Planetary Ponderings

I have recently started a new project, as an off-shoot of the Christians in OSS blog that I was part of, also called Christians in OSS. This one, however, is a mailing list-based community of Christians who want to see Open Source Software promoted in the Church and in Christian organisations.

The ichthux.com site has been down for months due to the fact that the server it was hosted on crashed and died a horrible death. Every now and then we'd get folks in the #ichthux channel asking, "Is the project dead? Cause the web site seems to be..."

So I decided last week to do something about it, and I took over the running of the website. Fortunately, Raphaël had managed to retrieve the data from the DB, and I was able to stick it on my development server at home and build the site up again.

The background

We have a chap at church who is very pro Microsoft. The type where, when confronted with an inescapable fact that shows Microsoft for who they really are, will come up with some excuse to help him deny the truth. While ordinarily this would not make a difference, in our situation, he is on the church council, and is a respected member of the church. He is also able to get hardware from the suppliers due to a business of his which has accounts with said suppliers. This means that when the church needs new computers, they ask him.

openlp.org is nearing it's final release, and we're putting together a distribution pack to market openlp.org to churches. See the openlp.org website and my blog entry on there for more details.

Well, I've just released openlp.org 1.0 beta 6. This is the last beta release, the next release will be RC1. However, last night when I tried to install beta 6, I found one show stopper bug, so it looks like I'll be releasing RC1 sooner than expected.

There are a few other bugs as well, that I found, and so I'm going to see how many I can find and "exterminate" this week, and hopefully release RC1 at the end of this week with the major bugs fixed, and look to RC2 for any additional minor bugs.

This Friday evening I tried to release the latest beta of openlp.org 1.0, but ran into SourceForge.net troubles.

Well, after numerous delays and vague deadline promises, Derek and I have decided to release openlp.org beta 5 tomorrow (that is, Friday). It won't have all the bug fixes and features that we wanted, but it fixes some of the real showstoppers, and hopefully after that I'll get stuck into some more development and add in those things that we have on our agenda.