Nirvana.

In my early days of learning about open source Dave at Senokian gave me a lecture on why its important not to tie linux security updates into a paying subscriptions service for any OS, as all it does is does is create problems for everyone else.  18 months on, I think I’ve understood why!

There are some cool new graphical interfaces, a new tracking tool I’ve found, and overall it just works, as I’ve come to expect linux and OSS software to do.

BUT, why was it a good idea to package a beta version of firefox in a LTS release that does not support existing firefox extensions/add ons?

This is a serious annoyance for me as I’ve come to rely on these extensions, that today don’t now work(in order of importance)

• Update Scanner (arhhh!  its fantastic, and now dosnt work)
• google toolbar (and google itself dosnt support the new firefox release!)
• Zimbra DnD drag and drop
• POPup alt Attribute
• SEO quake
• FEBE firefox backup

I’ve tried installing firefox 2 and got nowhere.  So now I have to wait, and hope and pray that a quick upgrade is available for these (and I guess many other) plugins.

 A quick note to the Ubuntu Commuity.

You are amazing, and thank you for your software. But, business people like stability, upgrading to a new version means that “stuff” should stay the same or get better.  Please dont take away what you’ve previously given us: such behaviour is what our government does to us, and it is not very popular.

Firstly, I recieved a quotation by email for some building work that was written in MS Word. I opened it in Open Office, read it, printed it, and it all looked the same. It was competitive, (but not silly) and I entered into many hours of late stage discussion and negotiation with the sender over a potential deal. After about 4 hours of my time, it emerged that the quotation I had on screen and in hard copy was different to the intended version, and crucially missed a sub total of £7,500 that completely destroyed the bid. (There was no grand total BTW - I can do maths!).

Dropping the font size to 2 point on each of the DOC pages emailed to me I “found” the missing text, hidden under the footer graphic. I’ve never seen this in Word, and it was a lesson that all formatting dosnt display as intended on Open Office. A waste of my time and that of the bidder.

Similarly, I’ve been signing off a major deal this week as part of my duties as a non executive director of Business Link, and the signature page of an emailed document I had to sign printed differently on open office to that of the “original” document. With so many lawyers around for all sides, someone noticed and at the (very) last minute we had to get the document resigned by fax to enable completion.

Now I dont feel agrieved by these 2 episodes, but it has made me more wary. For casual use, OpenOffice writer is excellent, and I’m very grateful to the community to have use of it. However, in business we cannt ignore the current status of the MS Word .DOC document format as the “definative” document format at the moment. If you try to work with other businesses by email using open source software, you do have to be careful that you are getting what was intended.

Solutions:

1. PDF. easy, obvious.
2. Or we could just have ONE combined ISO standard for documents (isn’t that ODF???) and not 2 “standards”.

We dont want (or need) OOXML as a second “standard” in business.

Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone if there was only 1, open (source), standard file format?

All I wanted from this purchase was an ubuntu laptop with a web browser that worked out the box and was reliable.  Well I got it, and it just works.

Nuff said?

We will then be working on the phone system, and finally move all the client machines to Ubuntu Hardy LTS when its out.

We are still very committed to the migration project, but as we are 100% dependant on our CRM for runing the business, it has to be perfect to migrate, hence the huge amounts of testing that Rich has been doing.

I’ve been running only on OSS for 6 months now, and love it - no more blue screen of death, and  Zimbra email is excellent (but we need HTML signatures, a global disclaimer feature and read receipts!)

Slow progress, but progress there is, all behind the scenes.

When it arrives, I’ll right a quick review.  Basically all I want is a laptop for the kitchen that allows web surfing, dosnt cause any hassle, and works out of the box.

This is my first open source purchase from Dell, so lets put them to the test.

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(*) FROM generate_series(1, (higherdate::date - lowerdate::date)) i WHERE date_part(’dow’, higherdate::date + i) NOT IN (0,6);

the higherdate and lowerdate are exactly what they sound like, the higherdate has to be after the lowerdate.

That will work out how many days between each of those dates, and return a result that doesnt include sat/suns basically giving you working days!

It doesnt take into account holidays, but I didnt need it to..

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 myfieldname is of type money, you will get nice errors such as:

ERROR: operator does not exist: money > integer
HINT: No operator matches the given name and argument type(s). You may need to add explicit type casts.

Doing what the Hint suggests isnt easy, and theres pretty much no good way to cast money to anything.

A few examples on the net dont work, depending on version, or can mess up the data.

After a bit of searching and messing, ive found a solution that does whats needed:

First you need to do:

set lc_monetary=’C';

to basically control the currency, ours was set to £ but doing that sets it back to $ and makes things easier to work with.

Next you need to do:

alter table yourtable alter column yourfield type numeric(16,2) using translate(textin(cash_out(yourfield)), ‘$,’, ”)::numeric;

Once thats done, you’re set and it seems to work flawlessley (in version: 8.1.9 anyway).

May be a good idea to make a copy of the table before, just incase:

create table backup_table_yourtable AS select * from yourtable;

then if you have any issues you can revert back!

Any suggestions please?

Yesterday I spent all day writing up 3 tactical plans for the business, and lost them all becuase of this.  Fortunately I got some of the work back from a syncd copy on a PDA, but not everything.  This episode also dented our team’s confidence in Zimbra as its the second time it has happened.

We have now improved the backup regime to daily full backups and hourly incremental ones.  We did this by changing the zimbra backup cron job using WEBMIN on port 10000 on our ubuntu server using the nice GUI webpage, and it seems to work.

A lesson for other new zimbra users, the default backups just ain’t enough, so update your instalation NOW to get more backups!

Lesson learnt the hard way (again).