Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral. A little obvious but I couldn’t let this one pass.

( See here if you missed the entertainment as it happened. )

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

Inkscape is one of the most popular free software vector drawing applications. With minimal effort you can achieve some excellent results. However, for the inexperienced it can be a bit hard to find out how to get those results. In this tutorial I’ll look at creating a simple ribbon effect which will hopefully introduce some of the key Inkscape features along the way.

Some websites need to handle data securely and assure the end-user they are a) secure and b) who they say they are. The traditional way to achieve these is via Secure Socket Layer. Firefox 3 changed what happens when a self-signed SSL certificate is encountered. It’s a change which has caused some concern and much discussion.

Should we only trust certificates signed by third parties? Are there cases where using a self-signed certificate is valid? Should users be informed or warned and how strong should the language of that notification be? Is it possible a simple solution is already available but has been overlooked in all the flan-flinging? I think so.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

When most people install a free software mail transport agent (MTA) they plumb for Postfix, Exim, qmail or Sendmail. Whilst these are all fine, they can be a little over the top for some smaller systems or systems where all you need is some kind of local MTA functionality. In these cases many people will install their favourite MTA anyway — but there are more lightweight alternatives. Here I look at one of them: Smail.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

Recently a blog post entitled “Why Desktop Linux is its own worst enemy has come across my feed-radar a few times. It’s yet another in the long line of “Linux ain’t ready yet” jeremiads and it doesn’t really say anything new yet it got on my nerves. Why?

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

A lot of software users I meet seem to feel they are not using their software as efficiently as they could. If that includes you, then listen up. Here is my list of the ten, lesser-known, OpenOffice.org Writer keyboard shortcuts that will help you improve your productivity.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

The fight against the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard is continuing in many countries. In the UK the UK Unix & Open Systems User Group (UKUUG) unsuccessfully, sought a judicial review of the British Standards Institute’s decision to vote yes. UKUUG are now seeking to appeal against that rejection of a review and you can help them.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw a item entitled “Maybe we should charge for Linux” in an established GNU/Linux site like Linux Today, and from the managing editor no less! Well I just couldn’t let it pass without comment.

Tony Mobily’s recent FSM post A future without Microsoft and the resulting comments have caused me to consider the way we use numbers to argue for free software in the marketplace. I’m not convinced that it’s the best strategy because those waters are particularly muddy when it comes to comparing free and proprietary software.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral