- Chewed mail, quick call with Vojtech, then Charles. Finally got around to submitting a LinuxTag paper or two. Lunch. More mail, patch pieces.
- J. out for Rosemary's leaving pizza party. Up extremely late poking android's wedging on ANativeWindow_lock - sadly the debugger gives no trace: an thread un-attached to the VM ?
January - 2012
Michael Meeks
2012-01-25: Wednesday
2012-01-24: Tuesday
- Up early, misc. mail chew, question processing, patch review, re-building action etc. Inched through more startup problems, Lunch.
- Chat with Kendy, more mail cleanout. Lydia over for dinner. Up late hacking android main-loop pieces with Tor.
2012-01-23: Monday
- Mail chew, read the git commits over the weekend. Call with Simon, improved the LibreOffice donation page to include a nice image rotation.
- Misc. android hackery - got past several unpleasant roadblocks in the UNO bootstrapping. Reviewed slideware. Dinner, babes to bed. J. under the weather, but out to a meeting. Back to the hackery - started on the first-start, user-installation creation code.
2012-01-22: Sunday
- J. dropped me to NCC to practise with the band, service, Thea spoke. Back for lunch with Keziah over. Out to a service of Christian Unity in the town. Back. Played games, lazed on the sofa. Tea, told stories to babes, put them to bed & read more stories. Sermon from Hugh Palmer, silly Naked Gun movie, bed.
2012-01-21: Saturday
- Up earlyish, H. and N. off to Bury to do music & book buying. Cleaned the house up, hacked a bit at some androidish pieces: discovered some problems with unit tests not being compiled.
- Lunch, Mary Rogers over in afternoon, sat by the fire and played with babes. Lydia over in the evening - more hacking at sal/ stopped readLine corrupting/writing to it's input buffer and crashing and fixed misc. build issues.
Hubert Figuiere
Firefox accessibility
Since I joined the accessibility team at Mozilla I took on one of the task that was in need to be solved: bringing back accessibility in Firefox on Mac as it has been lagging behind.
Marco already wrote about how things are ramping up and started filing more bugs on what is broken in the build I provided.
With the quick release cycle, I can't really commit on which Firefox version this will be in, but the code is current in Nightly, aka Firefox 12, except that on Mac we don't build with accessibility enabled yet.
Michael Meeks
2012-01-20: Friday
-
Chewed mail and misc. vcl fixing - and finally calc unit test
runs to completion on Android (great work from Tor); getting the process
slowly better documented in
README.Android and no pixels yet of course. Chat with Simon, then Charles. - The LibreOffice FOSDEM Devroom Schedule went live - a really great set of shortish talks (to get the most grist we can into eight hours) and some great speakers, I'm really looking forward to it.
- Planned my day, interspersing the tedious stuff with fun hackery, so that at least -some- tedious things get done. Lunch.
-
Filed a few more easy-hacks
around cleaning up the horrible old
tools/- a duplicate system abstraction that still malingers underneath LibreOffice. Hid a few more unused locking methods in SvStream, and made the FSysRedirector more obviously a no-op. There are big blocks of easy-to remove cruft in tools needing a beginner or two.
2012-01-19: Thursday
- Poked mail, fixed misc. build problems, poked at and spent the morning extending the tools/ stream abstraction also fixing some build issues. Nice to finally get some hacking done.
- Chat with Jonathan, lunch, SUSE team meeting, LibreOffice ESC call, Vojtech's staff, discovered I'm late at my travel budget planning; bother.
- Pondered the LibreOffice team. There is one set of very skilled hackers that perhaps people don't notice. As of today, we have quite a chunk of people working full-time on LibreOffice that used to be on Sun's OpenOffice.org team (in order of migration): seven guys: Caolan McNamara (RedHat), Noel Power (SUSE), Thorsten Behrens (SUSE), Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical), Stephan Bergmann (RedHat), Eike Rathke (Redhat), Michael Stahl (RedHat) - making (I think) the largest concentration of full-time ex. StarDivision hackers on any project with a nice cluster in Hamburg still. It'd be great to grow that list of course.
- More hackery and build fixing; late call with Camilo. Read babes stories, J. out for a run, final emulator hackery and bed.
Roberto Galoppini
Focus Group Open Source: Open Data, Rome 25 January 2012
| Jan |
| 25 |
| 2:30 pm |
The next Focus Group Open Source meeting will focus on Open Data, and it will take place on the 25th of January 2012 in Rome, at IBM’s office (sponsor of the event). Among invited speakers Gianni Dominici (ForumPA), Federico Morando (Apps4Italy), Salvatore Marras (dati.gov), Ernesto Belisario (Italian Association for Open Government), and Guido Vetere (IBM).
For more information and to sign up for the event, see the Focus Group Open Source blog.
por Roberto Galoppini el 19 de January de 2012, a las 12:11:32
Michael Meeks
2012-01-18: Wednesday
- Up lateish, call with Vojtech. Dug through the mail, until finally, in the afternoon - got to a little Android hacking; fun.
-
In connection with the somewhat irritating MS Office 2010
issue I mentioned
last Tuesday, I was somewhat startled to see Rob Weir change tack to a
new
attitude about standards:
I have no wish for the ODF standard, like the US Constitution or the Bible, being used as an excuse to justify stupidity. ODF is a specification for document exchange. If you are using it in a way that decreases interoperability then you really need to step back and ask yourself if your literal interpretation really makes sense.
Of course, amazingly the implication is that it would be 'stupidity' to follow the spec. and produce documents that are valid ODF 1.2 (as LibreOffice 3.5, and the Apache OpenOffice 3.4 pre-release builds do.
Then we have this gem:If a program does not meet user expectations then it is a bug. If you want to be compatible with Microsoft Office then you need to play by their rules. ...
This is really a deep & rich lasagne of irony, I'm really trying to work out which bit is most tasty, could it be - first the aggressive, purist, open-standards champion advocating deliberatly writing non-conforming output, and making ODF 'play by' Microsoft's rules ? Or - could it be the fact that (apparently) the TC chair hadn't bothered to validate or test changes to his standard in 'real world' office suites, but rather prefers to deflect attention at 'woefully inadequate QA' to a single implementor: LibreOffice. Or finally could it be that he hasn't noticed that his own Apache OpenOffice implementation actually does the same thing. Hard to choose really; mystifying; checked colour of the moon to make sure: apparently not blue.
In any case Seeing responses like this from LibreOffice makes be very optimistic about the future of Apache OpenOffice. Whatever the cause, the fact that LibreOffice ships with this problem shows either a woefully inadequate QA program, or total indifference to real world requirements. Even testing a single LibreOffice document in Office 2007 would have shown this bug. Is that too much to expect? - Of course, personally, I'd love us to have a good solution that ensures maximum interoperability while conforming, no doubt we'll find some way to work out what that is in the end. It is clearly not just as simple as removing that single version attribute: forwards compatibility is somewhat tough - but starting with backwards-compatibility is prolly sensible. Since ODF 1.2 is not completely backwards compatible with 1.1, knowing what the version is is rather useful for correct interpretation.
- Emily & Sarah around to read stories, share dinner & sit up late to chat - lovely to spend time with them.
Louis Suarez-Potts
Stop American Censorship — a campaign from Fight for the Future
Stop American Censorship — a campaign from Fight for the Future
Today, 18 January 2012, we are seeking to stop SOPA and PIPA now. These two bills, the first a US House, the second a US Senate, purport to stop piracy but they are such poorly drafted bills that they actually lay the groundwork for a regime of censorship that would, as virtually every major Internet organization has recognized, destroy the freedoms that have made the Internet and Web a vehicle for economic and cultural growth.
I have proposed to the Apache OpenOffice podling, where I intermittently contribute, to support the protest.
And I blacked out my other blog, www.luispo.com, in support.
I support the protest.
And for the remainder of the day, I ask you, too, to support the protest, if not by blacking out your site or your posts, then by looking at the bills and reading over the discussions. And then by doing what is really very effective: if you are a US citizen, contact your representative and express yourself. This is an election year; your voice counts.
And if you are not a US citizen, keep this in mind: The US is hardly exceptional and the laws that are in circulation and not yet enacted, also work to diminish freedom and weaken community and return us to a regime that didn't work and cannot work this century--but which can still make the oligarchs even richer, and at your expense.
Today, 18 January 2012, we are seeking to stop SOPA and PIPA now. These two bills, the first a US House, the second a US Senate, purport to stop piracy but they are such poorly drafted bills that they actually lay the groundwork for a regime of censorship that would, as virtually every major Internet organization has recognized, destroy the freedoms that have made the Internet and Web a vehicle for economic and cultural growth.
I have proposed to the Apache OpenOffice podling, where I intermittently contribute, to support the protest.
And I blacked out my other blog, www.luispo.com, in support.
I support the protest.
And for the remainder of the day, I ask you, too, to support the protest, if not by blacking out your site or your posts, then by looking at the bills and reading over the discussions. And then by doing what is really very effective: if you are a US citizen, contact your representative and express yourself. This is an election year; your voice counts.
And if you are not a US citizen, keep this in mind: The US is hardly exceptional and the laws that are in circulation and not yet enacted, also work to diminish freedom and weaken community and return us to a regime that didn't work and cannot work this century--but which can still make the oligarchs even richer, and at your expense.
por Louis Suárez-Potts (noreply@blogger.com) el 18 de January de 2012, a las 16:19:51
Cedric Bosdonnat
Halleluia, Clémence was born!
The Lord gave us a second cute little girl, named Clémence. She arrived on Saturday 14th in the afternoon. Everything went well and both the mum and the baby are in good health.
Louis Suarez-Potts
Le logiciel libre propose un potentiel d'économie incroyable | Francis A-Trudel | Économie
Le logiciel libre propose un potentiel d'économie incroyable | Francis A-Trudel | Économie
See, this is not only interesting but important. And here's a message to Ben: Let's collaborate. Change can start now. It's not a political or cultural thing, it's a simple case of legacy and momentum. There are alternatives now and choices, and we are on the brink of transmigrating to the Cloud for informatics. So now is the perfect time to choose to make data open, source open, and to decide that in the interests of all, it's best to use open standards. The alternative, a life licensed into boxed paralysis, cannot work for all, and not even all the time, for some.
por Louis Suárez-Potts (noreply@blogger.com) el 18 de January de 2012, a las 05:18:38
Michael Meeks
2012-01-17: Tuesday
- Crawled from bed, practise with babes, rapid mail triage, into Cambridge for interview at Sticky Beaks, dropping obsolete computers & electronics off at reboot on the way - somehow I feel like I lost something; the CPU count is substantially down, but cat swinging is possible. Lunch & home.
- Dug at some bugs, Roger W. kindly dug out a PPTX test document to isolate a performance regression. Put babes to bed, Lydia over for dinner. Chewed through getting the LibreOffice dev-room schedule into Pentabarf, phew. Poked mail, worked rather late.
2012-01-16: Monday
- Up early, mail chew, patch review, license statement collation in the wiki. Chat with Holger. Lunch. Split out multi-screen / display fixes and back-ported to -3-5. Poked at detecting old file-systems to avoid fsyncing on them.
- Dinner, put babes to bed, call with Pete , worked late.
2012-01-15: Sunday
- Up; off to NCC, Tony speaking on Truth. Back for lunch, lazed around, out to a Baptism (or two) of Charlotte & Jane. Back for more slugging, watched some Marx brothers comedy.
- Put babes to bed, tidied the office with J. while listening to a Rico Tice sermon on Psalm 1. Dunged out lots of obsolete electronics and boxes of things no longer needed in the modern world.
2012-01-14: Saturday
- Up, took H. to try out some choral and brass music lesson / practise goodness in Bury; hacked away at multihead work while there. If only we didn't have two types of integer indexed screens, both called 'screen' in the code, with tangled nomenclature everywhere. Started to push through some big cleanups.
- Home for lunch, tidying and prepping for Naomi's party. Helped games: guessing things in pots from the smell, pass-the-parcel, party food, and expended a four-year-old box of fireworks from my parents - lots of smoke.
- Put babes to bed, back to hacking multi-display issues.
Louis Suarez-Potts
'German cities following Munich's open source example' | Joinup
'German cities following Munich's open source example' | Joinup
Suppose that several key cities in Germany, such as Hamburg, Berlin, Bonn, Frankfurt--others, too--join Munich in moving, at least in part, their government offices to open source and open standards. What effect would that have on the Foss and open-standards ecosystems? For starters, once every time a major group migrates, it makes it easier for others. Not only does one--ideally--learn about what to do and not do, but also each migration spawns an ecosystem composed of small(ish) companies whose business is helping and supporting the migration. And this further aids the growth of the community, which increasingly includes contributors very interested in sustaining their business, solving client needs, and in making their own work easier by working with--collaborating--others to resolve bugs, add enhancements, and so on.
This is how a market is made, modulo 21st century technologies. It's not too different from any other time. A new technology or commodity or other product finds demand, and the suppliers rejoice, as do all the business people in the middle and periphery. Jobs are created, wealth, too, and it's overall a generally good thing, provided that the community (or in the plural) so established is able to sustain itself and is not simply a useful but temporary outgrowth of a larger business, one very much susceptible to the vagaries of the market.
For instance, here in Ontario, it seems that the largest industrial/manufacturing ecosystem depended--or depends--upon the US automotive industry. Sure, Canadians also drive these vehicles. But, as with so many other things Canadian, it really comes down to what the US buys. So, when the Lesser Depression began in 2008, and continued--continues--and the US automotive companies, once so mighty, once even defining the nature of the American economy, once they were shaken to the point of collapse, Ontario's manufacturing economy was bushwhacked. Poor planning had not provided for a real alternative, meaning that jobs lost to cars gone were jobs gone, at least until the car companies revived enough to resume their ways across the border. The point: The ecosystem up here was big and strong but depended upon the market strength of companies far removed from it and its concerns. The community so formed up here was intensely vulnerable. The solution is to establish a base that removes that vulnerability. But most cities around the world do not have the luxury of doing that. Yet some manage. Berkeley, where I pretty much lived half my life, was ridiculed by its neighbours--San Francisco, for instance, but also the much smaller and somewhat odd Emeryville--for not just ignoring the dot.com businesses of the 90s but for actually disdaining them, and favouring, instead, more or less failed efforts at re-establishing a manufacturing base by developing--way ahead of its time--electrical vehicles, for instance, as well as other things that were meant to provided *lasting* and less vulnerable jobs. The idea was not some Marxist fantasy. It was rooted in the clear perception that the dotcom boom was a bust waiting to happen and that a better future lay in making real things that real people would want because they really solved real problems. Cue to the present: Modern Web technology does not depend upon the mystery of the connection between the eyeball and the wallet. It uses Web and other Internet technology to connect, the represent and to build, and is not an end in and of itself. It's not about eyeballs--though my fellow community managers don't always seem to get this--it's about making things that last, using tools, such as the lowly mobile phone, that are now actually ubiquitous.
por Louis Suárez-Potts (noreply@blogger.com) el 13 de January de 2012, a las 23:16:56
Michael Meeks
2012-01-13: Friday
- Up early; walked babes to school. Chewed mail, watched Bryan M. Cantrill's Lisa talk on Illumos, it's always nice to listen to someone that gets it - Solaris users look like they'd do well to switch to Illumos (to me). Particularly amused by his take on Apache as a template (27:00), Oracle (34:00), the closing OpenSolaris (41:30) and more; wow.
- Mail, patch and bug bits, lunch. Spent the afternoon working away at a vile multihead bug of my own creation around the gtk3 port busting gtk2 as well. Worked late.
2012-01-12: Thursday
- Mail chew; poked at systemd socket cleanup again, a new attempt at beautification, more mail, patch review and misc. bugs. Estate Agent came over to value the house.
- More mail, patches. Team meeting, TSC meeting, wrote up minutes, worked away at FOSDEM dev-room scheduling - an encouraging set of speakers this year, really looking forward to meeting up with them.
- Emily kindly over to baby sit for us; J. out to swimming with Miriam; out for a drink & an Indian meal with J. - lovely.
2012-01-11: Wednesday
- Mail, call with Vojtech, another with Pierre-Yves, dug at my systemd tmpfile cleanup issue sent off a patch. Lunch. Call with Pierre-Francois - exciting to meet so many interesting & helpful new French people.
- Out to cell group in the evening, good to catch up with the crew after a long break.
2012-01-10: Tuesday
- More mail, and admin. Surprised and saddened to see that MS Office 2010 has a built-in allergy to ODF 1.2. Worked through a FOSDEM interview.
- Lunch, call with Tor, a little hacking, chat with Philippe Desmaison. Dinner, Lydia & Janice over. Spent some time struggling once more - trying to get simple VCL samples to run: once again the endless life-sucking experience of UNO bootstrapping.
Removing unused code in LibreOffice
One of the unfortunate things that LibreOffice inherited, as part
of the several decades worth of unpaid technical debt, is unused code that
has been left lying around indefinitely. This was particularly unhelpful
when mingled with the weight and depth of the useful code we have around
the place. Caolan McNamara of RedHat wrote a beautiful tool callcatcher that
identified these unused methods, and in recent times in LibreOffice we've had an unusedcode.easy
file in our toplevel with a list of methods that should be removed. It's pretty
easy to find and expunge a method or two, with a quick git grep,
and dropping a patch to the developers
mailing list. To escape from a pile of administration recently, I knocked up a pretty nasty
perl script to parse the git numstat output, to see how we're doing. That
produces a fun graph:
It seems that over half of our unused code has now bitten the dust. Uunfortunately as we remove more, more wasteage tends to be revealed, which explains some of the upward jumps in the graph, nevertheless the trend is clearly down. One of the side benefits of the unsung heros working at the conversion of our old-style macro driven generics to modern STL is that this looses us several unused methods per class converted.
If you want to get involved with LibreOffice development, it doesn't get much easier than this - please do check out the code and have a go. For the more adventurous finding an unused destructor, without a matching unused constructor is proof of a leak that needs chasing, of which there are a handful.
Failing that, why not run Caolan's callcatcher over your project to see which nooks and crannies are surplus to requirements.
2012-01-09: Monday
- Chewed mail, poked at the perennial fsync issue, chased my sudden socket death issue - it seems our compile doesn't kill the sockets. Wrote status report & other monday admin.
- Dumped graph, booked FOSDEM travel arriving midday on the 2nd, leaving midday on the 6th. Out for a run, dinner, J's pregnancy crisis group over. Prodded at the android sdk/ndk with some success, and tried to get Eclipse installed, despaired of my inkjet, and bought a color laser printer.
2012-01-08: Sunday
- NCC, Tony spoke on the Way - back home for lunch with Claire, Simon, Phoebe & Tally good to see them. Andy & John Madden around for dinner (the latter sadly moving away to Exeter tomorrow), spent some time writing up some chunks of his interesting biography.
Kazunari Hirano
OpenOffice StartCenter on my busy Keitai
I've been using this keitai for more than 3 years.
This keitai works very hard.
It edits texts everyday.
It receives emails with pictures everyday.
It takes pictures everyday.
Last Saturday I went to Honederamura with parents and children of our community, Yamanome, to experience heavy snow and mochi tsuki (mochi pounding or rice-cake making) together.
We tried Kanjiki to walk on soft snow easy.
We pounded mochi.
Isn't it beautiful?
Then we tore the mochi into bite-sized pieces and ate them with red bean paste.
Louis Suarez-Potts
City, Red Hat tout Raleigh as open-source leader - Technology - NewsObserver.com
City, Red Hat tout Raleigh as open-source leader - Technology - NewsObserver.com
Raleigh is by no means an insignificant city. So there are at least a couple of things of interest here, not least being the turn to, or at least the decline of a turn away from, open source. The other is that it's Red Hat that's moving this, it seems, and not any of the other big players in Raleigh and the associated Triangle. (The Triangle is one of the key intellectual and business centres of the US, and in some ways rivals Silicon Valley, but not quite: not enough ferment of new companies.)
I look forward to see how this plays out. For instance, will there be a public sector big-scale deployment of Foss? Or is this to be a deferred action, aka lip service.
Raleigh is by no means an insignificant city. So there are at least a couple of things of interest here, not least being the turn to, or at least the decline of a turn away from, open source. The other is that it's Red Hat that's moving this, it seems, and not any of the other big players in Raleigh and the associated Triangle. (The Triangle is one of the key intellectual and business centres of the US, and in some ways rivals Silicon Valley, but not quite: not enough ferment of new companies.)
I look forward to see how this plays out. For instance, will there be a public sector big-scale deployment of Foss? Or is this to be a deferred action, aka lip service.
por Louis Suárez-Potts (noreply@blogger.com) el 08 de January de 2012, a las 01:37:12
Michael Meeks
2012-01-07: Saturday
- Lazy day, slugging, and lots of house cleaning preparing for a valuation; amazing amounts of 'stuff' get stuffed everywhere over time. Ruthlessly pruned baby bits, sorted many workshop items cleaned all those potential metal splinters out of the zone. Out to Newmarket Open Door to drop things off, business until late.
Eric Bachard
Annotation mode improvement (OOo4Kids Impress)
English version (version Française ci-dessous)
I decided to continue the work started by the students of Ecole Centrale Nantes, improving the user experience with the Impress annotation mode (OOo4Kids Impress).
Previously, when you right click, you had everything proposed. e.g. in cursor mode, the submenu "change the eraser width" was proposed. Was a bit suboptimal ... o_O
The idea was to simplify. See below the result. Note: Mac OS X will show the blue arrow, because checkbox seems to not work. Investigating ...
1. Pen mode : only propose the Pen features
2. Cursor mode : no longer display the Pen nor the Eraser possibilities
3. Eraser mode : same idea, only propose to select the width.
If you don't like these changes, or if ever you can explain there is a good reason to not add the feature in the coming OOo4Kids 1.3, please contact me.
And Happy New Year 2012 !!
===============================================================
Version Française (english version above)
J'ai décidé de continuer le travail des étudiants de l'Ecole Centrale Nantes, en améliorant l'expérience utilisateur. En particulier, j'ai travaillé sur l'amélioration du mode annotations (OOo4Kids Impress).
Dans la version précédente, avec le clic-droit, tout était proposé dans le menu contextuel. Par exemple, le sous menu "modifier la largeur de la gomme était proposé, même en mode curseur. Ce qui n'était pas très utile.
L'idée a consisté à simplifier ce menu contextuel. Voir les copies décran ci-dessous pour avoir un aperçu (en attandant la sortie de OOo3Kids 1.3). Note: les checkboxes ne semblent pas fonctionner, c'est la raison pour laquelle la "flèche bleue" est utilisée sur cet OS. Je cherche activement ce qui ne fonctionne pas.
1. Mode stylo: proposer seulement les fonctionnalités du stylo
2. Mode curseur : ne plus afficher les possibilités de la gomme dans ce mode.
3. Mode gomme : même idée, se limiter à proposer simplement de modifier la taille de la gomme.
Si vous n'aimez pas ces améliorations, ou si vous connaissez une bonne raison de ne pas les ajouter dans OOo4Kids 1.3 qui sortira prochainement, merci de me contacter !
Et Bonne Année 2012 à tous !
Michael Meeks
2012-01-06: Friday
- Up early; mail chew, into Cambridge for Lunch, back, wrote LXF column, chased some tango / artwork licensing. Dinner. Interested to read about the future of CouchDB. Built some tooling to generate statistics on our dead code removal.
Kazunari Hirano
PR: デザイナーの求人情報・転職支援はマスメディアン
 |
| グラフィックデザイナー・Webデザイナーの求人数・転職支援実績NO.1クラス |
I have got Apache OpenOffice installed on my cell phone
Happy New Year! The year of Dragon!
The year of London Olympics!
My partner's mother will be 21 years old on February 29th.
:)
Today I have got Apache OpenOffice installed on my keitai.
If you like to know more about Apache OpenOffice, see OpenOffice.org Incubation Status.
Click here to see Japanese translation of the status page.
Otto's Club Twitter
openofficeorg: RT @corysd: I am on the verge of creating my own database using @openofficeorg for dealing with payments, charges, and students/clients!
openofficeorg: RT @corysd: I am on the verge of creating my own database using @openofficeorg for dealing with payments, charges, and students/clients!
Michael Meeks
2012-01-05: Thursday
- Up early; more mail reading and backlog unblocking. Some patch review, commit account creation, and account management. Lunch.
- More slog; team meeting, TSC meeting, posted minutes. Chat with Ross, built some stats. Dinner.
- Tried to buy Deutche Bank Ethical ETF's (listed on the LSE interestingly) using Barclay's wunder-trading website. Seemingly not possible - it appears they list only some subset of funds they happen to like - que ?
Otto's Club Twitter
openofficeorg: RT @EducaRedAR: ¿Tu carta para los Reyes Magos? Con ‘OOo4Kids’ http://t.co/0lF5OG36 @openofficeorg #educared #NoticiasParaAprender @Noti ...
openofficeorg: RT @EducaRedAR: ¿Tu carta para los Reyes Magos? Con ‘OOo4Kids’ http://t.co/0lF5OG36 @openofficeorg #educared #NoticiasParaAprender @Noti ...
Eric Bachard
OOo4Kids and OOoLight need translators
OOoLight and OOo4Kids are both shipped with the Presenter Screen included (full integration). One student who tested it remarked it was not translated. Starting the process ...
Any hepl is welcome, and if you want to participate, the instructions are provided on the current dedicated wiki page.
Thanks in advance and Happy New Year 2012 !!
Alexandro Colorado
Welcome to 2012
What does being stable means and how my friends have achieve that stableness? For a while I have been interested on learning how my friends achieve what they have had and what things they haven't achieved. During a meeting with a fellow friend with the same first name came to review. Only 2 stories within our 60+ friends have been able to make a future of their own. That means achieving a way of living without the help of their family.
However one of those stories, I have been one of those. I most say I am kind of proud.
On the business side, I got a call from a entrepreneur from a content company for certifications on Linux and soon OpenOffice.org. Which is a great news to start the year, this might be the break that would give me a business direction for 2012.
Promoting their material and having an agreement that will allow me to grow business wise, will be great for everyone.
I hope when I get back to Cancun I would be able to find new ideas and will be able to have a win.
Michael Meeks
2012-01-04: Wednesday
-
Up rather early - the iron routine of school is back again; to
work. Waded through mail. Bitten once again by finding my gnome-keyring
totally non-functional, filed a bug - it
seems systemd's over-enthusiastic cleaning up is to blame; after 10 days
it appears to do the moral equivalent of
rm -Rf /tmp/*destroying the gnome-keyring socket in the process. In the meantime:sudo systemctl disable systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer sudo systemctl stop systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer
No doubt just a mis-configuration that can be cleaned up; I wonder if it trashes ORBit2's sockets too - though perhaps it ignores sockets. - Chat with Frederic, caught up with Norbert & others on IRC; started digging through the mail backlog with vigour. Read the git commit logs over Christmas - lots of nice work and fixing. Lunch.
- Noticed a new and rather sexy General Polygon Clipper library with the boost license. That looks lovely for repsnapper's slicing code; and Martin "Hurzl" Dieringer already uses it, neat - roll on faster, better slicing.
- Prodded the bug lists variously; set some fresh from-clean builds going.
- Saw that Luis (good to his word) and Gerv finally got the MPLv2 out - which is lovely. That gives us an AL2 compatible (and more importantly) GPL* compatible weak-copy-left license; more in the FAQ. A crisp read too. Hopefully there is no longer a need for CDDLs in today's world.
- Dave & Emily over, put babes to bed, dinner, sat around and talked by the fire. Finished the spreadsheet and filed tax return.
Louis Suarez-Potts
App Shopper: CloudOn (Productivity)
App Shopper: CloudOn (Productivity)
Interesting--but when I tried to download it (it's free), the message, "not available for..." this or that country came up. Perhaps that's a sign of how popular it is? For my guess is that there are many who want what I want: an app for the iPad (or equiv Android) device allowing me to create and edit (or even just edit) ODF and (yes) OOXML files.
I will actually try to contact the makers of CloudOn, to see if they are interested in working on something related for ODF. Again, I'm sure there is a market there. It is one both for enterprises and similar environments, such as public sector offices and education institutions, and those who simply want to have a tablet and not a full computer and see the tablet as something more than a purely consumer object. Yes, they can use Apple's productivity apps--they are quite good, in fact, and operate nicely with Apple's own Cloud offerings. But that Procrustean hobble cuts out a huge market.
Interesting--but when I tried to download it (it's free), the message, "not available for..." this or that country came up. Perhaps that's a sign of how popular it is? For my guess is that there are many who want what I want: an app for the iPad (or equiv Android) device allowing me to create and edit (or even just edit) ODF and (yes) OOXML files.
I will actually try to contact the makers of CloudOn, to see if they are interested in working on something related for ODF. Again, I'm sure there is a market there. It is one both for enterprises and similar environments, such as public sector offices and education institutions, and those who simply want to have a tablet and not a full computer and see the tablet as something more than a purely consumer object. Yes, they can use Apple's productivity apps--they are quite good, in fact, and operate nicely with Apple's own Cloud offerings. But that Procrustean hobble cuts out a huge market.
por Louis Suárez-Potts (noreply@blogger.com) el 04 de January de 2012, a las 13:57:11
Mozilla Public License, version 2.0
Mozilla Public License, version 2.0
So, as Luis Villa announced on a list, Mozilla Public License v. 2.0 has just been published. It's actually an interesting evolution. (Indeed, the overall evolution of open licenses bears scrutiny, as they--the licenses--are being taken as seriously as any other legal instrument.)
As Luis explains in his brief message,
What's New
The result of a two year revision process that included feedback and suggestions from the Mozilla community, users of the MPL (both community and corporate), and the broader open source legal community, MPL 2.0 contains several important changes from MPL 1.1. In particular, MPL 2.0:
is simpler and shorter, using the past 10 years of in-practice application of the license to help better understand what is and isn't necessary in an open source license.
is modernized for recent changes in copyright law, and incorporates feedback from lawyers outside the United States on issues of applicability in non-US jurisdictions.
provides patent protections for contributors more in line with those of other open source licenses, and allows an entire community of contributors to protect any contributor if they are sued.
provides compatibility with the Apache and GPL licenses, making code reuse and redistribution easier.
So, as Luis Villa announced on a list, Mozilla Public License v. 2.0 has just been published. It's actually an interesting evolution. (Indeed, the overall evolution of open licenses bears scrutiny, as they--the licenses--are being taken as seriously as any other legal instrument.)
As Luis explains in his brief message,
What's New
The result of a two year revision process that included feedback and suggestions from the Mozilla community, users of the MPL (both community and corporate), and the broader open source legal community, MPL 2.0 contains several important changes from MPL 1.1. In particular, MPL 2.0:
is simpler and shorter, using the past 10 years of in-practice application of the license to help better understand what is and isn't necessary in an open source license.
is modernized for recent changes in copyright law, and incorporates feedback from lawyers outside the United States on issues of applicability in non-US jurisdictions.
provides patent protections for contributors more in line with those of other open source licenses, and allows an entire community of contributors to protect any contributor if they are sued.
provides compatibility with the Apache and GPL licenses, making code reuse and redistribution easier.
por Louis Suárez-Potts (noreply@blogger.com) el 04 de January de 2012, a las 00:50:31
Michael Meeks
2012-01-03: Tuesday
- Last day of the holidays; frantic tidying, cleaned out an unpleasantly blocked U-bend, fixed the heated towel rail, re-attached a malingering door-handle etc. Lunch. Tried to dig a tiny metal splinter out of Hannah's foot (most odd) with no real joy.
- Pollyanna in the evening, and tax filing afterwards.
Louis Suarez-Potts
Apache OpenOffice (Incubating)
Apache OpenOffice (Incubating)
I suspect that finding the newly christened and newly energised project and application formerly known as "OpenOffice.org" is less than super easy for some. So, the link is there... Right now, I'm using the latest build for Mac OS X of Apache OpenOffice (thanks to Raphael Bircher!), and not only is it stable but fast. I've also added the usual extensions, etc.
And I can further view my ODF files on my iOS devices. (Android-oids can also do this, with different apps.) Increasingly, office apps will read ODF, at least ODT; some are more complete than others. Symphony's ODF reader is the lastest on the scene, and very useful. I do wish I could edit--at least minimally--the ODF files, without converting them or having to use an online Web service. But I'd guess that won't come into play until yet more enterprises demand it by their acts alone, such as giving out iPads to employees.
I suspect that finding the newly christened and newly energised project and application formerly known as "OpenOffice.org" is less than super easy for some. So, the link is there... Right now, I'm using the latest build for Mac OS X of Apache OpenOffice (thanks to Raphael Bircher!), and not only is it stable but fast. I've also added the usual extensions, etc.
And I can further view my ODF files on my iOS devices. (Android-oids can also do this, with different apps.) Increasingly, office apps will read ODF, at least ODT; some are more complete than others. Symphony's ODF reader is the lastest on the scene, and very useful. I do wish I could edit--at least minimally--the ODF files, without converting them or having to use an online Web service. But I'd guess that won't come into play until yet more enterprises demand it by their acts alone, such as giving out iPads to employees.
por Louis Suárez-Potts (noreply@blogger.com) el 03 de January de 2012, a las 16:11:10
Otto's Club Twitter
openofficeorg: @Chasapple Track the bug on issuezilla https://t.co/jTxkDJm3
openofficeorg: @Chasapple Track the bug on issuezilla https://t.co/jTxkDJm3
openofficeorg: @PhilipGoose adjust your footnotes by using the stylist, and set up specific styling.
openofficeorg: @PhilipGoose adjust your footnotes by using the stylist, and set up specific styling.
openofficeorg: RT @baseanswers: ODF™ World News is out! http://t.co/lgygjJOm ▸ Top stories today via @alternative_to @paelladebits @openofficeorg @liao ...
openofficeorg: RT @baseanswers: ODF™ World News is out! http://t.co/lgygjJOm ▸ Top stories today via @alternative_to @paelladebits @openofficeorg @liao ...
openofficeorg: RT @discover_linux: @openofficeorg Openoffice 3.4 & Apache News : http://t.co/vjfk4syq
openofficeorg: RT @discover_linux: @openofficeorg Openoffice 3.4 & Apache News : http://t.co/vjfk4syq
Michael Meeks
2012-01-02: Monday
- Up earlyish, off to Bruce & Anne's, nice to see them. Lunch, out for a walk on Aldeburgh beach, unseasonably temperate, and queues for fish & chips - amazing. H. feeling unwell. Caught up with David M. in the evening.
Louis Suarez-Potts
H.P.’s TouchPad, Some Say, Was Built on Flawed Software - NYTimes.com
H.P.’s TouchPad, Some Say, Was Built on Flawed Software - NYTimes.com
This is a fascinating article, in particular:
Mr. Mercer gained fame at Apple as a software designer for the first iPod, and Palm recruited him in 2007 to help create the Pre. After some internal debate, the company chose to have WebOS rely on WebKit, an open-source software engine used by browsers to display Web pages. Mr. Mercer said that this was a mistake because it prevented applications from running fast enough to be on par with the iPhone. But a former member of the WebOS app development team said the core issue with WebOS was actually Palm’s inability to turn it into a platform that could capture the enthusiasm and loyalty of outside programmers. There were neither the right leaders nor the right engineers to do the job, said this person, who declined to be named because he still had some ties to H.P.
From concept to creation, WebOS was developed in about nine months, this person said, and the company took some shortcuts. With a project like this, programmers typically start by creating the equivalent of building blocks that can be reused and combined to create different applications. But with WebOS, Palm employees initially constructed each app from scratch. Later, they made such blocks, but they were overhauled once by Palm and then again by H.P., forcing programmers to relearn how to build WebOS apps.
Another issue was recruiting. In 2009, it was hard to find programmers who had a keen understanding of WebKit, Mr. Mercer said, and Apple and Google had already snatched up most of the top talent.
The narrative I read is that a community failed to coalesce around the project and it did so because a) the code was inapt--proprietary, and architected with a proprietary developer group in mind; and b) there was no forethought and no figure or apparatus to bring in developers.
Apple's iOS is famously closed but the charisma of Jobs transcended that huge fence because it promised an exciting market--the point not being (or not being only) money but the excitement of others using as well as devising competing products. That's a compelling, intoxicating complex and its produced wonderful things. (We see a more diluted form of this in Android, simply because Android utterly lacks a charismatic lead who mysteriously figures the market and all its promises.)
So, what can be done to fix this problem with WebOS? Probably, the answer lies in the description of the problem. And the same could be said for RIM's new OS. To form a successful community of app developers there has to be the exciting flux that what one does will be appreciated not only by the consumer (sigh....) but by one's peers--who, if they like the idea, will probably try to one-up it: which is to say, take it seriously, even if they think they can do what you did better.
Put another way, it's not about consumers only. It's really about engaging an open community. The former leads to what we've seen and will continue to see (just wait for MSFT/Nokia?): irrelevance. The latter to ... interesting life and huge markets.
This is a fascinating article, in particular:
Mr. Mercer gained fame at Apple as a software designer for the first iPod, and Palm recruited him in 2007 to help create the Pre. After some internal debate, the company chose to have WebOS rely on WebKit, an open-source software engine used by browsers to display Web pages. Mr. Mercer said that this was a mistake because it prevented applications from running fast enough to be on par with the iPhone. But a former member of the WebOS app development team said the core issue with WebOS was actually Palm’s inability to turn it into a platform that could capture the enthusiasm and loyalty of outside programmers. There were neither the right leaders nor the right engineers to do the job, said this person, who declined to be named because he still had some ties to H.P.
From concept to creation, WebOS was developed in about nine months, this person said, and the company took some shortcuts. With a project like this, programmers typically start by creating the equivalent of building blocks that can be reused and combined to create different applications. But with WebOS, Palm employees initially constructed each app from scratch. Later, they made such blocks, but they were overhauled once by Palm and then again by H.P., forcing programmers to relearn how to build WebOS apps.
Another issue was recruiting. In 2009, it was hard to find programmers who had a keen understanding of WebKit, Mr. Mercer said, and Apple and Google had already snatched up most of the top talent.
The narrative I read is that a community failed to coalesce around the project and it did so because a) the code was inapt--proprietary, and architected with a proprietary developer group in mind; and b) there was no forethought and no figure or apparatus to bring in developers.
Apple's iOS is famously closed but the charisma of Jobs transcended that huge fence because it promised an exciting market--the point not being (or not being only) money but the excitement of others using as well as devising competing products. That's a compelling, intoxicating complex and its produced wonderful things. (We see a more diluted form of this in Android, simply because Android utterly lacks a charismatic lead who mysteriously figures the market and all its promises.)
So, what can be done to fix this problem with WebOS? Probably, the answer lies in the description of the problem. And the same could be said for RIM's new OS. To form a successful community of app developers there has to be the exciting flux that what one does will be appreciated not only by the consumer (sigh....) but by one's peers--who, if they like the idea, will probably try to one-up it: which is to say, take it seriously, even if they think they can do what you did better.
Put another way, it's not about consumers only. It's really about engaging an open community. The former leads to what we've seen and will continue to see (just wait for MSFT/Nokia?): irrelevance. The latter to ... interesting life and huge markets.
por Louis Suárez-Potts (noreply@blogger.com) el 02 de January de 2012, a las 02:14:35
Shaun McDonald
2012 New Year Fireworks in London
Last night I went to the centre of London near the South Bank to watch the fireworks for the New Year celebrations. In the past I have taken lots of photos of the fireworks, so this year I decided to try some video instead. When started using my camcorder, a Canon LEGRIA HF M32, I realised that my Panasonic Lumix TZ20 had a wider angle lens, so I was able to get much more into the same shot. The Canon camcorder on the other hand has a bigger lens, thus is able to cope with low light conditions better. I decided to create two videos. They both take high definition video at 1080p in the AVCHD format, thus I’ll let you compare the results below.
Pansonic Lumix TZ20:
Canon LEGRIA HR M32
Prior to the fireworks I took a few photos of the London Eye and the crowds:
Afore I headed out I had some filling haggis, neeps and tatties for dinner:
Louis Suarez-Potts
BBC News - Man sued for keeping company Twitter followers
BBC News - Man sued for keeping company Twitter followers
The article cited above is about Noah Kravitz, who gained his far more than 15 mins of fame earlier this fall when his previous employer sued him for "taking" Twitter followers with him upon his departure from the company.
It's a tricky issue, and one that has particularly concerned me. My own claim to fame derives, in no small part, I am sure, from my role with OpenOffice.org. I've tried, always, to distinguish what I do strictly on behalf of OOo, on behalf of OOo's corporate sponsors and my (former) employers, and on behalf of my own interests.
It gets complicated fast, as my own personal interests overlap those of the others'. For instance, I'm interested in open source, open standards, social media, and the theory and practice of developing community. What's more, I've been interested in these issues since at least my first year in college, when I joined the UC Berkeley Student Cooperative Association (USCA) and by the next year was the youngest elected Workshift Manager (think: community manager but having to coordinate all jobs all the time) and then the youngest member to the university-wide USCA board of directors. (I also held several other positions.) How communities work, whether they be cooperatives or collaboratives or some other form of commons-based peer production networks and how to keep them together, so that things that need to get done actually are done, and that everyone more or less agrees with doing those things--all this has long coloured my working life. It also, in a perverse way, shaped my dissertation: I wrote on the romance of the vagabond (tramp) in the US at the turn of the 19th/20th century. The vagabond, or tramp, as the romantics like Twain and others called him, was a community disruptor. Of course, his disruptions enabled and indeed strengthened the affected community, for he figured a threat that unified those making up the community. It's an old story.
Open source relates in abstract ways: it works (as advertised, say) because of the community, which adds a kind of value that intramural employees can sometimes exceed but which is essentially unlimited in its boundaries, unlike corporate walls. But that's the nature of community and its difference from corporations; and it also points to the great difficulty of commodifying the productive community. One can easily put a price on a corporation. Corporate boundaries exist, in part, just for that reason. A peer network, on the other hand, cannot be priced--and indeed, perhaps the historical record of the transition from commons to property can provide a useful analogy--I'm thinking of the British enclosure movement, which more or less is coeval with the rise of the modern liberal (and propertied) state. But that shift was literally violent, and there seems to be (so far?) little violence associated with free software and any migration it might undergo to privatization. In part, that's no doubt because free- and open-source software *starts* from a position of property. It's not a denial of property nor of any of its rights. Rather, it's an extension of it, but instead of limiting access, open source enables it; by the same token, it limits how one can privatize it, and some licenses are more hostile to privatization than others.
As individuals, when we join a community, we thus have to be clear as to what will happen to the intellectual property we contribute: who owns it and for how long? That is, will rights revert to me? And what can I claim about my contribution? But these questions pertain more to copyright assignment. Some community projects require contributors, for one reason or another, to assign the copyright of their contribution to the project. Usually, "the project" means the governing and organizing foundation that will then disinterestedly manage all contributions. (Ideally, the foundation is not beholden to a primary corporation/contributor/sponsor. If it were, there would likely be a failure--or at least questioning--of trust.) We then join productive communities and participate as essentially rational beings (in the classical economic sense), able not only to understand the (immediate and longterm) value of our contribution but able also to act rationally on that basis. Of course, that, like most other planks making up the classical economic ship is fiction. Indeed, part of the lure of community is precisely to get us to act exuberantly (famous word....): in excess of reason--but also in a way that fulfills our enthusiasm.
I tend to believe that for a great many, it's as much the love of what community offers as the value one invests that makes "community" now so immensely important--even regardless whether the community in question is a production or consuming one. (Disclosure: my current work relates to what I've done all my life, only in a more effective and refined way: making community, and using--as needed and strategically [fancy way of saying, "with some idea of what I'm doing"] the ever-evolving social media tools, coupled with another key driver for me, "marketing.") And I also tend to believe that our love of community is sort of like our love of and ability to use--our capability for--language, especially as Chomsky would present it: as something essential to being human. And you cannot carve that quality into quantity and price it, though you can--and this is done all the time--price specific instances.
But identifying and then applying, and doing so consistently and coherently, the boundaries making up a community, especially one that is characterized as economically essential to the production of a commodity sold by a private company, and distinguishing those boundaries from one's own is difficult. It's easy to say, "If you do something on company time, it's the company's." But if you are fully salaried, there is no moment in time when you are not operating on company time and representing the company. Some company's will allott you private time, say, or loosen the legal identity so that you can represent yourself as yourself, without implicating the company in any way. But that's a rarity, though I expect the logic of community participation social media has made and is making possible will force a change in that. Kravtiz' instance is an interesting case, and it's not by any means unique.
For if the historical corporation "owned" your time and implicitly all you did, and therefore all your representations, at least as long as you were employed by them (and for whatever period after you agreed to), the modern corporation must now also deal not only with your multiple engagements, via social media but also, arguably, what you did prior to your employment. (It's Calvinism/Puritanism yet again.) The company can simply decree that no blogs, no Tweets, no other equivalent public communication is permitted without authorization. That will naturally dampen enthusiasm, but the company that decrees that sort of policy also clearly does not really see any value gained by enthusiastic speech. Or, the company can articulate a nuanced approach, and some speech is the employees and other is not. How do--or should--shareholders then view the private rantings of a senior executive? Of course, such an executive is probably a fool for ranting publicly in the first place, modern technology or not; but move it down a notch and the question remains as a fact. Shareholder value is frequently determined by the actions and speech of the company decision makers and producers, and evaluating speech extra-mural speech makes the overall valuation of the company more difficult. It's not unlike the situation of the late 90s, when a company's worth was determined by how many page hits--eyeballs--it received, even if revenue was hardly commensurate with popularity. The belief was that at some future date, the page hit would translate to hard cash. A blog post or Tweet is quite different, but it still suggests a dimension of valuation that is must be appreciated on its own terms and which cannot easily be converted--metrically or any other way--to coins. (This is not an argument *for* privacy as such; it's rather an observation that community today is a manifold unsettling traditional, fixed and bounded corporate modes of valuation. And that this new modality of creating value--the community way--implies virtues that potentially exceed the traditional.)
por Louis Suárez-Potts (noreply@blogger.com) el 01 de January de 2012, a las 23:05:52
Michael Meeks
2012-01-01: Sunday
- Up earlyish, drove to Hertford, preached, talked afterwards with some interesting people; back to Helena & James' for lunch with Rose, Mike & Anne - lovely food, fine company - home late.
