TooMuchGreen

TooMuchGreen has officially regressed to it’s former blog status, it likes being a blog and we enjoy blogging through it.

The “business” side of things is now fully re-branded as the wonderful MEBBI™ Solutions.

MEBBI™ Solutions provide all the services previously offered by TooMuchGreen plus a few new additions, why not visit our lovely new website and have a look around..

http://mebbi.net

Sector awareness for the benefits of open source adoption is rapidly growing amongst the forward thinking enterprise. An open source solution provides not only a comprehensive replacement but delivers added security and performance boosts to existing systems whilst offering huge reductions in immediate expenditure and long term cost of ownership.  Read more... (estimated reading time 47 secs)

Open Document Format – it’s the way forward, I have no doubts, and neither it seems do the United States..

They have a great website too – http://opensourceforamerica.org/ (I do think they missed a trick though, I’d have gone for “opensourceforus”, much more fun)

Obviously the UK are correspondingly on the ball (!). For information regarding open source in relation to the “Digital Britain” report you’ll need to download the PDF, you’ll find open source mentioned under chapter 8, section 19. However if you can’t be bothered (which of course you can’t, who would) here’s the extensive and inspiring text (yawn) >  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:09 mins)

This weekend I encountered first hand exactly the situation highlighted by TalkTalk in their recent demonstration aimed at the UK Governments naive plan to disconnect persistent on-line file sharers. The problem is that of unsecured home Wi-Fi, and there’s a lot of it about.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:47 mins)

I wasn’t going to post today but as recent article from Linux Pro furnished us with the quite substantial news that IBM have dumped Microsoft Office in favour of their open solution, Lotus Symphony, I obviously felt obliged. Although an understandable tactic for any company to prefer internal use of their own software product the ramifications of this particular strategy reach much further than some in-house back slapping due to the nature of the file format in use.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:33 mins)

There’s a continuing storm of ever increasing paranoia circulating our beaten up world these days, who’s watching who, who’s controlling who, who’s doing what to whoever, where, how and with what and who’s being doing all the above for years….and why, as such we’re all pretty “right on” with regard to safeguarding our personal identities from each other and our personal freedom from big brother, or so we’d like to believe.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:52 mins)

Open Source? Many people may have no idea what it means, to some it’s a descriptive tag for certain platforms of community developed free software, to others it’s “lab” computing for geeks, at the far end it’s a comprehensive lifestyle ethos and to a select Facebook few on the flip side of phonetics it’s a bottle of HP with the lid off waiting to be plopped onto their soggy fish & chips. What’s obvious is that the term “Open Source” applies to more than a single area or product, however there is a constant and if we dig down we’re going to end up somewhere around root “collaboration”.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:06 mins)

It’s incredibly reassuring and inspiring to come across like minds, especially when they’re based in ones home country (& county) and especially when they’re on such a professional level. I’ve recently linked up with Open Source For Business (OS4B) based in Leeds (West Yorkshire, UK) who are just this, and more, to quote…

“Open Source for Business (OS4B) is the exciting joint venture from Yorkshire Forward and nti Leeds, designed to help regional businesses make the most of open source technology to benefit from cost effective and flexible open source IT solutions”

Due to an increase in project work lately I’ve had to review and produce various bits of documentation sent to me in MS Word format, and nice as iWork 09 is (and it IS nice) you have to face it that the two still aren’t 100% compatible regarding the finer points of formatting (very close, but just not 100%), so, last week I gave the groovy little MacBook Air the shock of it’s iLife by by installing MS Word on it just to see how it compared to the open source offerings, I should have known better, from the *word* go it just didn’t feel right.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:38 mins)

This is the logo (and link) to The Pirate Google website, how long it will stay active for is anyone’s guess

Pirate Google is basically a search site dedicated to pulling back results of torrent searches ONLY from Google, which, as the site shows, you can do yourself through the actual Google search page merely be prefixing any entry string with filetype:torrent.  Read more... (estimated reading time 42 secs)

Empowered by the (Mark) Shuttleworth Foundation (as it says in the ad) ‘Freedom Toasters‘ are vending machines created by Breadbin.co.za to burn & distribute a variety of free software in countries where a restrictive and sub par communications infrastructure means reliable downloads just aren’t possible (South Africa for example), just turn up with your CD’s and burn……how cool is THAT..!  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:17 mins)