Archive for April 2005

LCA Day #1 / OOo MiniConf

Yay, LCA has started. Yesterday was dinner at the (in)famous Woodstock in Canberra. Russell agreed that it was the worst pizza ever… Internet at the accomodation was down, so I got lots of reading done instead.

OpenOffice.org
Today was Day #1 of the OpenOffice.org MiniConf. Simon Phipps, Chief Technology Evangelist at Sun sort of wrapped around a talk, and not agreeing with him at many stages happened I guess. Silly talk about licensing and software patents, and beating up of the “Even Red Hat recommends Windows for desktops”.

Marc Englaro, from Si2 mentioned challenges faced within organisation. His quick approach to desktop migration:

  1. Preliminary Business Case – Desktop Usage Survey and user requirements analysis, SOE analysis, Review of current cost structure, TCO analysis, Business case
  2. Proof of Concept – Design of proposed SOE, development of acceptance tests, workshop-based test of SOE by users, review results
  3. Pilot – similar to POC, small group of users running in production for fixed period, review results
  4. Staged rollout

Also good to know the common objections business face with OOo (and not with MSO): Pivot Tables, OOo Calc’s 32,000 row limit, macros requiring conversion, Access databases, Outlook, Visio, Project. Now, in Linux land, we have Evolution to replace Outlook, but neither Dia or OOo Draw comes close to Visio. Planner and MS Project are worlds apart as well. For document revision control tracking, it was mentioned that Xena, from the Australian National Archives would be cool to use, otherwise Propylon has something similar, in a commercial fashion.

Ian Laurenson had a good presentation about OOo Macro Development. His website has some of his macro resources. He heartily recommended the X-Ray Tool. And he’s also starting a OpenOffice.org Extensions Wiki, all really useful resources if you’re into OOo Macro stuff. I ended up buying Andrew Pitonyak’s book on OpenOffice.org Macros.

Ditesh had a great talk on document templating, and how he used the file format (go OASIS XML) and PHP to get things going. And afterward, Ken Foskey talked lots about developing on OpenOffice.org… then it was time for the pub, and Sun was footing the bill :)

An amusing rush

GNOME
So, with the 2.10 release, libwnck (metacity) sort of behaves funny in the sense that my GAIM windows don’t pop-up anymore. Its true, the current method of not stealing focus is a good one, but I felt it was important for IM. Havoc made an interesting post with options that we could work around, and reading back, the adding “URGENT” flashing to tasklist is a solution (that requires some coding effort). Otherwise, for IM purposes Guifications works really well. nosnilmot packaged them for review at his site, and if you’re lazy to rebuild rpm’s, I’ve got them built against a rawhide snapshot from post-test2 here.

Fedora
Fighting with QEMU. Its broken in Extras with GCC4 (log) and its also broken when I attempt a “export GCC=gcc32” (log). All on a stock QEMU 0.6.1, which I’d really like to get going before Wednesday, for the LCA kernel hacking tute. Paul Brook pointed me to missing FORCE_RET on store ops, and figures this is what I need to do for i386.

MyOSS Magazine
Remember the days of LinMagAu? Now defunct, but while it was around, every month it got Slashdotted. Ow Mun Heng got enterprising and created Malaysian Open Source Software Magazine, now affectionaly known as MyOSS Magazine. Good first attempt, and hope it continues this way. Pay it a visit, contribute an article or two. Better still, print it for the next install fest or something (there are pretty pictures).

Handhelds
Loaded Familiar 0.8.2 onto the iPaq. Delved into using minicom again, and boy did that bring back old memories. With GPE of course. My Dlink DCF-650W used to work with the slim sleeve, however, no drivers are being loaded now, so I’m sort of wireless impaired at the moment. Even a manual modprobe orinoco_cs seems to not work. However, my full-sized PCMCIA card seems to work nowadays; only catch is using the dual-sleeve, with battery thing, thats huge. Gotta love the new GPE Package Manager (though I think it lacks dependency resolution capabilities). Command line ipkg search seems broken, but listing works. Minimo, vim, and python are on it now. Online screenshot application (scap) works well from the command line and the menu, but via the command line, you get a direct URL to your shots.

Life
Boringness. Its just mad rush before LCA. Plenty to do, not enough time. Went for cell yesterday after a hiatus, and it was surprsingly good. Last day to see S. for a week, till next Saturday. I’m actually going to be missing her.

New face of open source

The OSDL has hired Paris Hilton to be the new face of open source. Pamela Anderson lost out because of shorter legs. I can’t wait to see this video.


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