Paul Maunders | Web log

We use Google Apps Premier to host Fubra’s e-mails, and on the whole I love it – I get a massively reduced level of spam into my inbox, and searching out old mails is incredibly fast. However, it does lack some of the flexibility of our old internal postfix based system, and this became apparent [...]

Tonight it was announced that Facebook chat now supports XMPP (also known as Jabber). This means that it will work with a host of chat clients, including my personal favourite iChat.
To get it working with iChat you simply follow these steps:

Navigate to iChat > Preferences > Accounts
Click the plus icon in the bottom left hand [...]

There will be an election in the UK within the next 6 months, so I thought I would take some time to compile a list of the major issues that will influence my vote.
So here’s my wish list for our next government:

All government spending and contracts should be published openly, and available for anyone to [...]

A new companies act was introduced in 2006, that has been gradually phased in over the last 3 years, becoming fully operational on the 1st October 2009. The full act of parliament is over 700 pages long (in PDF form), so I’ve decided to try to highlight some of the key points / changes in [...]

It may have been a long time coming, but I have to say the UK Government has now made pretty good progress when it comes to making their services available online – and we have taken advantage of this with our online accounting system, Clear Books.
Clear Books integrates with a number of Government APIs, including:

Companies [...]

Here’s some instructions on how to get Askozia PBX running on a virtual machine with VirtualBox on OSX.
1)  If you haven’t already, download and install VirtualBox.
2) Download the Askozia disk image that you want to use. I’m using the latest Linux port release at the time of writing (r1161)
3) Uncompress the image, and then convert [...]

There have been a number of vulnerabilities discovered in WordPress since it started, including one earlier this month. They all have pretty much the same objective: to try to get access to your blog in order to post links to their own sites.
In this post I am going to look at ways you can tell [...]

Recently we were looking for a Flash video player to use on our websites. Youtube’s default player was a little bloated, so one of our developers at Fubra built an alternative youtube flv player, which looks a bit like this:

We’ve also released this as a wordpress plugin. You can install it via subversion if you [...]

Last month, the government launched a new “feed-in tariff” subsidy scheme for renewable energy installations that will see them pay up to 36.5p per KWh of energy produced.
At current prices, an installed 2 KW PV system costs around £12,000 (£6 per installed watt), and it’s estimated you would save / earn around £830 a year [...]

As part of our commitment to open source, we have begun work on PHP class to make it easier to for developers to work with the UK’s government gateway. The project is hosted on Google Code, and is called php govtalk.
GovTalk is a set of standards for interacting electronically with government services.
In the [...]