Good Riddance to NZ Software Patents

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Grant

Software patents seem like a good way of protecting innovators and their ideas but function in practice as a threat to innovation. Especially harmed are the smaller players in the marketplace, ironically those most likely to generate exciting new developments. It looks like sanity has prevailed in New Zealand (fingers crossed) with software patents being effectively banned. This welcome development is thanks to concerted lobbying by New Zealand software developers. Special thanks go to David Lane (President of the New Zealand Open Source Society), Guy Burgess (lawyer and software developer) and Paul Matthews (IITP). Although vigilance is required as the new laws are implemented, we can all rightly celebrate.

Open Source Web Servers Rule

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Grant

Last time I checked, Apache was dominant but Microsoft IIS was making some ground. A recent survey has IIS pegged as 2nd equal with NGINX at about 16%. Open Source web servers are dominant and all is well with the world.

Ubuntu Raring Upgrade Boring in a Good Way

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Grant

I’ve messed with Ubuntu for 7 years now, and upgraded numerous machines for myself and relatives. I’ve played with alpha and beta versions and enjoyed each improvement in functionality and aesthetics. I found it most satisfying when upgrades went well but there were a dozen or so tricky tweaks required to get every last thing working. I’d blog about them. It’s kind of sad but those days seem to be gone – Ubuntu Just Works. And it works well – much better, in my opinion, than the Windows 7 system I use every day at work. It even looks better these days and I expect to be using Ubuntu for a very long time. So a big thanks to Canonical and the community for making it all happen. And just to be really clear, I love the polished Unity interface available in Raring and the direction Canonical is taking Ubuntu.

Raring Rocks

So I guess I had better switch my focus now to Ubuntu phone and start playing with that side of things. Hopefully, that will provide another 7 interesting years

VirtualBox internet restored for Ubuntu Quantal 12.10

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Grant

None of my VirtualBox systems were able to connect to the internet after I upgraded to 12.10. This is the fix that worked for me (and it persists after rebooting too):

VBoxManage modifyvm "VM name" --natdnshostresolver1 on

Thanks to I upgraded ubuntu to 12.10, and the internet does not work on vbox

SOFA needs your vote

Posted on October 13, 2012 by Grant

It’s time for the New Zealand Open Source Awards again and SOFA has been nominated

Obviously, as creator of SOFA, I’d love it if you’d vote SOFA up at the nominations page.

Packt Books

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Grant

I’m a bit of a sucker for good computer books so I am more than happy to support Packt’s celebration of 1,000 titles and get my free e-book . Personally, I like to be able to read the paper versions – I can read them anywhere and jot notes in the margins, underline key points etc. But they’re all good.

Check out http://www.packtpub.com/news/packt-publishing-reaches-1000-it-titles-and-celebrates-open-invitation

Kazam as replacement for GTKrecordMyDesktop?

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Grant

I have used GTKrecordMyDesktop and OpenShot to handle my video creation needs but it looks lke Kazam could be a good replacement for the GTKrecordMyDesktop part. It makes it much easier to accurately set the sizing and may solve some of the problems of using oggs generated by GTKrecordMyDesktop with OpenShot.

The Zareason Linux Laptop

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Grant

I recently acquired a laptop from Zareason who have recently set up shop in New Zealand. You can see the details here. In short, I’m really happy with my Linux laptop. And although it’s a silly little thing to be pleased about, I like seeing the Ubuntu logo as my super key.

LibreOffice Keeps Improving

Posted on August 11, 2012 by Grant

Version 3.6 of LibreOffice adds a whole slew of new features and fixes. See http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-6-new-features-and-fixes/. I don’t know if any are ground-breaking but they all add to ease of use and are very welcome. My personal favourites include:

Pressing “Ctrl+[" will decrease or "Ctrl+]” will increase the font size of the selected text, respectively. (Note that this function is not available for all localizations but will soon be updated to offer full support to all.)
(Thanks to Paul Cameron)
Impress now correctly detects the external display and puts the presenter console on the local display.
(Thanks to Michael Meeks)
Writer and Calc now use split colour buttons making it possible to apply the last used colour with one mouse click for font, background, border and highlight colours.
(Thanks to Winfried Donkers)
10 new Impress master pages.
(Thanks to Alexander Wilms, Mateus Machado Luna, Björn Michaelsen)
Merge cells option added to right-click menu. (Thanks to Greggory Hernandez)
Recent Documents list is updated on Save, Save As and Close. Bug report: fdo#37775.
(Thanks to Muhammad Haggag)
Allow for editing of read-only documents.
(Thanks to Stephan Bergmann)
Substantially improved simple .doc/.docx import.
(Thanks to Michael Meeks and Caolan McNamara)

PDF to PNG using PythonMagick

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Grant

The problem: you have a large, crisp PDF image and you use PythonMagick to write it as a PNG but it comes out as a small, low-resolution, blurry PNG. You mess around with density, size, and quality settings to no avail. And the documentation is of little help. The answer is subtle, and here it is: you must only read the PDF image AFTER you have set the density to something high like 300. Otherwise it is the default dpi of only 72. Big thanks to PyBlosxom for providing a working example of code and restoring my sanity .

FAIL
import PythonMagick img = PythonMagick.Image("Desktop/test.PDF") img.density("300") # too late, already read as 72 dpi when image instantiated img.write("Desktop/test.PNG")

SUCCEED
import PythonMagick img = PythonMagick.Image() img.density("300") img.read("Desktop/test.PDF") # read in at 300 dpi img.write("Desktop/test.PNG")

Apparently, PIL is no good for this task as it can only write PDFs (http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t563423-convert-pdf-to-png.html)

And if you are confused about how to supply the Geometry argument, that is because there are several ways of doing it:

image.density(Geometry(150,150)); // could also use image.density("150x150")
Magick::Image Class
image manipulation with python

Here are some links that may be useful:

PythonMagick Readme

pssst …

IT, open source, open culture