I know its terrible, I have not bloged in months which is really bad of me. Anyway I promise to make a real effort to blog more!

I have to get a quite a few sites migrated over to the new server and up and running so this is just the first of 18 that I need to do asap.

Its that time of the week again so your ears should be only in once place!

Listening to Bareafflication with Mike and Angie...12-2pm only on Sinradio

www.sinradio.co.uk

YES I am back!

After over a month of being down my website has returned :D

I took my blog down because I was getting too much traffic and it looked terrible so I would rather have no one seeing it than lots seeing something back. As usual life took over and instead of taking a few days it took a month to get the damn thing back on-line but alas here it is!

I will be adding much more to the site as time goes on, at the moment its just the blog on the front page thats back but I am working on much more.

I will be posting soon to update you all on progress with ShaftesburyTown, GoingOpen and Trisidian.

I got an email today that certainly made me raise an eyebrow. The following email is, im sure, from someone who has mistaken us for the town council website which recived large amounts of funding and yet consistantly have failed to deliver the lead in technology. openess and involvement. But just to show you the kind of feedback I get here is the email :)

"Pathetic! Who pays for this? Out of date and of no interest to locals, never mind tourists. There are lots of things happening all around as well as in Shaftesbury, but not one of you can be bothered to update and inform the people who live around and spend our money in Shaftesbury. Be ashamed and hang your heads; if your fat, overfed jowles allow you to.
" 

 and my reply....

I have literally just spent all morning working on adding two items to a menu. The site I am working on consists of some 40 odd code files in asp (yes I know that alone is enough to justify this being bad code) and it generates an elibrary system.

Now any sane person, would write this site in such a way that the menu was included from a menu template or generated from the database. Not so in this case, the person who messed up this site and I have to now clean up for decided to manually write the menu in all of the 40 odd files, and in such an inconsistent way that its simply impossible to do a find a replace. The result is I have had to spend hours cleaning the code and going through and making it into an including menu. Now that in its self is frankly a dumb ass thing to do if you did not know about includes (which are some of the most basic concepts in asp or php) but the files contained includes for other functions, so to understand the code and how it was put together and then still willingly, knowing and intentionally create so much pointless work for who ever had to maintain the site begs belief.

Cast 44 is out and I have just listened to it (http://ubuntuos.com/). I have to say that I am compelled to blog about the cast this week just because of Sal’s comment about Microsoft turning up to blackhat hacking conventions. Very funny line about “oh look at us we are Microsoft hack us…..bunch of jerkoffs” got to love Sal’s new york way of insulting people 

Leads me on nicely to the fact that I was discussing with Josh about my return to doing the cast my self and all being well, once I have spoken to Sal, I should be back on the cast host team from now on. I’ll let people know when I next do a show but there is an interview with me coming up on the next cast regarding goingopen.org so look out for that too!

As always I recommend people to go and listen to the cast, it really is worth it and a great show this month.

Ok well I want to make a concerted effort to blog more, and as such will be making my blog look much nicer later this week as well as adding a gallery of pics.

So on to today… Firstly I would like to say how impressed I am with Samsung. The other day I got (in sale!) a rather nice pro815. The only drawback with what seems to be a really great camera is that it was missing its lens adapter, which only really has two uses as far as I can tell and that is to mount the flare guard or the lens cap.  So in the interest of completeness I called their spare parts devision and it was quick easy and painless, they knew exactly what I needed, they spoke good clean English (which is nice not to have to deal with the normal support line problems) although that should not be a surprise these days it is and nice to see that they kept their call centre UK based. Took all of a couple of minutes to order my part so as long as it gets here then great customer service to Samsung.

Angela is home (YAY!) just as the rain sets back into the UK. Damn summer gone already!

Oh well at least she is home and we had a great weekend together :)!

This week I intend to get the Trisidian site up, finish the Tricount setup and get GOI live for editors to start adding content.

Now if only we can get some sun for all this hard work

While I continually to miss Angela at least as of this morning I now know WHERE she is in France! Some town called L’hermenaul, apparently must be close to a beach since tring to get as red as possible lying in the sun seems to be the main aim of her and Stephs trip.

Looking at the map I realise she is directly south of where I am, almost in a strait line.

Miss you lots baby, hope your having a great time!

xxxxxxxxx

I posted a point of discussion the Ubuntu forums regarding which, out of KDE and Gnome would be the better for business use. The aim was to see if anyone could come up with a good reason for Gnome being the default desktop system in the documentation on the Going open isn. website. The research shows that KDE is much better in the business world and only gets looked over by big companies like red hat because of licence issues (KDE is based on Qt which charges for COMMERCIAL software, thus forcing all KDE applications to remain free and open which in my view is a great thing but you can understand why the likes of Red Hat don’t like it!). While the poll attached to my thread showed Gnome was a clear winner I am forced to disregard this because it is clear people were just voting based on their personal choice and nothing to do with business environment merits. There did not seem to be a single sustainable argument that Gnome was better so for the reasons listed before by me GOI will be basing all its how to guides on Kubuntu until someone comes up with a reason to do otherwise.

Also the nice people at CodeWeavers have offered a 10% discount on their software to our members which is fantastic. I know a lot of people that want to use Linux but also want something like adobe suite or photoshop and that one application prevents them making the move. A discounted copy of crossover office makes migration much cheaper than buying Vista so for those that really can’t make a clean break to Linux its a good ally to have for our project.

OK, now I have made a sensible post I can go back to using the internet for writing out thoughts that not many people will be interested in but hey, its my blog so I’ll do it anyway!

I really really really miss Angie, for those that don’t know Angela is my girl friend and currently is somewhere in France. I know I really should have some idea where she is, and its not from lack of trying, but she simply refuses to find out for me or remember the detail her self. Ah well as long as she is having fun!

All being well I get to see her on Saturday when she comes home, although not to ‘home’ but to Salisbury because its her mum’s birthday so we should be back in Southampton by Sunday.

In case Angela is reading this, I love you lots baby and can’t wait to see you xxxxxxxxx

Well thought it was about time I made a post on my new blog, my third attempt at doing one. So anyway, I wanted to talk about GoingOpen.org, the new project I am starting. Its an idea I have been thinking about for well over a year and seriously researching now and again for over the last 6 months and its nearing launch. So what is goingopen.org all about?