Colin Charles Agenda

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.

So Jack has a BugZappers report from the last triage we had. We get goodies too! Pleasurable to note the next bug day is Friday, 19th August 2005 - so do rock up if you can (I plan on staying on till quite late Friday night, UTC+10, and then heading out for some fun at night); #fedora-triage on freenode. Fedora marketing (#fedora-mktg) is having a meeting soon as well - the list is steaming on with discussion, which is great.

No, the worst wasn’t over when it came to doing the UNDP LiveCD. First there was no sound from the Flash content… esd and alsa conflicts. ISO required 500+MB for an rsync, so had to workaround that; and no, xdelta was not the workaround - it was just as useless. Fix that, and then there’s no text being displayed (for majority of the content). Feeling this was font dependant, fixed that. Now I sincerely hope, I’ve had the last of the incredible updates to that. Note to self: Flash content is evil.

<kaeru> argh.. I'm going to do a bytee
...
<kaeru> that's why I need to pick up my 8cell batt
<kaeru> and you all will be hearing me stuck at some airport

So it seems thats what they call it now… I wish not the torture of being stuck at airports, missing flights, and what ever else could go wrong to anyone out there. And in the last 3 weeks, we’ve had 6 plane “crashes”, so lets hope for safe travel for everyone. And kaeru tells me he sent it (livecd) to the CD duplicators, so yay.

To celebrate, I took a walk in Melbourne.

I’m not a Steve Jobs fanboy or anything, but his speech at Stanford titled You’ve got to find what you love is a truly amazing read. Sometimes you can chart moments where you know your life is changing paths…

Looking at sbackup, a backup program, I was hacking on bits of it, wrote the Makefile, and miswrote the portion for the uninstall target. All patches generated, I tried uninstalling to make sure all worked well, and it took away portions of /usr. On my laptop. Sigh. Re-building took most of all day (seeing that I had no backups of /home that were recent either).

Caught I, Robot. Finished The O.C.. And got addicted to fiddling with Flickr. There, go view my sets, add me as a friend, or definitely check out their nifty tagging system. Incidentally, photos from my recent China, India, Boston, San Francisco and Canada trips are up there. And a few older blast from the past gems, as well.

Oh, and I think I finished the UNDP/IOSN LiveCD. Rebased to Hoary. Trimmed (their 625M iso doesn’t leave much space for other content). Delivered.

Caught The Terminal - funny show, definitely. Closer was good, and you’d really have to pay attention or get lost in the theme. Original Sin was not what I’d expected it to be - again twisty plot. Something’s Gotta Give was remarkably better, or maybe I’m just a sucker for romance. Catwoman had some action in it which was a change from the rest of the romance crap. And for somewhat action-packed, there was the The Day After Tomorrow. And if anything else, Garfield topped it all off.

A must read is Chastity’s Champions. Saw that in the dead-tree edition of The Economist, took a photo of the ladder even!

So I’ve been spending time getting the UN Development Program/IOSN LiveCD thing going, from its last 14/03/2005 update. Ubuntu now requires 3GB of swap? Geez, thats a lot of swap (though pushing the limits with 1.5GB seems to work). The content is all updated, the CD is being rebased to Hoary. Seeing that Sarge got released, Flash Player 7 is now in stable :)

Then in other news, we had a conference call (ditesh, ken min, aizat) and I sung to the free software song. Eeew. To make up for it, I also did a little French song - Sur le pont d’Avignon (Yahoo! audio search). All in lieu of rms2005. Apparently, nothing is free enough for this man.

I’m having great fun with Mynic. They’re so anal about the fact that you need to have a registered organisation, that I already do qualify for. I already own several domains in the .my-namespace. But for some reason, all weekend I can’t register another one, because I’m not an authorised employee of said company it seems. How awkward. Call up the reseller (because registering direct doesn’t work any longer), who says they’ll try and solve it as soon as possible; she repeats it and then contacts MYNIC. When I’ll get my domain will be interesting, I’m sure…

So, it was the girl’s birthday. Yum cha breakfast, 21 roses, iPod mini, almost-life-size Eeyore and just a long day of fun. Been a busy weekend, so I’m glad its mostly over and its time to get back to the real world. Let’s hope my 21-st isn’t going to be as hectic.

UNDP/IOSN LiveCD
Spent some time customising a LiveCD based on Ubuntu. This is for the UNDP/IOSN project. Some good customisation guides include: LiveCDCustomizationHowTo on the Ubuntu wiki page, and the GnomeLiveCD howto. Sure the LiveCD could ask less questions during setup (a more Knoppix styled “just works” thing). And no matter how much I wanted to use Fedora, I’d have to do some more infrastructure work that won’t make deadlines.

So what did I do differently? I installed flashplugin-nonfree, brought in the ruby dependency, and popped a lot of content into /srv/content (>98MB). Customised Firefox - /etc/mozilla-firefox/pref/firefox.js with pref(”browser.startup.homepage”, “file:///srv/content/html/index.html”); What still needs to be done?

• Add UNDP/IOSN logos appropriately
• Probably beef up the way the index page looks like
• Priority 1 - Update the content to Ubuntu/Hoary style where appropriate (just the end-user-guide basically)
• Fill in the holes that still exist in content (or types); add more primers possibly
• More extensive testing with hardware out there - its not been tested as much as I’d like it
• Release early, release often. And resync with a newer upstream Hoary
• Fix bug where Firefox still doesn’t notice that its supposed to load the index page. So now start Firefox and type: /srv/content/html/index.html in the Location toolbar
• Test Flash. All of you, test the Flash stuff thoroughly. Seems to work for me, but its in beta at the website itself anyways, so go give it a go (try it online - requires Flash 7)

Yes, casper is actually a very nice system to use. It was completely well thought out, I’m glad jdub told me to hang in there back when Warty was released, saying the LiveCD stuff was in the works.

Fedora LiveCD
So, is Stateless Linux without a state at the moment? With Xen around, and possibly soon installer (anaconda) support alongside Xen, the only thing left from stateless seems to be the LiveCD. While developers themselves don’t find LiveCD’s incredibly useful, its a great marketing tool, to say the least. There’s Basilisk, with an installer almost along the way, and then there’s Rookery. The Rookery looks pretty interesting and possibly only requires some namespace merging before it starts churning out LiveCDs. Both are written in shell, so merging/integrating them would make for a better integrated system overall.

Fedora’s success
Fedora takes off as Red Hat declines is headline news today. Generally circling around web server usage, is probably unfair, as RH do have quite the number of paying customers for RHEL. Its nice to see Fedora gain ground, at such a timely occassion that FC4 test1 is out today as well.

Update: Since it didn’t make it online at the UNDP website, its http://www.arenatechniques.com/undp/iosn-hoary-live-i386.iso there now. Be gentle to the server, thanks.

Written in OpenOffice.org, commissioned by the International Open Source Network (IOSN), part of the UNDP, here’s a guide for public review: User Guide to Using the Linux Desktop. Guess its nice to know that some of my work is now UNDP/APDIP comissioned. NSH is a real hero, especially tolerating my travelling :)

And its almost coming to an end, had the most magical two weeks or so with life. Love the feeling of waking up every morning not knowing whats going to unfold, and doing things on the fly. Past couple of days have been a little depressing; haven’t touched a keyboard in a while, have a tonne of mail to read, and I think its time to get back on track soon.

While it is a novel idea for Novell to migrate to OpenOffice.org, is the end of the year a more viable alternative than a end-of-July 2004 dateline?

Even up to this date, employees aren’t exactly convinced - OpenOffice.org might be installed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its being used. Forcing it down throats is what’s happening. And OpenOffice.org still isn’t cutting it for an average person involved in dealing with external customers (unless they get a lot of migration assistance):

• Writer is doing quite well, importing quite the number of Word documents without issues - however, certain data fields don’t show, watermarks don’t import properly, and for some reason, a document with the watermark created in about two revisions earlier, was still displayed. But most documents are fine, save for the weirder bullets issue.
• Calc’s importing of Excel documents are still hit-and-miss. Simple =SUMIF’s actually broke during the conversion. VBA macros obviously break.
• Impress imports PowerPoint presentations fairly well, but drawings like boxes do run quite the bit.
• The Document Converter AutoPilot seems to crash OOo 1.1.1 on machines with about 128MB of RAM in Windows when the document count was around 280 or so. I’ll be playing with this a lot more, I’m sure.

So as a check-list, Michael Meeks and team seem to be working on getting the VBA macro support in OOo - this is going to be very important for the migration to work. I don’t know what miracles we’re going to make on the import/export of files - they have to “just work” (no, PDF’s for clients aren’t useful, when they have to work with you) - so that dealing with clients using the other Office suite, is not an issue. Calc needs to be further enhanced, definitely.

It’s interesting to note that a Florida health organisation actually performed the migration for 3,500 PCs first, even before Novell did! Good beta testing ground, I’m wishing to hear more of their document migration issues, more than anything else.

So did they really start? Not quite, but they’re breaking it down for the staff, and they’re getting their first take at OOo usage - for most, it seems to be similar, with workarounds for the common things to use. For others, problems listed above, exist (among a few minor niggling effects).