The science of meetings
This post isn’t going to make an huge amount of sense to people who are not using IRC or involved in the Ubuntu project, feel free to let your eyes glaze over and wait for the next article. The...
View ArticleMicrosoft pulling dirty tricks in Thailand
I had a bit of a poke about in the newly released Wikileaks diplomatic cables archive looking for interesting stuff and came across a cable from the Chiang Mai Consulate that contains an allegation...
View ArticleOpen Source Sells Planes
Another one from the Wikileaks archive, in which Japan choose Open Source European fighter jets over closed American fighters. http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/08/09TOKYO1813.html While U.S. weapons are...
View ArticleIf all else fails, switch to Open Source
An element of comedy in the open source cable of the day, this one is from Latvia in 2008. The country is facing significant economic issues and they are trying to reduce their public sector costs....
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Free Ubuntu 11.10 CDs for the UK
Today the Ubuntu UK LoCo team CD allocation arrived from Canonical, as is traditional I have upgraded the Kubuntu CD that my chickens peck at. I have a different set of chickens to the ones in the last...
View ArticleERPpeek, a tool for browsing OpenERP data from the command line
We have been rather busy implementing OpenERP for a number of our customers and I have been tweaking and customising and extending it all over the place. It is a great fun product to work with, very...
View ArticleUbuntu IRC Council
The new Ubuntu IRC Council was announced this week and I am pleased to have been appointed to it. The Ubuntu project makes extensive use of the Freenode Internet Relay Chat network, with a team of...
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Unity Window Quicklists
The Unity desktop that the recent releases of Ubuntu uses is kind of nice overall, but there are some specific things that are really hard to do, one of which is finding and focussing on one window of...
View ArticleOpen Standards Open Opportunities
Flexibility and efficiency are perhaps not two words that have been traditionally associated with the public sector in general, and certainly not with government IT. This might change though, and you...
View ArticleOpen Source Software and Security
Back in December the UK Government published their Open Source procurement toolkit (in PDF and ODF formats) which is mostly aimed at the public sector procurement officials, but is of general interest...
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Rate My Spice Rack
On a bit of a whim I set up http://ratemyspicerack.com as a site for people to share a picture of their spice collection and a list of the contents. It runs WordPress with GD Star Rating, Really Simple...
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The Quantal Quetzal takes flight
A week today on the 18th October is the release date of Ubuntu 12.10 the Quantal Quetzal. This release was pitched to be all about quality and from my testing I think the quality has improved quite a...
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Camera Control
This is based on a £35 wireless pan and tilt camera, but with a bit of python running on a separate web server to control it. The camera comes with a rather messy user interface, that isn’t...
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OpenERP and Ubuntu Unity Desktop Integration
Ubuntu has been in the news quite a lot recently with the release of version 12.10 including the Amazon shopping lens and next week some game shop thing called Steam is going to be announced. It isn’t...
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Time for an Upgrade
The Ubuntu UK Local Team allocation of CDs arrived yesterday and as usual these are available for free to anyone who wants one in the UK. Just send me an SAE following the procedure here and please...
View ArticleActions from Ubuntu UDS-R
This week was the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen, this is kind of an internal series of workshops, but as Ubuntu is an open project it isn’t a closed doors event. Anyone can attend in person,...
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Privacy is hard. Lets go shopping!
It is possible that you have read some stuff about the Ubuntu shopping lens recently. Unity and lenses are pretty cool, it kind of gives one place to search for all kinds of stuff, and you plug in...
View ArticleShe sells sea shells
Unity isn’t the only desktop environment that Ubuntu has. There are many and as they said, Unity is a shell for Gnome but it is not Gnome-Shell. I have been using Unity for a few years now and figured...
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Shopping lens for Gnome Shell
The shopping lens in Unity has been one of the most talked about features, not always in a good way. Personally I quite like it, I have purchased several items through it and it seems to be a faster...
View ArticleUbuntu Smart Scopes
A new feature of Ubuntu was discussed today (which is like an announcement but without overhyping it), it is called Smart Scopes and is documented here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SmartScopes1304Spec go...
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