David Fraser

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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

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translate-toolkit 0.8rc5 and a holiday

Well I clearly didn't manage to release 0.8, there has been a fair bit of patching and adding tests (particularly ensuring round-trip maintenance of source files in Mozilla, David Farning has been filing many bugs). And quite a few bugs in our bugzilla have been fixed. I&

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Complete Office Suite, now with Chutney

I got one of our OpenOffice.org 1.9.128 CDs, and I must say they look very nice. Very South African. The thing about this OpenOffice.org is, it comes in all 11 South African languages. Would you like Mrs Balls Chutney with that, sir?

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Translate Toolkit now working on Firefox 1.5 xpis

I have finally gotten round to fixing up the Translate Toolkit so that moz2po / po2moz can be properly used with language pack xpis from the Firefox 1.5 series. moz2po -i en-US.xpi -o firefox-pot/ -P # convert to .po files, edit / merge with other .po files po2moz -t en-US.xpi

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Qemu and Qvm86 rpms for Fedora Core 4

Wanting to run virtual machines on my Linux machine, I decided to hunt for a QEMU rpm. I found this nice page that explains how to build QEMU rpms for Fedora Core. However he uses the kqemu accelerator which is not open source and I would rather use qvm86 which

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OpenOffice.org 2.0 released (and South African builds)

So, OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been released. If you've tried the 1.x series, this is much, much better. There's a very interesting interview with Louis Suarez-Potts available. ith unusually good timing I've managed to get South African builds of all our latest

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Work resumes on ooo-build on Windows, Pootle and Translate Toolkit

After being busy with lots of behind the scenes things and other work, I feel like I'm finally making progress on the following: Building OpenOffice.org on Windows - I've been working with Michael Meeks to get ooo-build working nicely on Windows with the 2.0

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Flumps DVD

A friend gave Danielle the Complete Flumps DVD for her birthday, and we've been watching them together as a family. This is giving us lots of fun and me some inspiration for Pootle quotes :-)

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Danielle's hoppy birthday

It's Danielle's birthday today, and she's 30! What a privilege to have such an amazing wife! Last night she fell well trying to stop James falling off some stairs, and twisted her ankle really badly, looks like the ligaments are torn. So its a