John Locke makes guest appearance on the Linux Action Show

admin — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 07:00:00 +0000

John Locke was an in-studio guest of Chris and Bryan on the Linux Action Show, Season 10 Episode 2. The conversation centered on how to make an open source business, and went for nearly an hour and a half.

Check out the video recording below.

For audio, go to Jupiter Broadcasting to download the episode.

Format wars: New Microsoft format is dead on arrival

John Locke — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time, for a period of about 8 years, picking a document format was safe and easy: save it as a Word document, a .doc file. The vast majority of businesses could open, edit, and print it with no difficulty whatsoever.

This mythical golden age of Word arose after Microsoft conquered the world of Word Perfect and Lotus 123 by bundling a “good-enough” version of each into a single package, Microsoft Office. After a few generations of painful Office upgrades where every new version had a slightly different file format, Microsoft finally matured into a format that it kept stable for three versions in a row—Office 97, Office 2000, and Office XP. And the overall interface has stayed stable much longer than that—there weren't any dramatic changes to the way you use Word between version 3 (when I started using it, back somewhere around 1987 on a Mac) and Office XP, in 2003.

With Office 2007, Microsoft completely changed the interface to its new “Ribbon” style. It also introduced a whole new file format. And now, only a year later, the new format is obsolete. Yet businesses are unknowingly starting to use this new docx format, not understanding that there are only a couple of minor advantages it has, while having several enormous drawbacks.

John Locke presenting at LFNW

John Locke — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 07:00:00 +0000

John Locke at LinuxFest NW 2008

John Locke of Freelock Computing is presenting at LinuxFest NW 2008 in Bellingham, WA. As a returning presenter, John continues his discussion of open source & small business, a topic near & dear to his heart as a principal at Freelock Computing in Seattle.

Meet John & contribute to the larger conversation of open source at his presentations:

Small Business Glue: Mashing up open source applications to run
Open Source for Business

For more information about this event, go to: LinuxFest NW 2008.

John is also the author of Open Source Solutions For Small Business Problems.

Information Technology in Business: The big picture

John Locke — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 07:00:00 +0000

Computers and information systems are essential parts of every business today. Like accounting and legal, every business needs to invest in technology to compete. Technology is both a cost of doing business, and an opportunity to do more business. Most people I talk with recognize the necessity of having a computer, an email address, and a web site, but still look at the upfront cost more than other issues.

After spending some time working with dozens of businesses, I think it's time to take a step back and look at the big picture of technology in business. Let's take a reporter's view of the topic, and ask the basic questions: who, what, where, why, when, and how much?

All about our customers

John Locke — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 08:00:00 +0000

It's been far too long since our last newsletter. There's a lot more stories to tell, but today I'm going to talk about some of the reasons I haven't written in so long: our customers.

Open Source Consulting: Helping people get the most out of Free Software

Web sites are the most visible thing we do, so I'd like to highlight a few of the ones our customers have launched in the past few months. Our newest core offering is an e-commerce system called ZenCart, and we've had two of them launch in the last month.

When all else fails, restore your backup

John Locke — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Quick quiz:

Your computer has been infected with a virus, and it deleted everything on the server. What would you do?
1. Send the server hard drive to a data forensic/analysis firm to see if they can recover your project data.
2. Recreate all your marketing material from scratch, scanning your logo and everything else.
3. File a law suit against Microsoft, Symantec, and Dell for letting this happen.
4. Call your friendly computer technician who disinfects your computers and then restores your previously backed up data from the Internet.

Spam, Spam, and Dspam

John Locke — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 08:00:00 +0000

We were in Sheridan, Wyoming, half way across the country to Jill's grandmother's house. I logged into my email to find something I hadn't seen in a long time: more spam than real messages. There were a couple dozen spams in my Inbox, and only half a dozen real messages. What happened to my spam filter?

I originally thought it was just a new type of spam not yet recognized by the filter. But then I looked closer and realized that the little signature my spam filter adds to each message was missing-these messages had not even been checked. No wonder they were getting through in such large quantities!

It's only when the tools fail that you come to recognize how valuable they are. In the 5 hours the server spam filter was out, I received more than 50 spams, and many of my customers also noticed immediately. The cause of the outage was a power flicker in the nasty weather Seattle was getting that weekend, which made that server shut down. Fortunately, we had this contingency (and many others) covered for our vacation, and were able to get everything back up and running.

Free Software of the Month: Workrave

John Locke — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 08:00:00 +0000

Hi,

Lots of news this month, so we're keeping the feature short. We're starting a new feature called "Free Software of the Month." Each month, we plan to highlight a free software package. There are some amazing software titles out there that do cool things for your business, your home, and your communities. Some of these run on a server, which we can host. Others are complete operating systems or packages you can use to replace expensive commercial software packages. We're starting out with a simple one you can install no matter what type of computer you use.

Free Software of the Month: Workrave

How much time do you spend in front of a computer every day? The answer for many of us is too much. If you work in an office environment, chances are you spend many hours a day in front of a computer, and are at risk for repetitive stress injuries such as tendinitis or carpal tunnel syndrome.

While no software can reduce your workload, taking frequent breaks and doing exercises to keep your muscles loose can help prevent injury.

Enter the most annoying software in my arsenal: Workrave.

John Locke to speak at next BNI Tech Alliance

John Locke — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 08:00:00 +0000

From the BNI Tech Alliance News:

The speaker at the Puget Sound Area BNITA for November is: John Locke Manager, Freelock Computing

The topic for November's BNITA will be: Manage your web site with Joomla, an Open Source content management system.

Many web developers have created basic content management systems to allow their customers the ability to edit their own web sites. And while many of these are very good, it's hard to compete with an open source project that has 60,000 active users.

John Locke featured in podcast

John Locke — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 07:00:00 +0000

James Gaskin, a columnist and editor for Network World and author of 16 books, called up a couple months ago to talk about hosting. Not for his business, but for yours--what we do to help small businesses have an appropriately secured, backed up environment.