The letters to the UK government departments and institutions requesting the removal of adverts for proprietary PDF readers have finally been prepared for sending! I wrote a new PHP script to generate the ODT documents complete with envelopes, and then printed and folded them all. There were 65 in total, which represent all the new Read more »
OggCamp 2011 attracted 200-300 people, and the FSFE booth was successfully run by myself and Chris Woolfrey. We talked to approximately 60 people, handed out approximately 120 leaflets, received one donation, and sold five t-shirts. FSFE was generally well received and I felt that the booth was a great success. OggCamp 2011 was a two Read more »
On Saturday 13th August Free Software activists came to FSFE’s PDF Readers Sprint in Manchester and found 59 previously unreported adverts for proprietary PDF readers, all of them on UK Council websites. Printing and signing of letters to the institutions began, and nearly half of them were prepared before the end of the day. Between Read more »
This weekend is the UK PDF Readers Sprint in Manchester, and part of the day will be spent sending letters to public institutions requesting that they remove adverts for non-Free PDF software. In anticipation of this task I purchased a printer this week, a Canon IP4850, expensive at around 65 EUR, but I was reassured Read more »
Computer Aided Design software is critically important to a variety of industries and professions. It’s also notorious for being poorly catered for by Free Software applications. Here’s a brief summary of the current situation. The .DWG issue The standard DWG (“drawing”) is currently the industry standard file format for CAD: it is also a proprietary Read more »
So far my battle to file my tax return online has taken six weeks. The official method of submission has failed repeatedly, and my attempts at resolution have led me into a web of usability nightmares. After having found the tech support telephone number using a search engine (ten minutes of searching the tax website Read more »
On Wednesday night I travelled from Manchester to London to attend the ODF Plugfest event, located in nearby Maidenhead the following day. Just before catching the train from Manchester Picadilly, I collected a new 2m tall self-supporting FSFE banner, for use at the booth that I would be running a few days later at the Read more »
On Tuesday I attended a workshop on Pure Data (PD) hosted by Manchester Free Software (MFS) at Madlab hackerspace. By the end of the evening, most attendees had used purely graphical drag-and-drop tools to create mouse controlled synthesised instruments. The room was filled with cacophony of 50’s style beeps and twangs. Clanger fans were well Read more »
I’ve recently had to do a lot of work on a set of data relating to my bank account transactions, which required a great deal of text manipulation, and working with several regular expressions. My bank doesn’t believe that giving their customers access to digital copies of their account and transaction history is important, and they only make available images (stored in PDFs) of past statements which have been posted. Because of this, I had to use Optical Character Recognition software to extract text from the images, fix by hand all the errors in the resulting output, and then manually structure the data into columns and rows by using regular expressions (as my OCR software didn’t detect them). To make matters worse, the images provided by my bank had a large text watermark on each one, written diagonally across the page stating “duplicate”. All contents of the spreadsheet which came into contact with this text was unreadable during OCR, and had to fixed by hand.
Last night I heard Ali Gündüz speak about Free Software GSM. During the talk, and in the following discussion, many interesting points were made: The GSM standard is controlled by only four or five international corporations The standard is very complicated for even experts and seasoned developers to grasp Mobile phone manufacturers have no access Read more »