One of us
OpenOffice.org
Some useful OpenOffice.org links (great for marketing, showing off new features, etc… for OOo2 in general; Erwin probably should start indexing his articles, they’re really helpful!):
- Creating PDF Forms with StarOffice 8
- Secure Document Exchange with StarOffice 8 - using the new digital signature features
- Analyzing data with StarOffice 8 - if you’ve never used the Data Pilot feature, this is a relatively good introduction. The other day I went to take a look at Excel from Office XP, and found its Goal Seek to be rather friendlier than OOo 2’s, but that means more improvements for us.
- XForms Editor in OpenOffice.org (XForms Essentials a book; Using XForms in Office Applications a paper)
- Java Macros in StarOffice 8 - this BeanShell stuff is probably in OOo2 as well. Its not in what I have in Fedora Rawhide though, I seem to have StarBasic and Python (yes!). Take a gander at openoffice.org-pyuno if running Fedora.
- Small college saves big with OpenOffice.org and Linux
- Perl OOo modules - Rene talks about OpenOffice::OODoc, which allows one to generate OOo docs for reporting purposes. Even more impressive are the 66 CPAN modules that consist ‘OpenOffice’.
- DUO - an OpenOffice.org UNO/Java wrapper that allows you to control OOo remotely using Java.
- Codesnippets are simply cool. Try them out!
Life
Plenty has been happening. I’ve been to a couple of acupuncture sessions. They’re fun. Especially when performed by a doctor that still practices Western medicine as a day job.
Spent yesterday being out all day, from lunch at Ying Thai, gelati for tea, to dinner at The Rydges (a hotel with really good seafood), and then Mamma Mia!. I can’t say enough good things about the play, it was just great! Its got an amazing story line, and a great selection of tunes from ABBA. And if that wasn’t good enough, she also bought me the show book. Rock! Thanks for a wonderful day out S. - I was smiling all day. Oh, and if you get the chance, go see Mamma Mia! - its great, even if you’re not an ABBA fan.
Today, Ditesh arrived in Melbourne. Attempted the under-eight hours tour of the general city sites, and whatever it was the CBD had to offer. A tour of Parliament house was a first for me. Plenty talking in regards to software industry, patents, markets in both Melbourne and KL.
Enterprise
Dinesh and a few others had a round-table discussion on the State of the Malaysian Software Industry, and the transcript’s now online. There’s a video too. In a sick format, but at least it works (the live stream didn’t for me on both Linux and OS X).
The seven tips to help FOSS companies succeed might be an interesting read.
Fedora
Paranoia is a bad thing. And running into constant roadblocks because “its a legal issue” seems to be getting like a rather boring and old answer. And damnit, where is the trust?
Fedora has come to a stage where we now offer you: x86, x86_64, and ppc. Now a lot of folk don’t have any x86_64 or ppc hardware lying around. When a build fails in Extras, you see build logs (*.rpm.log means built, *.log means failure). These alone are not enough for package maintainers to fix things.
So I did the funny thing and joined #debian-devel today to talk to some of their developers. Romain Francoise and Adam Heath stepped up to give me assistance to see how the Debian Project handled things. Look ma, a Debian.org developer machine list! Sure developers don’t have direct access to the buildd’s, but they sure as heck have access to a machine of every arch, so they can see why their build’s failed.
Developers do not have root on any machines they have access to. BuildRequires (or the Deb equivalent?) get provided for by a helper. I admit to not having looked closely at mach/mach+yum, but mach-helper as thomasvs pointed out might be useful.
Now, to decide if a build breaks on a certain arch, does it break for all Extras or not? I say Yes. But that means developers need access to boxes of other archs, no? This will undoubtedly increase the quality of Extras, and make it not sound like “Everyone’s favourite fourth-class citizen!”. The drugs to some degree need wearing off.
I don’t have all the answers yet, but its about 4.45am and I’m cranky. But if I wake up again and feel like this, boy am I going to take a closer look at this shite.