old-invention-blog

Plugging Skype and Pidgin together

After thinking about de-nuctifying the world I've started to investigate creating a Pidgin (formerly Gaim) plugin to control Skype. This means you're still using a closed network, but from an open program, which makes migrating easier (and allows people to try multiple networks from the same

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De-nuct-ifying the world

I've had a strange experience over the past year, and it's getting more common. As a developer, I used to be the one recommending software/tech things to my friends. Now all my non-technical friends have started recommending things to me that they have discovered on

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Caolan McNamara vs the Sun Global Special Store

Eike Rathke points out the new Sun Weblog Publisher you can buy for $9.95 for blogging from within OpenOffice.org Writer (or StarOffice, not that I know anyone who has that :-)). Sounds remarkably familiar. I wonder if Caolan has thought of trying to sell oooblogger...

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Finding projects using Pootle with Google code search

Well seeing as Google has release a Code Search on open source code, I thought I would put it to good use: searching for pootle in filenames ending with .po helps you to quickly find some projects that are using Pootle to edit their PO files, and you can even

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Pootle and Translate Toolkit Development 2006-06-13

There's been lots of discussion recently about Pootle on the debian lists, the direction it should take, whether to use a database to store translations, etc... It may be a nice idea to add a database as one of the backend options but keeping with handling the complexity

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Stardust Nasty Macro Application for OpenOffice.org

Slashdot reported Kaspersky labs discovering the Stardust "nasty macro application" for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org This is not really a virus, it is a nasty macro application. If you are foolish enough to agree to run it without checking what it does, you will suffer the consequences... Not many

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Data Entry in OpenOffice.org Calc

Pierre-André Galmes has a great tip on typing data in OpenOffice.org calc. Basically select an area and use tab to switch between cells. The only problem - I can't see how to get it to work nicely with the AutoComplete that happens when you start typing the

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Forwarding a wireless network connection from Windows

Trying to proxy network traffic through my wireless network on my laptop which is unfortunately running Windows... (oh, the irony)... these are handy hinters: First, use ssh -D to create a SOCKS proxy. That's fairly easy. Use tsocks to make any application use the proxy. (Or, try and

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Partnership?

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Jingle a better VoIP standard than SIP

Gervase Markham has a nice rant on how complicated SIP is. Jingle on Jabber is a much nicer solution if you're not a telecommunications person yourself. It's an open standard that's much simpler than SIP which makes it easier to implement, and there are

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How to do Credit Card Fraud in South Africa

Just phoned Debonairs to order some Pizza. The conversation went something like this: Them: Hi Me: Hi, I'd like to order some pizza Them: Hold the line please... (a 30 second pause) Them: Sorry about that, what's your phone number? Me: 000 0000 (Gives phone number)

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Sourceforge CVS woes and Pootle templatisation

This latest Sourceforge CVS outage has been most unfortunate. We tried to do a bug day aroud the one the week before, which was also unfortunate... Now for almost a week we haven't had any CVS access, and we had planned a release in that time of Pootle

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OpenOffice.org Recovery Dialog in Firefox

Was amused when I tried to open a Word document from webmail. It started in a Firefox window with an embedded OpenOffice.org instance but obviously something went wrong as it showed up a recovery dialog. After a few tries it opened a normal OpenOffice.org window that worked fine.

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Zimbra Mail Discoveries

Zimbra is a fantastic open source mail server. It basically wraps Postfix, and has a beautiful webmail interface including a great calendar system. Yes, AJAX, buzzwords, all apply. I've been wanting to migrate my mail into an IMAP server with a nice webmail frontend for a while. The

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Translate Toolkit 0.8 is out

Something I have been promising for many months has finally happened... We've been going backwards and forwards with so-called "release candidates" for 0.8 that were really betas or new versions, I managed eight! The combined effect of this and doing the last release candidate when

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A cool machine is a happy machine

I have been having repeated problems where my desktop just powers off if its overloaded. Its an Athlon XP 2400 and the CPU temperature was showing 79 degrees C and up (sometimes 129 degrees but I'm sure that was a bad reading...) This usually happened when I was

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A positive dental experience

Danielle and I went to the dentist today for the first time in around 10 years. And it was a positive experience! And I didn't come away feeling guilty! Yay!

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A great leap to freedom

We had a great Bug Day for the Translate Toolkit. I wrote little scripts to track bug and test status on different machines, giving these results: Bug resolution 10:20 NEW 23 ASSIGNED 2 RESOLVED 21 VERIFIED 3 TOTAL 50 10:40 NEW 22 ASSIGNED 2 RESOLVED 22 VERIFIED 3

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Zimbra messaging server

I've set up a copy of Zimbra, an open source messenging server with a beautiful AJAX webmail and calendar client on a local machine. Planned a while ago to move my mail to an IMAP server with a nice webmail frontend so it can be accessed from more

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Jingle builds of Psi and Kopete for Fedora Core 4

Was excited around Christmas to see the Jingle signalling protocol for Voice over IP through Jabber, which was jointly authored by Google and JSF people and is used by Google Talk. Google also released an open source library for doing Jingle called libjingle. This makes it even easier for all

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OpenOffice.org building day

Had an OpenOffice.org building day yesterday. Up to four concurrent builds. My Fedora machine seems to overheat in such a circumstance and turn itself off poof! Then won't turn on again for a few minutes. Frustrating. Anyhow the Windows build of ooo-build-2-0-1 now looks like its working.

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All South African locales in OpenOffice.org

All 11 South African locales have now been integrated in OpenOffice.org and should be usable in version 2.0.2 when it comes out. Thanks Eike for the work and the news :-)

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Where's the beautiful Nivo from Ndiyo?

In about May I read about Ndiyo, a non-profit that's making ultra-thin clients called Nivo (Network-In, Video-Out). They're basically designing an FPGA that can support VNC or RDP and so creates a tiny little box that has a network connection, keyboard and mouse connectors, and a

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Session Saving

SessionSaver is the most useful extension I know of for Firefox, and it's surprising it doesn't have a real home - it seems it gets passed from person to person to fix things up for different releases. Basically it records the set of windows and tabs

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Interesting articles...

Some interesting articles to read when I came back from holiday. It seems Swahili free software stuff is moving forward in lots of fronts. Tomorrow I'm going up to Pretoria to train some of the KiLinux team on using ooo-build for building localized OpenOffice.org. Kamusi Project Internet