Happy New Year!

To start with, very belated best compliments of the season. Although I was planning to spend more attention over the holidays on this blog and other secondary marketing efforts, the new year started very quickly, on the 1st of January with setting up an evaluation system of LIMS 2.0 for a Canadian client. This will mean that when we release LIMS 2.0 or soon thereafter we will have substantial functionality to cater specifically for the North American markets. More about this in our next Bika Mail newsletter.

Looking for Python / Zope / Plone developers
Although we're hardly a month into the new year, business is going very well. We have a variety of projects on the go, and they are all in need to varying degrees of development. So if you're reading this and would like to work for a Professional Open Source company, you have expert skills in Python, Plone & Zope, can work autonomously, and like project based work; drop me an email.

New Laptop: HP 530
Due to an astray half-full glass of wine landing on my laptop, I ended up buying a new one, as the repairs I was quoted for came close to a new laptop anyway. After some research and looking for a budget priced laptop I found the HP 530, I got the dual-core version 1.8 Ghz with 2 Gb of RAM. It's a decent machine and have little to complain about the hardware....but on the software side I was perplexed. To start with when having made up my mind about buying a new laptop, I went straight to the Dell site and hoped to be able score a laptop with pre-installed Ubuntu. Well, they're not available (I hope: yet), which disappointed me considerably. So it's all talk and no action then!
When contacting various re-sellers in South Africa, I asked what discount I would get if they gave me the laptop without any MS software on it (be it XP, Vista or Office), and to my complete shock, they told me that they were not allowed to sell the laptop without MS Windows on it. And of course that meant no discount. But also no freedom of choice for the consumer. Maybe this is something the European competition court should be looking into ;-)
So, in the end I got it delivered within 48 hours, and thought what the heck, I want to see how Vista (basic) looks and feels like. The next disappointments were; after starting up the laptop it took more then 2 hours to install Vista, if you set yourself up as admin, you want to be an admin and not have irritating warnings that your are performing admin tasks continually, and the whole MS bundle (Vista + office) hogged an unbelievable 30 GB on my drive!!
So I went for a dual boot set-up with Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10. Installation of Gutsy took exactly 35 minutes. Now that's a proper OS! I also have full support for Compiz-Beryl, and although not enhancing productivity it is quite smooth and a good laugh (especially shaking windows ;-).
I messed the partitions options up a bit, so I went to try GParted, and I must say it's an unbelievably easy tool to use, works flawlessly and allows you to resize partitions to your heart's content.

New: Bika LIMS 2.0 Alpha testing updates
In order to keep various interested parties updated with development releases and updates to our LIMS 2.0 Alpha Demo, I am going to post a small news item on the Bikalabs.com website, starting this week with the first.

That's it for the first post of 2008, more exciting news coming in the weeks and months ahead. Stay tuned!