invention

First saw on IOL that someone has managed to make a genetically modified blue rose. In the hunt for pictures, went off to Google News but alas a search for "blue rose" only turned up one other article. Both attribute the discovery to Suntory which doesn't have any updated news on its site. Both mention the subdivision called Florigene, but their website still says While we don't have a blue rose... yet.... Like trying to find a rose in a haystack.

Discovered its possible to combine multiple languages in one OpenOffice.org installation. Just no user interface at the moment to select the language. But managed to manually produce a English/Zulu version with only a few glitches. We should produce a South African version with all the languages so far included...

Met up with Mahle today who is interested in making a Xhosa Children's Bible or at least part of one.

Great idea.

nanoblogger 2.8 released - and saw it on freshmeat. Note that if you upgrade you need to carefully compare the changes made to the config files - doesn't seem documented anywhere... and made all my entries on the home page disappear

What advice would you offer to someone who is contemplating starting a GPL-based business?

Fran�ois Bancilhon: Where do I start? (laughs) First, clearly define a solid type of business model for the type of product or service you want to provide. Secondly, one pitfall people make is that they can use a service business model to propel a product. If you create a product, then a product-geared business model is needed, and if you sell services then a service model is needed.

OK, I am working my way through window managers, desktops etc ... currently xfce is the winner... I could personally use some of the blackbox or fvwm-style options but I think many newbie users would get confused. rox is interesting but wierd ... At least xfce gives me a basic usable panel, nice window manager, etc...

What I want now is an integrated tasklist in the panel instead of a separate window... seems that this can be done in the development version, 4.2 - nice screenshot also shows a nice start menu etc. I want it to be simple to install and maintain which currently means Fedora packages (I might compile xfce 4.2 myself just to look at though). newrpms is a good repository for xfce packages that includes a few of the available plugins, but not the taskbar plugin for the panel :-(

Telkom can't explain its tarrifs. Well that's not surprising - a legislated, state-owned monopoly has been privatised and their prices are higher than prices in countries with competition. Why would they be otherwise. But at least the government seems to think its a problem. What smells of corruption is the quote from the Telkom representative:

"There are interesting economics as far as pricing is concerned. Maybe we should go away on a retreat - away from the media - and we can explain to the committee how it works," group executive Nkhetheleng Vokwana said.

Now why would the retreat need to be away from the media? Maybe in a nice game reserve where the committe is wined and dined...

Vokwana said Telkom was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the second national telephone operator, saying there was a need for people to be able to compare apples with apples.

Since the second national operator would be in a similar position to Telkom, of course their prices will be high too... South Africa really needs a lot more deregulation in this area.

Seems like I am not alone in feeling frustrated with current Linux desktop bloat when running on older machines. An article from Bob Marr that was featured on slashdot says basically the same thing.

Anyway the point of this is there are a number of suggestions from the Slashdot story to look into... In approximate order of popularity (and ignoring commercial distributions that you can't download for free):

• xfce (desktop environment)
• fluxbox (window manager)
• fvwm (window manager)
• rox (desktop environment)
• sawfish (window manager)
• windowmaker (window manager)
• blackbox (window manager)
• icewm (window manager)
• pekwm (window manager)
• enlightenment (window manager plus)
• idesk (icons on the desktop)

Most of these are just window managers, some are full desktop tools. Anyway I intend to try some to see how they fare ... no point in having a system so slow as to be practically unusable. Some seemed to suggest that using konqueror without the rest of KDE, and one of the above would work well. A review of Linux desktops has a good list of resource requirements for fluxbox, xfce, KDE, Gnome. Another idea would be using kdrive instead of a full X server...

On a related note, read this interview with the CEO of Centaur about creating not-so-fast not-so-power-hungry not-so-expensive x86 processors for VIA. Good stuff - would be great to see more of these being used in South Africa.

Set up a Linux lab (5 machines) at Jubilee with Dwayne on Thursday and Friday. Fedora Core 2 has no boot floppy support. It's slow to boot up and OpenOffice.org and Mozilla are relatively bloated for low end machines. It still amazes me that minimo is planned for machines with 32MB of memory - I'm sure the original versions of Mozilla used to run fine like that ... anyway we're making gradual progress...

Steve's machine would only boot up in Safe Mode on Windows 98 ... Knoppix ... voila he can use it to do most of what he used to before. The power of free software!

OK managed to get through most of Javier and Dwayne's reported bugs ... with the exception of how to handle jar file names and locale directories in xpi files transparently, so released translate 0.8b2 :-)

Rearranged the code that serves as backends to the conversion and filter commands so it shares a common class, translate.misc.optrecurse - in preparation for updates to the filter code, so now you can specify preconditions in the code e.g. don't check for whitespace if untranslated.

Take look at the list of casualties by country in World War Two. Changed my perception of the war - far more losses in Russia and China than I would have expected...

The moment I've been waiting for for a long time ...

See XOpenWin - a plot afoot a long time ago to use things from Wine to get native Windows programs to run on an X Server. This message recently alerted me to a program that begins to do just that - cygpeace (it's a Japanese site).

I have winmine running in a remote X session from my Linux box. Slow, but amazing :-)

Did some improvements to pomerge with Dwayne on Friday.

Also started at looking at integrating dictionaries - like Swahili - think I know what needs to be patched now to integrate them into the build.