Archive for June 2004

OOo at WWDC

OpenOffice.org booth manning was relatively fun at WWDC. Louis, Ed, Patrick, Flip, meh, all good fun. Met Terry too, who popped by. Gave away plenty of OOo CDs, got a bunch of contacts to spam later (possible developers!), overall fun. Open Source BOF also, have some interest in OpenDarwin. Who knew it ran on x86 too? Apple promises (well, tries to) more developer documentation for their hardware…

DHCP works!

Good news for the day – I got tired of dhclient, and ifup not working for me on FC2 PPC, so I went out there and decided to fix it. dhclient requires an entry in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-interface where interface can be eth0/eth1 or so on. Added one for the airport, and all’s good. Now, to work on waking up from sleep, and pmud breakage (which I’ve successfully managed to reproduce that if I’m logged out of X, it won’t hang on wakeup – if X is running, it dies).

More on Bill’s agenda

Linux isn’t a threat for him in Asia! He wants to boost the Malaysian IT sector, and make a bunch of MS drones – Prime Minister, please listen, and remember, there are alternatives – Apple’s OS X, Linux, and many others.

Education minister signed a 5-year contract, titled “Partners in Learning” – teachers and students are getting on the MS-track! RM10 million is a lot of moolah to be throwing around – why could this not have been farmed out to an open source training company or association?

At least he mentions that talent needs to be cultivated. Seems Malaysians rank “low in terms of know-how”. The usual education needs to be revamped stance shows itself, but now that they’re “locked-in” for five years, I don’t see how that’s a revamp, considering this was the case, five-years before too.

pre-WWDC

So, everyone’s wondering what Steve Jobs is going to announce tomorrow, besides Tiger (OS X 10.4), iPod on your BMW, and even Airport Express – all been announced, so what’s new? Speculation of a new XCode maybe…

Otherwise, interesting comments like “Redmond, start your photocopiers”, or even “Redmond, we have a problem” in relation to Tiger exists (shots). If Apple is competing with Microsoft in terms of their OS platform, why haven’t they made a mention of Linux? After all, Linux has overtaken OS X on the desktop market – Linux is more a competitor than Microsoft is, to Apple at least, wouldn’t it be? Microsoft notice, Apple don’t?

In terms of usability, some ground-breaking stuff being presented (well, previewed), and the future, seems to be full-control via a mouse. Very cool stuff, GNOME needs this sort of thing, heck, The GIMP needs this sort of thing.

The goat comes to town

So by now, its a well known fact, that Bill Gates is coming to Malaysia for an Innovation Day. If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, Gates and Ballmer are probably going to visit the Prime Minister of Malaysia, just like he did to the Australian Prime Minister.

While some view this as a good bargaining leverage to use against Microsoft, keep in mind lock-in is never a good leverage. OSIA have some press release suggested topics to talk about, no one (body) from Malaysia has come up with something suitable to let there be better bargaining power for Badawi. So now, the open source world will have to hope he’s been given sane advice and doesn’t buy into it.

And its confirmed eh, Linux is a threat to Microsoft. They know it, and they’re going to fight it with all their might. Users, developers, fellow advocates, we must unite, and only then can we stand. If you’re attending an event, flood them with free software.

Malaysians shift

It’s probably safe to say this… but in Malaysia, we’ve just lost some important folk:

  • Imran William Smith – Lead of the R&D team at MIMOS, in the Open Source Division. Driving force behind one of the national OSS policies. Organiser of FOSSCON 2003. Will be greatly missed, as he’s going back to the UK. Has got great resources on archived policy documents.
  • Ken Wong – Driving force at the IOSN, worked at APDIP, part of the United Nations Development Programme. Another voice on open source, done great things for us, wrote premiers, organised FOSSAP 2004, now moving on to another challenge.

Losing the sane folk is always an event that’s sad. 2004 has brought the loss of 2 OSS voices in the Malaysian market…


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