and Times New Roman embedded fonts that are not available on a free license. This leads me nicely to my second general point.

I have recently migrated my server at home from a custom Linux build to Ubuntu Server (8.10 Intrepid). The main migration went very smoothly and I learned a few new tricks on the way too.

I wanted to share a little Joomla! hacking I did the other day for two reasons:

Remember the short piece I posted about the Radio 4 programme “In Business” a couple of weeks ago? Well, very kindly, the programme’s editor has provided me with a transcript of programme to

please use as you wish, but it has not been checked for accuracy. Good luck.

I have just read and listened again and didn’t find anything glaring although I did fix one rather amusing typo: “Linux Colonel” to “Linux Kernel”. It was sent to me as a Microsoft .doc file. I opened it in OpenOffice.org and exported it as a PDF so it should be readable by virtually everyone.