Colin Charles Agenda

I believe all standards should become standards, based on their technical merits. Look at HTTP as a “standard” - pre-dating HTTP we had Gopher (and WAIS was our Google), but quite clearly, HTTP won the day. TCP is another good standard. These all have one thing in common: they’re open, easy to implement, and there are wide varieties of implementations of them (I can count apache, lighttpd, and numerous ones in Windows-land) that all work similarly.

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is such a standard. Ratified as ISO26300. Implemented in OpenOffice.org and its derivatives. Implemented in StarOffice. Abiword, KOffice, Google Docs & Spreadsheets (okay, Google Office these days), IBM Workplace, and a lot more. There’s quite a good list on Wikipedia at the OpenDocument software page.

From the list above, you realise that implementations exist that aren’t just created by one entity. There are wide varieties of implementations. Generally, a good standard. Technically adept, for companies like Sun and IBM to back it.

Yet, Microsoft wants to pass OOXML (a competitor to ODF) as an ISO standard! There are many reasons why this is wrong, but the fact that there is no proper working implementation of such a standard (not even by Microsoft, might I add), makes me cringe if this were to be an ISO standard. Realistically, do we need two ISO document formats?

How far the No-OOXML petition goes, I cannot say. But I do encourage you to sign it (peruse the plenty of reasons there, too) - noooxml: Say NO to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard.

Technorati Tags: ooxml, noooxml, odf, opendocument, iso26300, openoffice.org, standards

When it came to an OpenOffice.org related presentation, my slide deck always contained a mention about security. However, as it gains in popularity, and a more bloated (read: MS Office-compatible) feature set, security alone is not going to be a selling point. In fact, when it comes to OSS advocacy, the word “free” (or the idea of zero/minimal cost) is also not a large selling point, neither is the “you can view the source code” (erm, yeah, so what do I do with it?). But I’ll save that rant for another day.

It seems there’s an OpenOffice.org worm in the wild, that affects Windows, Linux and Mac OS X systems. BadBunny as it has affectionately become known, comes to you as an OpenOffice.org Draw file, which displays a man in a bunny rabbit suit engaging in sexual intercourse. While you see this, its launching mIRC or XChat (on OS X and Linux) and forwarding it to other IRC users. Assuming you don’t have IRC installed, this shouldn’t do anything, right?

Apparently, not only does BadBunny come with some StarBasic, it also has got some other evil components that use JavaScript on Windows, Ruby on OS X and Perl for Linux. I wonder, why they just didn’t use JavaScript across the board? Why Ruby on OS X (Perl would’ve sufficed). Seems very odd, the choice of multiple languages.

This is largely a proof of concept, but it just goes to show that no matter what you’re running, its a good idea to practice safe computing practices. What peeved me though was a quote from Sophos in heise Security:

If the BadBunny developers had any financial intentions, they would have selected a more popular software structure and not included bizarre images, Sophos adds.

Is OpenOffice.org a non-popular software structure? I highly doubt it. Writing virii is like a coming of age present for some, and while OpenOffice.org was ignored as a suitable platform, its being recognised now. Mohandas Gandhi said: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” I think OpenOffice.org is at stage 3 (not just because of the virus writers, but also because of the plight towards ODF).

Technorati Tags: openoffice, openoffice.org, badbunny, worm, macro, starbasic, cross-platform, windows, linux, macosx

I found the recent interview with Bruce Momjian (founder, lead architect, PostgreSQL) rather interesting. From it I took away:

• PostgreSQL has stringent quality assurance. This is because there isn’t the “luxury of putting out a bad release”. He mentions that in the world of open source, there is zero tolerance for things that don’t work; I however can find many examples contradicting this line of thinking. Release engineering is largely dependent on humans and they do make mistakes.
• “People are more confident with us that some of the commercial databases.” I believe this largely is how your company is run - tech-oriented or suit-oriented. Worse if you’re suit-oriented and largely public. Investors and upper management need to blame someone when things go wrong, and thats why support services are so great in the open source world. Accountability is key. The ability to fix customers problems is key. Going off on a tangent, Michael Meeks, distinguished engineer at Novell and OpenOffice.org hacker extraordinaire basically said:
  

  Ubuntu, claiming to ship and support OpenOffice.org, it’s a total joke - they have a part-time packager. At Mandriva, for example, the OpenOffice.org packager is a self-described ‘not a C++ programmer’. So how you can then go and say ‘we’ll support you’… Novell, at least, has people across the board working on the codebase, with a good understanding of lots of issues.

• Bruce mentions evolution - from stopping PostgreSQL crashing, to performance tuning, to enterprise features. He reckons that 8.2 is Enterprise Ready, and 8.3 and forward is going to include “revolutionary features that go beyond things you can’t do with other databases”.
• My favourite quote:
  

  “If you look in the next five years, PostgreSQL will be a poster child for databases period,” he said. “There is not really another database that’s enhancing at the speed of PostgreSQL, so what that would look like is hard to say.”

• Pretty bold statement, eh? No roadmaps, like most open source projects. I actually think that’s a plus point, because roadmaps suit suits, but are completely inaccurate most of the time.

Technorati Tags: postgresql, interview, bruce momjian, michael meeks, accountability, database

Many people ditch the rat race, to start anything from a one-man show right up to a medium-sized business these days. Globally, computers are being accepted everywhere, and its always been touted to help the business owner, improve business processes. From an open source perspective, how do we help the small business owner?

We start by studying what a small business owner requires:

• contact management - the business is in the network. Without contacts, there’s no exchange of services, and definitely no exchange of money.
• document management - businesses, no matter how large or small, end up with lots of documents. Moving to the e-society that we’re all aiming for, we should aim to manage documents well, right up to the backups of these crucial business data.
• accounting - taxation, income, expense, credit, debit, etc. are what make the business world work. You need to keep track of absolutely every last cent.
• collaboration/whiteboard - this is where a Wiki tends to shine (or some form of CMS).
• weblog - these seem to be the promotional tools of the 21st century.
• e-mail client - long gone are the days of telex, faxes, and postal services. A lot of people live life out of their e-mail clients in business, so one that makes life easier and more productive is very important.
• office suite - just as typewriters, accounting books and transparencies (slides) go out of fashion, a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation suite are very significant in how modern business are run.
• server software - you need a domain, email, web hosting, and possibly some of these applications should be online, in a secure location, (say https://intranet.mybusiness.com/), that requires a login.

I haven’t mentioned a database, because I presume most of the above requirements do tend to use a database of sorts (usually MySQL). I haven’t even mentioned an operating system, because without a doubt, as a small to medium sized business, you will want to be running an open source variant - BSD or Linux is a war we shall not get into, neither is a war such that we go down the road of Fedora vs. Ubuntu or something similar.

Now, dear Interweb, what else do you think a small business owner needs to have? I’m just after the software processes that make a business happen. In fact, if it currently involves something Windows, OS X or (God forbid) DOS based, I’d still like to know.

Why? Things like the NGO-in-a-box project make a lot of sense. In fact, for open source to become more mainstream, we need to provide usable, workable, and reliable systems. With the launch of Vista, and the ease-of-use for business folk, combined with Office 2007 and all the stack they have to offer (which are surprisingly becoming less costly than before), the open source world needs to have the same, if not greater strength.

Oh, and because, all the cool kids are playing with virtualization, today. Tomorrow’s cool kids will be thinking about appliances.

Is anyone into document (not content) management systems? Is the best solution out there, for the paperless environment, something like KnowledgeTree? I’m looking for recommendations.

The idea here is to scan newspaper clippings, parts of books, and so on, place it in a DMS, and give it tags (like Flickr does), as well as add some appropriate metadata (like maybe the title of the article as text, an OCR conversion of the first paragraph and some notes), and have it as a searchable database.

I’m planning on picking up a flatbed scanner (it seems most USB ones do work with Linux, my aged 10-year-old-scanner that works on a parallel port still doesn’t), and then setting up the document management system that performs some kind of rsync or keeps version control in SVN, so that these documents are also accessible via the Internet (maybe private, maybe public). Services like Amazon’s S3 or even a DreamHost account seem to be viable for this option.

I like everything about KnowledgeTree (from its website, at least), save for the US$2,200 fee for their SMB edition (I can imagine the WebDAV stuff, and integration with Office applications being useful). It however does look like the license is liberal enough to allow extensions to be written… Q2/2007, maybe their OOo plugin will be free for all.

Technorati Tags: document management

In some surreal goodness, the Energizer Life Church in Hobart, Tasmania runs an all Mac shop, and they use (get this) Keynote for their announcements!

I told them all this was rather expensive and a misuse of church funds, and looking at Linux and OpenOffice.org will make sense in their next upgrade cycle. Besides, they can’t even get more volunteers to help, seeing that only two folk know how to use Keynote/OSX.

OOo has this wonderful advantage of being cross-platform. And even on a Mac, running in X11 full screen mode, is ideal for presentations. I’ll have to get playing with OOo Base in the near future, because combined with the Migration Assistant, there can be some powerful “NGO desktop”-styled switches.

There was a request to take a gander at the $100 Laptop: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and reading Fedora People recently made me want to snap up the opportunity to give it a go. Here are my first impressions on the emulator, known as the OLPC SDK, by Daniel Berrange.

Installation, if instructions are followed on FC-4 work fine. There are spec files to rebuild for FC-5. During the bootup sequence, I noticed that LVM was starting up, and finding no volume groups - can’t this be disabled? There doesn’t seem to be a use for LVM on the OLPC.

Once you get past the fairly slow emulator startup (its qemu based), you’ll notice that at the heart of it, you’ve got FC-5 sitting there. Very sexy.

Looking for a terminal? While gnome-terminal isn’t supplied (and probably will never be), xterm is there for the moment. Alt+F2, xterm, and you’re on your way. The root user has no password, so su - shouldn’t be a problem.

What doesn’t work with the olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3 firmware image is networking. Try modprobing for ne2k-pci, and it’ll fail, mainly because 8390.ko is missing. This should be fixed with the next firmware image.

All’s not lost however. If you run file on the .ext3 firmware image, you’ll notice that it contains an x86 boot sector, code offset 0×48. A little fdisk, will show that there are 63 sectors/track, with each sector size being 512 bytes. Multiply that, get 32256, and that should be the offset to mounting the image.

sudo /sbin/losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3
sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/loop0/mnt
merrily going on making changes
sudo umount /mnt
sudo /sbin/losetup -d /dev/loop0

Its well worthwhile to not have QEMU running with the disk image - make sure it isn’t, otherwise corruption is likely. Once that happened, it was fairly trivial to get MySQL installed. So I did.

MySQL running on the OLPC

The question is… do we want 61MB of a package sitting there? It can probably be reduced in size tremendously. So can removal of /var/log and /etc/yum.repos.d/ and so on…

From reading the software task list, it doesn’t seem like there’s a focus on teaching IT to the owners of the OLPC. Does MySQL pass off as educational software, covering a database component? I don’t see OpenOffice.org being listed as something that will be on the OLPC, and the GNOME Office (Abiword and Gnumeric) don’t have a front-end for database connectivity.

I’d like to thank davidz and Daniel Berrange for assistance when needed! Oh and read his blog for little tips - the simulator debugging did come in handy.

Arjen was mentioning about the perks of working at MySQL. It got me interested, so I joined them :) So I guess this is my change in affiliation announcement.

A timely photo from William, that I scanned in… (circa a couple of years back)

I don’t know if I can talk about what I do yet (I’m a Community Engineer). I already have a task on hand, but I guess there are meeting times to work out, and other stuff. I’m rather excited, and my drive (that was lost for a while) is back. I’m not leaving any mentioned project either, in fact I think my Fedora goodness should be stepped up, as will the OOo (db related) stuff.