Colin Charles Agenda

In an interesting twist (interesting for Microsoft and their OOXML apologists), about a month ago, MAMPU, the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, decided that they were going to go OpenOffice.org and go ODF, and dump Microsoft Office by year-end 2008. This made its round around news sites, and everyone was naturally talking about it.

Now, you can hold them to their word, as they update a Wiki page, informing you about how many agencies are moving to OpenOffice.org. Big wins, once all of the Malaysian government related agencies are on OpenOffice.org (open source software in general). Again, read OpenOffice.org and ODF Adoption!

As a current Malaysian tax payer, I wouldn’t want the government misappropriating money, on proprietary software.

One interesting bit from that? OpenOffice.org being taught in matriculation colleges (11 currently), as lecturers are trained to deliver it to their students. It all starts in schools, though, but this is much better than what was previously around.

Go OpenOffice.org! Go ODF!

Technorati Tags: openoffice.org, odf, mampu, migration

My friend Ditesh, is performing the tireless task, of following and updating the list of countries voting on Microsoft OOXML, at The Last Lap. If you’re interested in the freedom of document formats, this is a list you should keep a close look on this week. The comments feed is also particularly interesting.

In other news, today is Document Freedom Day. Have you freed your documents yet?

Technorati Tags: ooxml, odf, document freedom day, microsoft, ditesh kumar

In a mere eight days (March 29, 2008), the vote for the fast-track of ECMA-376 will have to be concluded. In the APAC region, the Participating (”P” member countries) countries are Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Korea, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore. Back in September 2007, Australia and Malaysia abstained, while Singapore voted to approve, and the rest, voted to disapprove.

So, will there be a change in votes, come eight days? India, has chosen to lead the pack and say that they still disapprove (much kudos to Venky for this information).

I’ve largely not followed the debate, but seeing Doug Mahugh’s blog posts, and how he seems to act rather immaturely, I can only hope that PIKOM, and naturally SIRIM look at the previous abstain vote, and decide to change it to a disapprove. Naturally, that’s not the only reason (that in itself will seem childish) - its just that the OOXML specification seems largely incomplete, despite the 8,000+ pages that exist out there (I’m including edits in the specification in that number).

Now, back to the real point of this. I challenge an adult to read, the following entries, and tell me if Doug doesn’t seem childish:

• PIKOM Meeting in Malaysia - Note the misinformation on the “IBM’s side”. It seems that Microsoft views that everyone anti-OOXML must be from IBM (its not only this blog post, I’ve spoken to Microsofties who utter the same corporate line). How untrue. This is not an IBM agenda against Microsoft - please wake up. Please do read the comments, because its really useful to the entire blog post
• An “open standards” meeting in Malaysia - This one takes the cake, clearly. I simply love the conspiracy theory on how Doug was removed from the meeting. Problems with Yoon Kit and Ditesh not showing up on time, and them waiting 30 minutes? Sure, it was bad form to be late, but being late happens everywhere, even in the US, Doug. I’m surprised that he also adds Madam Tan (from MAMPU) into the conspiracy mix. Its just an amusing read, something that maybe you’d have read in a Nancy Drew novel, when you were eight.

Naturally, one must read Yoon Kit’s response to all this childishness. Its interesting (but not surprising) to see that Microsoft goes through great lengths, to sully the standards process. But Yoon Kit brings up an interesting point.

Can someone, not from the nation, participate in a standards discussion, with having the nation’s interest at heart, over their companies interest? I believe its generally impossible. Its similar to applying to go work in the military/army - the requirements are simple, in that you have to be a citizen of said nation. After all, in war, where do your loyalties lie?

Anyway, the next eight days will be interesting. But if you’re to look at the antagonist behaviour in that blog post, I am just so glad that no matter what happens in the next eight days, MAMPU has opted to drop Microsoft Office from their stable of machines by year’s end, and the government agencies can only follow suit, and back ODF. Naturally, I’m hoping from an abstain to a disapprove, but I shall not count any eggs before they hatch (this analogy seems weirder, during the Easter vacation).

And… if you believe the Microsoft FUD about OpenOffice.org 3.0 supporting reading/writing of OOXML, and support should equate to a standard, that is an untruth. OpenOffice.org needs to support file formats that are out there in the wild. It supports reading from WordPerfect 5.1 documents (via libwpd), does that make WordPerfect’s document format a standard? No.

The opinions here in no way reflect the opinions of my past, present, or future employers. Standard blog disclaimer applies to this post.

Technorati Tags: brm, ecma-376, ooxml, odf, india, doug mahugh, standards, document formats, pikom, sirim, yoon kit, opendocument, microsoft

I thought I’d try to get OpenOffice.org going, and see if my presentations run well, on my new MacBook. It turns out, its just plagued with issues.

First up, OpenOffice.org 2.3.1, available on the porting site, will not allow you to run Base, or anything that requires Java. At least the message in red, tells all:

Please note that the Java features of OpenOffice.org are only available from OpenOffice.org 2.4 (more specifically milestone m237) and later. This means that the Wizards, Base and some other things are unavailable in 2.3.1 or earlier. All other functionality of OpenOffice.org remains on Leopard.

Now, after its downloaded, the install is easy. Drag to the Applications folder, and just double-click (it never was always this easy!). You at this stage will think that toggling Command+Option+a will allow you to go into full screen mode. You are very wrong.

X11 Preferences, allowing you to be in full screen mode

A little searching on the Apple X11 mailing lists, and I came across some gems from Ben Byer, an engineer in Apple’s CoreOS group. It seems that X11 is now based on Xorg as opposed to XFree86’s codebase. And during the rebasing, Ben realised that full screen support was broken and couldn’t fix it. The suggested fix? Find X11 from Tiger (not even on Apple’s site), or you don’t have full screen support.

I guess I’ll file a radar bug against it, but knowing my luck, it’ll be closed in no time, with a reference to a bug that I myself won’t be able to access. I can only hope that this is fixed soon. In the meantime, maybe I need to give OpenOffice.org Aqua a twirl, or even NeoOffice/J. If you’re interested in the history of X11 in OS X, don’t hesitate to read X11.app “pedigree”.

Bottom-line: If you’re reliant on OpenOffice.org on your Mac, you’ll find that making presentations using Leopard, is going to be problematic. And its not OpenOffice.org’s fault, its on Apple’s head.

Technorati Tags: openoffice.org, openoffice.org aqua, macosx, X11, full screen X11

On IRC, I told Pia, that I enjoyed the Beijing SFD tremendously, and they should definitely win for 2007. I did make a note that if it was required, I would blog about it… She mentioned that it probably wouldn’t matter, because they were a contender already. Nonetheless, I figured that eventually I’d blog about it - turns out its come many months later, generally inspired by Peter Junge’s blog post. Lucky for me, all this isn’t just coming off from memory, but my trip report, that was on an internal mailing list!

First up, some quick resources: the winning report, photos, including the ones from the speaker dinner, held after the event, and the winning announcement. Granted, it was one of three events that won, but I’m happy and proud to have been associated with the Beijing event!

I had 20 minutes in total to get the message across, and there were always interesting questions that required entertaining. So my talk was entitled, Growing with MySQL. The slides themselves are pretty sparse, and I had my talk simultaneously translated (good thing I had some practice in Japan, beforehand), so all in all, I had less time to get my message across.

However, the room was full, and it was one of those amazing standing room audiences that I so always like to see. In actuality, with questions, I overran, and gave a 30 minute talk, with generally no objections from the audience (or organisers).

Attendance at the event, in total, must have been about 700-800 folk. There were 500 showbags, and they were all finished by lunchtime. I caught up with Lalo (ex-Exoweb colleague), who handed me a nice pink Software Freedom Day t-shirt. Lets just say, you’ve got to be sure of your masculinity, before putting it on :)

I fielded some interesting questions, and the usual “How come Enterprise sources aren’t available if you don’t pay? How is that freedom?” of questions, to which I always honestly inform the questioner, that you’d get it at the BitKeeper source tree, available online.

During the event, I continually did plug, a MySQL Partner in China, Great Open Source, mainly because they were my excellent hosts, and they’re the focal point for all things MySQL in Beijing. The crowd was always interested in hearing that MySQL had a Cluster Team, that worked out of the Great Open Source offices, and I also mentioned a Summer of Code 2007 student, Jin Chen, who’s Chinese in origin, but is in Canada completing her studies at the moment,

The university that hosted us? Tsinghua University. This university is apparently ranked number one in China, though there’s a continuing battle with Peking University for the coveted spot.

Now, a few things I learned:

1. OpenOffice.org has been forked, and there is a RedFlag Office now. I amused the RedFlag Office folk at the booth, when I showed them the easter egg (Help->Ctrl+SDT) which brings up the credits. They were impressed when they saw my name float by.
2. There are about five known forks of MySQL in China. They are just basically renamed to something else, and rebuilt. Seems uncouth, and I understand things are being done to fix this.
3. Mandriva and Red Flag seem to be pretty active in the Chinese market. Ubuntu is gaining great traction and momentum, thanks in large to Amy Jiang and her crew.
4. Further language assistance from MySQL needs to happen so that more Chinese can take part in the Quality Contributor Program.

The event was generally fabulous. Walking around the show floor, speaking to people, being the only English talk in the audience of entirely Chinese talks (!), spreading the good word of MySQL and open source in general, I had a fabulous time at Software Freedom Day, Beijing, 2007. I guess I was just lucky to be in Beijing at that point in time anyway (literally, a transit between Japan and Germany). I’m also extremely greatful to my hosts: Great Open Source (Claude, George, Frank, Grace), the SFD organisers and team in general, and Ken & Michael who had a dinner with me (Exoweb management folk).

Technorati Tags: floss, sfd, sfd07, beijing, software freedom day, mysql, china, openoffice.org, tsinghua university

foss.in is officiated. Atul is on stage, speaking and the room is filled up. The lighting ceremony happened, a while ago. “Only an Indian can give a keynote, at foss.in” - here comes the Anjuta keynote, by Naba Kumar. History of Anjuta? The name, was the name of his girlfriend, and now, its his wife (they have a cute daughter, whom we got to see at Opus last night).

Last night quite a number of us went to the Opus, for a Mozilla party. It was truly, a hip event. Lots of beer, lots of chatter, and there was even some local Indian scotch towards the tail-end of the night. We were having so much fun, we didn’t even realise dinner wasn’t around yet ;) Aizat and I wolfed down some amazing pasta in under 5 minutes around 11pm.

Kudos to Shreyas and Shilpa for ensuring we were all safe and sound (and Kishore who sent me home, since I missed the bus :P). It was great to speak with Tejas, Allen, Gopal and the rest of the crew.

Yesterday, spent some time in Juergen Schmidt’s talks in the OpenOffice.org Project Day. I tailed into another talk about translations in Kerala, who seemed to represent the government of Kerala to some extent. Translations alone don’t interest me, but finding out more about FOSS use in Kerala clearly does. I am after all, a Mallu ? I hope I got that right :)

Jumped to see Tom Callaway speak about Fedora Secondary Architectures, though there are some things there that I feel are a little incorrect with the idea behind it. Build machines, not hosted by the Fedora Project? Wrong. Packages and the distribution itself, save for the torrents, not hosted by the Fedora Project? Wrong. Allowing a build of software to fail on a secondary architecture? Wrong. Allowing the secondary arch maintainer to fix broken packages? Smart. Though honestly, I think this might end up having to becoming a team.

Rahul Sundaram’s talk about spins was great. Considering I was building LiveCDs before there were tools, to do so, I’m glad that there are so many ways to do so now (easily, even). And of course chit chatting with him over beer at the Opus later, was fun.

Anyways, time to pay attention to the Anjuta talk. Not a big fan of IDEs myself, but I’m seeing the need for it (for folk that aren’t comfortable with vim).

Technorati Tags: foss.in, foss.in 2007, opus, party, fedora, openoffice.org, secondary architectures, livecd

One interesting feature of OpenOffice.org 2.3 is its Export to MediaWiki functionality. Its simply, a File -> Export, give it a filename, and select MediaWiki. Automatically, you have a .txt file, that you can paste directly into MediaWiki. There, an offline editor for MediaWiki!

Sadly, this isn’t as well integrated as I’d like. You can’t actually edit an existing MediaWiki document in OpenOffice.org. And it has some limitations, so I suggest taking a read of the Odt2Wiki page (also, the Features page). Like adding images manually, is a bit of a quirk.

However, as someone that writes a lot in a Wiki, I’m pleased to say that I can now do this easily in OOo Writer, and will only have to resort to the built-in Wiki editor, when actually, editing content. Well, here’s to open standards and XSLT transformations.

In a related matter, of editing Wikis, its good to know that Firefox 2 has built-in spell-checking in text area fields, so there’s now no reason to have badly spelt Wiki documents.

Technorati Tags: openoffice.org, mediawiki, odt2wiki, xslt, firefox, spell checking

Today I received most interesting mail from a training company in Australia. They want to use some of my (dated) open courseware, and obviously, I gave them permission. What was amusing was how they approached the situation: “We are prepared to not make a profit but will realistically have to cover printing and admin.“

Yes, they’re a training company. And this was from their Business Development Manager. How many out there think the courseware should be brought up to scratch, for modern versions of OOo and Linux?

Under a modern version of the CC license, though I’m not sure how many people are out there happily not-attributing and ripping me off, as we speak. Maybe just PDFs, and no sources? Definitely interested to hear anyone’s thoughts on this (via email, even).

Technorati Tags: training, courseware, open courseware, openoffice.org, linux, amusing