Entries For: March 2008
2008-03-30
Updates
It's a relief to be healthy again. Being sick also highlighted that I need to quickly finish and reduce additional work, which are now overdue. My personal goals are to continue supporting FOSS accessibility work and continue laying the foundations for Inigo. So I'll have to cut down a lot of additional consultancy work.
Inigo
Kagesenshi's been holding down the fort for past few weeks and he has been doing good work on a UN site we've been contracted to work on. Inigo is a lot of fun as he can attest to, as we pervasively do things the FOSS way. New memory is in gambit, so slowness for past month should be gone. From July onwards, I hope that Inigo is ready to grow quickly if needed. If you're a student keen on FOSS and Python, do contact us for internship/practical opportunities. Part of the vision I have for Inigo is that we follow in the paths of many successful technical startups elsehwere. Which is that early employees have a share in the ownership and shares of the company in addition to working on stuff that's not mainstream. This is part of the excitement that you feel when you read about how companies like Apple, HP, Google, RedHat etc. started. I strongly believe, that this can be done in Malaysia also through Inigo. I think me and Kagesenshi should start posting pictures of our current environment, and then compare every few months, as our workspaces improve.
Accessibility
The main community work I'll focus on other than development would be accessibility. We plan on running volunteer LPI classes for the visually disabled and I'll try to continue support in different ways on accessibility like presenting at the Web Accessibility Conference http://accessibility.ncbm.org.my/ on how to use FOSS CMS (Plone) to make your sites more accessible and standards compliant.
2008-03-28
Marketing Positition at OSCC
We're still looking for a FOSS advocate to help out here at OSCC. It's a full time job doing advocacy to agencies, events etc. In addition the job scope also includes working on research outputs and building community.
Email me your CV and expected salary to khairil@oscc.org.my
2008-03-25
Back in the world of the living
I and family caught a nasty virus that kept me in bed for 3 days with high fever and muscle aches. The joint and muscle aches are still here 5 days later, and will persist according to the doctors until later this week. So I'll continue to be popping pain killers like Dr. House.
So I don't mind if people avoid me for this week. I wouldn't want anybody else to catch it.
2008-03-19
What will you do without freedom?
MAMPU today begins implementing migration policy to OpenOffice.org and ODF format for documents.
From April, all new documents will be in ODF and by the end of the year, all copies of MS Office will be uninstalled.
Great news for document freedom and open standards for Malaysia. Since MAMPU is the lead agency for implementing change and modernisation for the public sector, we should be looking forward to seeing Malaysian government standardising on ODF for electronic documents.
2008-03-18
Ubuntu, Bluetooth and Digi GPRS/EDGE
This was quick relatively quick to set up, by following the guide here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BluetoothDialup
The only catch was that I couldn't browse my Sony Ericsson z558i. Just make your phone discoverable and then try browse it, you'll get the MAC address, which you will need.
You can pair with the phone, from the phone itself. Ubuntu will come up with a dialog box for the pass phrase. (as I recall).
Only one technical step, which is to find out the RFCOMM channel
sdptool browse your-phone-mac-address
Look for Dial Up Networking, there should be a Channel. On my phone it's 2.
Edit /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf like this,
rfcomm0 {
bind yes;
device your-phone-mac-address;
channel your-phone-rfcomm-channel;
comment "Bluetooth PPP Connection";
}
Copy and edit the chatscripts given from the link to the guide.
For Digi users, this is the chat script:
TIMEOUT 35 ECHO ON ABORT '\nBUSY\r' ABORT '\nERROR\r' ABORT '\nNO ANSWER\r' ABORT '\nNO CARRIER\r' ABORT '\nNO DIALTONE\r' ABORT '\nRINGING\r\n\r\nRINGING\r' '' \rAT OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","diginet"' OK ATD*99***1# CONNECT ""
From the command line, type:
pon BluetoothDialup
and you're on the way.
To disconnect:
poff BluetoothDialup
