links for 2007-07-11

July 11, 2007 General 1 Comment

links for 2007-07-10

July 10, 2007 General, running No Comments
  • Gmaps Pedometer

    Back in training – with no pain! I’m still taking it easy, but I did a nice easy 12k run last weekend which did the morale a world of good.

    (tags: running training)

Easy personal back-ups

July 10, 2007 freesoftware, General, home 15 Comments

I’m looking for a back-up solution which is easy to use. Ideally, I don’t want to have to decide what I need to back up and what I don’t – disk space is not an issue.

My dream app would be a graphical application which has back-up profiles – system configuration, personal data, application settings, media files, and maybe user-installed applications.

Ideally, I would be able to do incremental back-ups (à la rsync) where the weekly back-up will only be saving the new email, files and pr0n, and not the 30GB that was backed up first time round.

Also, a restore facility would be nice. In the past, when I have backed up files and had to restore, I have had issues because the user files were backed up for uid 501, and the corresponding account after installing the system anew was 502 (or something like that). I don’t want to have to think about user rights – I want to, as root, restore the system, and have user accounts, files, configuration all recreated as they were at the last back-up.

Anyone know of an easy one-click solution for Linux for the man who wants back-ups, but doesn’t want to have to think about them?

Update: I should probably mention that the back-ups will be to an external USB disk, and will be on-demand. I don’t want to leave the disk plugged in all the time, and I don’t want to have to think about plugging it in on Thursday evening to have the back-up done on Friday morning. Also, I’ll be backing up 3 different systems – including 2 on one double-boot machine. So ssh + rsync via a cron job is probably not the idel solution (but many thanks for the many people proposing it).

Google, Sicko & voice

July 5, 2007 General 6 Comments

The interesting thing about the recent Google “Sicko” controversy and the reaction to the controversy is the persistence of the myth that corporations have opinions on anything.

The story, for those who haven’t heard about it, is that someone from Google blogged about a movie they didn’t agree with, and a newspaper picked up the story as “Google didn’t like Sicko”. Since then, Google’s communication staff have been working hard to say “No, Google likes “Sicko”, really”.

Shouldn’t they be saying “Google is a non-physical non-thinking entity, it can’t like or dislike anything”? Isn’t the whole point of corporate blogging to show that a company is not a Borg-like entity where some company position (which the president or VP likes) gets proliferated down the organisation to be adopted by mindless drones?

How about this as a non-denial denial? “Google’s management is very proud that our employees have the ability to express their personal opinions through our corporate blog. The diversity of opinion is something which makes our company stronger and richer. We stand by our employees, and have complete trust in their ability to exercise good judgement in their blogging activities.”

links for 2007-06-29

June 29, 2007 General No Comments

Good clients/bad clients

June 29, 2007 General 7 Comments

A while back it seemed to be cool to talk about “firing your customers” if they were bad – that is, if they were not really clear on what they wanted, were asking you to change away from your core competencies to gain their contract, or were being very needy and impatient before (or after) signing a contract.

I’d love to hear about people’s reactions to this. Are there good clients and bad clients?

My own opinions are that if you’re in a position where you want to fire a client, someone hasn’t done their job right. Isn’t before-sales in a large part helping decode what the client wants, and explaining to him how your product/service fits into that picture? Isn’t the whole sales process supposed to be about figuring out if selling your products & services will be mutually beneficial?

Not going to LRL

June 25, 2007 openwengo 3 Comments

In spite of my best intentions, I won’t be going to Lug Radio Live this year to represent OpenWengo.

The official reason is that it’s only 2 weeks before the birth of our third child, and I can’t justify going away for a day & a half during a weekend that close to the “quick, call a taxi” date.

However the real reason is because I was afraid of all the abuse I would get from the LugRadio crowd – a taster of which I got from Stuart “Aq” Langridge upon hearing that I was cancelling:

Well then you are a useless Irish bastard and we are never going to speak to you again, you pig-holding arse.

Yes, that’s right, I am an arse that can hold a pig.

Thanks to Stuart for putting into my mind the image of two beautiful plump rosy bum-cheeks grabbing a poor defenseless squealing piglet. It’s enough to give you nightmares.

For all GNOME user groups wondering what to organise…

June 25, 2007 gnome, marketing 3 Comments

…Have a “Give a school a foot up” day on Software Freedom Day.

The idea: you go to your local university, and ask permission to have a stand during the day. You print out some posters, wear some team t-shirts, and go along with a few hundred LiveCDs.

During the day, you organise 2 hours of presentations in a lecture hall (one in the morning & one in the afternoon) where you just show off the software. Nothing whizz-bangy, just showing people that there’s an alternative to Windows (“Look! There is a clock & calendar at the top! And I can browse the web while writing a text document in two different fonts!”).

The hard part is getting back in touch with that Comp.Sci. professor that only gave you a C in AI 10 years ago. Go on, pick up the phone!

(post inspired by discussions with Fabrice Alphonso and Frank Alcantara, and the recent posts from BarCamp Chicago by Ken vanDine)

Update: In comments,  Andy Price gave some priceless advice (sorry, I couldn’t resist): Computer clubs have access to university facilities,can typically rustle up volunteers and do pre-event advertising for an event, and are usually delighted to have someone do some of the organisation for them. Help out the young ‘uns – they’re the community’s bone marrow.

links for 2007-06-22

June 22, 2007 General No Comments

The challenges of the foundation business development hire

June 22, 2007 gnome No Comments

For those who haven’t been paying attention, the GNOME Foundation is hiring. For the past few months (seems like years) we have been actively hunting for a director of business development – someone who will help us to open doors, do fundraising, and investigate partnerships that could generate revenues for the foundation.

It’s been a long road so far, and we’re still hunting. We don’t have the resources or the experience of the Mozilla Foundation (who are also hiring), and a big part of the job so far has been spreading the word and getting in contact with appropriate candidates for the role. As with any process, our requirements have varied over time.

One controversial element of the job is that since the Foundation is an American corporation, our director of bizdev should be able to work in the US. For posterity, here’s the current draft of the job description (which needs to be added to the foundation website somewhere, without doubt):

The GNOME Foundation is an organisation created to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software.

In that role, we are looking for an individual to join us and define, implement and manage our business activities and partnerships, and fundraising activities, with the aim of generating revenue which will allow us to invest in the GNOME project and its needs. These business activities should remain consistent with the core principles of the GNOME community.

The ideal candidate will have experience with the IT industry in a business development role, will have experience defining their own agenda and working in a decentralised environment, and will understand the underlying principles and needs of a free software development community.

Interested candidates should send a résumé to board@gnome.org

If anyone reading this can think of a great candidate that we might be interested in, then I’d love to hear about it. drop us a line.

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