Ottawa Roundtable on Social Movements & Open Source

Russell McOrmond & I attended the Social Change and Community Technology Roundtable yesterday, June 16th. This was organized by Martin Itzkow and supported by the JW McConnell Family Foundation and the PLAN Institute for Caring Citizenship. It is always nice to meet with people like this and share our excitment about Open Source as a tool to build more collaboration between progressive organizations. Mike

Google Links

Google is great for a lot of things, but it s a pretty big place and often it doesn't seem like there is much of a road map to services that you actually want to use. Thought I'd just put together a few links that I'm using. GMail / Gtalk (why this can't also keep the .ca I'm not sure): http://mail.google.com/mail/ Google Maps (would be good if map.google.ca would redirect to maps.google.ca): http://maps.google.ca/ Google News - a nice customizable way to view the world: http://news.google.ca/ Google's Webmaster Tools - the Google sitemap interface: https://www.google.ca/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview Google Analytics - to monitor site...

Makepovertyhistory.org's cornerwhitebandsmallright css/javascript

I saw this a few times, but wanted to make sure I'd be able to find it again. Haven't seen other campaign sites with banners like this, but totally see how it could be a useful form of promotion. The javascript just provides referrer information for make poverty history.. Probably better ways to do this, but interesting.. The banner fits in very nicely with the white wristband that this campaign uses. Could also be used quite effectively with breast cancer campaigns or any of the ribbon campaigns out there. // Current Page Reference// copyright Stephen Chapman, 1st Jan 2005// you...

CVS Patching Tutorial 1

by Peter Bojanic Scenario: You customize a file that is under CVS control with some local changes (e.g. hostname, owner) and some common changes (e.g. application logic, host-independent variables). You need to commit some of your changes but not others. I'm working with a file called BE_config.php. There are some local customizations to make Back-End work on my machine and there are some common changes that need to be check into cvs. 1. First, move the working file out of the way: $ mv BE_config.php BE_config.php-peter 2. Now, let's get the latest version from cvs: $ cvs update BE_config.php U...

How to roll back the version of a file in CVS

Peter Bojanics put this together for OpenConcept. Familiar scenario: someone has checked a new version of a file into the CVS tree that resulted in a regression of the application. You want to roll that version back to a known state. This brief tutorial shows how to do it. 1. First, I update my working copy to the latest version... $ cvs update BE_Article.class P BE_Article.class 2. Now, let's find the latest stable version... $ cvs log BE_Article.class RCS file: /cvsroot/back-end/back-end0.5.x/class/BE_Article.class,v revision 1.45 date: 2003/04/08 16:40:51; author: iclysdal; state: Exp; lines: +109 revision 1.44 date: 2003/04/05 23:20:51; author: mgifford; state:...

phpMyAdmin Help

phpMyAdmin is an powerful tool to help folks manage their MySQL databases. Generally this tool is well documented and there is an active forum if folks want to ask questions to the community. Setting up Sub-Account Permissions MySQL (which is the database which is controlled by phpMyAdmin) has a great many levels of permissions which allows a lot of flexibility for securing your data. If you have a number of databases which you would like to administer, you can do this under a single MySQL user account. However, you can also give access to specific databases and tables to different...

Grep/Find Tools for locating text in Linux.

1) Problem with stripping front & back slashes Looking for an easy way to find php array definitions without quotes $foo[bar] = 'bad'; with definitions with quotes: $foo['bar'] = 'good'; Peter Bojanic suggested the following: grep \"[[^'\"$].*[^'\"]]\" *.php Which is the set of all things in square brackets that do not start with either quote character or a $. This set includes some valid extras, like $bits[count($bits)-1], but you just have to careful. Extra spaces below a ?> in a php script can cause problems with cookies, caching, sessions, etc.. It's often a problem finding which file has the extra...

Using wget to Mirror Whole Web Sites

The following should all allow you to mirror an existing site from the Internet to your hard drive (if you are using a Mac or Linux): wget --convert-links --mirror http://www.slashdot.org wget -r -k -R .pdf -Dslashdot.org http://www.slashdot.org wget -r -l5 -k -Dslashdot.org http://www.slashdot.org It can be a useful way to migrate a script from an old server (which you may no longer have access to) to a new one.

Why NGOs and Unions Should Use OpenSource

The following was adapted from a workshop lead by Mike Gifford on why NGOs should be interested in Open Source: Practical reasons why NGOs and the organizations that work with them should use Free/Libre Open Source Software Viruses - Any other OS than Windows will have fewer problems with viruses. Stability - GNU/Linux is a very stable Operating System, and Mac's stability has increased considerably with OS X which is based on Free Software. Cost - No license fees (up front or annual), no mandatory upgrades (you can choose to upgrade or not), and no external costs to try out...

WTOAction & WTOCaravan

OpenConcept's origins were based in the anti-globalization movement framed by the Battle of Seattle. In the fall of 1999 we were contracted to provide a web site for the Cross Canada Caravan Against the WTO. This was a loose coalition of unions, NGOs, student groups and political organizations that was organizing to raise awareness about the World Trade Organization. OpenConcept's origins were based in the anti-globalization movement framed by the Battle of Seattle. In the fall of 1999 we were contracted to provide a web site for the Cross Canada Caravan Against the WTO. This was a loose coalition of...