Label Grid launched – is is possible to have browser based label printing software – and open source too!

Posted by Adrian on Jun 29, 2010 in coding, Labels, Open Source | 1 comment I was interested to hear of the launch  of Labelgrid recently.  This is a new open source project (GPL licence) to design a web based label printing software stack to design and print labels in a browser rather than the typical client based software.  There  will be a number of challenges in this as the authors point out on their webpage, but I thin its a really interesting idea if they get...
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How to configure a SNOM 300 phone for a conference call using TRIXBOX

Posted by Adrian on May 6, 2010 in coding, Open Source | 0 comments We use a lot of SNOM 300 VOIP phones at our sites, and have just cracked a way to make conference calls on them, which is not obvious or covered by the manual. If you are trying to do this: Login to your phone using the web GUI via http://its.IP.x.x and select function L4 – directory, (or any function you dont use) change the function tag to   F_CONFERENCE save to make a conference...
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miserware only delivers a 2.7% power reduction

Posted by Adrian on Feb 13, 2010 in coding, Open Source | 3 comments 15/2/10 NOTE: this post has content that is seen as inaccurate by Miserware and you are advised to read all the text before forming conclusions to give Miserware a fair hearing. Interested by some of Alan’s posts at the Open Sourcerer, I’ve been conducting an experiment in recent weeks with the Miserware power saving software that claims to save energy by better controlling CPU...
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Multiple Accounts using a single Alias in Zimbra

Posted by rich on Mar 30, 2009 in coding | 0 comments A little back end tweak here to allow multiple Zimbra email accounts to use a single alias. Normally, you can only assign an alias to one single user, otherwise you are presented with a similar error: Cannot add alias: Account user@domain already has alias aliasuser@domain We needed to be able to allow two user accounts to send emails from the same account (alias); there may be other ways to do...
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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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Finally, I’ve found a decent webpage design software for linux (like dreamweaver)

Posted by Adrian on Jul 20, 2008 in coding, Open Source | 0 comments Apart from a couple of small SEO applications that only run on windos, the biggest problem I have come across when using linux in the past year for day to day business use is the lack of a WYSIWYG webapge editor.  At the moment I’m still remote desktop’ing onto our old windows server where we have dreamweaver installed.  I can code in html, but to be honest a split screen...
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new software system, dry run results

Posted by Adrian on Jul 14, 2008 in coding, Open Source | 1 comment Well we did a full dry run last Friday with the new PHP driven labels CRM system (yet to be named – any ideas?) and it didnt go as well as we hoped.  So much so that we have a list of bugs to work on before its good enough to go “live”, hopefully next weekend. Patience is a vurtue as they say, but I’m just so keen to see the new system up and running and give us some...
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Postgresql: Calculate work days (none weekend days)

Posted by rich on Feb 15, 2008 in coding, Postgresql | 4 comments Coming from a MsSQL database with access queries/macros/modules and so on, its easy to be able to work out weekend days from two given dates, ie if you have two dates you can calculate how many days between them aren’t weekdays. In postgresql, this isnt so easy! there aren’t many examples on the net, without creating mass functions, but i’ve come up with this: SELECT count(*)...
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Postgresql: Converting money type to numeric!

Posted by rich on Feb 14, 2008 in coding, Postgresql | 0 comments Quick post here, as I was having trouble finding any information(that worked, or indepth enough to work for what I needed). The type money is now deprecated from postgresql, and a few of our tables contained this data type. This is fine, and worked as we wanted, until there came a time I needed to do a query such as: select * from mytable where (mytable.charge > 0); seems easy enough, but if...
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lessons in backing up….

Posted by Adrian on Jan 23, 2008 in coding, Open Source | 2 comments Sometimes I never learn, and check that backups are working as they should be.  Last night we had a zimbra failure that resulted in the default backup schedule not being run (incremental backup at 01:00), which measn that when we had to have a fresh install today we lost all yesterdays emails, calendar changes and additions, everything. Yesterday I spent all day writing up 3 tactical plans for...
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linux admin course notes

Posted by Adrian on Jul 5, 2007 in coding, Open Source | 0 comments I have just finished a rewarding 4 day course at OpenAdvantage on linux admin, very presented and run by Paul Cooper. I got a lot out of the course, but there was a wide range of attendees, from people with (literally) decades of unix experience to me, a microsoft convert making early steps in the command line environment. The course was based on the linuxIT course , for people working towards...
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learning how to run linux at command line with only a DOS and windows bckground

Posted by Adrian on Apr 7, 2007 in coding, Open Source | 1 comment although the techies love it,probably for good reason, a lotof user interface with linux is at the command line, not the usual GUI interface that we are geneticly engineered to know and understand…. this means that if you really want to use some of the linux features and functions, you have to know how to use the command line. I have some basic unix experience from numerical modelling...
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The MVC fun continues…

Posted by rich on Mar 21, 2007 in coding | 2 comments Well.. we finally decided that we should give the MVC framework process a chance, to see if we could truly benifit from it. I’m going to be using a simple ish MVC framework and Smarty for the templating system, this seems to be working both logically and easy for us, or fairly easy anyway. The way im going to do this is have a main page which will control the configuration etc, and then a...
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