Jonesieblog

I was rather shocked this evening when I realised that the last official release of FreeMIS was in June 2006!  This release has been downloaded over 3000 times, but I have done quite a bit of work on the application since then, so I really ought to put together a  more up-to-date package.

It’s now officially on my to-do list!  Anyone impatient for the latest code can always download it from the subversion repository

Stumble it!

The account hosting the FreeMIS demo site got hacked just after Christmas, and I stripped out all the sites I was hosting on that account until I worked out where the vulnerability was.  It turned out that the vulnerability was in a old Joomla extension, but I have not yet got around to switching the FreeMIS demo site back on. It’s on my list of things to do this weekend

Stumble it!

It’s reassuring to read that someone else would like teachers and students to have more freedom on the PCs and laptops that they use in schools - Tom Hoffman expresses this better than I ever have in his post “Security Don’ts or User Requirements?”

I know Tom through our mutual interest in providing an open source alternative to the commercial MIS systems that our schools pay through the nose for. Tom is the project manager of SchoolTool, a project that has the backing of Mark Shuttleworth, the millionaire South African who went into space, and I’ve created FreeMIS.

If students and teachers can’t install software without a significant risk of data loss and support time, that’s a flaw in the system. It is a design goal of the OLPC system to allow users to safely install software.

Stumble it!