Posts published by “Christine Hall”

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Facebook Compromises With Social Fixer

Facebook Compromises With Social Fixer

By Christine Hall on October 17, 2013 |

Business, Social Networks and Software

Sometimes the community can win. Hordes of people became upset when Facebook began playing hardball with Matt Kruse and the browser extension he develops. Called…

Watching the Penguin’s Back at All Things Open

Ross Gardler, speaker for Microsoft at All Things Open

Watching the Penguin’s Back at All Things Open

By Christine Hall on October 14, 2013 |

Business and Site News

You can be certain of one thing; if you’re a penguinista I’ll have your back at the All Things Open conference. I’ll be paying attention. Plenty of good companies and organizations will be represented at the the conference, to be held next week in Raleigh, but it is an enterprise conference so there will be a few snakes slithering about.

Mainly I’m talking about Oracle and Microsoft.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

IT-oLogy: Opening Doors in Raleigh With ‘All Things Open’

By Christine Hall on October 9, 2013 |

Business and Software

The story behind All Things Open (ATO) is IT-oLogy, the nonprofit behind the conference coming to Raleigh later this month. This occurred to me last week as I was preparing for the event, on a night when I’d decided I knew as much as I wanted to know for the moment about the speakers and their workshops and started to look into IT-oLogy.

IT-oLogy school kids — IT-oLogy working with grade school students

Like most, I imagine, I was basically ignorant about the organization. I knew a few scattered facts. I also knew that in our dealings with them, FOSS Force has been treated with respect and encouragement. As I read about them, and started to connect the dots, I began to realize that IT-oLogy and All Things Open are joined at the hip. This conference isn’t separate from them; it’s just part of what they do.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Facebook Gives ‘Social Fixer’ Ultimatum

Facebook Gives ‘Social Fixer’ Ultimatum

By Christine Hall on October 7, 2013 |

Browsers, Business, Internet, News and Social Networks

Things aren’t going well for Matt Kruse, the developer of the über-popular Social Fixer browser extension which gives users control over how their Facebook pages and news feeds appear to them. It works within the browser and doesn’t affect the experience of anyone on Facebook other than the user. With it, status updates can be tabbed, items can be filtered, and it allows hiding or blocking sponsored stories and other advertising that runs through the news feed.

The last we heard, about three weeks ago, Zuckerberg’s people had taken down Social Fixer‘s popular Facebook page, a place for users to testify for the app and seek help and for Mr. Kruse to make announcements about updates and so forth. FB was claiming it removed the page due to reports of spamming, but was offering no way for him to plead his case.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Zen Cart Migration: When the Manual Fails

By Christine Hall on October 1, 2013 |

Tutorial and Web Apps

RTFM.

Anybody who’s played with computers outside of surfing, sending emails and doing some word processing has run across these initials at least once or twice. Put politely, they mean, “Read the manual.”

Sometimes the manual is of little use, however. Such was the case in a recent Zen Cart migration I undertook. However, even in cases where the manual is being ignored, it should still be read first. Before going off book, it helps to understand the process behind what you are doing.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Why Not ‘Click to Play’ Flash?

By Christine Hall on September 30, 2013 |

Browsers, Business, Internet and Media

Last week we learned that in the near future, browser plugins won’t automatically work out of the box in Chrome and Firefox. Instead of running automatically whenever a website calls for a plugin function, they’ll be “click to play,” meaning the user will have to give permission for the plugin to run with each instance. According to Google and Mozilla, this new rule will apply to each and every browser plugin in existence on the entire planet, save one. Flash will still run automatically, requiring no prompt from the user. With Flash, it’ll be business as usual.

This has the look and smell of a business play all the way through, although that might not be immediately evident when reading what ad giant Google and open source Mozilla have to say. At first glance, their reasoning makes sense. Flash is just too darn ubiquitous. It’s everywhere; buried in everything. Including Flash in “click to play” would put too much of a burden on the user.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

The Death of the Browser Plugin is a Good Thing

By Christine Hall on September 25, 2013 |

Browsers, Internet and Web Apps

Oddly, the death of the browser plugin started with Microsoft. Now, the other two major players in the browser game seem to be in the process of saying goodbye as well, although it’ll be a long goodbye evidently.

Everybody’s reporting on this. Earlier this week we heard that Google is in the process of doing away with the NPAPI architecture, a Netscape relic. They’re not throwing it out the window just yet; they’re just making it a damn nuisance to use. Brad Chacos at PCWorld put it this way:

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

When a WordPress Update Goes Awry

By Christine Hall on September 25, 2013 |

Business, Tutorial and Web Apps

I guess this is something of a cautionary tale.

The weekend before last we decided that it was time to update the WordPress installations on two of our five sites. Both sites had been using version 3.4.2 which was now a year old. Days earlier, WordPress had released 3.6.1, urging all users to update due to some serious security issues. Although it wasn’t clear that this affected the version we were using, we decided to go ahead and update. It was time.

That Friday night, in the wee hours of Saturday morning actually, I upgraded If This Be Treason, our less trafficked site. I began by checking all of the plugins to make sure they were good-to-go with WordPress’ latest and greatest and then updated all that had newer versions available. Except for one, all of the plugins used by that site indicated they worked with at least 3.6.0, which was good enough I figured, since 3.6.1 was only days old and was primarily a bugfix and security release, otherwise no different than the earlier point version.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

‘All Things Open’ Conference Offers Enterprise & More

By Christine Hall on September 23, 2013 |

Business, Media and Site News

When IT-oLogy opens the doors to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh on October 23, the focus will be on open source in the enterprise. That’s only fitting, given the fact that Raleigh is Red Hat’s playground–and Red Hat practically wrote the book on enterprise level open source.

Every hour during the two day conference there will be six lectures or workshops with at least four of them tailored especially for the business IT crowd. There’ll be tech-centric workshops on Python, databases, big data, Github, PHP and more. Not being a developer or admin type, I can only imagine what all of this might mean to the serious IT department types as they peruse the All Things Open schedule.

So where does that leave the rest of us who work with FOSS everyday without getting our knuckles dirty writing code, building and tweaking networks or figuring out new and better ways to make big bucks with computer technology? Is there anything at All Things Open for those of us who think the word “code” must always be preceded by “morse” or that “enterprise” refers to a Federation star ship laden with photon torpedoes?

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Oracle Losing Its MySQL Grip to MariaDB

By Christine Hall on September 16, 2013 |

Business and Software

When it comes to Oracle as caretaker of FOSS projects, users are voting with their feet.

The company that already very quickly lost control of OpenOffice when most of the project’s developers bolted, formed the Document Foundation and forked the code to create LibreOffice, is now in danger of losing another open source jewel it inherited when it took over Sun. LibreOffice, as you know, is now the defacto office suite of choice among Linux users and is rapidly gaining traction in the Windows world as well. OpenOffice is pretty much only a memory.

Of course, no one ever expected Oracle to be a good open source caretaker.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com