Advogato blog for jono

16 Sep 2002

Mon, 16 Sep 2002 01:14:52 GMT

Well, only a couple of days before I go to the USA on holiday with my family, but before I go I have had some thoughts.

To be honest, this has been brewing in me for a while, and a combination of work, band, TV, playstation 2 and other stuff has prevented me acting on it.

We all love free software. We all know free software is a good thing and it can do good things for the good people that use it.

Although free software is a good thing for many people, there is a key group of people that have not been directly targetted for using free software to benefit them: charities.

Charities are possibly the most needy of organisation for requiring costs to be cut and investments to be procured to benefit the charity. I think it is important that we direct our knowledge of free software to charities so that they make full use of it.

With this in mind I am going to do some work in this area and focus on how charities can invest in free software which can not only save them money but also get them out of the vendor lock in that plagues so many.

I am planning on doing some of the following to acheive my ambition of getting more free software in charities:

- identify the current IT needs and requirements of charities. Develop a paper on what these needs are and how they can be approached with the current catalogue of free software.

- determine the extend of use that charities rely on commercial software. I will also seek to determine the costs and licencing of this software. Put it this way - I doubt it is all free...and then there is the lock-in situation.

- Write a proposition paper on how free software can offer a solution to these requirements.

These are quite hefty goals, and I am by no means expecting these goals to be completed any time soon. I still have things to do as a student and other work to satisfy, but you know my intentions.

10 Sep 2002

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 12:21:15 GMT

*Yawn*. Just woke up ready for a da of writing, unpacking (in our new house) and packing (for our holiday in a week).

At some point today I am plannin on looking over the KWebStat source to investigate if it still compiles the latest HEAD compile which I have, which is admittidly quite old due to the lack of broadband until a few weeks. :(

By the way...does anyone know if there is a client to add diary entries to Advogato? I am sick of logging into the site.

9 Sep 2002

Mon, 9 Sep 2002 01:27:24 GMT

Heya folks,

Well, I have returned after many months away from this site. I have been busy with my band and some other Linux related stuff.

I am however going to keep this thing updated where I can.

18 Mar 2002

Mon, 18 Mar 2002 16:45:37 GMT

I have been fiddling with PHP some more today and looked into Cookies in more detail, mail ahnding and LDAP.

Work on the Question API for usability.kde.org has been been continuing, and I have found that it is teaching me lots more about web development - all good fun.

Band practice tonight...last one before the gig. :)

Seeya later all!

11 Mar 2002

Mon, 11 Mar 2002 16:34:43 GMT

Well the past few days have been interesting - lots of metal, relaxing and PHP.

I have been coding the Question API for the KDE Usability Study - I decided a complete rewrite was in order and I have begun coding it all up. this version will have support for multiple languages, mail responder support and more.

Gotta run...I will keep you informed.

7 Mar 2002

Thu, 7 Mar 2002 16:27:33 GMT

Hello folks, sorry for the lack of updates but the past week has been busy at work and witht he band.

I have been sorting out a lot of band related business recently as we are now in a giggable state - we are looking for venues to play at and hope to record soon.

Just a quick update for now, but I will be back soon. :)

25 Feb 2002

Mon, 25 Feb 2002 01:32:37 GMT

Had a nice weekend. We went out looking at houses on Saturday, and I have relaxed and caught up on my kip.

Chris Howells has set up Bugzilla on the KDE Usability Study site. This is cool, and it should give us a means to handle usability based issues. We are just ironing out some of the issues with it.

Aaron has also written a KIconEdit patch to fix some usability issues - I am going to test it and give some feedback on it. I havent had time today but I am going to look at it tomorrow.

I was reading a few pages of Beginning Linux Programming the other day, and I was reading some of the Socket information - interesting stuff; I am thinking of having a go at writing some client/server stuff. This is going to be one of those play with something until I understand it then forget it occasions I suspect. Nontheless...this is one of the greast things about free software - playing with technology you don't understand.

I have been getting interested in the Konference project (H.323 based KDE VoIP application). I subscribed to the mailing list and I am keeping tabs on it. I installed the KDE 2.x Debian packasges and compiled it - a straight link to kde-common yielded no success and the intricies of Autoconf did'nt give me time to make it work. I eventually compiled it after unsetting QTDIR and installing all the right libs and it looks promising - it does'nt do much when you call...but promise is there. I mailed the developers list and offered to do a website for the app - I am also going to take a look at the code.

Had a band practice today - it went well although Jim wasn't there - the website is up now at http://www.seraphidian.co.uk/ - I still have some issues to sort out but the site is mostly there.

OK...it is late and I am going to shower and get some kip...seeya later all.

21 Feb 2002

Thu, 21 Feb 2002 16:39:13 GMT

Oh what a fun night last night. Went to the LUG pre-meet at 6.30 and munched on some Chicken Enchalades with 2 slices of cheesecake. The usual pre-meet rabble turned up and then we went to the main meet. We were greeted by some people already there and Ron Wellsted (LUG expert and purveyor or bizarrely facinating facts) had got a RAID array, PC and projector set up, complete with video camera to film his RAID talk.

The talk was interesting and I learned a lot. Adam Sweet also brought along a mate who I chatted to for a while about KDE coding. Towards the latter end of the meet I had a number of crashes on my laptop. After fsck'ing my disk a few times I deduced it was the patches I applied to the ov511 driver source in /usr/src/linux/drivers/usb. I had compiled this as a module, so I removed it from /etc/modules and rebooted. things were fine then...but the meet was over. :(

It was agreed that a few of the LUG faithfull would go for a curry afterwords, so Aq, Re-load, James, Lee, Dan, Simon and myself piled into a curry house and devoured some nosh. Much fun was had and I can see this happening again in the future. :)

I got into work today to see a nice thing on the ov511 developers webpage:

"21 February 2002: Released version 1.55. It should fix some reported memory errors and crashes/freezes, and should compile under 2.5.5 now."

I patched my 2.4.17 and it has been working fine today. Nice work Mark. :)

My plans to conduct my KControl usability research last night failed miserably due to the kernel problems. I decided to use my workmates as guinea pigs and I am getting some useful data. Some discussion on kde-usability and on #kde is sealing some interesting solutions.

Well, tonight I have a band practice - we had some photo's developed so I will get them scanned in soon. :) I also updated the band website today. I will be officially announcing the band website soon when I have a few more updates on there.

Seeya later all!

20 Feb 2002

Wed, 20 Feb 2002 16:44:09 GMT

Gotta be quick today as I have to get going.

Today I have done some usability stuff. I am starting an assessment of KControl's usability. It truly seems a mess and could do with clearing up.

I have begun developing a document and some solutions and I have created a research paper to run over some people at home and at the LUG tonight. The plan is to get a nice varied view of what people think of KControl's organisation.

LUG meet tonight. :)

Seeya later all!

20 Feb 2002

Wed, 20 Feb 2002 00:12:16 GMT

Spent lots of time today doing some work at work. I actually worked too much today. :P

I compiled KDevelop CVS from the KDE_2_2_BRANCH and it is cool. The code completion is nice. :)

The camera is still working nicely - despite the fact it was off all day today as I forgot my laptop cable. :(

I sent a proposal to kde-usability for an official board. Chris Howells likes the idea and it may be a good thing for the KDE Usability Study. We will have to wait and see.

Seeya later all!