Archive for February 2004

Molly’s kids!

Spent half the day with Dr. Molly’s “kids”. OK, they’re folks she’s taken on to give them some work to do in the open source world – UTAR students on an attachment. Spoke to them about Fedora, OpenOffice.org and GNOME; introduced them to IssueZilla/Bugzilla and how they might find QA’ing bugs useful.

I see these ten bright students doing good things… They might not code well (yet), but they will be open source indoctrinated in due time. That said, I can’t stand the way the local uni’s are teaching them. They’re not. They’re learning more at this 6-month attachment (already in month two) rather than their first two years at uni. Sucks. And they’re paying big bucks.

Wednesday review

Posted the Wednesday review, on the way towards a GNOME 2.6 release. I want release notes people! So if you haven’t already sent it in, now’s a good time.

Thanks for the response from yesterday. I think my Dad felt rather happy :)

“Don’t be impatient.”

“What wise words do you have to offer, for the year ahead?”
“Don’t be impatient.”
“Happy Birthday Father!”

And with this, I hold in my hand, the release that will allow others to build FLOSS Capacities easier. The release that will mean people don’t charge crazy prices for open source training. It starts with OpenOffice.org for Beginners, and it doesn’t end here – hang in there for more.

Presenting to you: http://training.bytebot.net/

Read more at the release notes.

Happy Birthday to my Pa! Off to dinner now, The Lobsterman (with great lobster) calls!

M3 stands up

Of interest would be the amusing Sunday reading. I spoke to Mr. Adlin from M3; and no, no personal vendetta against he or his company. He’s admitted to the mistakes in the article, so let’s put it aside as that.

They started as a small business, and have grown large enough to be funded by the Ministry of Finance! A promise of RM15,000 for 10,000 OpenOffice.org CDs is up for grabs too. They’re certain they’re here to stay (which is great!), and after the half-hour conversation over the phone, I say, let’s plan the RM15,000 usage well, and let’s market OOo (and Linux) a lot better. They sell Fedora Core CDs too (but admitted to not having a usable support structure in place). All will be fixed in time.

Amusing Sunday reading

Read Open Office, a free option. Interesting snippets include (but at not limited to):

  • Mohd Adlin Abu Bakar, managing director of M3 Management Sdn Bhd, the local distributor of Open Office.
  • On Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice.org differences – There is a 10% difference.
  • M3 Management is one of four GNU public licence holders for Malaysia and has the authority to distribute the software.

Such a joyful article… To which I responded. Funny that they are one of the four GNU public license holders. Or even that they’re a community distributor. Real joy. My thanks to the M3 Group for giving me laughs on a Sunday.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.1b for OS X

Using cws_fix645_ooo111fix3, it built. No more errors about ooovirg and this is generally a better build.

Presentations from Impress just work as well, though there’s a quirk – the first screen loads, and OOo still has the focus. You have to click on the background, for the focus to be on the presentation. This means you lose the first slide of the presentation. Minor issue, work-around-able.

Oh, release notes (not fancy), and the standard disclaimers apply – build is not QA’ed, not official, not anything – if you find something broken, e-mail me.


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