Tag Archives: Open Source
The making of MBChat v3 – part 1 introducing Nested Closure Programming
MB chat is an Ajax chat application that I built for Melinda’s Backups. It was originally so that the leadership team could hold meetings without resorting to e-mail, but it became more of a general social thing for the members of the web site. In order for the software to work out if someone had said anything new, it polled a database every two seconds. Not something that would scale particularly but OK for v1. That was until Melinda herself came to chat one time, and a large number of people tried to come in at the same time.
An update on Asterisk
This is just a quick blog entry to note that I now have a working environment of a local telephone system, including three telephones inside the house and two located with my daughter some way away.
I initially purchased a linksys spa3102 as the first attempt to get ordinary telephones to work with , but after that I discovered the linksys pap2t, which gives two analogue phone circuits each. The whole setup works fine.
I have even managed to get asterisk to set up conference rooms and voicemail. Quality is really good.
Playing with Asterisk
Asterisk is the Open Source PBX software that can manage telephone lines. As well as the classical hardware phones, more importantly for me, it also manages VOIP traffic. I decided to give it a go after I received our last quarterly telephone bill and discovered that we had spent £110 talking to my daughter in the period.
Free as in Freedom as well as to Free as in Beer
I just came across Aaron J Siego’s post in his blog about the difference between free as in beer versus free as in freedom, and how the open source community has not done enough to espouse the benefits of the second form of freedom.
Software Patents are Bad for Europe
Since man first invented the wheel, society moves forward technologically by inventors standing on the shoulders of those who came before. This advance in our knowledge has improved our lives immeasurably, so much so that society wants to encourage inventiveness, by rewarding those that invent new things a monopoly in that invention (a patent) in exchange for the knowledge that future generations can build upon.
My Open Source Philosophy
It may seem strange that someone who has made his living for over 35 years in the software business, with at least 15 of those years in charge of a product for which we charged significant licence fees, should advocate the open source movement and the supply of software for free. This paper clarifies, and then justifies, my stance on this. I hope that in doing so I may add to the debate on the subject by showing why I believe that despite the free availability of software there is still significant revenues and profit to be made by those that wish to supply solutions to the business community for money.
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Melinda’s Backups
Alan is the IT director of Melinda’s Backups., the official “Support Association” for Melinda Doolittle
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