Peter’s Soapbox

Interview with Justin Hayes of Funpidgin

Harlem and I interviewed Justin Hayes from the Funpidgin fork of the Pidgin project on this week’s Fresh Ubuntu podcast.

Bethel Signs on to EC Fiber

From this week’s Select Board Meeting Minutes:

With respect to the Town joining with others through the ECFiber Interlocal Contract to develop and implement a communications system, Chairman Fox stated that the Town appears to be in receipt of sufficient legal advice to confirm that the draft Interlocal Contract for formation of “ECFiber” should now be signed, it being anticipated that the initiative will move forward expeditiously, and that a final form of the contract will be available for consideration in the near future which, when executed, will perpetuate the association being formed at this time. He then made the motion to approve the subject contract, this motion being seconded by Joe De Freitas and unanimously carried. Justin McCoart asked if the Town had yet appointed an alternate representative to the ECFiber Board of Directors; Chairman Fox advised such has not yet been undertaken by the Board.

Brookfield is Now Part of ECFiber

Last night, Brookfield, one of the three towns who have expressed an interest in ECFiber but not yet signed the agreement, did indeed sign on and is now a part of the initiative to bring fiber to every home and business in 21 (and counting) towns in east central Vermont.

gAIM -> Pidgin -> Funpidgin -> Carrier?

There’s a little program out there known as Pidgin, which is an open-source messaging project formerly known as gAIM. It supports communications with all of the popular chat platforms out there, like AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber. I have been using it for years and love it.

However, there is a sense in the user community that the Pidgin developers have been unresponsive to user requests. Apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back was the latest version not allowing you to resize the text entry box, forcing the user to rely on the program doing so automatically. Continue reading gAIM -> Pidgin -> Funpidgin -> Carrier?…

(Minor) Corrections to this Week’s Herald Article

The Herald of Randolph this week published a story covering my presentation to the Stockbridge Select Board on April 17th. It was good, nut there were two minor errors. First, I did not say Stockbridge has the highest number of pre-registrations, I said we have the highest rate of pre-registrations among the member towns. Also, the article indicated that I am attempting to solicit more pre-registrations. In fact, other individuals in town are heading up this effort. All I am trying to do is get the grand list from the town so that other volunteers can contact property owners in town who may not yet know about EC Fiber.