James Purser New Media, Politics And More

Sigh, I know, we promised our first episode tonight, and here we are, after a weeks delay and nothing. We will be releasing this week (hopefully tomorrow night).

There is a change happening around here. I posted this on my business blog a couple of days ago, and I thought I would share some of the changes with you dear reader.

We have renamed the business, or to be closer to the truth, we have given it a real name. No longer will we be operating just under my name, instead, we will be using the name Collaborynth. Yes it's a made up name, but I think it works to show how the main aim of our business is to help our clients through the sometimes very confusing maze of collaboration options.

We're in the process of developing our own hosted collaboration products as well as continuing the development of our more general hosting stuff.

This means that jamespurser.com.au has now returned to it's normal function as my personal blog.

The future looks exciting, let's go there!

I've blogged about this before but I'm going to do it again.

Why, oh why do people insist on building their own TZ databases and ignoring the Operating Systems TZ dataset? Is this just a really stupid case of NIH? I've hit this in drupal (specifically the Events Module), Plone (inherited from zope), and I've been told about java having it's own tz set as well.

I might even do a t-shirt, this has got me that annoyed!

Okay, unfortunately we are going to have to delay the release of the first episode of OSOTA until next wednesday (2nd July 2008). This has come about due to a mix of family illness (it just keeps coming back!) and an increased work load which has meant that we've had re-jig time for interviews and so on.

We are coming back, this I promise, and our first episode will be a doozy.

Remember if you have something you want to talk about, or want to know about, let us know.

Okay so we're seven days out from the launch of the new season of Open Source On The Air and what can you expect. You know, I'm still tossing up what to cover. So much has happened since our last episode. Just today, two major events in the Free and Open Source Software world occured. Firefox 3 and Wine 1.0 were released.

In the corporate world, two major organisations have indicated that they want to move to Open Office, in one case possibly as a pre-cursor to moving their SOE to linux in the fullness of time. SCO is pretty much dead corp walking, LCA 09 is drawing ever closer and Software Freedom Day is just around the corner.

So much to talk about.

One thing we would like to see is something from you dear reader/listener. One of the things we regretted about the last run of the show was the low listener interaction (with the exception of our wild and whacky attempts to stream live :)). What we want to see now is emails. forums posts and audio files from people who want to get things off their chest, have questions they want asked, projects to promote and so on. So if you have something you want to say, then use the contact form or join up and use the forums.

Still on podcasting, places are starting to fill up for the podcasting webinar I'm going to be holding so if you're still interested, sign up and join us :)

As a parent of three wonderful kids, during their brief existance on this planet, I have found my self running the gamut of things I thought I would never hear myself say. As an example I thought I would post just what I've heard myself say today:

 - To three year old: "Stop beating your brother up with bedtime bear"

- To three and five year old: "How many times have I told you, no tug of war on the toilet!"

- To ten year old: "No, no one has worked out how to build a machine that can genetically modify you to become a four armed super hero"

- To five year old: "Stop trying to stick barbie in your sisters ear!"

God being a dad is fun :)

When I play with a new distro or *nix I tend to throw it into a virtual machine and install irssi on it. This allows me to work within the OS and ask questions without having to switch around too much. Given that most of the distro channels appear to be on freenode I give my virtual machine user a nick like purserj_$DISTRO to help distinguish.

I threw CentOS up this morning and after futzing around getting rpmforge installed I actually managed to install irssi and tried to connect to the #centos channel with purserj_centos. Except I couldn't. I got told that I was banned. Given that my entire time on the centos channel previously could be counted in minutes, a little wtf was warranted.

Turns out that for some reason they have the word centos banned for users trying to connect to the centos channel. Why? I have no idea, but it does seem kind of silly.

Anyway, that's my minor gripe for today. 

As promised yesterday, here are the details of the Podcasting Webinar I'm going to be hosting in a couple of weeks.

http://jamespurser.com.au/events/2008-06-30/Podcasting_Presentation

So if you're interested in catching it, signup and I'll be sending more details through about how to connect and so on.

I've been a little busy lately sorting out a couple of things relating both to the business and to OSOTA so I thought I'd talk about it here.

Firstly Open Source On The Air now has a new site at http://osota.fosscasts.org. It's got most of the old episodes available and I've added forums and what not so as to encourage listener participation. Have a look around, and let me know what you think.

Secondly I've been business blogging a bit lately. For the last three entries I've been having a look at some of the "Tools of Collaboration". I'm going to be continuing this series of entries looking at areas such as Groupware, Virtual Worlds and so on, so if you're interested keep reading :)

Oh and while the first attempt at running a webinar was bit of a bust, I'm going to give it another go, details to be released shortly. Anyway onwards and upwards as they say.

I'm on one or two social networking sites, namely facebook and linkedin. It's a bit of fun, doesn't take up too much time in my day and has allowed me to talk to a few people I haven't spoken to in literally years.  However there are aspects about the whole social networking thing that concerns me.

Basically it boils down to people are too trusting.

There are features common to both linkedin and facebook that allow you to see who in your email contacts (provided it's a common web based email service) is also on the site. However in order for you to use this, you need to give over both your email address and your account password. It may just be the cynical bastard in me, but I am not about to hand over my email account to someone I don't know.

The privacy problems with facebook and other services have already been documented, especially the behind the scenes shenanigans, however I wonder how many people have signed up to the "find a friend" services without giving it a second thought?

Sigh, by all means, use the services, but please, please think twice before clicking.