IT Journalist

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Mon Feb 4 15:33:19 CET 2013

During Fosdem 2013's key signing party, several participants pointed out that I needed to update my gnupg key. Today I have set up a new key, and will be transitioning away from my old one. The old key will continue to be valid for some time, but I prefer all future correspondence to come to the new one. I would also like this new key to be re-integrated into the web of trust. This message is signed by both keys to certify the transition.

Ever found yourself searching on Google for a PDF (or any other downloadable file), in order to include the link to that PDF in a text? Only to be confronted by a monstrous long url that only a Google can understand? If you look closely, you'll see the actual link to the PDF, wrapped in Google's meta data.

It is easy enough to fix

Public administrations need not fear switching to open source, says Matthias Günter, until last month CIO of the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property. "Wherever we use it, after the usual careful selection that we apply to any software implementation, it proves its worth."

An article for the EC's Joinup project, published on 01 October 2012. Read it here.

Exit costs, the cost of IT vendor lock-in, the cost of network effects and innovation should be included in any Total Cost of Ownership financial estimate of IT projects, says the OpenForum Academy, a think-tank.

An article for the European Commission's Joinup project, published on 27 September 2012 . Read it here.

Parliaments around the world are only slowly increasing their use of free and open source solutions, according to the World e-Parliament Report 2012, published last week. Most parliaments (80 %) now use at least one open source application. In most cases this type of software is used to run servers (50 %), for webpublishing (36 %), databases (31 %) and email (31 %).

The board of the German city council of Freiburg should disclose the analysis that underlies its move back to proprietary office software, say the Open Source Business Alliance, the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Bundesverbands Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie. In an open letter published this morning, the three organisations also call on the city board to keep the Open Document Format as the default.

The cadastre administration in Luxembourg uses open source software solutions where possible. This type of software was used, for example, to build its latest online service, a wizard that makes it easy to order cadastral extracts online.

An article for the EC's Joinup project, published on 17 August 2012. Read it here.

Spain's public administrations are aware of the advantages of sharing and reusing software solutions. According to a white paper published on 2 August by the PAE, the federal administration's e-government portal, both technology and platforms for collaboration are mature.

An article for the EC's Joinup project, published on 8 August 2012. Read it here.

A 4 line mini howto "get the multimedia keys working on a Thinkpad T400s". This laptop is running Debian Sid, yet this will work for other distro's too.

the only Debian and variants specific line is:

apt-get install xbindkeys xbindkeys-config

The rest should be the same for all distro's.

Create the file .xbindkeysrc containing:

#Mute
"amixer -q set Master toggle"
m:0x0 + c:121
XF86AudioMute

The 4200 desktop PCs used in the public administration of the German city of Mannheim are completely locked-in by proprietary software, says head of the city's IT infrastructure department, Gerd Armbruster. The city quietly abandoned a move to open standards and open source in 2007. "Vendor independence is no longer a political topic, here."

An article for the EC's Joinup project, published on 10 February 2012. Read it here.

All laptops used by European officials should have either LibreOffice or OpenOffice installed, two open source suites of office applications. This suggest the mayor of the German city of Munich, Christian Ude, to Neelie Kroes.

An article written for the EC's Joinup project, published on 20 December here

Het Rotterdamse waterschap vraagt in een aanbesteding specifiek om Microsoft, maar zegt tegelijkertijd over te willen op open source. Het zoekt in feite een leverancier van open source Microsoft.

Het Hoogheemraadschap van Schieland en de Krimpenerwaard in Rotterdam krijgt een spoedcursus aanbestedingsrecht van het ministerie van Economische Zaken, Landbouw en Innovatie (El&I). Tenminste, als het ligt aan de Tweedekamerfractie van D66.

This is a note, more to myself, on Emacs' Gnus (certainly one among the best email clients ever). Gnus offers multiple ways to search and find messages in mailboxes or on mailservers. Here is a handy one, finding and marking messages by mail header:

in a mail box, hit '&', select header, fill in the desired value, select type of mark (E for expiry, for instance).

more here.

Meaning others may add applications to router Linux-firmware

ADSL modems are PCs, ruled the Regional Court of Berlin last Tuesday, and their owners can do with it whatever they like. That includes installing software on it, says Cybits, a software maker selling applications to make Internet connections at home and at school safe for children.

A news article published by Tech Eye on 10 November 2011. Read the full text here.

Alex Bennée yesterday released the latest version of "Edit with Emacs" to the Google Chrome web-store.

This nifty tool allows Emacs users to "edit text areas on the browser" using this flexible editor.

I'm using it, for instance, to write this little announcement.

Find "Edit with Emacs" here.

Following the link will install it in Chromium. It will also put a copy of edit-server.el in your

Is your browser's download folder slowly filling up with copies of pdf's and other files that you downloaded twice or more times?

You recognise them instantly whenever you look at the list of files in that folder
file foo.pdf
file foo (1).pdf
file foo (2).pdf

Here are two easy ways to get rid of these two copies:

1) find . -name "*\([12]\)*" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

or, shorter:

2) ls -b *\([12]\)* | xargs rm

Bedrijven krijgen terabytes vol klantgedrag en marktinformatie op zich af. Onder de databerg is een goudmijn verstopt, maar het goud is maar op één manier te delven: met nóg meer software.

An article for Management Team, published on 10 October 2011. The complete article can be read here .

Gemeenten falen met het digitaal opslaan van documenten. Dat blijkt uit een minimale steekproef onder twaalf Nederlandse gemeenten. Veel van de gevraagde elektronische bestanden zijn niet meer te openen, slecht leesbaar of opgeslagen in foute, fabriekseigen formaten.

Zonder al te veel moeite zet de gemeente Ede begin juni duizend medewerkers over op mail- en agendaserver Zarafa. De gebruikers krijgen eindelijk op afstand toegang tot hun e-mail en agenda, zowel thuis op hun Mac als onderweg op een willekeurige smartphone. Het grootst is de schok voor de Exchange-beheerder: “Hij ziet de Linux-cursus niet zitten en heeft daarom nu een alternatieve functie.”