Thursday, October 31, 2002

Open IT - Govt to rewrite source code in Linux My colleague Gordon e-mailed me this post, which is from the IndiaTimes. the title of the article is misleading - it's really about the Indian goverment's interest in promoting the use of Linux. "The Department of Information Technology has already devised a strategy to introduce Linux and open source software as a de-facto standard in academic institutions, especially in engineering colleges through course work that encourages use of such systems." During my last trip to Belgaum (central India), I visited the local tech college and checked out a nice Linux-based computer lab that used inexpensive black boxes that gave the user GUI sessions that were hosted on a Linux server. The campus had a t-1 connection to the internet. 11:49:39 AM    comment []

€250,000 European Commission Linux migration study In this report on the EC Linux migration study from the Register, "Countries represented included: Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Spain and a representative from the European Commission." Why are they looking at Linux? "Microsoft's recently introduced licensing changes have added weight to this concern but Bleasdale said an even bigger issue was the rate of change that Microsoft is imposing on customers, and many are struggling to deal with it." - Brussels to spend €250k on Linux migration study. Major architectural rethink [The Register] 11:38:24 AM    comment []

Wednesday, October 30, 2002

A nice tool to aid Linux Migration The Codeweavers product mentioned in this article enables you to run most MS Office products (except for Access) on Linux and is pretty good price: $54.95 for the download version. A WinXP pro license is $150. Hmmmm. - SuSE Linux makes its pitch for the Windows desktop. Enterprise version on the way [The Register] 12:09:01 PM    comment []

Thursday, October 24, 2002

Building a Tivo clone Article on Slashdot, Could CDRW Disks Replace Videotapes? kindled interest in building my own PVR. After scannning the Slashdot articles, here are some useful links: MythTV.org - "Yes, I could have just bought a TiVo, but I wanted to have more than just a PVR -- I want a webbrowser built in, a mail client, maybe some games. Basically, I want the mythical convergence box that's been talked about for a few years now." dvd::rip - "a full featured DVD copy program written in Perl." 8:29:57 PM    comment []

Monday, October 21, 2002

Secure Linux desktop begins shipping to UK police force Nice cost savings on this project - "The user-facing part of the system consists of an ultra low cost machine being supplied by the Telford office of Taiwanese company GCI, price £299, including a smart card reader." They are using OpenOffice for desktop applications and VNC for access to legacy Windows applications. 11:45:46 AM    comment []

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

XML::Comma While checking out Allafrica.com's website, I noticed that it is powered by a perl-based open source content management system called XML::Comma. Content is created and stored as XML files, and then indexed by a relational database such as mysql. Nice approach that is quick and easy to maintain. And it's perl! 11:46:39 AM    comment []

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Radio E-mail in West Africa: The Complete Version I love solutions like this: using 2-way radio to build a network in Guinea, West Africa, for offices over 375 miles (600 kilometers) apart! 1:47:09 PM    comment []

Friday, October 04, 2002

Reaching Content Management System Nirvana Just caught this article this morning: PHP and PostgreSQL Open Sesame I really dig what they are doing with php and postgresql. But approaching the topic of content management from a sustainable coding perspective, I am looking harder at the approach taken by the apache coccon folks. The problem I see with markup language approaches such as pHp and Cold Fusion is that the logic easily gets mixed-up with the presentation layer. To their credit, projects like fusebox are attacking that problem. Still, I am looking fascinated by Xopus, a "browser based in-place wysiwyg XML editor", and how it could tie into the Coccon framework. The demo crashes and burns in my Mozilla build (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20020930) but works brilliantly in IE6. If this really works, a few of my must-have bullet points will be there: Separation of logic and style (Apache Coccon) Nice user-friendly in-place editing (Xopus) Open source goodness I am also following the mozdev.org Composite project, which "is a chrome overlay which enables a streamlined Mozilla Editor for html composition in textareas." It does not work in-place - yet - and is a tad buggy in my build of Mozilla, but it certainly shows promise. 11:00:22 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2002 Chris Kelley.