So Larry and the boys over at Oracle have decided to attack the Free Software community via a patent suit against Google and Android, huh? Anybody in the Free Software world have any patents they think Oracle might be treading on? I'm lookin' at you Red Hat. Seriously though, why don't we as a community go after these guys, show them that even if they win we can make sure they lose. I'm not just talking about patent suits either, if you're in the market for a data base try Postgre SQL or if you need something a little more robust even if it's proprietary DB 2 is from IBM who have always played nice with FLOSS. I'm calling for a boycott of Oracle products until they drop the suit, free the JAVA and start acting like the good open source citizens they promised to be when they bought SUN.

Dear Lazy web, does anyone know if it's possible to use Go To Meeting in Linux? I've tried User Agent switcher and Wine, I tried installing IE7 with Wine, I tried using the Mac version. So far no go. If anyone has found a way to make this work let me know.

Weird question, why when I set the keyboard to Canada (where I live) and the language to Canadian(English) in Ubuntu do I get a French keyboard layout? Let me be very clear that the majority language in Canada is English, which is the first language for slightly more then 2/3rds of Canadians. I mean I appreciate that the Ubuntu guys have put in a bunch of work to set up a keyboard layout for my French Canadian country men, but Canada is a bilingual country with a large French speaking minority and an English speaking majority. It would be a lot more sensible to make the default keyboard layout for Canada English and add a Canada(French) layout to support the French speaking minority. At the very least when you're going through the install and pick Canada for your keyboard layout it would be nice if it informed people that the Canada keyboard layout is in fact French and if you choose it you won't be able to find the question mark. Anyone know why they do it the way they do? Well enough ranting for now. 2 interviews tomorrow so off to bed.

Does anyone else wonder what happened the the frenetic energy that existed in the free software world even 5 years ago? One only needs to look at distrowatch to see the difference, back in 2005 on any given day there would have been news of one or more new flavors of Linux being released, these days though it's all point releases and version updates, I can't remember the last time I heard about a truly innovative new distro or a world shaking new open source app. What happened to that flurry of creativity and how do we get it back? I'd love to hear your thoughts?

Been to long since I posted here, and a lot has happened. On the personal front, I'm getting married to the most wonderful person in the world. However it's on the professional front that the most exciting stuff has been happening, I've started a new career as a salesforce.com developer and consultant. While this transition has force me to compromise some of my open source principles I am also still committed to open source and free software. Lets start with the compromises. first off Salesforce mail merge documents require IE, so IE 7 in wine was a must, this is also good for browser testing, and it works beautifully. That said I hate it and use it as little as possible. Other Proprietary stuff I've had to install includes MS office in wine, this was necessary for both the excel connector for data loading and for running MSAccess data bases given to me by clients for data integration, I found that while some would open in OpenOffice older Access BDs and passworded BDs failed to open, this has been a problem as many of the businesses moving to salesforce are relatively small and in the process of moving their data from pokey tools the put together on the fly when they started up to their first full enterprise class applications. Development wise I am currently working on a new salesforce quotes app, the plan is to sell the app on the salesforce app exchange and publish the code under a free software license, possibly on sourceforge. I won't be publishing code until I get the app to Beta one at least so watch this space for the release announcement. Also I am currently looking for development work, contract or permanent. If you need salesforce dev, config or admin work let me know.

Yay for Karmic Koala

Just upgraded to Karmic Koala, easiest upgrade ever. Seriously this is the first completely trouble free distro upgrade I've ever done. In the old days everything broke and I'd end up reinstalling, the last few times something minor broke and I fixed it, this time though everything seems to be working. Awesome work Ubuntu team.

I use linux at work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yay!!!! That's right I now use Linux as part of my daily work. I found there were some issues that were easier to sort out using Linux then trying to do the same thing using windows (sometimes you just can't beat bash). So yesterday I grabbed VMware server and installed an Ubuntu 8.04 Beta VM. Works great. I still in the process of configuring things the way I want them, but so far I very happy with the results. Next step is to get Evolution talking to Exchange.

Yay for Ubuntu Hardy

Upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 Alpha 6. I'd been having trouble video drivers in Gutsy for a while, they'd break, I'd edit xorg.conf to fix them and within a couple of days they'd break again, plus no matter what I did with gutsy I couldn't seem to get desktop effects to work. So this morning I got fed up and upgraded to Hardy. Yay, after a minimum of poking the Intel video drivers are finally working properly and desktop effects are working wonderfully. Next job will be to fiddle with Wifi and Webcam. Wifi looks to be an easier task on Hardy then it was on Gutsy too, Hardy is at least detecting the Atheros wireless chipset, even if no wireless options are appearing in Network Manager. In the meantime I'll continue to get by using my Netgear USB wifi adapter, which detects and runs just fine :) I haven't even poked webcam yet, but, one project at a time I guess.