Category Archives: Software - Page 3

The open source library, for books that is

Posted by on January 6, 2007 Comments Off on The open source library, for books that is

One of the things that really warms my heart is to see governmental and pseudo-governmental agencies (which often have quite limited budgets as individual entities but collectively have both talent and money) contribute to the common good (and help themselves) by creating open source software which meets their needs and the needs of their peers. This is a great example of how there are a lot of agencies in different geographical areas paying for the same software but which could work collaborativly to develop open source solutions saving everyone money.

The example coming to mind right now is the Georgia PINES library consortium which has developed a free ILS (integrated library system). Libraries often pay quite a bit of money to commercial vendors for nightmarish ILS systems and these fees can easily break the budget for smaller library systems or standalone libraries. A solution like this is an excellent opportunity to have some control over the development of features and costs while contributing back to peer libraries.

Offline Windows Patching

Posted by on January 4, 2007 Comments Off on Offline Windows Patching

Not that long ago I ran across some nifty scripts from the British Heise-Security site. These scripts allow you to automatically download Windows updates for offline installation on other systems (a great idea, espcially before you connect a brand new installation to the Internet). The scripts even go so far as to create an ISO for a CD or DVD which will allow you to easily install the updates on other machines. The list of updates is actually gathered for a file published online by Microsoft for use with their Baseline Security Analysis tool so it stays up to date automatically without the need to constantly update the scritps as with some other similar programs.

Unfortunatly the scripts are command line based and do not allow for easy slipsreaming into a new Windows XP installation CD which is the golden egg for me. Ideally soemthing like this would be integrated into a tool such as the excellent nLite OS slipstream tool which I have mentioned before. All the better if such a solution were open source. If you’re aware of anything like this please comment here and share the wealth of knowledge!

E-books for the taking

Posted by on December 17, 2006 Comments Off on E-books for the taking

Regular readers know I’m both a strong believer in giving away free electronic books and articles under open licensing and posting links to other free book resources as I find them. This week I was looking for a source of free e-books with nice formatting to try out one of the print on demand services and I came up with the Linux Documentation Project Guides site. I’ve been to and used the LDP site before but only for the much shorter HOWTOs. The guides section of the site contains a number of free full length refernce books in a variety of formats.

Another tool I came across that’s helpful in working with ebooks is the open source GutenMark software. As you probably already know Project Gutenberg makes public domain books freely available on the internet. If you haven’t used PG what you may not know is the majority of these are formatted only as ASCII text with hard line breaks making them quite unpleasant and difficult to read. The GutenMark software makes a best effort to make them into more readable word wrapped HTML files which can then be imported into a word processor and further refined if you so choose. Hopefully people will spend a bit of time cleaning up some of the more popular books and create versions suitable for offline prinitng and reading. I’m working on such a version of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education.

Also, if you’re not aware the Google books project has been scanning public domain books at libraries and posting the images in PDF format online. Unfortunatly, they are watermarking the files and have somewhat restrictive licensising attached to downloading them. What you may not have heard is that Microsoft, Yahoo, the Univeristy of California and several Canadian libraries are undertaking similar projects but are working with the Internet Archive Texts project which have different terms depending on who sponsered the digitization of the book. It is unfortuante that some of these sponsors (usually only the corporate ones and not the libraries) are attaching terms of use to public domain books, but it is at least somewhat nice that they are being made available at all.

In other free ebook news O’Reilly will be publishing the updated Using Samba, 3rd Edition book in January. Hopefully it will be released under the same type of free license as the previous two editions. This updated reference guide will be greatly appreciated by the SAMBA community which has made significant strides in the recent versions of their software.

Organizing Media

Posted by on December 17, 2006 Comments Off on Organizing Media

I’ve written at least once before about software I could use for organizing my collection of books and DVDs. At that time I thought the Home Library project looked interesting but a little immature, since that time I’ve located a more mature project with similar aims. The Open Media Lending Database (OpenDb) project seems to be just what I’m looking for. It’s clear some real thought has gone into the layout and design of the program. You can add new media type definitions through plugins, export a standardized XML listing of your holdings so you’re not locked in, loan media to others and create a library with several friends. I’ll be sure to take this for a spin in the near future and maybe even start posting some of my own media collection.

Sending SMS messages in Windows XP

Posted by on December 5, 2006 Comments Off on Sending SMS messages in Windows XP

If you have a GSM cell phone with either Bluetooth or Infrared technology and a Windows XP system you can save a lot of key tapping on your phone by using a free Microsoft utility to send SMS messages. First you’ll need to download and install the widget from Microsoft. Make sure your phone is paired (assuming you’re using Bluetooth) with the system and select the appropriate modem for your phone in the SMS utility and start sending messages. More detailed instructions are available from O’Reilly along with instructions for doing something similar on Mac OS X.

GRC’s Script-Free Pure-CSS Menuing System

Posted by on November 21, 2006 2 comments

If you’d like to do a modern drop-down menuing system for your website but want to maintain compatibility as much as possible for people browsing with scripting turned off or older browsers you might want to take a look at the GRC menuing system which is entirely done in CSS without any help from Javascript or any other scripting language. Implemented largely by Steve Gibson with help from the GRC community the menuing system has been placed in the public domain so anyone can use it for free and allows tons of customization including at least two layers of menuing. Don’t take my word for it check it out yourself at the GRC script free menuing page.

Synchronizing Thunderbird and Pocket PC

Posted by on October 30, 2006 Comments Off on Synchronizing Thunderbird and Pocket PC

One of the things I’ve missed out on by using the fantastic Mozilla Thunderbird email client has been the ability for me to synchronize it with my PocketPC. Because I use an IMAP email server this didn’t really present a problem as far as email goes but it has left me dead in the water for a calendaring solution.

For a while I tried using the calendar solely on my PocketPC but because I don’t have my PocketPC with me everywhere I go that didn’t last very long. In the end I resorted to using a great open source php web-based calendar program. This allowed me to access the calendar from anywhere and sync it with calendar programs on my PC using the iCal standard. Unfortunatly the PocketPC doesn’t support iCal syncing so again I was dead in the water and could only use the calendar when I had web access.

Recently I ran across the open source FinchSync project which claims to be “a tool for synchronizing contacts, appointments and tasks from Mozilla email and calendar products with a Pocket PC or SmartPhone”. While I’ve been too busy to get it up and running it yet looks like a promising solution that might actually allow me to use my PocketPC device as a calendar which would come in handy from time to time. FinchSync is cross platform and allows syncing over IP so you don’t even need to be running it on the PC you normally dock the PocketPC device with.

IAX Softphones

Posted by on October 2, 2006 Comments Off on IAX Softphones

In the past I’ve used the multi-platform iaxComm program to test IAX VoIP links with a PC but I’ve since discovered two more IAX sofphones. IDEFISK and Kiax are both multi-platform IAX softphones.

At first glance IDEFISK actually looks somewhat similar to iaxComm but with a more polished look and some more advanced features such as mail program plugins, the downside is that it is not open source and some features are only available in the paid version. On the other hand Kiax looks more like an instant messaging program than a softphone, but is entirely open source. Actually it is remeniscent of Skype or the Gizmo project.

Open Source Routing

Posted by on September 26, 2006 Comments Off on Open Source Routing

I’ve written about competition to Cisco products in the past, most recently about a college in Texas switching from Call Manager to the (fantastic) open source Asterisk PBX. It seems there’s more trouble in paradise. The networking market has been moving towards commoditization for some time but remains stratified, for example when Linksys got too close for comfort Cisco bought them out and made it clear such products were not suitable for the enterprise customer.

Another threat should be on the radar at Cisco. A company called Vyatta has released an open source product set to compete directly with Cisco routers called Open Flexible Router (OFR). The software runs on standard x86 PC hardware and is based on Linux but boots up and runs in much the same way a Cisco router does, right down to the command line interface that closely paralells Cisco’s. It seems the marketing is currently targeted and small and medium sized businesses but there’s no real reason that such a company couldn’t convice some educational and enterprise users to switch if they were convinced the support was good enough.

The two main things Cisco has going for it are the dedicated hardware which allows for (theoretically) more stability and optimized processing and the history of customer satisfaction and excellent support that Cisco has built into its brand. Of course with an open source program such as OFR another company could come up with a customized hardware solution that would erode at least one of the Cisco advantages, the other one will just take time if Vyatta can build a name for quality and stability.

Back up that data!

Posted by on September 26, 2006 Comments Off on Back up that data!

I’ve looked at online data backup solutions in the past and have found them slow and overly expensive. I recently uncovered rsync.net which looks to change all that, at least for those users confortable with the Linux command line.

The great thing about rsync.net (other than the $1.80/gb price and unlimited transfer) is that you can use the rsync protocol. For those not familiar, rsync is a protocol which transfers only the portions of a file which have chnaged instead of the entire file. Essentially it makes the tramsfer process much more efficient. As an added benefit you can use other open protocols such as sftp, Unison, rdiff-backup, WebDAV and duplicity. If that sounds like alphabet soup to you rsync.net is probably not the right solution, this is not a one touch backup solution. On the other hand if you are comfortable getting your feet wet rsync.net might be a great and inexpensive solution for automated offsite backup.