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7 August 2007
Posted by Nad on 7 August 2007 at 02:02
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format ERP Research I've had to accept the reality that the nodal model is still in its infancy and will not be able to help us with managing our organisational systems or those of our associated organisations such as Zenovia and NomadIT for quite some time yet. So in the mean time we need to include existing management software into our current software management system (the OD/Wikia) which currently allows us to set up and maintain instances of MediaWiki and ensure that those instances are backed up and that the entire configuration is easily portable between servers. OD/Wikia is being made more generic so that it can include a range of LAMP applications which can be dynamically linked with domain names in the same way as the MediaWiki's currently can. The configuration of these domains and their software will be managed from within the wiki using FileSync II. But what software should we use to handle our organisational requirements? Our main requirements are that it be fully open-source freeware and web-accessible. I've been checking out some ERP systems, see the ERP article, but so far have found nothing appropriate. The GNUe system looks impressive but is too early in development to use yet. TinyERP is too difficult to install, has too many external dependencies and is not LAMP. WebERP is LAMP but it's interface and usability is complete crap. I'm currently checking out vTiger and OsFinancials and attempting to integrate them into the OD/Wikia system.

6 February 2011
Posted by Nad on 5 February 2011 at 22:36
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Organic Design to become Squeakers Toward the end of 2010 we contacted a number of different languages and platform's developer mailing-lists to try and determine the best choice of software to use for the organisational system and project management aspects. We came to the conclusion that for the short-term Drupal would be best since it has all the tools we need now. However, our ideal system must run in a fully p2p and offline-capable manner which the LAMP environment is not well-suited to, so we've ended up deciding on Squeak (an open source version of Smalltalk) for a number of important reasons. Squeak works in a way which is very aligned with our Nodal Model in that it's self-contained (its own interpreter and virtual machine are described in its own language) and unified (the class and instance structures are aspects of the same runtime object structure). Being self-contained means that any part of it can be changed through collaboration using the same tools that are used to develop the content. It also has the Seaside web-application framework and the Pier CMS so that we don't have to build our system from scratch. A major advantage of Squeak is that each application that's added extends the Squeak object structure itself so that modifications can be made to the core workings of the system using high-level tools at the model level. We've found in our research that this is an essential feature for being able to migrate the system from a single instance's (peer's) runtime structure to a unified network-wide persistent runtime formed from all the currently running instances.

12 July 2008
Posted by Nad on 10 July 2008 at 23:28
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Get Loaded! PayPal used to be an excellent alternative to the whole credit industry for online payments, but then it got bought by the huge eBay corporation in 2002, and by 2007 had achieved the status of a proper bank in many countries. Now it's charges and fees are much higher and requires its users to have a credit card linked to their account or it will become frozen and unusable. However, it's still one of the most widely accepted and useful online payment solutions. Until recently this new credit card requirement was a problem for NZ customers who couldn't obtain one due to a bad credit-rating. But now we have some local debit card options such as the Visa "Loaded" card which you can get from any NZ Post Shop (take two forms of ID and $16.50 with you). It's a normal credit card but with zero credit (i.e. it's prepaid), but it still links to your name and address like a normal Visa card so you can use it to get a proper verified PayPal account. I recently applied for a Loaded card and today I successfully used it to verify my PayPal account. Once you're a verified PayPal user, you have no limit to how much you can receive, send or transfer and you can enable other useful features such as the ability to accept credit card payments on your site, instead of only being able to accept payments from other PayPal users.

05 December 2006
Posted by Nad on 4 December 2006 at 20:48
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Poor Mike throws in the towel after a long battle with the Troppo :-( Thanks to contributions and assistance from so many of you, Mike Ruppert was successfully moved from Venezuela to Canada on November 18th. He is currently in the greater Toronto area and receiving medical care and rest thanks to dedicated Peak Oil activists. In addition to his previously described symptoms it has been learned that his adrenal system is severely damaged and there may be toxicity of the liver. He has lost more than 20 pounds in the last ten weeks. Many of you have written suggesting possible poisoning as cause for his known symptoms. We are not pursuing that at the moment because the treatment for the symptoms would not change in either case. Mike has received offers of residency from more than 20 countries on five continents. It will not be possible to further consider those options until his health has stablized which may take several months. In addition, Mike must also turn his attention to a number of legal issues arising from FTW's permanent cessation of operations. Mike sends the following message to all FTW subscribers, friends and fans: "Over the past four months many of you have touched me with your generous and loving offers of support and encouragement. You have kept me alive. I have also understood, probably for the first time, how deeply FTW has impacted your lives and the lives of a new and younger generation. As my health and my access to your letters improves I will be writing personally to as many of you as I possibly can. "I want to repeat something I have been saying in private emails over the last month. Personally, I am through forever with investigative journalism and public lecturing. I am leaving public life. It is my hope that by continuing to repeat this sincere position that many of the inexplicable difficulties which have dominated my life over the past months will ease. "It is time to move on. I spent twenty-seven years as a dedicated public activist and that is something which I am no longer able or inclined to do. The price was ultimately too great. I want to assure all FTW creditors that if it takes the rest of my life we will pay off our debts. Unfortunately, any unfillfilled orders will not and cannot be shipped. We will refund them as soon as we are able. Many of the tragedies and mishaps which marked FTW's final months and necessitated its closure became a perfect storm. How they played out has already been discussed. But I am still alive and plans are underway to have the FTW web site archived in perpetuity on the internet for the benefit of future researchers and we expect that to happen soon. "This is not the end but a new beginning."

16 May 2010
Posted by Nad on 16 May 2010 at 03:35
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Decentralize the web with Diaspora Diaspora is the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network. Four talented young programmers from NYU's Courant Institute are trying to raise money so they can spend the summer building Diaspora; an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data. Enter your Diaspora "seed", a personal web server that stores all of your information and shares it with your friends. Diaspora knows how to securely share (using GPG the GNU implementation of OpenPGP) your pictures, videos, and more. For a little more detailed explanation, checkout this blog post. Another extremely interesting aspect of this is KickStarter which is the donation system that the Diaspora team have used to raise development funds for their project. KickStarter allows anyone to set up a new project and to specify what their goals are and how much money they need to achieve them. The site then accepts donations from people who want to support it, but if after 30 days the project hasn't met their required amount, the people get their money back. This is an ingenious idea which is similar in some ways to the escrow model seen in many online project management environments. The Diaspora project is an example of a very successful project on KickStarter. The team required $10,000 to work solidly on their development over the summer break, and had received more than that after only 12 days! At the time of writing this article the total received is $166,926 and there's still 17 days to go!! Click here to see what it's up to now. Update: Diaspora's funding closed on 2 July having received $200,642 from 6479 backers :-) See also Diaspora - our local article on Diaspora Eben Moglen's speech that inspired Diaspora quirky.com Diaspora Roadmap and Wishlist on Github Introduction to diaspora Diaspora guys discussing technical details of implementation

21 September 2011
Posted by Nad on 22 September 2011 at 00:27
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Help stop illegal plunder in Libya! There are definitely two sides to this story about Giddafi and the reasons for the NATO attack on Libya - the problem is that there's extreme propaganda on both sides. The so called "Little Green Book" seems to be very good, but whether or not it was written by Giddafi I don't know, its content is about how to run a free nation and what true democracy really is. Talking to people from Libya doesn't help as some say he's a hero and others say he's an evil tyrant. Videos such as this one that went viral a month or two ago may be true, or may be just as much propaganda as anything Fox or CNN ever come up with. One thing I know for certain is that regardless of whether he was a hero or a tyrant, being ruled by the global financial elite is a big problem. See also: Arab Awakening - Libya: Through the fire - real or more propaganda? RT news on the Libya conflict Why Libya? Why Now? - very good speech by Vladimir Kršljanin (4 parts on YouTube) Technology for the New Society Social mechanism Common vision Self governance Law

16 March 2006
Posted by Nad on 16 March 2006 at 08:15
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format SWF Compiler Functional! swf.php is now up and running within the XmlWiki environment, and swf.pl should be close behind :-) A working example which you can experiment with is at Flash compiling example. PNG's are working fine, but flashvars are not, they've had to be hacked in at compile-time. The logo-with-changes-behind is now generated from logo.as and logo.xml.

7 April 2012
Posted by Nad on 7 April 2012 at 22:04
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format P2P Wikipedia gets closer Looks like p2p tech is finally mature enough to handle the functionality of a large SQL-intensive app like Wikipedia. Scalaris is fully p2p and they used the project of a Wikipedia clone as their proof of concept. "To prove our concept, we implemented a simple Wikipedia clone on Scalaris which performs several thousand transactions per second on just a few servers." Their aim is to use it in a world-wide cluster of servers, but it shouldn't be too much of a big step to make the server aspect available for clients to run. See also: Scalaris.pdf - the original paper Peer to peer - local P2P article PeerPedia - local ideas about p2p Wikipedia PeerVote - another related aspect of p2p Wikipedia

14 July 2013
Posted by Nad on 14 July 2013 at 23:11
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Wikimedia starts a major new workflow framework The Wikimedia foundation have embarked on a grand new project addressing the need for a generic solution to workflow called "Flow". At first glance, Flow is a next generation discussion system - but that is only one part of it. Flow is actually a rethinking of how the foundation works collaboratively on their projects. Initially, the key components of Flow are will include powerful ways for users to have insight into their discussions, interests, subscriptions and tagging. Of particular interest to us here at Organic Design is the incorporation into Flow of a "Workflow Description Language" module which can potentially encapsulate all the systems from discussion and notification mechanisms up to large-scale project workflow scenarios. This is the kind of thing we were trying to head towards with our Wiki Organisation system. For more information, see the Flow Portal.

7 March 2007
Posted by Nad on 7 March 2007 at 12:07
This post has the following tags: News
This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format Tree-view component upgraded The XmlWiki tree-view.php component has now been turned into a wrapper of the superior MediaWiki treeview.php version which can handle recusive transclusion and allows items within the tree to include tranclusion of other trees too. This new version is designed to work with any normal MediaWiki 1.6.x or later and has a page on the MediaWiki wiki at MW:Extension:Tree view. Trees can be transcluded within other trees so we can define large trees from structures of smaller trees. Such a conglomerate trees are defined using the following syntax: <div class=tree-view> *Tree1 **Item1 ***Sub item1 **{{:Tree2}} **Item3 </div> In this example, an article called Tree2 is transcluded as an item in Tree1. Tree2 is defined as a normal tree starting at root which can be used elsewhere in the normal way. The tree-view code matches nested trees and adjusts them to the appropriate depth for them to seemlessly integrate into single whole tree. The class and other attributes of sub-trees are ignored and the whole tree renders in accord with the attributes of the root tree.

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