Category: tech

As given by Marc Andreessen[1] at the “Open Source in Government” conference. “The Internet is powered by open source.” “The Internet is the carrier for open source.” “The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed.” “It’s simply going to be more secure than proprietary software.” “Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments.”… Continue reading 12 Reasons for Growth of Open Source

I’ve been asked to speak at the April meeting of the North London branch of the British Computer Society (more details nearer the time) and they invited me along as a guest to the March meeting so I’d get a feel for how their meetings work. The meeting was at a Microsoft office in central… Continue reading Davorg in the Lion’s Den

I’ve just been sent[1] a free sample copy of TheOpenCD. This is an evangelism project which provides nicely packaged CDs containing open source applications for Windows users. The version I have contains OpenOffice.org, the Gimp, Mozilla and a host of other less well-known apps. It also contains tutorials and a few books about open source.… Continue reading TheOpenCD

Here’s a perfect example of the madness I mentioned last week. I have a set of four compilation CDs which were released in 2001/2 called The Album. Yesterday I started ripping them. I use grip to rip CDs and grip gets CD and track data from FreeDB. FreeDB gets its data from submissions by users.… Continue reading Music Tagging Again

The way that music files are tagged is all wrong. There must be a better solution. Like (I suppose) most people reading this I have a large (and growing) collection of music files that I’ve (legally, of course) ripped from my CDs. The ripping software that I use writes various information about the track into… Continue reading Music Tagging

…when you see the headline Amazon search for UK campaigner and you think it’s got something to do with online book shops.

It’s summer 1999 and I’m working for QXL. They are in the middle of a major redesign of their web site. This involves changes to both the back end (replacing a home-grown file based system with Oracle and a commercial shop-building application) and the front end (a complete redesign). We are doing the back end… Continue reading Dotcom Memories

Voyager 1 has just left the Solar System. If Gene Roddenberry is to be believed, it’ll be back in less than 300 years[1]. [1] Actually, on further thought, I don’t think that was Voyager 1. Was it Voyager 6?

Eric Raymond is proposing that hackers[1] adopt a logo. It’s the “glider” symbol from Conway’s game of life. [1] By which he means hacker, not cracker.

Over the weekend I installed Webalizer on my web server so I can get pretty pictures of the stats on all of my web sites. Looking at the results, it seems that one of my sites (and it’s a site dedicated to genealogy) has had some very interesting visitors.