The Blog from Mercian Labels & Security Labels International

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 – it will be interesting to see what actualy migrations and adoptions there are to support it though as the cost of migrating will be immense.

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.

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 Birmingham commented on the plight of many skilled workers loosing jobs where skills cannt be replaced.

Yesterday I recevied a message from a guy who I wont identify, but who I regard in the very highest esteem as a true technical expert, and at the very head of his profession.  He is a technical “god” at a major multinational ink company.  He has just been made redundant.  The knowledge and experience this guy has has taken decades to build up, and when the economic upturn comes, his knowledge and skills built up over decades just can not be replaced by that company.  I am not critising the decision of the MD of that business, as I dont have any information on the circumstances, but I know that it is a crying shame that such skills are being lost in the fight for corporate survivial.  Manufacturing in the UK is under enough pressure as it is, and if we are to specialise in the clever R&D stuff to develop new and exciting products based on good IP, then we need these high level skills to stay in the industry.  Loosing them will just prolong the recession IMHO.

In the meantime, if anyone in UK printing is looking for an ink guru with a pedigree ,a “people person” skill set and project management skills, let me know and I will put you in touch. He comes highly recommended from us.

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 connecting to your device.. try to connect the pc from your mobile

then go to console n issue the following command

adrian@adrian-laptop:~$ sdptool search DUN

output
———-
Inquiring …
Searching for DUN on 00:1A:89:CD:14:9A …
Service Name: Dial-Up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0×1005c
Service Class ID List:
“Dialup Networking” (0×1103)
Protocol Descriptor List:
“L2CAP” (0×0100)
“RFCOMM” (0×0003)
Channel: 4
Language Base Attr List:
code_ISO639: 0×454e
encoding:    0×6a
base_offset: 0×100
Profile Descriptor List:
“Dialup Networking” (0×1103)
Version: 0×0100

NOTE THE CHANNEL NUMBER
step 2: Issue the command

hcitool scan

output
———–
Scanning …
00:1A:89:Cx:14:9A    Adrian e90

step 3: issue the command

sudo gedit /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

paste the text in it

rfcomm0 {
bind yes;
device 00:1A:89:Cx:14:9A;
channel 4;
comment “Nokia E90″;
}

USE YOUR OWN DETAILS FOR MAC ADDRESS AND CHANNEL NUMBER
save it

step 4:

issue the command

sudo gedit /etc/ppp/peers/airtel

copy this in that file

/dev/rfcomm0 115200
connect ‘/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chat-gprs’
crtscts
modem -detach
noccp
defaultroute
usepeerdns
noauth
ipcp-accept-remote
ipcp-accept-local
noipdefault

step 5:

issue the command

sudo gedit /etc/ppp/chat-gprs

copy this in the file

” ATZ OK
AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”general.t-mobile.uk”
OK “ATD*99***1#”
CONNECT ”
step 6:

FINISHED

To run it,make sure you are not connected to another wifi network (reboot in needed), then  just issue this command

sudo pppd call airtel

It works, and has just saved me £150 for a 3G wireless USB dongle device.

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

I’m not sure how this compares to your experience, I am runnung a 1.83 ghz core2 processor with 2gb ram. Once open the document moved smoothly and was easily updated.

My personal results on my old laptop (Ubuntu 8.10, 1.1GB RAM, 1.6GhtzAMD Turion processor) were

Ubuntu OO.o Open 60 seconds save 50 seconds

Just goes to show, open Office just sisnt as quick as MS Word for these huge documents (300pages+, 1.5MD in ODT format.

Thanks for Philip for his time in testing.

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 least 1 open source company (outserve) exhibiting, and I hope the event will be well supported.

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, but it took me a while to find this out!

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 bad we were often told to “get out of the dustbin” and we sounded like daleks
• Calls cut of in the middle of a conversation
• Calls to a group were notifying to the SNOM hard phones in the group upto 10 seconds before the softphones, making it very difficult to identify calls
• SNOM M3 DECT SIP phones didnt work, but SNOM 300 hard phones did. Sometimes.
• Call handling using Hudlite was not integrated with Ekiga (or anything), and so it was very hard for users to forward calls around the office, and many, many calls were missed as there is no way to notify users of an incoming call if the ekiga box is minimised.
• the system often had network problems, such that we replaced the ADSL router and moved the DHCP function several times in a month to get some sort of stability.  Last week alone, we lost about 6 working hours of the working week with no phone system (yes, no phones at all).

By the end of the 4th week, morale was pretty poor, and after a crisis meeting we decide to do 2 significant changes.

1) bring in Matt and Dave, both sys admin type people from our open source support consultancy Senokian on a “do not leave until you have fixed it” mission to find out what was wrong with our setup.

2) abandon the softphone system – hudlite and a SIP client (like ekiga) it is just not good enough for a business environment; we bought a new batch to SNOM 300 hard phones for all the previous softphone users.

Very satisfactorily, a major trixbox/network fault was found by the superb Senokian chaps, and fixed, and after that all the new hard phones worked perfectly.  That was friday.  After a very frustrating period, we should have a much more stable week this week, but have leant some lessons that others may wish to heed in due course.

1. The Hudlite system built into trixbox is difficult to work, and we do not recommend it for busienss use.  It desperately needs an inbulit SIP client, and is almost unusable without such a  development.  We know this, becuase we used a SWYX VOIP phone system that was so integrated for 4 years before trixbox.
2. If you have the same symptoms as us, then check your trixbox setup, so that it has the right local network subnet mask, or else, as we found, if you use an incorrect one (probaly the default), all the network traffic tries to go via your  network router (ADSL in our case), and it dies with the repeat NAT and repeat boucing of packets.  In our case, it was set as (i think) 127.0.0.1, and it should have been 192.x.x.x etc.

I hope this post helps someone.  I will report back after a few days on what we experienced this week, but it looks good.  Just dont make our mistake, and try to use Hudlite softphones for a business critical operation ie a working phone system.

It may be a conincidence with the snow and bad weather this week, but the disruption to our operations has been very significant, resulting in the one of the lowest level of sales against target in my memory.

This is a profit warning to businesses – unreliable phone systems hurt.

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$oft Word is that for large documents (eg my 334 pages word procedures manual – 13MB) it takes an age to load, and run and update, and crashes sometimes.  For all spreadsheets, presentations, and under 20 page documents, its great, but IMHO, for very large documents, Micro$oft Word is superior.  This may be becuase I#m running an older laptop (1.1GB RAM, 1.6GhtzAMD Turion processor), but for me, its the truth.

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 current position, as announced in labels and labelling last year.

Great to hear from you Ian, and congratulations on your latest career move.

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 any link, it was blocked. Nice.  Fortunately it was fixed very quickly.

Just goes to show, nobody’s perfect!