Category: Uncategorized

Friday afternoon funnies

(13:37:27) lazza barr: atarau quite perplexed by baby doll
(13:37:33) chris.cormack: oh?
(13:37:44) lazza barr: starring at it
(13:37:48) lazza barr: patting its head
(13:37:49) chris.cormack: hehe
(13:38:00) lazza barr: lol and now hitting it with wooden mallet
(13:38:11) lazza barr: lol
(13:39:10) chris.cormack: lol
(13:39:15) chris.cormack: he’s awesome
(13:39:53) lazza barr: hes into that “must hit this with that” phase
(13:40:02) chris.cormack: hehe
(13:40:31) lazza barr: this morning he was hitting his own knee making the reflex kick him in the face

koha-community.org

Today in a community meeting in irc it was decided to continue on with the koha-community.org domain and begin migrating things other than just the website to it.

From the email from Galen

The log of the meeting can be found at

http://stats.workbuffer.org/irclog/koha/2010-03-02#i_403276

I recommend that all members of the Koha community read through this
carefully.  Highlights of the meeting include:

* The draft rules for the Horowhenua Library Trust’s Koha Committee
have been assented to (with some revisions that were discussed during
the meeting) by HLT and the attendees of the meeting.

* As negotiations concerning the transfer of the US Koha trademark and
koha.org domain have completely stalled, we decided to adopt
http://koha-community.org/ as the main website of the Koha project and
to start transferring services such as the wiki, the bugs databases,
the Git repository to new hosting under the koha-community.org domain.

The next community handover meeting is scheduled for 19:00 UTC+0 on 6
April 2010.

New release of the Koha Live CD

From Miztik’s site

This release adds the much-requested Zebra support and updates Koha to 3.0.5. You don’t need to configure anything, as I have pre-configured zebra daemons to start automatically and added the crontab for indexing, which will be there as soon as the Live CD starts up. You do need to select to use Zebra when you go through the web-installer wizard, as well as selecting “Marc21″ when asked.

So go ahead check out the project page and give it a whirl

Hide and snake

Tonight before bed I said to Kahurangi “One more game before bed”, Kahurangi said “Let’s play hide and snake”. I said “I don’t know how to play that” he said “I’ll show you” then he ran off and got his toy snake, then got a blanket and climbed under it with the snake and yelled “Find me daddy!”.

I’m still not totally clear on the rules but he seemed to enjoy it.

Kohacon10 registrations open

If you are planning on attending Kohacon10 in Wellington later this year, please go to http://kohacon.appspot.com/2010/registration/ to register.

Registration is free but we do need to know numbers. If you wish to donate to help with running costs there is a paypal button as well. Space is limited so please register only if you are coming.

Full git stats for Koha

So after the great article by Eric Hellman on his blog about the copyright to Koha code I decided to learn about subtree merging so I could combine the old koha repo, with the new one. That way instead of having the stats broken into 2 different ones, pre 2000 and post 2000, I can generate stats for the whole of the history of Koha.

Github has a great tutorial that I’m not going to repeat here. But if you follow it, you will end up with a repository that combines as many other repositories as you need.

So here’s the stats report. Some interesting things:

  • If you look at at the activity tab, you can see that we have pretty even coverage for all 24 hours of the day.
  • If you look at the general page you will see we average 3.2 commits a day .. doesn’t sound that much until you realise that is 3.2 commits average for 3755 days!!
  • Out of the last 32 weeks, there is a only a single week where commits dipped into single figures

So whatever might be happening elsewhere, main trunk development of Koha is as strong as ever. Tis good to see.

Koha round up from Linux Conf Australia 2010

I had a great week last week at LCA2010, apparently there were about 650 attendees … which makes it one of the larger conferences I have attended.

Some of the presentation highlights for me

  • Jeremy Allison’s talk about ‘The Elephant in the room, Free Software and Microsoft’
  • Andrew Tridgell – Patent Defence for Free Software
  • Patrick Brennan – The Bravest man in NZ
  • Mark Osborne – For his presentation in the education mini-conf and the lightning talk as part of the keynotes

And equally as good were all the social (organised and unorganised) parts around the edges. I got to catch up with some friends, and make quite a few new ones.

Ok, bringing it back to Koha, I mentioned Mark Osborne before, he is the deputy principal at Albany Senior High School, and one of the best advocates for Free Software and Koha you are likely to meet. His school is Free and Open Source Software end to end, linux on the servers, linux on the desktops, Koha, Moodle, Mahara, Inkscape .. the list goes on an on. One of the more memorable quotes of the conference and one that resonates hugely with me was in his lightning talk. In New Zealand Microsoft and the Ministry of Education have a deal locked up that provides Microsoft software free of cost to schools (not free of cost to taxpayers of course), so Albany could have done the easy thing and just taken this, but instead they chose to empower their students.

Although there was Gratis we chose Libre

Mark actually spoke before me on Tuesday at the education Mini-conf, he did such a good job I was actually rewriting my talk as he spoke to take out all the points he covered.

I also bumped into the fantastic people from Technology Wise in Tauranga. They have installed Koha in a couple of schools and working on getting it into more in the Bay of Plenty area. Smart people, passionate about what they do. I am sure we will be talking much more in the future.

As Jo mentioned in her great blog post, I also got to spend some time with Bob Birchall of Calyx. We had some good talks and formulated some good ideas for the future.

There was also quite a bit of interest in Koha from attendees, and I learnt quite a few little tips that can be useful for us. I really do think 2010 is going to be the best Koha year yet.