For those who didn't know, I started working for a company called Nomanini at the beginning of last year. Nomanini manufactures an airtime point of sale terminal for use in the informal sector (taxis, spaza shops, etc).

I'm excited to say that my boss will be speaking at ScaleConf 2013, which kicks off tomorrow, and myself and my colleagues are going to be there too. See you there!

Many of you know that I am the project leader of an open source worship presentation program called OpenLP. Yesterday evening, as I was doing something on OpenLP's project page on SourceForge.net (a popular repository for open source projects), I glanced at the reviews page and the one below caught my eye.

The newly-approved Ubuntu Mexico LoCo has decided to celebrate their status as an official LoCo by hosting an online gaming event. They will be hosting matches for AssaultCube, Urban Terror and Battle for Wesnoth on the 9th of Feb from 17:00 SAST (9:00 CST) to midnight (16:00 CST) on the 10th of Feb. They have 2 LoCo's signed up so far, so why don't you get together and add yours!

Congratulations to all my fellow members of Ubuntu-ZA, thanks to all our hard work we have been approved for another 2 years. This means that Ubuntu-ZA is still an official LoCo.

At work we use PyCharm for all our Python development. It's a good IDE with great code completion, and decent support for most Python libraries, good unit testing support and good Google App Engine integration. We also use PyLint for checking our code and trying to keep our coding standards up.

I should have blogged a while ago about this, but didn't get around to it till now...

I decided a few months ago that I wanted to have an Ubuntu hour in Cape Town, as most of them happen out in Stellenbosch, and I don't really get the time to drive out there. In true open source style, if you want something done you need to do it yourself (not in a negative sense though, it's more like a self-help style thing), so I started organising it.

This afternoon I came across a blog post entitled The True Cost of Open Source, in which the blogger tries to dissuade churches from using open source solutions, and thereby promote their own proprietary CMS.

I commented on their blog post, but I don't know if they'll post it, because I show them up for what they really seem to be doing. So with this in mind, I've posted my full, unedited reply below:

Choqok seems to be about the only native microblogging client for KDE. It's actually a rather nice app, but I've found it to be rather buggy when it comes to Twitter authentication. For the last few months it has moaned about not being able to authenticate, after which it crashes. Starting the app again does the same thing, which means it crashes constantly, and you're left without a Twitter client.

One of the complaints I've heard fairly often from users of OpenLP is that our forums lack somewhat in usability and features. With this in mind, as part of the OpenLP 2.0 release, I wanted to see if I can move the forums over to some alternative forum software. However, I have a few important prerequisites:

Unfortunately I was quite pressed for time when I wrote my blog entry the other day, so I wasn't able to say everything I wanted to. I have a bit more time today, so I thought I'd write up a few things I didn't get to say then.

Firstly, after using Quassel for a little, I wanted to make the interface a little less crowded. So what I did was to remove some GUI elements like the status bar, and reduce the font size. Here's what Quassel looks like now: