Last week, mostly
OpenOffice.org
Well, from the MiniConf at LCA, there are pictures of all the speakers thanks to Jonathon Coombes. He seemed to have everyone but himself! Of interest from Cybersite, would be the OpenOffice.org Knowledge Base. Now if this becomes a central resource for all things OOo, I’d be really happy. The one thing people like Microsoft and Apple got right, was the idea of knowledge banks. All OSS projects need this, otherwise, users find it far too fragmented to get information. And by users, I mean your Average Joe, who want things to “Just Work” (and if it doesn’t, head of to one support site).
Fedora
Fedora runs on my Mac Mini now. Yes, I picked one up last week for a little work, and boy is Rawhide dog slow with 256MB of RAM (from gdm login to it being usable, about 4:30, seems rather inane). OS X actually seemed a bit more usable. GNOME or KDE runs horribly on such a machine, but it seems mighty usable over SSH. Otherwise, everything just worked. A more comprehensive report will be around soon.
Ubuntu
Turns out that I got to work alongside Simon Sharwood, a tech journalist type-fellow. So he wrote a couple of articles: Ubuntu plans desktop raid and Ubuntu Linux backer tackles colloboration. Caveat emptor is with multi-arch support now, though I’m told all this is getting fixed, the right way.
Life
Spending time recovering for the crazyness that’s been my life for a while. With a semi-flu, and just the complete feeling of being tired, the doctor has recommended Alertonic Elixir. Keeping in mind I hardly have prescription drugs, this is about the first I’ve had in years. A lot of time being spent with S., and her family (make that extended family), and boy is the Hakka passing around not going down well with me; half the time, I’m lost in conversation.
Gave a talk at LUV titled: The Last Two Weeks of My Life. Just a general summary of lca, and UbuntuDownUnder for the folk that couldn’t go. This surprisingly went on for a little over fourty-five minutes, and I was a little shocked (seeing that I wrote the talk on the train ride there). Paul Sladen was a guest of honor, so to speak - he rocked up by surprise; I hope he got accomodation somewhere that night.
Sladen, eating ice-cream with chop sticks
Your Rights Online
Michael Geist writes about the great firewall of China. Having spent enough time there with a crazy firewall, you learn interesting tricks. Always have a SOCKS5 proxy available for web browsing, at a foreign server. It helps if your server is colo’ed in Hong Kong, because China’s Internet links to there are usually good. Having your box hosted where the tracerts will suck, will be painful at best.