Craig Box's journeys, stories and notes...


Posts Tagged ‘opensource’

OpenID and MindTouch

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

The below is all outdated - links updated to archive.org for historical interest.

When I was working at Coreworx in Canada I introduced an internal knowledge base in the form of MindTouch (then DekiWiki).  I got involved in the community around the project, and ended up meeting the developers behind it in San Diego.

I evaluated it for a project at Symbian, and in order to try and make it suit us better I wrote a module for using OpenID.

Today, MindTouch have published a couple of posts I wrote on the subject, which I am happy to share with you here:

In other news, over the course of the next few weeks, I'll be running a series on the migration of Symbian's LAMP/LTMJ (unfortunately Linux/Tomcat/MySQL/Java doesn't have a vowel in it) hosting servers to Amazon EC2. Stay tuned!

Software Freedom Day - all over!

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Thanks to everyone who helped out with WLUG's Software Freedom Day event. There is a good writeup and some pictures online at the SFD website.

On a personal note, I'd like to thank Ian and Bruce, who did most of the work on the day, as well as Bruce's family for their support and penguin suit wearing. Also, Michael, Rod and Ron for their help on the day. It was unfortunate that the sterling efforts of a number of individuals was sullied by the actions of another member on the day, who is being officially reprimanded for his behaviour. (And it's also unfortunate we were buried on page D7 in the Waikato Times, while front page, above the fold, was an article about our local furries.)

t this point I should also announce I am not standing for re-election on the WLUG committee next year. I've been secretary since we founded officially four years ago, through three presidents, vice-presidents and treasurers, and over 10 general committee members. It's been a great way to contribute to the open source community and I really hope that someone new and fresh gets involved.

Fear not, I'll still be involved; my current goal is relaunching the Ubuntu NZ local community team.

SFD/NM updates

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

My NetworkManager PPTP plugin package for Ubuntu is sitting in the REVU queue. If all goes well it will be approved and end up in Universe for Edgy.

SFD preparations are coming along. We have people hard at work preparing 150 copies of the Kia Ora CD, a fantastic open source software CD for Windows, collated by zcat from WLUG, and of course we have 300 Ubuntu CDs to give away.

Oh, and MythTV 0.20 is out. Make sure you get 0.20a, as a big MythWeb bug slipped in at the last minute. All going well, it'll make Edgy, if a simple sync from Debian Multimedia is possible.

Software Freedom Day 2006: Donated SFI goodies

Thursday, September 7th, 2006

After our Canonical goodies arrived, we received our parcel from SFI:

SFI goodies

We got two T-shirts free and bought another four (thanks to Pia for arranging them when the web site got frazzled), both to wear, and to support the cause.

We're making progress with everything and hope to see as many people at Centreplace in Hamilton on Saturday 16 September as we can.

Software Freedom Day 2006: Donated Ubuntu goodness

Monday, September 4th, 2006

It's all starting to come together now! A box of goodies just arrived from Canonical:

Box of goodies from Canonical
Including 250 Dapper Drake PC CDs, and 60 Ubuntu stickers.

Craig's Way

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

Open letters seem to be all the rage these days. How about we just go with "Craig, as benevolent dictator, says How It Is":

Microsoft are hereby instructed to publish Open Office XML as a royalty and patent free open standard. Everyone else is hereby instructed to change to use it (they can call it OpenDocument 2.0 if required), and then people won't have to care about OpenOffice.org if they don't want, because the standard is standard.

Microsoft will then be forced to operate exactly to the published standard, publishing changes under the same license and arrangement if they wish to extend the standard (well before the release of their product), and maintaining backwards compatibility.

There, everyone wins. Why does it always take me deciding how it has to be, to get results like this?

Vote Quimby.

Software Freedom Day 2006

Saturday, June 24th, 2006

Sfd-logo-06

WLUG have had two installfests in the last two years; between them and the Saturday Workshops that run once a month, it seems we need to do a bit of advertising before we'll have any new people that need Linux installation help in the Waikato. (That, and Linux has become substantially easier to install recently!)

With the growth of international Software Freedom Day, it seemed about time that WLUG ran an SFD event in Hamilton to drum up interest both in F/OSS and the group itself.

So, if you're in Hamilton, or will be on September 16, mark the day in your calendar, and if you're interested in helping out, sign your name on the planning page.

This is a new area for us, so any advice from people who have done it before is welcomed.

Jealous before God

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

This post didn't have this first paragraph the first two times, but something I'm doing is crashing Firefox, and while the Sessionsaver extension is nice, it doesn't seem to save form entries. I like the fact that Web 2.0 is all about "instant updating", and there's no reason why I shouldn't have my content saved as I go, even in draft format, everywhere on the web. Score one down for WordPress.

(hits Save and Continue Editing) Back to your regularly scheduled rant.

I learnt something today. The word 'zealot' is often bandied about, normally in the context of "someone who has a different opinion to me, and isn't afraid to espouse it". Zealous is actually a Hebrew word, meaning "jealous on behalf of God". While the two words have a common heritage, jealous and zealous today mean two different things.

Enough Hebrew - the Computer zealotry article is the one we we really meant.

I read an interesting article in the Computerworld this week, suggesting that the Free Software Foundation's reworking of Digital Rights Management as Digital Restrictions Management, and their Defective By Design protests, were painting them as fundamentalists, and that Stallman should continue at what he's good at, namely software freedom.

(So, this time, hitting Save and Continue Editing crashed Firefox. Not impressed. I did upgrade GNOME, perhaps I should have rebooted, like it asked...)

Then I read a presentation that Cory Doctorow from FSF Europe presented to Microsoft in 2004 (if you haven't read it, you really should), pointing out that people don't like being made pirates, and they will always try and do what they think they should be able to do, so the way to succeed in the business is to make the player that can play everything, and have the law change to follow you.

I could agree with either side individually. Yes, the FSF are appearing to be zealots, by trying to tell people that iTunes will eat their children. But for those people who believe that the FSF is communism incarnate, doesn't it seem like they just trying to reintroduce a free market?

At issue is the software embedded in the songs bought from the iTunes music store that prevents them from being played on rival devices. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden have demanded that Apple strip the blocking software from its iTunes service. France is readying legislation that enforces such interoperability, and Finland may follow suit. Although no action has been taken in the United Kingdom, the record industry's trade body there has called for a removal of the software.

Meanwhile, protests have begun cropping up in the United States. A group called DefectivebyDesign rallied demonstrators at eight Apple stores across the country last Saturday, including the company's new 24-hour store in Manhattan. Wearing hazmat suits, they hoisted signs and handed out leaflets calling for Apple to stop using the blocking software.

The EFF have also weighed in with their cartoon interpretation of the future that could be.

In a world ruled by DRM, tinkerers will always be criminals. I've often thought that the hacker community should possibly stop trying to reclaim the word in a world that associates it with "computer criminal", but on the path that is bring projected, will there be a difference between the two? It seems the issues of copyright and Free Software are intertwined in a way that means that the FSF really do need to be involved.

I'm glad that issues like this and Net Neutrality will bring the issues to public attention. Linux Australia are bringing it to the attention of the Australian public It's happening now in Australia, as a Free Trade agreement with the US appears more likely. I'm not sure if it will come up in New Zealand - it might happen with music, it might happen with HDTV. But look out for NZOSS announcing memberships in the next month or two, and consider flicking us a buck to look out for you.

Best description of the open source model I've ever heard

Saturday, May 20th, 2006

Linus Torvalds:

In fact, I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today, and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do. So openness is not something new, it is something that actually has worked for a long time.

(Source: CNN interview)

In other news-stolen-from-Slashdot today, Peter Calveley, a New Zealand actor, has convinced the USPTO to reconsider Amazon's one-click ordering patent.