Results of a 22,000 hour experiment on UV degradation of many different types of label printing ink

Posted by Adrian on Aug 29, 2008 in Labels | 1 comment Since early 2006 we at Mercian Labels have been conducting extended experiments on the effects of daylight on self adhesive labels printed using a variety of label printing methods, and we have regularly updated the results of these experiments on a dedicated webpage. This can be a serious problem in our industry, as labels are often used for warnings and often exposed to daylight for extended...
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USB frustrations with linux

Posted by Adrian on Aug 27, 2008 in Open Source | 3 comments Today I thought I’d blog about one of the most annoying problems I’ve had since migrating to linux at home.  FYI I only use an 8.04 HP Ubuntu laptop and have a spare dell ubuntu laptop at home for general domestic use. I back up all my files (tens of GB) whenever I can , and when I was a windows user I used a removable USB hard drive.  Since migrating to linux, this has proved...
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renewing our support contract with Senokian

Posted by Adrian on Aug 20, 2008 in Open Source | 0 comments We’ve renewed our new support contract with Jake and his team over at Senokian today.  Its been a very easy decision, as we need the support and they are very good at open source software support in a business environment. They come recommended by Mercian Labels! Thanks Dave etc over in Coventry for your ongoing support.
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Major milestone, our MIS migration has completed!

Posted by Adrian on Aug 20, 2008 in business, Open Source, Postgresql | 3 comments I am about 6 days late in posting this, but I am exceptionally proud to say that we completed the major piece of work in our migration on Wednesday last week when we went live with our new php/postregsql MIS system. I am very pleased with it, as FINALLY we are not dependent on MS to run our core business management information system. Top give you some idea of this achievement for us… We...
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open source licensing lesson

Posted by Adrian on Aug 15, 2008 in Open Source | 3 comments I’m far behind others in blogging on the US court decision yesterday on the applicability of open source ( creative commons ) licenses, as reported by the BBC. However, it may be obvious once you think about it, but I didnt actually recognise that if you breech the exact terms of an open source license, then you are in fact breeching copyright.  In extreme cases, this could be pretty...
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today is migration day

Posted by Adrian on Aug 13, 2008 in Open Source | 3 comments Last night, after 5 separate concurrent use days of both our new and old CRM systems we did a final data dump and turned off the old system.  From 9am today we are running solely on the new PHP / POSTGRESQL system. I dont there is ever a perfect time to migrate IT systems, but Rich has put in a lot of effort to get us here, and I dont think we can be any more prepared than we are. Watch this...
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What to do with pressure sensitive label printing waste?

Posted by Adrian on Aug 5, 2008 in Open Source | 5 comments Here at Mercian Labels we are always trying to improve our performance in every way possible, and with my academic background in environmental engineering, I’m particularly conscious of our environmental performance. However, there is a tough issue to deal with in our industry, which is how to dispose of our 2 main waste streams (by weight and volume), these being siliconised paper liner...
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100th post

Posted by Adrian on Aug 5, 2008 in Open Source | 0 comments Wow, I just noticed this in the wordpress console manage. This is the 100th post on our blog. Time flies when you are having fun!
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open source migration progess

Posted by Adrian on Aug 5, 2008 in Open Source | 0 comments We have now done 3 seperate days of “duplciation”, testing our new PHP MIS system agianst our existing MS database with ever improving results.  Every time we test it in duplicate offline mode we find new things to fix or improve, but its now so dangerously close I can almost grab it… But, of course its the silly season and its hard to test when a lot of staff are away on...
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