Archive for the ‘oss’ Category

Introducing Portify

Posted at 11:10pm on Monday, March 8th, 2010 by

I done gone made a thing – portify converts audio files from any format to one more suitable for your portable player.  For me, sadly, that means converting everything to mp3.

Testers are welcome, particularly on non-Linux platforms, but please be gentle :)

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This doesn’t happen in America

Posted at 7:59pm on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 by

[youtube http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ]

Homer tries to vote for Obama.  Thing is, we’ve all read enough about Diebold to know this is true, so why’s it in the Simpsons?

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No secret software

Posted at 10:06am on Monday, July 28th, 2008 by

Tim Bray highlights Christine Peterson’s talk from OSCON; No Secret Software. As Tim says, we are in her debt (again) for providing us with a powerful rhetorical tool.

(A large part of me hopes that the second commenter was being ironic, given the purpose of this new rallying cry is to dispel the sense that Open Source  is “associated with ill-groomed inarticulate geeks who have odd opinions about lots of things”.)

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Oh look – today we’re the football

Posted at 4:15pm on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 by

UK politics makes yet another attempt to claim Open Source as its ownYou tried last year…  What happened?

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Why I love the Internet (and Open Source Software)

Posted at 11:58am on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 by

One of my subversion repositories broke.  Nastily.  I thought that I was going to have to rebuild it and lose the changes that came after the corrupt revision.  I googled for help, and found someone who had written a script to fix my very problem.  I ran it, it worked, I was very grateful.  I blogged about it on the Isotoma blog.

4 hours later the author of the script commented on my blog post. How awesome is that?

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Shock sighting of Eee PC in Norfolk…

Posted at 10:45pm on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 by

eeepc.jpg…Or how I have come to think that Stephen Fry is in fact a living God.

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A veritable lawyerclism

Posted at 5:14pm on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 by

You sue us, we sue you. The OIN threatens Microsoft with the nuclear option.

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Man, you’re right, this never gets old…

Posted at 9:44pm on Monday, February 19th, 2007 by

heh

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Geocoding and other countries

Posted at 4:54pm on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 by

I’ve been muttering previously about geocoding in the UK. It sucks. Everything is under heavy (and expensive) license restrictions and the Open Source alternatives are a long way from getting there. Luckily the latest job we‘re working on is an Australian Google Maps mashup (map my adventure, soft launched last week)…

One of the things that we’ve been asked to do is tie points on the map to the State that they’re in. Doug and I had been worrying about this for some time, as we thought that we would end up manually building polygons to represent state boundaries from a map ourselves. But no. Of course, we live in the UK and think that all map data is sacred. In Australia, and a lot of other countries too, the data is freely available and provided by the Government. You can download it yourselves too if you want.

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UK Geocoding

Posted at 9:46pm on Friday, January 5th, 2007 by

We‘ve been thinking about a couple of web apps for a while that need UK geocoding, but Sleevenotez and Forkd (and some others that we *still* can’t talk about!) have kept us rather busy.

Over Christmas I got the time to start thinking about the next applications and the first thing I started researching was the excellent Google maps API, with a plan to some very basic geocoding. It took me a while to realise that the reason my test code wasn’t working wasn’t that it was bust, but that Google don’t allow UK address geocoding.

Further investigation showed that there’s a very simple reason – the UK is one of the few countries where the geocoding data is not in the public domain (despite being generated with public funds).

There’s a good piece on the current state of play, and the new alternatives, over at The Guardian. Both alternatives (npemap.org.uk and freethepostcode.org) are a way from being a viable alternative to the PAF file, but they’re definitely worth watching.

Luckily one of the two applications we’re thinking of is equally well served by the excellent Geo-Names web services. Quite what we’re going to do about the other one though, I don’t know…

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