issue tracking / ticketing system

RT is an enterprise-grade open source ticketing system which enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users.

the alternative to MS Office

Have you purchased a new computer recently? Did they give you a micky mouse slimed down version of MS Office because you decided against the additional £250 upgrade option? Open Office is for you.

OpenOffice.org (Linux/Windows) is a fully-featured office productivity suite, compatible with other market leading products such as MS Office. It is developed and improved by a virtual community.

Many people will have heard about it but there are those who haven’t. Use it… it’s good.

I feel that in the years to come many sectors such as government, public administration, and education should have to justify why they are not using it.

It has a similar look and feel to the Microsoft alternative. Some things are implemented differently which means there can be a bit of a learning curve but let’s face it, most of use don’t use 90% of the functionality in Office anyway.

The biggest selling points from my point of view are:

• ability to open and save documents in Microsoft .doc format
• and it’s free!

I generally use the word processor and spreadsheet.

One draw-back is that it takes a little while to start Open Office on my old laptop. I can generally live with that, and if I know I only need to do X, Y, Z I might use KWord or KSpread instead which also has .doc format compatibility.

saving a Word document as a PDF

Open Office (Linux/Windows) has a cool feature which lets you save a document in PDF format with one click.

effective spam filtering

If you’d had an email address of any length of time which has appeared on websites or otherwise been picked up by automated spammers you’ll be sick of receiving junk emails, not to mention how much of your time it eats up.

I make use of Kmail (Kontact) which is like Outlook Express in Windows for some websites which I maintain. One of the neat features of this is that several anti-spam filter tools are available (free!). I use Bogofilter which you teach initially. Yes, it learns. If it makes an incorrect classification (spam or not-spam), you teach it with a single mouse click.

I do however also make use of a free Google mail account via its intuitive web browser interface. This includes good spam filtering. Using providers such as Google mail means:

• you can access your emails from any networked computer as nothing is stored on your home computer.
• and in a backup sense since, you can still access all your emails if your home computer breaks.

take regular breaks!

Workrave is the name of the open source application/utility (Linux/Windows) that you can you to remind you to take regular breaks from your computer.