Planetary Ponderings

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:

A few weeks ago I finally bought myself a Nokia N900. I saw it a while ago in the news, and as soon as I heard that there was going to be a phone with a proper Linux distribution (as opposed to Android which is basically Google's JVM sitting sort-of directly on the kernel), I wanted to get that phone. Not only that, but the phone's features were also pretty darn convincing.

For those who don't know know the phone's specs, here's a brief run-down:

This evening I was thinking about the various security measures put in place at work. Although I use Kubuntu on my desktop, our network is a Windows/ActiveDirectory network.

The main thing I was thinking about was the password policy. ActiveDirectory has been set up to force a password change every 30 days. Of course this means fun for me once a month, since I don't log in via ActiveDirectory, and I only realise that my password has expired because I can no longer log into the bug tracker and I haven't had any new e-mails for two days.

Recently I needed to simulate a serial device (a GPS, to be precise) for a Windows application I'm modifying for a client.

I don't use Windows on a regular basis, but I do have a license for it, and an original Windows XP CD from back in the day, so I loaded Windows in a VirtualBox virtual machine for the odd occasion I might need Windows, like when I build the Windows version of OpenLP 2.0.

I think most folks are probably well aware of the Windows Subversion client, TortoiseSVN. It has been around for a number of years, and is easily one of the most handy version control clients on any platform.

Recently, I have been wanting to be able to do the same thing in Linux. Simply right-click and update. Sure I can use the command line, and sure I could even use Bazaar Explorer, but I don't always have a terminal open, and Bazaar Explorer doesn't work with files as much as workflow, and that doesn't always fly.

In my last post, I talked about using Bazaar on Subversion repositories. Soon afterward, David Rubin asked me in IRC if I can do the standard branching and merging on a Bazaar working copy of a Subversion repository, and how easy it is.

Soon after I started developing version 2.0 of OpenLP, we moved OpenLP over to Launchpad.net and to using Bazaar for our version control. Over the last (nearly) 2 years of using Bazaar, I've really come to enjoy working with it, and the workflow that the Bazaar integration in Launchpad offers.