The Savvy Technologist

An article at Linux.com about a new open source library circulation system caught my eye recently. We’ve had quite a battle getting a new library system going at work, and although I don’t usually use this space to beat up on vendors I feel compelled to name names. Think long and hard before buying InfoCentre from Sagebrush. OK, I’m done. I feel better.

Koha has been around for quite a while, and I almost installed it on a test server a couple years ago. The Linux.com article mentions a newcomer called Evergreen, and it looks pretty promising too. With two good options out there I think it’s time to give serious consideration to moving away from the expensive, proprietary library systems.

We almost have our InfoCentre system running acceptably now, but our media specialists are so frustrated that I think they’d be willing to consider other options. And here’s another situation where our move toward a virtualized server infrastructure pays off. We can create two fully isolated virtual test servers for Koha and Evergreen without having to scrounge up any real hardware. It’s not the highest priority at this point, but I’ll post some observations about both systems when I get around to trying them.

koha, evergreen, ils, library, infocentre

This isn’t a political blog, and I don’t intend for it to become one. But I just can’t ignore the technology angle that’s brewing in our upcoming U.S. election. I’ve been concerned for some time about the potential for fraud and errors associated with the current state of electronic voting devices. Jon Stokes at Ars Technica has an excellent article summarizing the latest information about voting problems and potential problems with these machines.

Party affiliation is irrelevant here. It’s likely that thousands of voters next Tuesday will have their votes miscast or not accepted at all. While I don’t discount entirely the possibility of carefully planned attempts to manipulate the results of the vote, I’m also reminded of what Napolean said, “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” My bigger concern is that large numbers of voters will be disenfranchised by simple technical glitches that won’t be properly handled by poorly trained (however well-intentioned) election judges.

Others have called for a government-sponsored project to develop open source voting software and hardware. I think that’s the only solution that has any hope of producing a secure, reliable, and trustworthy system. I would also recommend the Verified Voting Foundation as a good source of information on this topic.

Please read the Ars Technica article and be prepared to stand up for your right to vote next Tuesday.

electronic voting, midterm election, verified voting foundation, election 2006

Those of us using OS X haven’t had the easiest time with OpenOffice.org. Running that open source office suite has always required additional (but free) software that isn’t usually installed by default on OS X systems. Once installed, the software never really fit in with the rest of my system since it wasn’t a native “Aqua” application. Thanks to NeoOffice 2.0 I finally have a native Aqua version of OpenOffice.org for my PowerBook. MS Word and Excel import and export work great too. Give it a try and you may find that it does the job for you. There must be a lot of computer labs in schools where this software would come in very handy.

openoffice, openoffice.org, neooffice, office suite

There is a bunch of open source software available for Apple’s OS X operating system. Thanks to Open Source Mac it’s now a lot easier to find. Many of the apps have obvious educational uses and other are just for fun. The list is growing so bookmark it and check back occasionally to find new entries.