Colin Charles Agenda

Been playing with OOo m130 for OS X. Its also rather pleasant that OOo2 is in a release candidate stage. Cocoa OS X OOo? Hmm, while Tim Bray might’ve commented, keep in mind that this has been a requirement/want/need for the last few years. Programmers involved need to have X knowledge, Cocoa, C++, and Unixish tools. We try to gather folk at WWDC, I had created a fairly large spam list at WWDC2004, and got no responses. Now we’ve got web-based OpenOffice.org coming soon? I don’t think so. And I’m sure the X11 port of OOo isn’t dying. Really.

Caught Spanglish and Wimbledon on DVD. Serenity in the cinema. Whats all the hype about? Then its been Bride & Prejudice, P.S. and Lady Chatterly’s Lover on DVD.

And yes, no sell out here. Really. I did however get some good news via email a few days ago. I received the Apple University Consortium 2005 Best Practices Award. Hello PowerBook, money, and a plaque. I’m somewhat kicking myself for not attending the conference in Tasmania last-last week, as Joi Ito was keynoting. My only interest in OS X is from a commercial standpoint (i.e. I’m graduating eventually, I need to broaden my horizons). I’d need to eat and what not (its no fun dating without income, I’m sure), and maybe having both Linux and OS X knowledge will make me a lot more marketable.

As I said on #wordpress, Linux is still my first love, OS X is just like the concubine I’ve always wanted.

I’ve been so behind on lists, that when I finally did catch up, I found some amazingly bad news. Terry Teague, longtime OpenOffice.org Mac OS X contributor, has passed on. I met him at WWDC’04, and it was great talking to him. Little did I know he worked for Apple but kept it quiet online, till I met him, doing all sorts of amazing hardware related testing (he tends to write the Apple Hardware Test stuff you see on Disc 1 of some of your Macs). Showed me some cool things you could do, all on a floor! Didn’t get a chance to catch him at WWDC’05 this year, as he didn’t rock up, but in passing, we’re going to miss you mate.

Update: There’s a great eulogy to Terry. And his brother left a comment on this blog, mentioning if there were nice words, etc. it could be forwarded along to his e-mail address.

• Caught Madagascar at La Premiere in Hoyts. I can heartily say that Gold Class at Village is heaps better. On DVD, got to see Farenheit 9/11, which makes me wonder about Bush, and all.
• Walked the 1,000 steps. It was surprisingly nice. Been up to Mt. Dandenong a lot, but never ever went on this trail. Napped, and then karaoke later with a bunch of friends - boozie took over.
• Because I tried hard to put off any writing for the MyOSS Magazine, I ended up doing some Fedora package stuff. Sorted out gaim-guifications, MagicPoint. Trying to include xwrits. My livna foo is sorted, gtkpod is updated.
• Spent most of today lazing around in her house. All was fine, till dinner time when I felt like punching his face. The gall. My stupidity for going, I guess.
• I got my Tungsten C back. Its a nice, brand new unit, with everything “just working”. I’m impressed with Palm’s customer service, being the first time I’ve had to use them, ever. FileZ is useful to beam your old DatebookDB/AddressBookDB/MemoDB over to the new unit. pssh is an SSH client worth checking out. One annoyance is that when the Writing Area is enabled (grafitti all over the screen), the NotePad doesn’t work - is there some way to disable the writing area just on a per-application basis?
• Wah, Base is now component-ized. (iz#46898) So its now an optional install, and OpenOffice.org requires no JRE. I can imagine this pleasing Windows users somewhat, but all sane free Linuxes are probably going to include the gcj stack, and get things going, right?

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.

OpenOffice.org
Attended Jonathon Coombes talk about De Bortoli Wines and how they switched to OOo. Learnt about a new OOo+Content Management System plugin, Typo3. Its open source, and apparently works really well with Writer documents (with styles), uses nice structure for a web content base, and you can print and so on.

Ron Skeoch talked about Muli & Ngipi, which is a project based accounting system, and now its built/integrated with OOo. Other talks happened, it was great to see Jim Watson (sparcmoz) talk about Linux/Sparc OOo, then I talked about OOo and how “cool” it was on OS X, and PowerPC. Got to show off natively built OOo (gcj) on Fedora Core 4, which got lots of people happy.

Today, we see the Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org article, and there’s some stuff that’s seriously wrong with that… Sure its just large, but where are the Red Hat contributors? 4 active community developers? C’mon, maybe just for Linux building, but there are way more than that. Either misquoted, or highly incorrect.

PHP
I attended Rasmus’ talk/tutorial on PHP5. Boy did I learn some new things: simple RSS reading/parsing, lots of the Yahoo! developer API, its uses (web nodes, Buzz Images and News), PHP security, maintaining large PHP development teams, regression testing, debugging, templating, tuning for high performance.

“Any PHP site out there, can be hacked”. Now that’s troubling. Its in regards to input filtering (and the next version of PHP will have this and break things; alas, full Unicode comes then too). So using PHP5 and input_filter would make sense, it’d seem, but its hard to write a good input filter.

Thinkpad R51 becomes useful
I’ve had issues getting video out working for a while, on my Thinkpad R51. I wasn’t one of those lucky enough to get a Radeon card, but instead I got 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02). With a little pointer from daniels I got i855crt (rather than i810switch, which I was trying to use). Now just running sudo ./i855crt on 1024×768@70 works wonders. I still can’t get the software cursor going, but I didn’t have too much time to play with it.

And today, I just made sure sleep has started working. The 2.6.11-1.1240_FC4 kernel, with echo -n 3 > /proc/acpi/sleep actually puts the laptop to sleep, and wakes it up. Magic appending of acpi_sleep=s3_bios to grub as a kernel parameter, and voila! things magically work.

Others…
Met dwmw2 for the first time in a funny way… Dinner at a not-so-good Asian restaurant, audio thing was so-so, overall retired early. So yeah, David pointed out the breasts in my firefox…

Breasts? Really, it came out of a newspaper article. Why female breasts? or Women’s breasts: Let it all hang out, I say

Today, I won the Sun Regional Delegates Programme National Winner category. That entailed me $5,000 to go to a cool Linux conference, so I’m headed to OLS this year, I should think. I’ve heard heaps of good things about it, and could just never really afford going (and this year at Boston, pjones kept on telling me how cool it was!). So thank you Sun.

Then I went to the really nice dinner that Sun hosted. It was so far the best meal I had in Canberra - 3 courses, of great food. Of course I said lots of things why JAVA was bad, and why we love gcj for instance, and they were respectful of my decisions. Went back, talked to S., didn’t feel so good, so headed to the Wig N Pen with the rest of the folk. Met Menno Smits (yum fame; bought me a guinness), Andy Fitzimmons, talked to jdub and gman, and just had a good time (with alcohol). Fun night in all.

Yay, LCA has started. Yesterday was dinner at the (in)famous Woodstock in Canberra. Russell agreed that it was the worst pizza ever… Internet at the accomodation was down, so I got lots of reading done instead.

OpenOffice.org
Today was Day #1 of the OpenOffice.org MiniConf. Simon Phipps, Chief Technology Evangelist at Sun sort of wrapped around a talk, and not agreeing with him at many stages happened I guess. Silly talk about licensing and software patents, and beating up of the “Even Red Hat recommends Windows for desktops”.

Marc Englaro, from Si2 mentioned challenges faced within organisation. His quick approach to desktop migration:

1. Preliminary Business Case - Desktop Usage Survey and user requirements analysis, SOE analysis, Review of current cost structure, TCO analysis, Business case
2. Proof of Concept - Design of proposed SOE, development of acceptance tests, workshop-based test of SOE by users, review results
3. Pilot - similar to POC, small group of users running in production for fixed period, review results
4. Staged rollout

Also good to know the common objections business face with OOo (and not with MSO): Pivot Tables, OOo Calc’s 32,000 row limit, macros requiring conversion, Access databases, Outlook, Visio, Project. Now, in Linux land, we have Evolution to replace Outlook, but neither Dia or OOo Draw comes close to Visio. Planner and MS Project are worlds apart as well. For document revision control tracking, it was mentioned that Xena, from the Australian National Archives would be cool to use, otherwise Propylon has something similar, in a commercial fashion.

Ian Laurenson had a good presentation about OOo Macro Development. His website has some of his macro resources. He heartily recommended the X-Ray Tool. And he’s also starting a OpenOffice.org Extensions Wiki, all really useful resources if you’re into OOo Macro stuff. I ended up buying Andrew Pitonyak’s book on OpenOffice.org Macros.

Ditesh had a great talk on document templating, and how he used the file format (go OASIS XML) and PHP to get things going. And afterward, Ken Foskey talked lots about developing on OpenOffice.org… then it was time for the pub, and Sun was footing the bill :)

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.

And if you think I had a happy Easter, I didn’t. It sucked. In short, I’m a free man now. Really, really free. I guess its supposedly nice to have just a female best friend around. I finished Season One of One Tree Hill as well. Guess I now know what it feels like to be despondent. And after the few days of fasting, celibacy is looking brighter and brighter.

Fedora/ppc
Seth has always been a good man, and now there are even more PPC packages available. Please look at the build logs of failures. So this has really been an exercise in expanding my BASH shell scripting skills… Come test2, I’ll do a mass rebuild with mach and the “actual buildsystem”, so that we can wade thru possibly weird issues. Also wanting to do things over NFS, as the build box needs more space… (bigmac not so big after all!).

OOo
OOo2 and its java dependencies seem to be a hot topic at newsforge. Where he got the idea that I lead, I don’t know. A more useful article is on the reinvention of Progeny - an OSS company, startup even, that survived the .com crash. Nice read, with common business sense information sitting there. And rather unrelated, but How to start a start up is a great read.

Firefox search plugins
Mozilla search plugins are cool. I’ve always just used the Google one, but I guess I felt the need to change it to use Google Australia by default now. The eBay one works well for eBay Australia too. Added the IMDB, CDDB, Wikipedia (somewhat broken), and the Bible (NIV). On Fedora Core, you’ll run into add engines not working (RHBZ#134701).

Anyways, I tried to access the search rhbz via google and it didn’t work (site not accessible), so I ended up writing my own. RHBZ Firefox search plugin is now available for download, as is the source. It was only later that thl pointed me to this - all the RH Bugzilla stuff you need. Gah.

/etc/motd
“When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.” –Maurice Maeterlinck
Does anyone know of an intelligent random signature generator that will pipe well for Evolution to use? Or is writing one my only hope?