For a number of years, the discussion amongst UK-based free software professionals has been about how to do more with Government. The most active discussions happened around the time of the UK open-source, standards and re-use policy was developed (around 2004; it has been updated since): it wasn’t great before, and it hasn’t improved an awful lot since.
In very similar ways people have bemoaned the accessibility of Government procurement processes for micro/small businesses, and it’s basically the same problem – the “big guys” tend to be pushing proprietary solutions.
LibreOffice is a wonderful, welcome, huge step forward for what was OpenOffice.org. People are complaining about the name and stuff, but really, that stuff doesn’t matter: what does matter is that this now unfetters developers to do anything from the firing of drive-by patches to more fundamental work, and get the project going at the speed it deserves.
Lots of people have talked about the direction the project ought to be going in; I fear to some extent many of those people think that OpenOffice.
I don’t usually like to do a me-too post, but mizmo is right on again with her thoughts on jcm’s post. I raised a similar question at a town hall meeting earlier this year – basically, asking if Fedora is really suitable for day-to-day use as a primary desktop. My personal situation is much like some of those who answered, that it works for me but that I would find it difficult to recommend.
Recently a new system has been added to people.fp.o, the ability to host yum repositories. It’s not an equivalent of Ubuntu’s PPA system by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s another useful facility to have available.
I’ve been testing this over the past few hours with a new package: SparkleShare. For those who’ve never heard of it before, this is essentially a little tray app that synchronises a local directory tree with one held on a remote server: you can think of this as being very similar to Ubuntu One, Dropbox, iFolder or similar.
This evening I completed a new bit of code which has been uploaded to the bongo-web projects; it’s a Z-Push back-end and is only barely functional at this point: however, it works well enough that on my HTC Desire phone I can set up an ActiveSync account, it authenticates and synchronises contacts into my Bongo. To make it usable for just contacts will take a little bit more work, because at the moment it’s not storing them in the Bongo-native format, and it’s difficult to test that syncing is actually working without so more clients – then after that we get to do the same dance again with the calendar (although at that point, 60% or so of the code needed would have been written).
It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything about Bongo; for much of this year there hasn’t been an awful lot to write about – we’ve all been pretty busy. However, yesterday we had a teleconference which is worth talking about.
One of the problems we’ve had is that working on a number of pieces of the system, including the backend and web front ends, has been difficult – both parts are in development, and having everything subject to change like that it pretty difficult.
For some reason, Google have decided to put large images as the backdrop to their search engine. Not only are they large and grating, but they change over time and it’s horrible.
I’ve turned this off by putting the following in Firefox’s userContent.css:
This gets rid of most of the nasty. However, sadly, the file you need to edit may or may not exist, and could be in a variety of different places, and of course there doesn’t seem to be any good way of doing this easily.
It’s only been a couple of months since I last wrote about the future of Thunderbird, but I’ve been thinking about it again recently. The immediate issue which prompted me to write this was the disturbing news that a potentially bad crasher bug in Thunderbird has gone unfixed in Fedora even though a patch was submitted about a month ago because of sensitivity over trade marks. Although some users on the devel list appear to be dealing out their usual standard of hyperbole on this, it is an extremely difficult position to defend: who knows if the maintainer would have actually released an update by now, but the immediate problem is the mark.
Release time is coming again soon: Fedora 13 will be out in beta form in around a week, and it’s difficult not to get excited about this release. Fedora 12 went extremely well, at least in my opinion, and thus far my experience with 13 is that it will not be the unlucky-for-some release. For some reason, though, there tends not to be as much buzz around Fedora releases as they really deserve.
Occasionally there are things that I read about on the web which happen to fit perfectly with some need I have at the time: and “Open Data Protocol”, or just oData, is one of them. I think I got hip to this by reading Miguel’s post on oData, but looking around it has been mentioned in a few other blogs I follow.
What is oData? Put simply, it’s a bit like being able to do SQL queries over the web – for non-technical people it’s deeply disinteresting, but what it effectively promotes is an ability for web-based services to open access to their databases in a pretty straightforward and standards-compliant method.
