new UK government policy on open source

Posted by Adrian on Feb 26, 2009 in Open Source | 0 comments For those interested in the adoption of open source standards and software by the powers that be, there was an interesting announcement yesterday reported by the BBC, The Open Sourcerer and others.  You can read the full announcement here, but on the face of it, its a step in the right direction, and follows earlier policy statements by the opposition. A policy statement is one thing –...
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The Times on open source

Posted by Adrian on Feb 21, 2009 in Open Source | 0 comments This article on the Times website may be of interest to those who follow the march of Open Source, IMHO its a shame there werent more mentions of SME use of open source though.
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the economy bites, in a worrying way

Posted by Adrian on Feb 19, 2009 in business | 0 comments There are a lot of people suffering in UK PLC as a result of the downturn, and the widespread redundancies are hurting many.  At Mercian Labels we are still expanding, but I’m very aware of the plight of others, and a particular incident yesterday caused me some concern, especially after watching a Channel 4 documentary called the Big Job Hunt earlier in the  week, where Lord Jones of...
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Gulp – our first published hack – using a nokia e90 mobile phone over bluetooth as a 3G modem on T-mobile

Posted by Adrian on Feb 13, 2009 in coding, Open Source | 0 comments I think this is our first ever hack, heavily copied from here (thanks to that author) with a few little changes for the UK T-mobile network, and shows how to use a nokia e90 mobile phone over bluetooth as a 3G modem on T-mobile on ubuntu 8.10, saving yoruself the cost of buying a £150 USB 3G dongle First Pair your Mobile to Your laptop Manually…using bluetooth manager.. if pc is not...
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using OpenOffice 3.0 with a large documents – a speed test

Posted by Adrian on Feb 12, 2009 in Open Source | 1 comment Further to my earlier post on the speed of open office for large documents, Philip at Outserve kindly benchmarked my document for speed and sent me these results: I have done some comparisons on a laptop which I have dual booted Ubuntu 8.04/Vista Vista MS Office 2007 Open 6 seconds Save less than 20 seconds Vista OO.o Open 25 seconds Save 45 Seconds Ubuntu OO.o Open 30 seconds save 40...
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West Midlands IT showcase – an opportunity to promote and experience open source software

Posted by Adrian on Feb 12, 2009 in business, Open Source, press releases | 0 comments In an different life to my work at Mercian Labels, I am a non executive director of Business Link West Midlands, who are running the West Midlands IT Expo on March 31 in Birmingham. I would like to encourage any IT industry people, particularly those involved with open source to contact the team at Business Link and get involved, promote your products and meet new customers.  There is at...
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migrating to Open Office Calc 2.4 to 3.0 – tip!

Posted by Adrian on Feb 11, 2009 in Open Source | 0 comments very quick one, if you are running logical IF statements in open office Calc 3.0 (soon to be rolled out with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 I guess), the syntax has changed. IF (A1>B1;”true”;”false”) was correct in v2.4, but returns a 508 error in v3.0 it it now IF (A1>B1,”true”,”false”) replace the semi colon with a comma is the simple trick,...
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Our most painful experience of migrating to Open Source – trixbox softphone clients using Hudlite arent good enough

Posted by Adrian on Feb 8, 2009 in business, Open Source | 11 comments As previoulsy blogged, we completed our migration in full to open source over Xmas, and have been running everyting possible on open source for 5 weeks now.  Without doubt the biggest problem, and source of legitimate continual complaints from our staff, our customers, and anyone who used the system, was our trixbox phone instalation.  Negative symptoms included: very poor call quality, so...
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Open Office 3.01 quick review

Posted by Adrian on Feb 8, 2009 in Open Source | 0 comments Today I have upgraded my default ubuntu 8.10 instalation of Open Office 2.4 to version 3.01.  My initial experiences are that its no real improvement on my main gripe, which is the ability to handle huge word processing files. My main gripe with Open office against Micro$oft Word is that for large documents (eg my 334 pages word procedures manual – 13MB) it takes an age to load, and run...
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A stepping stone to greater things

Posted by Adrian on Feb 6, 2009 in Labels | 0 comments Yesterday I had an email from Ian Bates, Executive Vice President of Gerhardt USA who are a global player in label die cutting technology.  In the 1980′s Ian cut his teeth in the label printing world in our first label printing factory in the small village of Penkridge, Staffordshire.  He moved on from us over 20 years ago in 1988, and worked his way up the industry tree to his...
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google broke.

Posted by Adrian on Feb 3, 2009 in business | 0 comments A funny thing happened on saturday, something I’ve never seen before, a human error mistake from one of the world’s biggest companies that very effectively killed all google’s search results.  Here is a screenshot of what I saw. (click to enlarge) Note the “this site may harm your computer” statement against every listing, including ours!  If you clicked on...
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