Colin Charles Agenda

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.

As Patrice Riemens would say… and that really means “Ole, ole, ole, Ubuntu boleh!” (boleh, means can, in Malay/Indonesian) While there was Fedora Core 3 lying around, we loaded most of the labs with Ubuntu 4.10 Warty Warthog, and I’d like to give a big round of love to the Ubuntu team. They did a splendid job, and the faults that we did encounter looks like it got fixed in updates; we never did get to get them, since the Internet link has been horrible, but here’s my experience with training a bunch of Windows users for about eight days, on Ubuntu’s Warty; the quick summary of this is definitely that I can’t wait to see Hoary. And the one-CD install is a definite winner.

That was a saved post, since leaving Bangalore that I never got around to finishing. The folk at Asia Source, loved Ubuntu. And I spent the whole of last week at Ubuntu Down Under, in Sydney. And I love what Canonical is doing to make Ubuntu oh so totally, rad. While not a conference, more like a public company meeting, the rendezvous really seemed to me like a Canonical Powwow. I served as the Spec Editor, which meant I read some 180-odd specifications for the next 6 months that should be achieved. If things sounded like crack, they got sent back, otherwise they went on to get approved.

It was a fun week, all in. The hotel was great, food was yummy, and I got to talk to Mark quite a few times (really down to earth man!). Met a whole bunch of (ex-)Debian devels, lots of Ubuntu heads, seeing how their community has really taken off, and so on. Saturday proved to be fun, ended up going to Sydney’s Chinatown to get some Chinese herbal things for S., then that evening, they took us out - we got to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and had a really, really nice dinner. A few of us ended up to go party later - sabdfl, mdz, and a few others… the idea was to party the night away, and get on our early 6am flights. Thanks for all the cider!

JaneW convinves a DJ that he wants Ubuntu

I was fine till we hit a gay club, and someone cupped my bottom…. and smiled. Urgh. Went back to the hotel, showered, met Mark and the gang again to get a cab to the airport. And Krispy Kreme’s! Taxi driver was amazed that a whole bunch of them got on a private jet, and I ended up parting with my Ubuntu Hoary CD as this guy had even used a Knoppix LiveCD before (and couldn’t get over the amazement of a private jet). So no to Rob Weir, who’s been trying to convert me - I gave my CD away to the cab driver ;-)

self-explanatory right?