Category
Ubuntuzilla thunderbird 3.1 problem fixed
Ubuntuzilla is a great way of having your cake and eating it. You can have the robustness of the Ubuntu repository system without foregoing the very best of Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird (see Getting latest Firefox and Thunderbird on Ubuntu). But I did experience a big problem upgrading to Thunderbird 3.1. Clicking on the Thunderbird [...]
Reducing Single Vendor Lock-in in NZ Health System
Single-vendor lock-in is great for the lucky vendors – but terrible for competition and consumers. So it is great to see fresh steps to develop a standard desktop based on open source software for a major District Health Board in New Zealand HealthAlliance restarts open-source desktop project. Let’s hope it’s for real this time. A [...]
FFmpeg deserves support
I have recommended WinFF before. WinFF is a GUI for the command line video converter, FFMPEG. Without FFmpeg, there would be a lot I couldn’t easily do. So I am happy to support it in my own small way. Please read below: FFmpeg is an open source project, so it is a shame when companies [...]
F-spot and the date sort order of pre-digital photos
F-spot is very useful but it has a few quirks which can be very confusing. Especially if you are working with photos which do not come from a digital camera (e.g. scanned, taken from the web etc). The order in which they display, and the dates under which they are stored, can be quite confusing. [...]
wxPython Dialogs swallow TAB movements
If your wxPython text control is on a Dialog, the TAB key movement will be swallowed unless you use the style TE_PROCESS_TAB. Strangely I only had the problem in Windows but not Ubuntu. I hope this helps someone because it had me stumped for quite a while.
Gorgeous Javascript Vector Graphics e.g. Charts
Check out http://raphaeljs.com/ to see some beautiful charting. No flash required – just Javascript and a reasonably modern browser (IE 6+). The developer is hoping to have a range of standard charts available by November (fingers crossed) – see Plans for barcharts, scatterplots etc?.
Positive Future for Linux Netbooks?
Caitlyn Martin argued that Linux netbooks have a bright future in a recent article entitled Linux To Regain 50% Netbook Market Share. It was noted that netbooks powered by ARM processors are a good fit with linux and that these devices have advantages over larger, more powerful machines. Those who assure us that Linux has [...]
SOFA Statistics packages available
SOFA Statistics has now been released in the form of a deb package for Ubuntu and an NSIS installer executable for Windows. SOFA stands for Statistics Open For All which is not a bad summary of its goals. The program is still under heavy development but nested tables (including summary tables, nested tables, and straight [...]
Tax Dollars Supporting Microsoft Monoculture
[Breaking news - G2009: There's no deal] Don Christie, president of the NZ Open Source society makes an insightful plea in the news release: http://nzoss.org.nz/news/2009/press-release-nzoss-stop-g2009. The complete release is well worth a read. The NZOSS is calling for: an immediate cessation of the G2009 process a complete, line by line review of the money spent [...]
Client-device Linux use reaches 2-5%, world better off
Preston Gralla, in a provocative article entitled “Client-device Linux use reaches 1%, world yawns”, makes a series of negative claims about desktop linux; Linux will never be a big player in the desktop market Linux should not be Linux flounders on the desktop because there are too many variants Linux flounders because it is too [...]