An open letter to Asus

Dear Asus,

Having been on vacation for 5 weeks — with my Eee PC —, I only just became aware of your new site It's Better With Windows, and the fact that you no longer sell netbooks with Linux. Unfortunately, you have not provided a way for your customers and potential customers to comment on this site, so I'm left with less-efficient means to publicly let you know what I'm thinking about this move. In short: You're making a big mistake! Here's why.

Continue reading “It's better with Windows? Here's why *not*!”…

While on vacation in Iran, I met a group of Open Source developers and users in Mashhad, and discussed the situation of Free, Open Source Software in Iran with them. Free software is not as free there as it is in most other parts of the world - through no fault of their own. Read on about how OSS happens anyway in Iran. ...

Continue reading “Because Freedom Matters”…

When I selected Habari as a blogging platform, I knew I was in for an occasional rocky ride, with the software at version 0.5 and under very active development. Today I had planned to continue working on building my first plugin but instead my day turned out pretty rocky as once again I had to upgrade to the latest revision to get rid of a problem while a DDoS attack got in the way as well. But instead of growing my own plugin I learned a thing or two, so it still ended up being a good (though not very productive) day.

Continue reading “Upgrading fun (well…)”…

I did a few more tweaks today, to two other plugins I use: Summary and Tag cloud. That took some spelunking in Habari's core code (and these plugins) to investigate how forms are built and modified, how content is added to a feed, and how to make the tag list sorted case-insensitive. That turned out to be quite instructive…

Continue reading “Keeping a low profile”…

Having seen enough of Habari and experienced its helpful community, I've decided to dive in a little deeper. It had become clear already that the latest stable 0.5.2 release was too limiting as many of the available plugins already depend on features only available in 0.6-alpha, so I upgraded to that.

The first plugin I really wanted to look at was the Twitter plugin, not so much because I'm active on Twitter (I have an account but I'm no longer active) but because I wanted to explore how to adapt it to work with the FLOSS laconi.ca microblogging software which powers identi.ca…

Continue reading “Habari: first plugin and theme adventures”…