The Dude abides.

Using OpenOffice for fun and profit

OpenOffice has come a long way in recent times and it is therefore surprising that a number of folk don’t use some of OpenOffice’s basic features (styles, outline numbering, captioning, restarting page numbering, headings, auto-generating an Illustration Index etc) and instead choose manually format their documents. I’ve found such features to significantly reduce documentation time [...]

“Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men”

A brilliant read, I find it very true in this day and age when hiring ICT graduates (hence my rule of dismissing all locally awarded degrees as being irrelevant as an indicator of performance of the candidate being interviewed). Some excerpts:

For a time I tried picking these youngsters out of the colleges. But my [...]

foss.in shortlisted speakers out

The foss.in 2007 preliminary speaker list is out and it looks like it’s going to be a blast. Notable speakers include:

Danese Cooper (of OSI fame)
Harald Welte (of netfilter fame)
Josh Berkus (Postgresql, yay! Am I glad to see a Postgresql talk )
Mitchell Baker (of Mozilla fame)
Rusty Russell (of packet filtering fame)
Ulrich Drepper (of glibc, iconv [...]

Running CouchDB on Fedora Core 6

CouchDB runs well on Fedora Core 6. You just need to ensure you install:

icu-3.6-4
libicu-3.6-4
libicu-devel-3.6-4
erlang-R11B-2.3.fc6

Then it’s simply a question of:

svn checkout http://couchdb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ couchdb
./bootstrap
./configure –with-erlang=/usr/lib/erlang/usr/include
make
make install

Run couchdb and access the inbuilt web server at http://localhost:8888 and enjoy

LPI results out

For those who took LPI on the 29th September 2007, the LPI results are out. Congratulations to those who passed You should be receiving your LPI certification kit within 4-6 weeks. If you don’t receive it, email LPI immediately.
The next LPI exam will probably be held only next year (if possible).
Cheers.