The Mercian Labels Group Blog – Security Labels International, Mercian Labels and AC Labels

Mercian Labels located in Cannock, Staffordshire are now recruiting for a Graphic Designer (published 23 August 2010).

The role of Graphic Designer is to assess and prep electronic design files for digital pre-press work and the production of printing plates, ensuring maximum continuity, the highest quality and efficiency of operation.

100% desk based.

Detailed responsibilities

* To reconcile all electronic design files with customers expectations, and press production
* To be responsible for accurate and timely issue and chasing of artwork approvals to our
customers
* To be responsible for accurate and timely issue of works orders to our print team
* To submit timely design file to plate makers every day
* To solve problems by liasing with customers and suppliers as required
* To resolve all internal and external design queries.
* To support the Sales Team with technical queries when required
* Other tasks to support the business plan as and when required

For full details, please view the full job description

To apply please email (preferred) or post your CV to the Sales Team Leader – Elaine Jefferson at elaine.jefferson@mercianlabels.com as soon as possible. Informal discussions by phone are welcome on 01543 431 079.

first chilli crop of 2010

The fist chill cropping of 2010 was on Saturday, now all safely picked away in jars ready for the winter curries. Lots to come from the initial plants!

I recently purchases a new Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop from Amazon.co.uk

This came with Microsoft Windows Vista pre-loaded, but being the Open Source advocates we are here at Mercian Labels, I bought this laptop with the mind to install Ubuntu 10.04 right away.

Whilst installing Ubuntu 10.04 was easy, a few issues arose with getting the wireless working with the chipset, but thats another story; but after installing Ubuntu, I decided to try my luck at getting a refund from Dell for Windows.

I had read previous articles outlining a few steps in order to try and get a refund on Windows, so this is what I did.

Even though I purchases this through one of Amazon’s third party sellers, I thought it was best to contact them first.

I went through the process of contacting customer services (Amazon > Help, Click How do I contact customer service?, Login, Click E-Mail and then Put in order number, then select Issue: Return and Refunds, and then I sent the following email:

SENT On: 28/07/2010 10:30am

To Whom this may concern.

I recently purchased a Dell laptop from yourselves, order number ############.

I do not agree to the terms of the Dell Software Licensing Agreement or the Microsoft Windows End User License Agreement.

I confirm that I have not used any of the software on the laptop, nor booted the laptop up into Windows, and have deleted all preloaded or embedded software from my Dell Laptop.

How will you refund the cost of the Microsoft Windows Vista software? I note that Windows Vista Home Premium retails at £151.95, which means a total refund of £151.95 is due.

Kind Regards
Rich

Within 19 minutes of sending the email, I got a response from Amazon, which was prompt, stating:

Response: 10:49 28/07/2010
Dear Customer

Thank you for contacting Amazon.co.uk.

After looking into your enquiry, I can see that you have placed this order ############## with one of our registered third party seller “######”.

I am sorry to learn that you are not happy with the license agreement. In a case like this, we do ask that you first contact the seller to explain the situation and to make appropriate arrangements.

To contact your seller just click the Your Account link on the top right of Amazon.co.uk, and click the Your Orders button. Next select the order from the options Orders Listed by Date.

Then locate the relevant order number on the left of the screen. You will also see an image of the item(s) in your order so as to identify it correctly.

Once located, look for the yellow button to the right of your screen reading Contact Seller.

For more information on communicating with Marketplace sellers, you can visit this link:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=3149541

I hope that this issue will be resolved to your satisfaction

Thank you for your understanding and for shopping at Amazon.co.uk Marketplace.

I have sent the exact same email I originally sent to Amazon, to the third party seller, and will update this post as and when I receive any response.

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 it to work well, and I wish them all the best in the code development .  You can see a demo here.

getting ready for the off!

Cpt Ed Pawsey of the 2nd Battalion, the Yorkshire Regiment recently contacted us in their bid to raise money for Help for Heroes , the charity that helps to support wounded UK service men and women.  Ed and his colleagues are doing the Help for Heroes European Rally and have had some good local publicity.  This is what they say on their website

Team Green Howard has secured a place on the Help for Heroes European Rally 2010.  This rally as you may have read consists of a monster 1650 mile drive starting on Salisbury Plain crossing Normandy and ending at Hitler’s ‘Eagles Nest’ in Berchtesgaden, Austria whilst traversing 6 countries.  This rally follows the route of the well known TV series ‘Band of Brothers’ and is part road/off road competition whilst visiting specific historical locations.  All in order to raise funds for the Help for Heroes charity.

The Team consists of Ed Pawsey, Will Pawsey and James Kelly.  Both Ed and James are Captains in the Army.  Ed’s in the 2nd Battalion the Yorkshire Regiment (the Green Howards).  James is a Captain in the Royal Engineers and is a Bomb Disposal Officer.  Will is a student studying Criminology at Nottingham University and is set to join the Poice Force.  All three of us have close links to friends who have been injured or killed in Afghanistan and make this trip and raise funds in memory of them. Help for Heroes is at the front of our mind for obvious reasons and without this charity and your generous donations our many injured service men and women would not have the lengthy process of rehabilitation your fundraising has begun to provide.  Without this rehabilitation it would be near impossible to give these Heroes the ability to rebuild their lives and face a positive future.

Please give what you can as every little helps.  ALL money raised goes to the charity and not funding the event or team.  It may take 5 minutes to register but 5 minutes now is a future better for all.

Ed is asking for any donations on his Just Giving website, so please contribute anything you can to this very worth cause.

Chilli plant update

As I’ve been blogging here and here, I’ve been on a bit of a chilli growing mission this year after last years startup effort.  Here is the current state of play, and I think I’ll get about 150-200 chillis out of this lot which will make some excellent christmas presents once picked or dried, plus some curries for my family.  There is mix of hot and mild varieties, and I’m happy to share if anyone wants some!

Mercian Labels are passionate users of Ubuntu Linux throughout our business, and since our migration to open source software we’ve found it to be much more stable and reliable that Windows, which we now only use on machines where there is isnt really a choice eg graphic design, sage accounts etc.

We hope to attend the Ubuntu in Business Event on 13 July in London to meet up with other Ubuntu Business users, and would like to hear from anyone else who is going too!  Register here – see you there.  We may speak at the event if given a chance, so would welcome any comments on what you’d like to hear about from a SME who has migrated its business to open source linux software.

Having had some recent experience on a family members windows PC recently, and a iMac as well, I know why I have a strong preference for working on an Ubuntu linux PC.  The new distro 10.04 is great, very nice GUI, but there is one real problem with the CSS rendering in Firefox 3.6.3 it ships with in that it dosnt show the same CSS as firefox 2.8.  This is withdrawn my access to our intranet externally for me until we fix it.  Other than that, its excellent, and worked right “out of the box”.  Excellent work again from the community, thank you!

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:

1. 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)
2. change the function tag to   F_CONFERENCE
3. save

to make a conference call,

1. call the first call, speak and put on hold by pressing the L1 line 1 button
2. dial the second number and speak to them
3. press L4 and all 3 callers are connected

I really enjoyed my day at OGGCamp in Liverpool on Saturday.  The variety of freedom of thought from the attendees was quite refreshing.  From ANPR camera monitoring and embedded linux in in car entertainment systems through to the role of women in open source culture and home automation it was a great event.

Thanks to all who organised the event, including Josh who came to work for us last summer on an open source work experience project.  Josh has got a place to read Mathematics at Oxford University I found out too – well done Josh!

I’m up in Liverpool for the open source software OGGCAMP this weekend and will be there on Saturday around lunchtime.  If anyone wants to catch up with me in particular then please email me your contact details. I’d particularly like to share experiences with any other SME users of  FLOSS .  See you there!

chilli plant update - early incubation in the airing cupboard has got these off to a flying start

I’ve picked up on the open source community interest in Chilli plant growing from Alan at the Open Sourcer, and previously blogged on last years Chilli crop, and the new batch for 2010.  Growing progress is good – this is the state of this years crop.  Good curries coming next winter!

dell mini 9 running ubuntu netbook remix

I’ve had problems recently connecting my Dell mini 9 using ubuntu netbook remix to a t-mobile  3G modem over bluetooth as previously blogged, which I think is related to this ubuntu bluetooth bug.  I had some time yesterday and set about finding a fix to this problem to enable me to get web access on the netbook anywhere I have my phone and a 3G cable.

The solution was to connect the phone to the netbook using a normal USB cable and select “PC suite transfer” on the nokia e90.  Then setup a new “mobile broadband” connection under system>network connections>mobile broadband, in my case t-mobile UK.  Then unplug and replug in the usb cable and the new t-mobile connection appears in the network connections icon in the top right of the page.  Click and it just connects.

Ok, we give in. You can now follow our posts on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MercianLabels .

I’ve been to lugradio live a couple of times, and am hoping that the new Oggcamp event will be the replacement FOSS social and networking event.  I’ve got relatives in Liverpool, so have it in my diary to visit Oggcamp 2010 this year.  Hopefully see you there!  If you want to catch up with me and discuss our experiences of open source soft3ware in a UK SME environment then please post a comment and we can try and meet.

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.

I used a power meter to measure the electric draw of the PC using and not using miserware

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 management.  I run a new (late 2009) pc with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 (4x 2.33) CPU with a 450w PowerCool 80+, and have given it a go.  However, I didnt rely on the software’s own claimed power savings, I put an electric meter between the PC’s plug and the socket, and directly measured the power usage over 3 weeks, both with and without the software installed, set at my current domestic electricity rate pkwh.

Here is my data:

What I did was to run the PC without the software installed for 4 days from 19-23 Jan, installed miserware from 23 Jan to 8 Feb, then ran the PC again from 8 Feb until today.  Congratulations to the miserware support though, when I had issues installing they were right on the ball, and FOC.

The results are pretty unimpressive.  Despite a claimed 15% power saving claimed by the software (sudo grep Estimated\ energy /var/log/* )  it actually made very little difference at all.  In fact, if you average out the estimated annual usage for the 2 periods without running miserware ((52.22+54.07)/2) = 53.15 and compare that to the annual cost running miserware of £51.77, you see a 2.7% power saving thats worth about £2.30 a year.  OK, its a saving, but its not worth a lot to me.

The scary observation is that if you leave a PC on 24/7, its going to cost you over fifty quid a year at current online dual fuel electricity tariff rates!

A couple of months ago I started getting into running.  I’ve always found running really boring, even at the gym watching TV, listening to music whilst pounding the pavement, or whatever.  However, I’ve now discovered the secret – podcasts.

Download any podcast on a specialised subject that you enjoy, but dont get time to listen to normally, load it onto your MP3 player, and get out there and enjoy the fresh air whilst losing weight, getting fit and all that good stuff.

To get you started, here are some good podcasts that I regularly download and listen too whilst running:

1. Shot of Jaq -twice weekly 10 minute podcasts on technology from the legendary Jono Bacon + “Aq”
2. Prime Ministers Questions – the UK’ weekly political punchup
3. Small Biz Pod – small business podcast with some very good interviews
4. FLOSS – weekly open source podcast
5. The Naked Scientists – science podcast from some boffins

I’d love to find some more good ones on similar themes – please comment on this post if you can suggest any!

I have been using a cowon iaudio iplayer for playing MP3s for some time now, as its the only small mp3 player I could find that mounted natively in linux without special software that needed to be run under WINE or similar.

Today I had a problem whereby after a power cut where the unit was charging and the unmount had not been done “properly”, it refused to mount in any other way but “read only”, and no amount of CHMOD 777 ing would solve it (see this post also).  In the end I found the solution was simple but brutal.

1. copy the SYSTEM directory to a different device over USB
2. reformat using ubuntu linux system>adminitration>disk utility in FAT32
3. copy the directory back and any files you want to listen to
4. it then works.

Ok, you have to recopy all the files back again, and at 15GB capacity thats a few hours of USB transfer, but its the only way I could find.

USB mounting under linux just isnt as forgiving under linux as windows, as I’ve previously blogged abut, and thats a shame.

opusvl is our new open source support provider

Since Senokian Solutions Ltd ceased trading earlier this year we have been in negotiations for a new supplier of open source software support for our systems.  Today we can signed up with Opus VL in Rugby, who we have met and look very capable of meeting our needs.  We look forward to working with the people there.

It wasnt easy finding quality suppliers of open source support in the UK, in fact there appear to be about a handful or less.  Hopefully with the rise and rise of linux, this will change.

the BBC covers the upcoming Karmic Koala release

With the recent release of Windows 7 getting widespread publicity as a half decent replacement for Vista, widely acknowledged to be a failure, its great to see the BBC covering the new Ubuntu release on their homepage yesterday.  You can read all about it here.  I will be using it, and its free, as in speech as well as beer. Give it a go – just download the CD ISO image and try it from your CD drive without it evening touching your hard drive!

Ginger6.com sell PCs with no operating systesm that work with Ubuntu

My home PC was a 9 year old Dell heavyweight box (1ghtz pentium with 512mb ram running ubuntu 9.04) given to me years ago, and it finally gave up its lust for life recently and started tripping my home electrics.

Looking for a new supplier of a good value linux desktop I initially ordered from Efficient PC, but after some days of no response I cancelled the order by email and bought a custom made box from a local supplier to us, Ginger6 in Wolverhampton.  Of course Dell have now stopped selling ubuntu desktops, and for good value linux preinstalled hardwere there are few options in the uk now.  Looking at the Efficient PC site today they have ceased trading.  Ginger6 duly constructed the machine (entry level intel quad core, 4gb sdramm) in 2 days and shipped it over. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 first time with no hassles (”it just works”) and was up and running in under 30 mins after waiting for the hard drive to format.

I’m really pleased with it, ubuntu runs all 4 processors with no config, and its so much quicker than my old machine, especially when running multiple apps / firefox tabs at the same time.  Thank you again to the community who make such fantastic software available to download for free, and I’m happy to recommend Ginger6 as a good value supplier of PC hardware that works with ubuntu linux straight out of the box.  Now all I have to do is persude them to sell ubuntu preinstalled!

A technical post here… this weekend we had a problem where one of the partitions on our zimbra email server reached 100% capacity, and resulted in us doing a hard restart.  As a consequence of this on restart we could not get zimbra MTA to start, the problem being that postfix thought it was already running.  The solution for anyone who finds this is  as follows, pasted to gether from some notes from “Dave”, who fixed it. “The problem was that whenever postfix is started, it runs postalias. Postalias takes files like /etc/aliases and translates them into machine-readable files.  There was an aliases.db file hanging round in /etc, owned by root. When zimbra tried to start up wuth the zimbra id, it couldn’t touch the stale file.  Unfortunately, this hung it rather than erroring out cleanly. I cleaned up the stale files, and started zimbra using root and /etc/init.d/zimbra start. That reset the necesary permissions and recreated the files.”.  I hope this helps if you are a Zimbra user that finds that same problem.

2009 chilli crop

One of the UK’s leading bloggers on open source software, Alan Lord (aka the Open Sourcerer) got me thinking some time ago about growing chilli plants.  Alan has just posted pictures of his 2009 chilli crop, and so I think its only fair that I post mine.  Not quite as impressive, but then again most of my conservatory was taken over with monster tomato plants this summer!  Next year I shall try harder – it was good fun and easy to grow chillis.  This is what they look like all preserved.

preserved chillis for winter curries

If you are intereted in preserving chillis, I’ve followed this recipie (with some additional water).

When we first started to explore the possibility of moving to open source in 2007, I looked into a number of possible open source support companies and settled on working with Senokian Solutions Ltd, who have been very good for us.  Unfortunately Senokian Solutions Ltd have now ceased trading, and their entrepreneurial MD Jake Stride has moved onto other areas of open source software development with their Tactile CRM product (which I use – its good).  A new company, Senokian Internet Ltd look over our support contract but this business has recently been sold on to a highly capable web hosting company who have agreed to support us as well as they can, but do not specialise in the type of support that we will need long term.

Therefore I may be back in the market for a new supplier of open source software support.  Ideally someone UK based (Midlands would be perfect but not necessary) who knows Ubuntu, Zimbra, Postgresql and Trixbox.  I have to say that I dont know of such a company that offers this – can anyone recommend one please?  Lots of individuals I know have specific skills I can call on, but in the long term a company that aspires to offer open source support as a main part of its business would be ideal.

If you are, or know of such a business, please contact me by email or post a comment – Thank you.

This script from Dan at Zomgee is excellent, and allows you to compile your own XPI firefox addon in under 2 minutes (using nothing more than a basic text editor and your mailserver domain name) that makes all mailto: links open up in Zimbra, not evolution of similar.  Its easy and works for me using Zimbra client on an ubuntu 9.04 linux machine with Firefox 3.0.12.  Nice work Dan.

The concept of taking older and redundant windows PCs, triageing them, clean installing linux and passing the machines onto good homes is an excellent one, and cuts out an awful lot of legal problems.  Its being done in the USA and I wonder when it will happen in the uk?

If anyone knows if and when this is going to happen, please let me know and we have a bunch of old machnes we can contribute from our factory in Cannock. Come to think of it, if anyone local to Cannock wants a PC with Linux installed, let me know your circumstances and reasons and I’ll see what we can do.

At Mercian Labels we have benefited hugely from open source software, but unfortunately it is rare that we actually get a chance to help out anyone from the community back.  However, this week it has been a pleasure to host Josh Holland, who has been here hacking us with a new VPN connection on our ubuntu server and the technical stuff needed to integrate Zimbra email into our own CRM. Josh found us online whilst looking for an open source sys admin role for a weeks work experience.

This is Josh’s write up of his experiences this week.

“I am a 16 year old 6th Former taking A levels in Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry, and have been doing work experience on the Mercian Labels computer system for the past week.

I have set up a VPN to allow access to the network when offsite, and written (most of) an extension to the bespoke CMS that extracts all the emails to and from a certain address from the Zimbra groupware server and displays them. I have learnt the syntax of iptables, got to know my way around Zimbra and found out a lot about networking.

Would I have been able to do this without open source and the community around it? I doubt it, because the freedom to download, use and redistribute it allows people like me to try things out without having to spend a fortune on something. For example, I can run my own server on £80 per year with no setup costs because all the software is free. If I didn’t have a server, I would not have got the skills I used this week and would use in a real job, becuase Windows Server (say) costs a fortune and keeps people like me from being able to teach themselves.

Also, the community is a fantastic asset. When I hit a snag in setting up of OpenVPN, I was able to turn to the openvpn-users mailing list and get it working like a charm. Almost every major open source project has support mailing lists populated by volunteers, ready to help anyone who has a problem.

Getting all this for free is fantastic, and something that is very hard to find anywhere else. Open source systems have opened the world of IT for me; they have allowed me to teach myself the skills to work in a whole new sector of employment.”

Thanks to Josh for his hard work this week.  We have really benefited from his expertise, and hope that he does well in whatever career path he takes.  It has been a pleasure Josh!

The blogosphere has been awash today with the news that Google are launching their own operating system.  Of course its easy to say I told you so, but I can confess to putting Chris DeBona, Google’s Open Source Manager on the spot at Lugradio live 2007 Q&As as to when Google would release its own Linux Distro, as strategically it didnt seem sensible for them not to do so.  I didnt believe his reply then that they had no plans to! Anyway, its based on the Linux Kernel, open source, and hopefully using Debian in some way – the Universe is excellent.

I really like my Dell netbook running ubuntu netbook remix, and it will take a lot to get me to move to Chrome OS.  I dont use Google’s Chrome browser as I am suspicious of the data privacy, and qute frankly unless Chrome OS is much, much, better than Ubuntu, then my reply is simply no thank you.  Google is a fantastic business and dare I say it, a free service to the planet’s online community, but if its working towards running my OS, browser, search experience, email and office files, then thats a monopoly I would rather do without.

We are recruiting a new member to our team and they have asked for a blackberry as their email device of choice, something we have never used before in house.  Having looked into this, it seems like a real can of worms.

What I would expect is that there is an easy way of connecting a zimbra server to a blackberry device using a protocol similar to IMAP or the nokia exchange server that I use on my E90 (works with Zimbra fine), but no, you have to have a separate windows box running a piece of blackberry middleware software that only connects to MSSQL type software, to which a special zimbra add on connects to .

What a faff, and I’m not doing this.  Blackberry have just lost a sale becasue the dont support Zimbra.  If you agree, consider signing this petition to ask RIM to natively support Zimbra.

In the meantime, I’m going to get a smartphone that does support zimbra like the HTC or nokia E90 we current use.