This certainly qualifies as an interesting development. CBC is reporting that FACIL, a non-profit organization that promotes the adoption of free software in Quebec, is suing the provincial government for buying Microsoft software. More specifically, they are alleging that Quebec's provincial government refuses to allow competing bids (including bids from free software vendors) in preference of large players like Microsoft. Allow me to quote from the CBC article.

"Quebec's open-source software association is suing the provincial government, saying it is giving preferential treatment to Microsoft Corp. by buying the company's products rather than using free alternatives. The lawsuit by Facil was lodged with the Quebec Superior Court on July 15 and made public on Wednesday. In it, the group says the provincial government has refused to entertain competing bids from all software providers, opting instead to supply public-sector departments with products bought from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle Corp."

You can read the entire article on the CBC Website. You will also want to read FACIL's press release on this suit.

What do you think? Is FACIL doing the right thing? I've said many times that it's very nearly a crime that our governments and schools cry poverty when they spend a veritable fortune on proprietary software and its trappings. Is FACIL's action what's needed to force government to play nice with our tax dollars?

Creme Brule on 12seconds.tv

I've always felt that if you needed to comment on a story or blog post, you should take the time to register with the site, log in, and do things properly. Somewhere along the way, a handful of readers managed to convince me to at the very least, open up anonymous comments and see how it goes. That was the easy part. The hard part cost me a few hours and an eventual trip to the #drupal-support IRC channel where a user who goes by nick "nearlythere" got me there. Allow me to explain.

My sites run on Drupal and while I love the power and flexibility of Drupal, there are times . . . [ insert sounds of growling here ] Since I wanted to avoid a massive influx of comment spam, my first step was to add captchas with the aid of the reCaptcha module which makes use of the wonderful and superb reCAPTCHA system. I also wanted to force Anonymous users to include their names and email addresses, a common enough practice on blog sites around the Net. Here's what Drupal gave me to work with when I turned on anonymous comments.
Read more

Inside that distinctive, tall, Vin d'Alsace bottle, is a pretty fantastic little wine. Those of you who know me well will find it somewhat surprising that I would gush over a medium-dry wine, but gush I must. Intensely floral, moderately fruity with hints of peach and apricot, and deliciously golden in color, the 2006 Cuvée Bacchus Pfaffenheim Gewurztraminer is a pleasure to savour.
Read more

Looking good is easy for our regular guests. True enough. However, looking good on the Web takes a little more work, which doesn't mean it can't be a lot of fun. With a little help from your Linux system, your smile will shine online!

Yes, François, I think it would be great to add a gallery of our regular guests on the restaurant's Website, but I do have a couple of concerns. First and foremost, I really don't think you should call it a "Rogue's Gallery". Second, why on Earth are you coding HTML by hand. This is going to take you forever and our guests will be here momentarily. Lucky for you, tonight's menu has some great free software for your Linux system that will make creating that gallery a breeze. Later, though. I can see our guests arriving as we speak.

Good evening and welocome one and all to Chez Marcel! Your tables are ready as are we to serve you. My faithful waiter, François, will fetch your wine while I introduce you to tonight's featured Linux software. François, to the wine cellar. Vite! In the South wing, you'll find a case of 2003 Sariza from Bulgaria. The Sariza is a great medium-bodied red wine that I'm sure you'll enjoy.

I must tell you that François had an excellent idea that involved creating a Web photo gallery. Before I show you how easy it can be to create such a gallery, I need to tell you about a package you'll need to have on your system, a package which will let you do all sorts of magical things with images.
Read more

Hello, oh great and powerful Adobe people.

Thank you so much for releasing Flash Player 10 beta 2 for Linux. Thanks even more for (finally) building in support for video4linux2 Webcam technology. You have no idea how much we appreciate that. The only problem is that many (if not most) of us can't use it. You see, it crashes our browsers within seconds.

Reading earlier posts on this subject, it's obvious that Adobe is aware of this problem (Flash player 10 beta 2 crashing Firefox) and that they have fixed it in-house. I think I speak for more than just myself when I say, "Please, just let us have the fixed version." You don't know how long we've waited for video4linux2 support. The suspense is killing us. Besides, it's kind of rough to be told that a beta is available with said features, then not have it work. It's even harder when we are told it's fixed but we can't possibly have it. So, please. Please. Let us have the current fixed version. We know it's not the real, final product, but we accept that. It's cool. Really. What do you say? Come on, guys. One little tiny fixed beta? No one is going to complain. In fact, we'll say nothing but nice things about you. Really.

What do you say?

Please. Pretty please . . .

You know that you love Cooking With Linux. You just can't get enough of it. François knows you by name and Chez Marcel has a table permanently reserved for you, complete with an engraved solid brass plaque embedded into the chair back. You love sitting down to a nice glass of wine while playing with cool Linux and open source software and lately, you want to tell the world. But how?!

Just copy the following text anywhere on your Web site and you'll not only provide a link back to this site, but also proclaim your love of Cooking With Linux with a stylish button featuring my faithful waiter, François.

<a href="http://www.cookingwithlinux.com/"><img border="0" src="http://www.cookingwithlinux.com/images/cwl_button200.png" title="The Original Cooking with Linux" alt="The Original Cooking with Linux" /></a>

Link away, mes amis.

Well, he tells some, anyhow. By now, you've probably heard the news that Xandros has purchased Linspire. Moments ago, I was sent the following Q&A with Xandros CEO, Andreas Typaldos. Enjoy . . .

Q: What are you announcing today?
A: Xandros' acquisition of Linspire, a pioneer in the commercial desktop Linux marketplace with its easy-to-use commercial Linspire operating system and innovative Linux software delivery service CNR.

Q: How did this deal come about?
A: Xandros and Linspire have had talks at the CEO level over the years about the possibility of a combination given their historically similar Debian-based roots and complementary product lines. Such talks accelerated in late 2007 and culminated in the current agreement.
Read more

Over at Practical Tech Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols suggests that it may be time for a fork of KDE, mostly because he doesn't believe that KDE 4.1 is heading in the right direction. It's obviously an interesting and emotional topic as the comments will attest. I'll quote a small portion of one of the comments. A writer who goes by burpnrun said, "I can understand the emotional investment that Asiego has in Kde4. But the article writer is correct: the desktop should not get in the way of the mainstream user’s productive needs, and that is what KDE4 does."

First of all, the Asiego (sic) in question is Aaron Seigo, a KDE luminary if ever there was one. The article writer is Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols, a luminary in his own right -- of the tech-journalist variety. Now, Stephen may have said a lot more about KDE 4 in earlier postings but in this article, he points to one feature of one icon in one application. Not much to go on really. However, he does, indirectly, remind us of an important aspect of Linux and the world of FOSS (free and open source software).
Read more

Once upon a time, ASCII art was practiced in e-mail messages sent around the world. Unfortunately, fancy fonts and HTML-ized e-mails have struck a powerful blow to this ancient and noble art form. The most missed are probably the cows, for Tony Monroe, anyhow. His cowsay program (a nice, easy-to-play-with Perl script) provides a simple way to generate an ASCII cow that speaks your message. Head on over to www.nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay.shtml to pick up your copy and extract it into your directory. (A number of distributions have cowsay in their repositories, so look there first). The installation consists of running an install.sh file. Running the program also is quite simple. Let's pretend that I want a cow saying “More wine, please”:

$ cowsay More wine please. ------------------- < More wine please. > ------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || ||

But wait! There's more . . . oh yes!
Read more

if you are Twitter-savvy, then you know that one of the most popular topics when it comes to Twitter is its reliability. There are more jokes and comments about Twitter being down again then you can imagine; and I'm talking on Twitter itself! Anyhow, our resident Joomla! wizard, Jason Kendall (aka CoolAcid) has a theory about that, one that starts to make a lot of sense.

Ok - So I've noticed twitter was not on my IM anymore. I regularly post via my gmail account on my rim. I didn't think much of this. Marcel sent me an invite to plurk, and some posts on his lug-nuts list showed signs of twitter problems, so I decided to go over to the site to see what's what.

Seems they've been having issues for a while - I started off my journey to a "we're down" page. But! The blog is up, so I mossy on over there to see what's what. I found this entry:
Read more

Ever wonder why a guy like me writes all these articles, pens all these books, gives talks at trade shows, universities, or appears on radio and television. It's not the fame and glory (there isn't much anyhow). No, it's something entirely different.

I've got more, but I thought it best to stop when I did.

I need help. No, not that kind of help. I need your technical advice, specifically as it relates to Linux distributions. I've been running Linux in one way or another since 1992 and as my exclusive desktop environment since 1996, so we aren't talking that technical. It's just that I feel it may be time for me to part company with my current distro. That's where I need your help. Watch the video, then let me know what you think.

 

 

So . . . Mandriva? OpenSUSE? Fedora? Stick with Kubuntu?

read more

After a few weeks of 'beta testing', I've decided to make it official. From this day forward, Cooking with Linux is officially 'real'.

 

 

Enjoy your stay.

read more

I knew it all along. "Microsoft has claimed user "complacency" is to blame for malware infections, and denied that its Vista operating system is less secure than Windows 2000," quotes an article on ZDNet (for the full article, click here). It's not that Microsoft's operating system, browser, email package, word processor, etc, etc, etc, are to blame. After all, the users should know better. They are the ones responsible for Windows' problems. That amazing claim is Microsoft's response to a study that shows Windows Vista, the new operating system from the Redmond monopoly, is actually less secure than the now ancient Windows 2000.

Sad days indeed. And Microsoft would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those darn users and their complacency!

Pity poor Microsoft. I know I do.

read more