Archive for the ‘FOSS’ Category

Set up Malaysian ISO 3166-2 zones for osCommerce / Zen Cart

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

The standard 'zones' facility of osCommerce has an attribute 'zone_code' which at first glance looks as though it might support a standardised shipping quotation system, but osCommerce comes with a database populated with zone codes that are not at all standard. The kinds of codes that are present in the ...

The Ministry of Tourism Poll: Penang Botanical Garden Arches

Monday, June 14th, 2010

There's plenty of 'information' available in Malaysia, and just a few people publicly questioning its quality. The Ministry of Tourism is conducting a poll on its website to see whether people want to keep the arches being built at the Penang Botanical gardens (Warning: abysmal Flash site). Anil Netto (who ...

On-screen ruler for Ubuntu: screenruler

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

[caption id="attachment_898" align="alignright" width="256" caption="screenruler - two of them, one rotated to vertical"][/caption] Just a quick note to say I've found one of those surprisingly useful features of a graphical desktop that really does make sense. I was thinking about calculating the positions of some elements on a web page and ...

Ubuntu 9.10 on Pentium MMX 233MHz (very old PC!)

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Among the old computers that end up on my desk is a Pentium MMX 233MHz PC from ... I don't know, the dawn of time, probably. It can't have been made any later than late 1990s. I use it for testing code behaviour on low-resource systems. It did have Slackware ...

DVD player died, Ubuntu / NVIDIA TV-Out saves the day!

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

The complaints from the kids were finally overwhelming. Their VCDs and DVDs kept 'sticking' and restarting, but seemed to play OK in our PCs. I couldn't bear the thought of replacing the DVD player, I can't help thinking it's next week's antique. We have an old LG TV for the ...