Planet AbiSource

Martin Sevior: Nice interview in redhatmagazine

Fri, 09 May 2008 12:31:18 +0000

In which our heros (mostly uwog) talk about all things AbiWord.

http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/05/08/abiword-team-interview/

</shamlessplug>

Thanks mether!

Mikey Cooper: Live Mesh preview

Wed, 07 May 2008 18:22:11 +0000

I finally got my invite for Live Mesh today. I've been pretty excited to try it out, especially now that I have a laptop and a desktop I'd like to keep in sync. Unfortunately, after trying to run the installer, I was greeted with this message:

"Product does not support running under an elevated administrator account or with UAC disabled."

Why!? UAC is SO annoying when working on a development machine. So my choices are to constantly by annoyed by Vista or not use Mesh. So stupid!

This is the first issue post-SP1 that has made me regret going Vista over XP. Hopefully a future release allows non-UAC usage. Turns out there is a valid technical reason and it's fixed with Vista SP1. Hopefully the next Live Mesh release will take advantage of it. Just frustrating.

Martin Sevior: AbiWord-2.6 packages for Ubuntu.

Mon, 05 May 2008 13:38:02 +0000

Despite his heroic efforts, Ryan Pavlik has been unable to get AbiWord-2.6 into the official Ubuntu repositories.

Nevertheless Ubuntu users can grab Ryan's packages for AbiWord-2.6 by following these instructions

Hubert Figuiere: demosaic and pixbuf

Sat, 03 May 2008 15:58:43 +0000

I just committed some code in libopenraw that allow displaying digital camera RAW files in eog (or anything else using GdkPixbuf). The colors and the gamut are still off, that's because I only perform the demosaic.

Just to be clear, I haven't changed a single line of code in eog. It is the stock version from openSUSE 10.3.

Marc Maurer: AbiWord 2.6.3 Released!

Fri, 02 May 2008 22:58:54 +0000

AbiWord 2.6.3 is a nice cleanup release; make sure you get it!

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

Marc Maurer: OLPC finally ditches annoying education goals

Fri, 02 May 2008 20:24:10 +0000

“[…] the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible” - Charles Kane. It’s good to see some clarity coming from the OLPC camp.

Ryan Pavlik: The secret of Microsoft’s success

Thu, 01 May 2008 09:49:23 +0000

Clearly, it is AbiWord’s lack of videos like this that keep it from being the dominant word processor “in the industry.” We don’t have an equivalent, but I can fix that pretty easily.

Vista Sales Video

Jordi Mas: Back from Extremadura

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:30:00 +0000

I was in Extremadura last Friday on the Festival Tecnologico at Santos de Maimona, Extremadura, Spain. It has been great to see again their vision in open source. For those of you who do not know, Extremedura is the poorest region in Spain. They missed the industrial revolution all together; thus since the beginning of 2000 politicians have been trying to ensure that Extremadura does not miss the information society revolution as well.

I arrived to the event on Thursday evening. Olga drove me one hour and half (thanks so much) from Seville airport to Santos de Maimona. At night, we had dinner in a traditional and home-run restaurant with Olga, Alex and Tony from Fundation Maimona and Jose María Figueres, ex-president of Costa Rica and a wise man. My first dinner ever with a president or ex-president of a country. The conversation was focus on regional and rural development and information society issues. It was like been on a club of the Economist readers.

Next day the conference started. I had the opportunity to listen to Carlos Castro Castro (I actually helped to translated one of his articles into Catalan back in 2003). He talked about the strong commitment of the Extremadura government towards open source, materialized, among other things, in the Linex distribution.

Arround 14.00 the panel about open source and business started. My presentation was mainly focus on highlighting the possibilities that open source offers to companies and what Openbravo can provide as solution. I had lunch with a couple of people and some of the ideas interesting comments were made:

· Many people still thinks that an ERP in just an advanced accounting program. This is obviously far from reality not only from a f unctionality point of view also for the effort that an ERP solution requires to be implemented.

· Some people are abandoning home-grown solutions and looking at Openbravo as product and platform to build their next generation of solutions instead of investing in their own product (I blogged about this time ago).

Next stop is Galicia. I have a close relationship with Galicia since my book Software libre. Tecnicamente viábel, economicamente sostíbel e socialmente xusto (in Galician) was published two years ago. I'm going to be talking on the 14 of May at University of Vigo. Keep tunned in our site more details.

Hubert Figuiere: exempi 2.0.1

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:19:01 +0000

Just released a bug fix version of exempi. Version 2.0.1 address issues with error handling and some building issues on non-Linux systems.

This is likely to be the last 2.0.x release. 2.1.0 is on its way.

Renato Filho: Bossa Conference 2008

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 16:19:52 +0000

Bossa conference 2008 promotional video. be ready to 2009.

Mikey Cooper: So busy!

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 02:30:28 +0000

My first week of self-employment has been too busy. Unfortunately, too much of that time has been personal errands. I've got about 25 hours to make up so far and am still burning the midnight oil for another gig. Tomorrow I'll be spending a good chunk of the afternoon at a nerd conference which may end up putting me further behind. I'm trying to stop thinking of everything in terms of "how much money could i have made working instead of doing this?" (where "this" could be anything from "dr appt" to "taking a nap"), but it's hard to turn that off sometimes.

Today I got a gum graft done to try and stop my implant from failing. My mouth's still achy and I'm cranky that I can't eat the foods I want until the gum heals up. But on the plus side, the implant's not sticking out up front anymore.

Martin Sevior: Latex rules!

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:34:10 +0000

To follow up on Marc's post, Google Summer of Code students really wanted to work on our Latex exporter. I think we had 10 applications to enhance that feature but we had none to work on ODF.

Another example that Words != Action in the Open Source world.

Marc Maurer: AbiWord developers show strong support for OOXML

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:31:45 +0000

The winning Google Summer of Code applications for AbiSource have been announced. The AbiWord developers show strong support for the emerging OOXML ISO standard by the selection of 2 winning proposals about improving AbiWord’s OOXML import and (currently non-existent) export filters.

This year’s winning entries are:

Getting rid of non-portable library use in AbiWord/Gtk+ (read: make AbiWord use Cairo and GTK-Print)
Improve LaTeX Support (read: improve the LaTeX exporter)
AbiWord Multiple Page View
Rethinking Styles (make our style related dialogs not suck)
Improve OOXML support (this one focusses on the import filter)
Proposal for developing OOXML Export plugin for AbiWord

PS. Please don’t flame me to death. We don’t particularly like or dislike the OOXML format itself. It was a joke. Funny.

Interestingly, we did receive quite a few applications about improving OOXML support, while we got zero OpenDocument related proposals. Apparently the support for the OpenDocument ISO standard isn’t strong enough in the F/OSS community to actually make an effort to improve support for it. Even when paid. Food for thought.

Hubert Figuiere: teaser...

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:08:05 +0000

Just because I won't be at LGM 2008 to show this in a corner, here is a teaser screenshot:

It is still pretty much a work in progress, and is not actually up to the point where I can use it. Some keywords: XMP, digital camera RAW, non-destructive, asset management, GNOME, C++

Jordi Mas: Miscellaneous topics 17/04/2008

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Some miscellaneous topics:

Open Source Census is a new project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software in the enterprise. It basically means that they count how many enterprise installations for each open source package exist.
On Monday we published the Openbravo Manifesto (I'm the main author). For a long time, many of us at Openbravo wanted to clarify the extent of our commitment to our projects, and open source in general; we also wanted to share our values and belief with our Community. Today Matt Asay blogged about it.
I have completed (it was half done) the update of Mono.Cairo to Cairo 1.4 (just now that Cairo 1.6 has been released). I needed some of the new functionality for experimenting with gbrainy. It's cool to have the latest Cairo functionality handy.

That's all for now

Marc Maurer: Yes, it is stop energy

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:16:17 +0000

@Jason: First of all, stop bashing Red Hat. Red Hat had nothing to do with any PackageKit design decisions. It makes you look silly.

Second of all, software distribution on Linux is horribly fscked. Yes it is. There is a reason that you can’t find any Linux binaries on AbiSource’s download site. We’ve tried and tried again, it is broken. Yes, even your fancy .deb/apt-get/synaptic stuff. We had software distribution solved in Windows land 5+ years ago, and Linux still can’t do it cross-distribution.

Now, for the first time in years we might actually get a good working tool that makes things like installing a dictionary from AbiWord *doable*. Hello, this is 2008, and installing a dictionary is still hard for normal users and developers alike. We have to deal with it on irc and via e-mail every single day, so we have a clue how bad it actually is.

So, what’s your solution to this all? Whine that PackageKit currently does not look at fd 0 so you can slam the user a VTE in the face to totally confuse the crap out of him. If showing a terminal is so precious to you, then how hard can be to whip up a patch to do just that? It can’t be more than 10 lines of Python. If that patch does not get accepted upstream, you can always put a custom patch in the PackageKit .deb.

Now stop the stop energy please.

Martin Sevior: Pango In Action

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:51:19 +0000

Thanks to Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay who recently provided a nice example of how far the freedesktop community has come in supporting complex text such as Indic scripts. I simply copied his post and pasted it into abiword and got the following.

This was just copied from Sankarshan's blog post in firefox and pasted into abiword-2.6. Congrats to the pango hackers and Tomas Frydrych who made this "just work" :-) (Plus it's a nice example of the quality of our X11 clipboard support :-)

Update:
Changed the screen shot to show the font Lohit Bengali

Martin Sevior: All the cool kids are doing it...

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:21:11 +0000

[msevior@seviorlap ~]$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
220 cd
147 make
137 gdb
120 ls
46 svn
43 abiword
35 loccp
33 emacs
31 ssh
18 abib

"loccp" essentially runs grep over *.cpp
"abib" does cd /home/msevior/abidir/bin

Yep I develop abiword in 15 gnome-terminals. Who needs a fancy IDE?

Ryan Pavlik: Abi on Ubuntu, and Guademy

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:04:18 +0000

Howdy folks! Thought I’d give an update on the AbiWord on Ubuntu work. I’ve put up packages on my PPA, and as of version 2.6.2-0ubuntu0~ppa17 is in “final shape” - that is, I’m reasonably pleased that I have all packaging issues resolved. We managed to get an MIR approved to bring in the headers for AbiCollab into Hardy if AbiWord itself gets in, so those builds have both TCP and Jabber/XMPP (Loudmouth) collaboration support, where the TCP one is a more polished and also compatible with Windows! Now, the remaining steps to get Abi 2.6 into Hardy is to get libwv-1.2 promoted to main - this used to be included in the Abi tarball, so I’m hoping this step is pretty straightforward - and the actual sponsorship of my AbiWord packages into Hardy. Here’s hoping it goes well! If you’re running Hardy and want to check out Abi 2.6 before it hits the regular repositories, just check out my PPA: https://launchpad.net/~abiryan/+archive I’m also gonna see what I can do to put up a backport to Gutsy and perhaps Feisty, but no guarantees there, just check it out

Owing to my current location in Valencia, Spain, the host city of the second Guademy conference, I’ve been able to register and go! If I know you and you’re going, send me a ping, and hopefully we can meet up there and say hey!

Oh yeah, and I’ll give in…

Manzanita:~ ryan$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
82 cd
73 ls
63 ssh
30 sudo
23 (censored web site update script)
18 svn
14 killall
12 python
10 ps
9 mkdir

and

ryan@hardy-vm:~$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
42 cd
38 dpkg-buildpackage
32 sudo
28 apt-cache
24 dch
20 ls
17 dput
10 svn
8 dpatch-edit-patch
8 ca

Interesting - I’ll let you guess which terminal I worked on the AbiWord package in…

Marc Maurer: AbiWord 2.6.2 Released!

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:17:49 +0000

AbiWord 2.6.2 is roughly what 2.6.0 should have been; 2.6.1 was scared, so we didn’t release that one :)

[ Release Notes | Download ]

Ryan Pavlik: AbiWord 2.6.0 on Ubuntu?

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 16:40:56 +0000

Why not? After it seemed like only the lack of a package(r) was keeping Abi 2.6.0 out of Hardy, it became clear that wasn’t a good enough reason. Thus, I set about to get together a nice package of AbiWord 2.6.0, based somewhat on the original Ubuntu packages, but fixing as many packaging bugs as possible and simplifying as I went.

The result: My source package creates only an abiword, abiword-plugins, and abiword-plugins-gnome package (gone are the days of abiword-gtk, abiword-gnome, abiword-common) Furthermore, unless there’s a good reason for a plugin to not be included by default (good reason being defined as needing more dependencies), it’s been included in the regular abiword package. (This means that abiword-plugins only has the grammar and math plugins. Nothing is in abiword-plugins-gnome right now, since I haven’t poked around long enough to get the gnome-office stuff going yet.) Yes, this means ODT is in the main package, as is Microsoft Office OpenXML import and AbiCollab.

Oh, and by the way, that screenshot was taken while in an AbiCollab session with an AbiWord 2.6.1 prerelease build running on Windows.

Martin Sevior: Video of my AbiCollab presentation

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 05:58:01 +0000

Last Tuesday I gave my abicollab presentation at the Linux Users group of Victoria. The presentation was recorded and is now on the web in the place where my LCA 2008 presentation was meant to be.

The audience was great and asked me lots of insightful questions. Unfortunately my inexperience at being recorded was obvious as I often forgot to repeat the question for the recording. I also spent a lot of time explaining our upcoming web service to support abicollab but unfortunately I couldn't demonstrate it. My laptop refused to work with the video projector. The first that that has happened to me in 6 years :-(

A special thanks to Peter Lieverdink who organised things.

Martin Sevior: Ubuntu - Suffering Sclerosis

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:16:48 +0000

Well I guess it is almost inevitable. After a few years as being first on ball and dynamic as anything, it appears Ubuntu is suffering the Sclerosis its supporters have accused other distros of having. Case in point. Look at the officious bureaucracy we're dealing with trying to get abiword-2.6 into the next Ubuntu builds.

It is worth noting that Fedora, SuSE, Foresight Linux and Mandriva have all managed to get AbiWord-2.6 into their distros. These all have similar release dates to Ubuntu.

Fedora and other distros have developed ways to be far more dynamic in their support of upstream projects. Ubuntu should take a look to see if they can learn something from them.

As it stands Ubuntu users look to be frozen out of the next wave of collaborative document creation available to Windows and other linux users. It's all pretty ironic since the initial impetus for abicollab came from a former Canonical employee, Jeff Waugh.

Hubert Figuiere: exempi 2.0.0

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:12:22 +0000

I finally released exempi 2.0.0 The changes from previous versions are only for endian detection (I let autoconf do it) and some missing includes.

Now I'll branch, keep the 2.0 branch for eventual fixes, and master will stick for 2.1.

Marc Maurer: Declaration of Human Rights killed

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:44:52 +0000

Appalled as to why almost no-one seems to be bothered by the death of the Declaration of Human Rights as we know it.

Mikey Cooper: Resigned

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:01:27 +0000

Today was an emotional rollercoaster of a day. I gave my notice at work and will soon be dangerously self-employed, doing consulting work for some friends I used to work with. So tired. So happy and excited about what's ahead.

Marc Maurer: PET scan

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:10:15 +0000

Tomorrow Wendy will finally get a PET scan to see what is causing her fever. She has had a constant fever ranging from ~38C to ~38.8C for about 6 years now (amongst an increasingly large number of other issues, suchs as inflammation of her eyes). The University Medical Centrum Groningen has been rocking so far, throwing all their technology at it to find the cause of her problems. Something our local hospital would and could not do. So next is the PET scan, which is typically used to 1) find cancer 2) find inflammation. Naturally we hope for the latter; not finding any problem would, as weird as it sounds, be a dissapointment. When they find something, they’ll try to biopsy it to determine what is actually going on.

Hubert Figuiere: April's Fool... NOT

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:42:16 +0000

Using Cheese, here is a shot of my forehead after a trip to the ER.

Funny... NOT!

Marc Maurer: AbiWord 2.6.0 Released!

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:15:24 +0000

Release Notes | Download

Jordi Mas: Barcelona's Taxi channel uses Linux

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:06:00 +0000

It has been a few months since I showed up at the vocalist's jam session at Tarantos in Barcelona city center. Fantastic as usual and after having a good time, the session ends up arround 2am. I walk to pick up a taxi to get home, obviously getting the usual drugs and sex offers for which la Rambla has become famous in the recent years.

I manage to jump into a taxi and I find a touch screen in the passager's sit. I try to use it but it does not work.

    Me: What is this mate?
    Taxi driver: It is an advertisement thing. I get paid for having this installed.
   Me: It does not seem to work.
    Taxi driver: Let me reboot it for you.
   (This is when I start to think how great software is nowadays)

Reboot starts and a little linux mascot shows up in the left corner of the screen and a Knoppix based system starts booting. Four euros of taxi later, the machine is finally initialized. It uses an old hardware and boots from CD. I can then use the application. It is not bad but there is very little content.

The system is called the Taxi Channel and it is an advertisement platform with some contents. A little research on the Net seems to indicate the service is operated by Taxicom and it is already working on a few taxis in Barcelona and Valencia.

Linux is definetly getting everywhere these days :)

Hubert Figuiere: Gtk HelloWorld

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:43:16 +0000

No I won't be presenting a Gtk+ HelloWorld, but just the valgrind output of one. It actually does not matter what program.

==28869== Syscall param rt_sigaction(act->sa_mask) points to uninitialised byte(s)
==28869==    at 0x40007F2: (within /lib/ld-2.6.1.so)
==28869==    by 0x483A7A2: sigaction (in /lib/libpthread-2.6.1.so)
==28869==    by 0x5562321: google_breakpad::ExceptionHandler::SetupHandler(int) (in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libgnomebreakpad.so)
==28869==    by 0x556242D: google_breakpad::ExceptionHandler::SetupHandler() (in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libgnomebreakpad.so)
==28869==    by 0x55626D7: google_breakpad::ExceptionHandler::ExceptionHandler(std::string const&, bool (*)(void*), bool (*)(char const*, char const*, void*, bool), void*, bool) (in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libgnomebreakpad.so)
==28869==    by 0x5561DE2: gtk_module_init (in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libgnomebreakpad.so)
==28869==    by 0x41AB1EC: (within /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1200.0)
==28869==    by 0x46472E9: g_cclosure_marshal_VOID__PARAM (in /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x463A918: g_closure_invoke (in /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x464D9EC: (within /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x464F63E: g_signal_emit_valist (in /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x464F988: g_signal_emit (in /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==  Address 0xbec4e5f4 is on thread 1's stack
==28869== 
==28869== Syscall param rt_sigaction(act->sa_mask) points to uninitialised byte(s)
==28869==    at 0x40007F2: (within /lib/ld-2.6.1.so)
==28869==    by 0x483A7A2: sigaction (in /lib/libpthread-2.6.1.so)
==28869==    by 0x5562321: google_breakpad::ExceptionHandler::SetupHandler(int) (in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libgnomebreakpad.so)
==28869==    by 0x5562445: google_breakpad::ExceptionHandler::SetupHandler() (in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libgnomebreakpad.so)
==28869==    by 0x55626D7: google_breakpad::ExceptionHandler::ExceptionHandler(std::string const&, bool (*)(void*), bool (*)(char const*, char const*, void*, bool), void*, bool) (in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libgnomebreakpad.so)
==28869==    by 0x5561DE2: gtk_module_init (in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libgnomebreakpad.so)
==28869==    by 0x41AB1EC: (within /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1200.0)
==28869==    by 0x46472E9: g_cclosure_marshal_VOID__PARAM (in /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x463A918: g_closure_invoke (in /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x464D9EC: (within /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x464F63E: g_signal_emit_valist (in /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x464F988: g_signal_emit (in /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==  Address 0xbec4e5f4 is on thread 1's stack

Apparently this is a known bug.

Also when quitting, --leak-check=full is revealing:

==28869== 2,048 bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 143 of 184
==28869==    at 0x4022AD8: malloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:207)
==28869==    by 0x55623E5: google_breakpad::ExceptionHandler::SetupHandler() (in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libgnomebreakpad.so)
==28869==    by 0x55626D7: google_breakpad::ExceptionHandler::ExceptionHandler(std::string const&, bool (*)(void*), bool (*)(char const*, char const*, void*, bool), void*, bool) (in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libgnomebreakpad.so)
==28869==    by 0x5561DE2: gtk_module_init (in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libgnomebreakpad.so)
==28869==    by 0x41AB1EC: (within /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1200.0)
==28869==    by 0x46472E9: g_cclosure_marshal_VOID__PARAM (in /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x463A918: g_closure_invoke (in /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x464D9EC: (within /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x464F63E: g_signal_emit_valist (in /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x464F988: g_signal_emit (in /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x463ECC0: (within /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)
==28869==    by 0x463B68E: (within /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.1)

Hint: this is not in Gtk+.

Hint2: neither is it because it is written in C++

Martin Sevior: AbiWord Back for GSoC in 2008

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 06:43:13 +0000

If you're a student, interested in getting paid to work on the project that provides "Word processing for Everyone", then head on over to the Google Summer of Code homepage and write up an application for AbiWord.

You don't have long! Applications close on March 31st!

Hubert Figuiere: sigc++ and boost::bind

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 01:39:13 +0000

I have been using Gtkmm a lot for a personal project.

I discovered that you can pass boost::bind to Gtkmm signals (that use sigc), thanks to the magic of templates.

Something like that:

m_selection->signal_selected
    .connect(boost::bind(&LibraryMainView::on_selected,
        m_mainview, _1));

Why? Because I'm more familiar with Boost.Bind and for me it looks more flexible. Also because you can pass a shared_ptr<> to it, unlike with sigc::mem_fun.

Hubert Figuiere: New GNU linker

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 22:36:30 +0000

A new linker for GNU binutils, gold, targetting ELF, has been announced. It is apparently 5 times faster to run than the regular GNU ld. It is written in C++, and Tom Tromey praise it for its performance and its coding style.

Off course it is still pre-release and will probably need a lot of testing as well as being ported to new target architectures, as it currently only support i386 and x86_64.

And I actually need to give it a try.

Martin Sevior: A hint of Physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 06:16:19 +0000

Last Thursday, Nature published a result from my experiment, Belle that shows an unexpected imbalance in how matter as opposed to anti-matter behaves in nature. Our paper was covered by slashdot.

The reason for the widespread interest is that it could be the first clue to both solving a puzzle that originated with the Big Bang Model of Universal creation and for a deeper level of understanding of particle physics than that provided by the standard model of particle physics.

The standard model assumes that there are 3 generation of quarks (fractionally charged particles) and leptons (integrally charged particles).

Source: http://www.benbest.com/science/standard.html

Interactions amongst these particles are mediated by the strong, electroweak and higgs fields. Of the particles shown above, only the Higgs particle has not yet been discovered. Each quark and lepton also has a corresponding anti-particle with identical mass but opposite charge. The are many general descriptions of the standard model on the web but I'll summerize the relevant points. It works extremely well but it is highly unlikely to be the final word on how particles interact. There are almost certainly new principles in nature that operate at very small distance scales that are not incorporated in the standard model. There are 3 powerful pieces of evidence for this.

Firstly: the masses of the neutrinos are much too small to be generated from the Higgs field.
Secondly: calculations of the mass of the Higgs yield nonsensical results at energies above 1 TeV
Thirdly: there is mass in the Universe.

It is this last point that our result addresses. In the bIg Bang, particles and anti-particles were created in equal amounts. As the Universe expanded and cooled these annihilated one another and were transformed back to energy. In order for the matter that makes up the stars and galaxies to exist, there must have been an imbalance in how nature behaves with respect to matter and anti-matter. This imbalance would mean that a bit more matter survived this annihilation process and remained to form the stars, galaxies, planets and people of the universe. We call this imbalance "CP-violation".

OK, now the standard model does provide a means for favouring matter over anti-matter, however it is too small by about 10 orders of magnitude. If the standard models was all there was, matter would not have been dense enough to form a single star.

So here is one big hint for a new principle of physics. Whatever new principles of nature exist, one or more of them must provide additional CP violation. My experiment, Belle, has found many examples of CP violation in the decays of B-mesons. In the result cited in our paper we look at how the rates of:

Anti_B0 => K^-⁺ decays compared to B0 => K⁺^- . We find that the former is 20% less likely than the latter. This clearly demonstrates CP violation happening in nature.

In addition we measured the rates for:

B- => K^-⁰ and B+ => K⁺⁰ In this case the former process is about 14% more likely than the latter. The histograms showing these results are shown below and one can see by eye the imbalance in the numbers of observed events.

source: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7185/full/nature06827.html

The Standard Model can't predict absolute results for these processes because of the difficulties the theory has forming mesons from quarks. However the most obvious calculations do predict that the asymmetries should be the same. The fact that they're not is quite surprising. It is possible to stretch the hadronic corrections to the model so that they agree with the measurements but such efforts are both contrived and serve to make other measurements we've made disagree with calculations.

So what does it all mean?

A nice and far more detailed commentary on our results is provided by Michael Peskin in the same edition of Nature.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7185/full/452293a.html

It could be that hadronic corrections will explain our result. However, the result could also be the tip of the iceberg. The first hint of some new principle in nature that was previously hidden from our view. If so, it has the profound effect of making life in this universe possible through ensuring matter is the predominant form of ordinary mass.

Mikey Cooper: Goodbye, Ole Clanky!

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:00:57 +0000

Lowes got our new fridge in early and I just happened to have the day off of work, so they delivered it today. Hooray! No more clanking compressor driving me crazy at night. The delivery people were awesome and got everything set up in about 10 minutes. As one of them was demonstrating all of the features to me, she tried the in-door water dispenser and it didn't work at all. They futzed around with the shut-off valves under the sink for awhile before telling me I'd have to call a plumber. I swore to them the line was working before and showed them the ice that the previous fridge spit out literally as they were unloading the truck. They were stumped.

After heading back apologetically to their truck to leave, I tried it out and the ice maker and the water dispenser were completely dead. Then I noticed the "lock out" button was set to "lock". After turning the lock off, water started gushing out. I facepalmed and brought a cup of water out to the truck where they were finishing up paperwork. After telling the delivery person about the lock out button, she facepalmed as well. So hooray new, working fridge!

Hubert Figuiere: 10 years ago

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:34:42 +0000

10 years ago, almost, Mozilla was released as Free Software under the NPL. It was supposed to be Netscape 5. I built it on a K6-200 with 64MB of RAM which was powerful at the time (running Debian)

Yesterday, I finally rebuilt it for the second time, using the Firefox 3.0b4 code base. I'm not sure how much code is in common either. The build was smooth and, by far, much easier than OOo. Actually the fun part is that in some configuration OOo leads to building xulrunner :-)

Now let's learn XPCOM the hard way.

Jordi Mas: gbrainy Windows madness and new version and location

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:11:00 +0000

Early this week I started to get a few messages regarding gbrainy from Windows users. I was very surprised because the current version is experimental and the only effort that I did to disseminate it was to blog once about it. Well, it turns up that some Windows software directories (see 1, 2, 3 or 4 as examples) have registered gbrainy and exposed it to a large number of Windows users.

From 16th of March until yesterday there were 12.661 downloads of the gbrainy Windows build:

[despertaferro httpd]# cat access-default.log| grep gbrainy-0.53.exe | wc
12661 250825 2729558

This is not funny if you think that the file is 70Mb and the machine where I have my homepage hosted was already receiving lots of traffic.

So, I decided to move the Windows build to SourceForge (they have better infraestructure) and release a new 0.61 build. All the information of the new location is available in the gbrainy's Windows page.

Hubert Figuiere: I'm no longer operational...

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:37:51 +0000

... and none of my circuits are functioning properly.

R.I.P. Arthur C Clarke.

Jordi Mas: gbrainy 0.6

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:54:00 +0000

Here we have gbrainy 0.6, almost two months after the previous version. gbrainy is a brain teaser game and trainer to have fun and to keep your brain trained. What is new in version 0.6 from the NEWS file:

Version 0.6
* Implemented difficulty levels: easy, medium and master
* Complete revision of the texts
* 1 new calculation game and 3 new logic games
* Bug fixes

gbrainy 0.6 is available for download from:

* http://www.softcatala.org/~jmas/gbrainy/gbrainy-0.60.tar.gz
(md5sum b4addaca5a66504aff73612dfd64ecd0)

The new difficulty levels work very well with calculation and memory games since its complexity is correlated to level that the user is playing. It also work well for most of the logic games but for some of them is just not possible to honor it because the logic is what it is. You can additionally use the time in seconds to memorize the challenge setting in memory games to increase or decrease the difficulty.

My friend and workmate Sanjeev Nath, that is a native English speaker and someone with a great teaching background, has helped me to do a full proof-reading of the English of the application. The English now flows more naturally, some of the questions and answers are more precise and we have unified the terminology. As result of this work 20% (sorry translators) of the texts in application have changed. This is good not only for English speakers but also for other languages too since the original texts have better quality.

Until recently I have been releasing a version of gbrainy every month. Now that the application is playable, I'm going to produce a major version every three months. During these three months I will maintain a stable branch releasing fixes and updated translations. This will also reduce the pressure of people helping me to port gbrainy to other platforms and working on translations.

Thanks to everyone that has given help or feedback to this version: Siegfried-Angel Gevatter, Sanjeev Nath, Brandon Perry and all the translators.

Mikey Cooper: Monthly rewind

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 04:21:16 +0000

I've been with Tammy 12 years today. That's longer than any of her students have been alive. Another couple of years and the time I've spent with her in my life will outweigh the time I haven't. That boggles my mind. The only people I know (that I still keep in some semblance of contact with) who have been together longer are georgy and Rick. Tam and I often remark on how relatively drama-free our lives are. Hopefully that's a good thing, hopefully it keeps making us happy and content, and hopefully it continues.

We went down to SoFla last weekend to bring my nephew to the RenFest. He ended up going to a last-minute birthday party instead, but we got to hang with my fam for dinner. Tam, Dan, Sean, and I all still hit RenFest. The magic it once held for me is mostly gone and I can't really put a finger on why. I'm sure it's not much different than it was way-back-when, but somehow the whole tourist-trap aspect of it is so much more obvious and grating to me now. It was cool just hanging out with the TamFam for the majority of the weekend.

We finally got upgraded to TFS 2008 at work this week. I created a separate work blog so I don't keep spewing more Microsoft fanboy posts at everyone here.

Met up with jobu138 and zeekster for our semi-annual Wing night tonight. We've decided to do a Rock Band Block Party at some point in the very near future. I need to dust off the drums and get practicing again. Also, 6 master DLC Grateful Dead songs for Rock Band released last night? Well played, sir!

I started listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks back in December. I enjoyed the first 4 immensely, was bored with the 5th until the very end where it squeaked out a somewhat jarring adequate, and am (so far) much happier with the 6th. Rowling doesn't mind playing rough with her characters, which is refreshing.

IT'S OVER!

Hubert Figuiere: RIP Gary Gygax

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:45:37 +0000

Gary Gygax passed away today. R.I.P. For those who don't know who he was, Gary Gygax invented a game, and a game concept in 1974: Dungeons & Dragons and the concept of Roleplaying Games.

Marc Maurer: Martin is a bug killing machine!

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:51:09 +0000

The last few days I’ve been feeding the bug that annoyed me the most in AbiWord to Martin. One bug every day before I went to bed. Since Martin is about 18000 KM away, he had the whole evening to fix it. Nothing (well, if you only consider geekdom land) beats waking up and seeing a commit message in your IRC logs that kills your most hated bug! I wonder how long Martin can keep this up :-P

Rock on, AbiWord 2.6 will be neat!

Jordi Mas: gbrainy 0.53 for Microsoft Windows

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:57:00 +0000

During the last weeks I have been trying to build a gbrainy's installer for Windows. I finally got some results. The installer packages gbrainy, its precompiled translations and a Mono 1.2.1 and GTK Sharp 2.8.3 stack. This is the Mono/GTK# version that worked better with gbrainy and is the same used by MonoDevelop on Windows too. The final package is 70Mb, that is far from more ideal but I really have no much time for rebuilding the Mono runtimes that I found that work well for gbrainy.

I have created a page with all the information on how to compile and create an installer for gbrainy in Windows. I also have published a gbrainy 0.53 installer for Windows.

Once installed, gbrainy on Windows XP works pretty well. On Windows Vista there are a few problems but nothing that prevents from using the application. Obviously all this could not be possible with the great effort that the gnome, mono and cairo hackers made to make sure that these tools work well on Windows.

Remeber that is an experimental build.

Jordi Mas: Miscellaneous topics 01/03/2008

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:40:00 +0000

Some miscellaneous topics:

Alfresco Community Conference in Barcelona. The state of art open source content management system is having their European Alfresco Community Conference next 22nd of April in Barcelona, 10 minutes walking from my home! I have already registered for the full day.
Asolif is officially born. After lots of months of talks between different companies a Spanish Federation of free software companies has been established with the support of many other groups like CatPL in Catalonia. This is good news for all the small IT vendors that work with free software and face on a daily basis the same challenges.
Abiword and Google Summer of Code. I added some ideas into the coordination page and I also offered myself as a mentor (I already was back in 2005 for the Mono project). I hope that someone will be able to devote some love to the Windows Unicode port that I started (60% done I would say). If nobody takes into this one I'm considering taking some time off from work and doing it myself. Been still an ANSI application these days is embarrassing.
LinkAt is the Linux distribution for education build by the Government of Catalonia. I heard from my flatmate Jesús Corrius that their presentation at FOSDEM was a success. Version 2.0 is going to be released soon and they are already closing some bugs. Their are doing a terrific job, not only building the distribution but also creating training materials, courses and helping people to deploy it.

That's all for now

Mikey Cooper: Foot-in-mouth disease

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 12:38:20 +0000

Dan, you're asleep in your room right now, so I'm leaving you this letter. Sorry for secretly blaming your Airport base station and Apple in general for our networking woes whenever Tammy and I visit. Hours of slow, painful, fruitless googling over my cellular connection finally led me to an article. While the content of the article itself was useless, it did contain this image:

And that's when I realized that the letters in your network key were all capitalized.

Hubert Figuiere: I told you so!

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:37:45 +0000

I think that this time I can say "I told you so".

In 2005/09 I posted this to rant about the use of hidden and undocumented MacOS X API in WebKit.

In 2008/02, the Mozilla folks post this, this and this where they denounce that issue.

The difference is that at that time I didn't bother to provide data like performance comparison, probably because I decided that it was someone else problem.

To add the these post, Microsoft actually got sued, back in the early 90s, for using undocumented APIs in order to be ahead of their competition in the space of... office applications. And Apple employees still continue to drink the KoolAid claiming that one need to file a bug... or that these are not API bit SPI (sic)^[1].

This is just one of the many frustration I no longer get by choosing only Free Software.

Notes

[1] actual justification given to me at one point

Hubert Figuiere: CPU^wSpam assassin

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:18:28 +0000

Federico: concerning Spamassassin in Evolution, I filed that bug a while back. Enjoy.

Hubert Figuiere: libopenraw 0.0.5

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 05:49:17 +0000

Just released libopenraw 0.0.5.

Here is the announce mail.

Download it.

Jordi Mas: Book: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:28:00 +0000

I have just finished the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins (paperback). From the back cover:

John Perkins should know - he was an economic hit man for an international consulting firm that worked to convince poorer countries to accept enormous development loans - and to make sure that such projects were contracted to U.S companies. Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, the American government would request their "pound of flesh" in favours, including access to natural resources, military co-operation and political support.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is the story of one man's experience inside the intrigue, greed, corruption and little-known government and corporate activities that the U.S. have been involved in since World War II. The message is clear, unless these clandestine activities are stopped, they will have dire consequences for our future.

I really enjoyed this book but I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about it. In one hand, many of the things that its author explains sound perfectly right and are aligned with what you probably have read in many other books (No Logo, the World is not for sale and so on), or more generally, about Latin-America history in the 80s. In the other hand, unfortunately, he provides very little evidence or data to backup most of his points.

I still recommend its reading even if may be it should be read as something that is not really such a true history. See the book's page at Wikipedia.

Hubert Figuiere: Checking more than one version with pkg-config

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 16:17:33 +0000

Sometime you have to check for different versions of a packages with pkg-config because of new APIs. I had to query the lazyweb and I ended up finding something. Here is the configure.ac snippet I wrote:

GNOMEVFS_VER=0
PKG_CHECK_MODULES(GNOMEVFS, [gnome-vfs-2.0 >= 2.14],
[
  GNOMEVFS_VER=214
],
[
  PKG_CHECK_MODULES(GNOMEVFS, [gnome-vfs-2.0 >= 2.12])
  GNOMEVFS_VER=212
])
GNOMEVFS_CFLAGS="$GNOMEVFS_CFLAGS -DGNOMEVFS_VER=$GNOMEVFS_VER"

Something I haven't seen often is that PKG_CHECK_MODULES allow found and not found action blocks (yes this is in pkg-config main page). The default not found action is to fail. The above code works as follow: check the highest version you need, if not found check the one you can eventually go away with. Define a symbol with a numeric version and pass it to the modules CFLAGS.

Then in the code do:

#if GNOMEVFS_VER >= 214
...
#endif

Hubert Figuiere: Moving job...

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 05:37:16 +0000

It is the season apparently. Last week I moved inside Novell from the OOo team to the SLED Desktop team to work on Gnome.

Dom Lachowicz: 18 Feb 2008

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:18:16 +0000

As Arc mentioned the yesterday, GTK+ is well on its way to getting a native Win32 GDI+-based image loader, using Microsoft's so-called GDI+ "flat" API. We've avoided any hard run-time or compile-time dependencies as we're looking up GDI+'s functions at run-time from the DLL. In theory, this should let us do away with our libpng/libjpeg/libtiff dependencies on Win32 and let us support precisely whatever image formats Win32 natively supports.

Today, I managed to get single-frame images working properly, including scaling them (which most of the built-in GdkPixbuf loader plugins don't get right, FWIW). What's left is:

Importing metadata (orientation, PNG text chunks, etc.)
Handling animations (i.e. multi-frame GIFs)
Saving pixbufs to PNGs/JPEGs/whatever

Unfortunately, this won't ever have progressive loading, since I don't believe that GDI+ supports that.

Anyone who's interested in checking it out and contributing, the code is in GNOME's SVN, under the gdpi-pixbuf-loader module.

Fridrich Strba: Yes, we can!

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:36:00 +0000

Starting to realize more and more how much different would be Obama's America from the Bushistan we know today.

Link

Dom Lachowicz: 15 Feb 2008

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:18:23 +0000

I'd like to second Rob's assessment of Senator Clinton's proposed "subprime" mortgage fixes.

I bought in a little bit after the bubble had started to burst. Luckily, I was smart enough to seek out a relatively low fixed-rate mortgage that was affordable (my mortgage costs me less than what I was paying in rent, before considering interest-related tax deductions).

I deeply sympathize with the people who were misled into thinking that they could afford their adjustable-rate, sub-prime mortgages. In a lot of ways, I'm a bleeding-heart liberal, and I can't stomach the thought of millions being kicked out of their homes. Especially those who were tricked into thinking that they could afford the houses they bought.

Whether these "let's bail people people out" plans might be what's best for the country, I can't say for sure. What I do know is that it hurts those people who were betting against the mortgage market. It engenders animosity in me, a fixed-rate borrower, toward people getting off easy on their sub-prime ARMs. And, simply put, plans like this one reward foolishness.

Rob's right - Mrs. Clinton's proposal is heavily biased toward borrowers. Without a doubt, borrowers acted irresponsibly, and should be made to see the error of their ways. But I can't feel bad for the originators. For over a half-decade, they handed out sub-prime loans like they were candy. No credit or proof of employment? No money down? No problem. Here's $400 grand. Enjoy your "jumbo" no-doc loan.

These originators knowingly acted irresponsibly, and shouldn't be surprised when the houses they've foreclosed on are worth less than the loans they issued. It was the originators who should've known that these people couldn't afford their loans. It was the originators who should've more accurately appraised the housing assets they were purchasing. And it was the originators who shopped around for underwriting companies to classify these untold sub-prime loans as "good debt", so that they could sell slice, dice, repackage, and re-sell them to mutual funds. Their irresponsible lending practices directly caused the bubble that's come back to bite them.

What Rob misses is that the lenders are going to get "short-changed" anyway, and rightly so. They should have had no reasonable expectation that the majority of these loans would pay out at the higher, adjustable rate. Their option isn't between getting the higher rate vs. the teaser rate, because millions of people are defaulting just as soon as they hit the higher rate. Their choice is between getting the teaser rate vs. what they'd get from selling a foreclosed property that's worth far less than the loan they originated. But maybe the market should be left to its own devices to decide what return these lenders should get on their investments.

And since we're talking about bail-out plans, it's worth mentioning that the lending institutions already got a bail-out in the form of a enormous cash injection, lowered interest rates, and new federal underwriting rules which allow the feds to buy bigger loans from these lenders, thus passing the debt and risk from the lenders onto the taxpayers.

The people who are really getting screwed are the ones who own this repackaged "good debt" in investments like mutual funds and responsible people who might legitimately need a loan to start a business or purchase a car, but can't get one at a reasonable rate due to the "credit crunch". And there's no plan out there to help us.

At the end of the day, the irresponsible originators get a big bail-out. It looks like irresponsible home-owners are about to get one too. And it looks like responsible people like me get a weakened dollar and a big drop in their mutual funds' value. Enjoy.

Hubert Figuiere: Hack week

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:23:28 +0000

Long time no blog, mostly because I had nothing to say beside the usual rants.

This week at Novell it is hack week, and I decided to spend a good amount of time to put libopenraw into a better shape, mostly in the area of extracting and decompressing the CFA^[1] data (the RAW data).

Recently I got my first major outside contribution for libopenraw as support for Minolta MRW files. Thanks Bradley, you rock!

So far this week I have done:

refactored and genericized the unpacking (12 bits to 16) as most RAW files have 12bits per channel and store it without padding in the file ("harder" to decode^[2], but less space wasted). This code I wrote it for the Minolta MRW but end up being usefull to DNG and Nikon NEF
implemented an API to also obtain the CFA pattern. The CFA pattern describe the organisation of the CFA (Color Filter Array), mostly the order of the colors. Currently it only support RGB and 2 by 2 patterns. This data is required in order to perform the demosaic (ie convert the CFA to obtain a colorful RGB image)
enhanced the test suite to checksum the data (in order to check that we didn't break anything) and to check for the CFA pattern.
fixed various bugs needed to either go further or to that were actually bugs, like the unpacking that did fail because it was losing the last bytes of the buffer whose size was not multiple of 3.
started dealing with the Nikon mess. Nikon files are either uncompressed, packed with some weird padding (discard 8 bits if column % 10 == 9), or compressed in a lossy way. As of right now, only the uncompressed files are supported. Oh there is also a bug where NEF file from the D100 might be marked as compressed when they are not^[3].

So far the file very well supported are:

Canon CR2 and CRW (not the CRW from the "hacked" firmware)
DNG (unless they are compressed, I need to support loading in tiles as I already have the lossless JPEG compression), and only with a number of bits per channel of 12 or 16. Strangely, the Leica M8 files seems to be 8 bits per channel.
Nikon NEF uncompressed (D1, D1X, D2X)
Minolta MRW (with the exception of the A200 for which I still miss a sample)

Notes

[1] Color Filter Array

[2] 12 bits is actually simplier than 14 or 10

[3] apparently some people did choose to compress, but it was very slow on the camera. I have to locate a sample.

Jordi Mas: Gnome-games chat meeting

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:02:00 +0000

In the last days we have agreed to have a gnome-games irc chat meeting to discuss the feedback on the different posts, list messages and other channels that has been generated. The current schedule is:

· Date: Monday 18th of February at 23:00 GMT
· Channel: #gnome-games at irc.gnome.org
· Language: English

You have the agenda, the people planing to attend and other details at the new GnomeGames chat meeting page.

Fridrich Strba: Happy birthday, Miriam!

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:26:00 +0000

Happy birthday, Mirka!

Martin Sevior: Linux Conf au 2008

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:22:45 +0000

I have been to many, many conferences over the past 25 years but none have been as interesting and fun as Linux.conf.au 2008.

We had awesome talks that ranged trige's clustered samba presentation where he demo'd the cool features that enable 30,000 windows boxes to share a single file structure (100's of millions of dollars of gear required). To how you can physically interact with the second life virtual world, ($30 interface board). A demonstration of a self replicating machine (some human intervention still required) and Keith Packard's description of the awesome work at Intel with their fully documented and open source graphics drivers.

I even had a decent audience at my highly technical description of abicollab (odp warning) our real-time document collaboration feature for AbiWord. There were some excellent questions and very informed discussion. Aaron Seigo (of KDE fame) and I had some long talks on how other projects could re-use our algorithms. If your application has Model-View split and can represent locations in the document with a unique integer mapping, it is possible to use what we've done in abicollab for real-time collaboration. Aaron is keen to generisize what we've done and make it available to the wider Open Source community.

OLPC (pdf warning) had a huge impact at the conference and I spent Open Day talking about it to many, many interested people. There is great interest in trialling it all over Australia. Pia Waugh (ogg waring) is in the process of setting up OLPC Australia (http://olpc.org.au)to facilitate this process and allow interested people in Australia/New Zealand and the Pacific Islands to contribute as they like. As of February 7th 2008, that domain does not yet resolve, Pia assures us it will Real Soon Now.

There was tons of other great stuff along with numerous high bandwidth conversations with great people in the free software world. I think the fun, excitement and technical focus is brilliantly encapsulated in Paul Fenwick's 3 minute talk: 'Fixing the Web'

Enjoy!

Finally, the crew down in Tasmania won the bid to host linux.conf.au 2009. I'm really looking forward to a conference hosted by people who put together this totally awesome mascot.

Mikey Cooper: Charmed

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:41:20 +0000

With Australia's wacky timezones, I think it's safe to assume it's Thursday (maybe even Friday) there by now, so Happy (possibly belated) Birthday, Martin! May this year be as full of 6.5 sigma significance as your last.