Minimal IT newsletters - open standards and free and open source software
Free and open source software is a viable alternative to commercial products. Once you have switched to free software, you are unlikely ever to switch back.
Cheap IT helps small companies compete on a technologically equal basis with large companies. As well as cutting costs, cheap IT helps you beat your competition with innovative products.
Are you stuck for ideas for presents this year? Give your loved ones Linux!
What do Ozzy Osbourne and Tim Berners-Lee have in common? Whatever it is, it could be disrupting your IT department very soon.
Big documents like user manuals are really hard to write using Microsoft Word. DocBook is a well-established standard that makes writing big documents much easier.
Inkscape and The Gimp are full-featured open source graphics programs. Even if you are not a professional artist or designer, they have plenty of features that you will find useful.
I use free and open source software all the time, but I have not open sourced my own products. Am I an open source hypocrite?
Offline electronic forms are a useful part of many IT solutions. The XForms standard meets requirements that many commercial products do not meet.
If you develop or manage web sites or IT systems, you need to know about XForms.
Standards are too important to be monopolies. We need to introduce more competition into standards so that they can be adopted more widely.
If you do not use a password manager like KeePass, you should.
The latest formats make it much easier to export data and reports to Excel, even if you do not use Microsoft technology and do not have the latest versions of Microsoft Office.
The XML processing language XSLT is a powerful and flexible solution to many development needs.
Free and open source software is constantly improving, and becoming more of a challenge to paid-for, closed-source software. Where will it end?
Power*Architect is a free, open-source data modelling and database design tool that is easy to use and packed with features.
The latest release of Ubuntu for netbooks demonstrates the increasing quality and flexibility of Linux.
HTML should be the first choice for most documentation produced in IT.
Freemind is an easy-to-use open source mind mapping tool that can help you organise you thoughts.
Basic web technologies do not fully meet the demands of modern websites.
JavaScript overcomes the limitations of plain HTML and CSS websites, but is difficult to do well.
jQuery is an important technology for anyone involved in writing websites or developing business systems that run on the web.
AntiSamy is a very effective open-source library for making web sites more secure.
Commercial software can be hard to learn, but free software can be hard to remember.
Image Magick is a powerful image manipulation utility that you can use to build automated image processing solutions or solve image management problems.
Open source products are the best choice for integrating into larger solutions.
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We use the term "metadata-driven" to describe IT solutions in which functionality is defined in data. Taking this to the extreme can provide unparalleled levels of speed, simplicity and versatility.
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