FLOSS News

We’ve got two Yahoo! related news items today.

The first is that we’ve launched a Yahoo! 360 importer (listed in your admin screens under Tools → Import) to make migration from 360 to WordPress.com super easy. Just upload the Yahoo! 360 export ZIP file, and we’ll do the rest. Yahoo! will be shutting down their 360 service soon, so if you have any friends over there feel free to give them a little help and encouragement to head over to WordPress.com

Today was a little more lively than yesterday on nakedcomputers.org. So far there have been 2698 unique visitors (nearly 4 times the highest count I have ever seen on any planetlotus.org entry), most of them arriving from the home page of Linuxtoday.com so again a non-random sample. There is clearly a lot of windows XP still out there, but Ubuntu is close behind, with about 4 times the Vista numbers. I also had several people asking for their stores to be listed.

Firefox continues to be the leading browser by a country mile at 75% market share. IE7 and Iceweasel have been trading places for 3rd and 4rd with it being a draw at the moment.

lotus notes,php Job Trends
lotus notes jobs - php jobs

overall a much quieter day today, but I think it will ramp up again.

Well today and yesterday cumulative. There was a traffic burst from stumbleupon and from Groklaw. IE 7 was at one time browser number 5 after Konqueror, Chrome and Firefox 2 and 3. A late surge saw it creep past FF2 into a distant second place. Interestingly the operating system has still got XP in the lead, followed by Ubuntu then Vista.

I am not sure this means a vast amount, the sample set is just “the first 66 people who give a toss what Alan says”, but I was struck by the total dominance of Firefox. The numbers don’t add up because of search engine spiders.

The latest Quickr bug I hit. posting here because I think more IBMers read Planet Lotus than the partner forum.

Steps to Reproduce:

Quick excerpt from an interview with Jeffrey Zeldman which includes some discussion of the impact of Open Source, and particularly open source CMS’s, on the process of designing and building web applications:

Although I think it’s important to draw a distinction between simple, relatively cheap licensing (the Expression Engine model) and Free and Open Source software, I generally agree that

Now, we have really powerful comparatively easy to understand, open source content management systems

Via Sandro Grogans comes an interesting interview / discussion from http://initmarketing.tv/ about the use of the phrases “open source” and “free software” and the need to tailor the message to the audience.

Bruce Perens (co-founder of the Open Source Initiative) and Shane Coughlan (from FSF Europe):

I am used to confusing and infuriating and just plain wrong dialog boxes, I have been conditioned to them over the years, as I suspect have you. Bet you haven’t seen one like this though, from the very clever Jigsaw download tool, the command line version of which is currently getting a nightly alpha build of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope for me.

I clicked on “Awesome!” which is a word that only really works properly when said with an American accent.

IBM really don’t seem to get how to do software for Linux. The current process is to download a tar file and extract a .deb from it (which is like putting a .zip inside a .zip) and then install it as a standalone deb so you have to manage your own updates. The right way to do it is for IBM to host a repository. Really IBM it isn’t hard and here are the instructions. Downloading stuff from websites to install is something that Windows users do, it is an obsolete process. Anyhow, error 2 in the packaging is that it is only targeted at the i386 platform (which is nearly all the 32 bit intel architecture processors from the 386 onwards).

or deportalization for the American contingent I suppose. One of my clients has a deportalisation project going on. I am not involved, but it was a new word to me so I had to share it. This isn’t a Websphere portal or anything relevant to Lotus technology at all, but I think it might be an interesting new trend for people who have invested in a portal strategy who now find that the components are not best of breed solutions any more and tighter integration between applications makes them hard to individually upgrade.

Techworld has the details, including some choice quotes from an industry expert who had read the press release and made some educated guesses http://techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?newsid=108034

“Alan Bell from Linux consultancy, The Open Learning Centre,  said that this was significant move from IBM. The Foundations server is a clever software/hardware combination that provides a lot of server services such as file & print and email to lots of thick client computers,” he said. “This means that the client has applications such as Lotus Notes and Symphony running locally.”

I would like to announce the launch of a new social networking site, specifically catering to the needs of people called Alan. If you are an Alan, or know one, then head on over to http://thealans.com where you will meet up with literally several like-named people. If you happen not to be called Alan then you can still register and take a look around, but we might just delete your profile after a few weeks. The site is based on the Elgg social networking platform. If you think your company could use facebook-like technology as an internal tool that you can control then give me a shout and we can help you get started with Elgg.