invention

Caolan McNamara vs the Sun Global Special Store

David Fraser — 2006-10-12T17:11:07+02:00

Eike Rathke points out the new Sun Weblog Publisher you can buy for $9.95 for blogging from within OpenOffice.org Writer (or StarOffice, not that I know anyone who has that :-)).

Sounds remarkably familiar. I wonder if Caolan has thought of trying to sell oooblogger...

Stardust Nasty Macro Application for OpenOffice.org

David Fraser — 2006-06-02T09:18:03+02:00

Slashdot reported Kaspersky labs discovering the Stardust "nasty macro application" for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org

This is not really a virus, it is a nasty macro application. If you are foolish enough to agree to run it without checking what it does, you will suffer the consequences...

Not many technical details in the above links, but TechWack says the following:

Antivirus firm Kaspersky is calling the virus "Stardust". This virus is basically contained in a StarOffice document that uses macros and then infects a global template, which is used by the application to generate new documents. If a victim opens the file carrying this virus, Stardust copies it into the global template and all contained in a StarOffice document that uses macros and then infects a global template gets infected by it used by that copy of the software.

Of course (as paveljanik pointed out I hadn't said in the original version of this entry), this is all nothing to be afraid of. I only linked the above information because there are no actual details about this perceived problem, but I'm not saying it's actually a serious problem!

Data Entry in OpenOffice.org Calc

David Fraser — 2006-05-23T20:00:53+02:00

Pierre-André Galmes has a great tip on typing data in OpenOffice.org calc. Basically select an area and use tab to switch between cells.

The only problem - I can't see how to get it to work nicely with the AutoComplete that happens when you start typing the same text as an entry above. Pressing Enter or arrow key all lose the selection, and pressing Tab gives a beep. Any ideas?

(I would have left a comment on his blog, but you have to start your own Blogger blog to do that...)

OpenOffice.org Recovery Dialog in Firefox

David Fraser — 2006-03-04T17:17:54+02:00

Was amused when I tried to open a Word document from webmail. It started in a Firefox window with an embedded OpenOffice.org instance but obviously something went wrong as it showed up a recovery dialog.

After a few tries it opened a normal OpenOffice.org window that worked fine. Puzzling...

Firefox embedding OpenOffice.org recovery dialog [640x480]

A cool machine is a happy machine

David Fraser — 2006-02-17T15:44:50+02:00

I have been having repeated problems where my desktop just powers off if its overloaded. Its an Athlon XP 2400 and the CPU temperature was showing 79 degrees C and up (sometimes 129 degrees but I'm sure that was a bad reading...)

This usually happened when I was running two openoffice.org builds simultaneously (HEAD and ooo-2-0-1-branch) - so I would leave them running overnight, come back and the morning and the machine was off...

I finally got fed up and decided to investigate properly, and found an immense amount of dust between the heat sink and the CPU fan. After dusting that off (couldn't possible have been providing any cooling like that), the average idle temperature has dropped from 63 degrees to around 50 degrees, and the temperature under load to around 55. Much nicer and will save me much frustration

Jingle builds of Psi and Kopete for Fedora Core 4

David Fraser — 2006-01-27T09:06:04+02:00

Was excited around Christmas to see the Jingle signalling protocol for Voice over IP through Jabber, which was jointly authored by Google and JSF people and is used by Google Talk.

Google also released an open source library for doing Jingle called libjingle This makes it even easier for all the free software instance messaging clients to get the spec implemented quickly, and they all seem to have started doing that. Now that Google Talk has also turned on XMPP Federation, this looks like a blast for open protocols to win the day...

But when I looked at the roadmaps of Gaim and Psi, it became clear that although implementations are there, it'll take a while for these to reach general release.

Finally got round to trying to build some for myself, and found that they actually seem to work quite well (at least on my local network :-)).

Psi's jingle branch built fairly easily once I had the right dependencies etc.

I couldn't find instructions on building Gaim with Jingle support, it seems like they are still working on integrating it (in the Gaim-VV project), and I liked using Gaim because I can do IRC, Jabber etc all from the same client...

So I found Kopete which is similarly functional and has Jingle support in their development branch.

Building this as an rpm took more work because on Fedora at least, its part of kdenetwork which is fairly big. Eventually got it working after learning a fair bit about spec files... (rant: lots of "HOWTO" documentation, not enough reference documentation...)

The resulting RPMS, SRPMS and specfiles are all at http://davidf.sjsoft.com/files/jingle/ ... of course I should create a proper package repository but that can wait for another day...

OpenOffice.org building day

David Fraser — 2006-01-11T10:28:30+02:00

Had an OpenOffice.org building day yesterday. Up to four concurrent builds. My Fedora machine seems to overheat in such a circumstance and turn itself off poof! Then won't turn on again for a few minutes. Frustrating.

Anyhow the Windows build of ooo-build-2-0-1 now looks like its working. I tried to integrate the SIL Graphite OOo patch into ooo-build but had a problem building graphite 1.1.2 with gcc 4.

I did a complete build of 2.0.1 and m149 on Fedora, just respinning 2.0.1 to fix up the installs which have a problem with strip. Discovered you have to manually specify to use -system tarball if you want to build dictionaries, something we do because we've got our own South African dictionaries.

Finally have a Windows build of 2.0.1 after fixing numerous problems and restarting a number of times. So should be building out of ooo-build cvs now. Tor has been doing parallel builds to me there

Also have been helping Friedel who's joined the South African project to try get his builds going. A frustrating process for him, showing that OpenOffice.org's build system is better than it was, but still has a long way to go.

All South African locales in OpenOffice.org

David Fraser — 2006-01-09T11:03:54+02:00

All 11 South African locales have now been integrated in OpenOffice.org and should be usable in version 2.0.2 when it comes out. Thanks Eike for the work and the news

Interesting articles...

David Fraser — 2005-11-29T10:31:13+02:00

Some interesting articles to read when I came back from holiday. It seems Swahili free software stuff is moving forward in lots of fronts. Tomorrow I'm going up to Pretoria to train some of the KiLinux team on using ooo-build for building localized OpenOffice.org.

Kamusi Project Internet Living Swahili Dictionary is a good read, this is a great project.

Tanzanian government uses OSS for localisation shows how the government is realising the importance of free software.

Also found this article on the Guardian on Owning ideas a good read - not neccessarily technically right in everything, but has some good insight and is accessible to people unfamiliar with the debates... e.g. Patenting ideas rewards failure and makes success more difficult. ... This is madness. Ideas aren't things. They're much more valuable than that

Looks like Firefox 1.5 is going to be released shortly, thus making this a fun week Most of the issues in the translate toolkit for Firefox 1.5 have been resolved, there are still some that I'm working on but people seem able to produce their translations OK using it.

translate-toolkit 0.8rc5 and a holiday

David Fraser — 2005-11-19T08:52:18+02:00

Well I clearly didn't manage to release 0.8, there has been a fair bit of patching and adding tests (particularly ensuring round-trip maintenance of source files in Mozilla, David Farning has been filing many bugs). And quite a few bugs in our bugzilla have been fixed.

I'm off on a week-long break so I've released 0.8rc5 (with a Windows build that the snapshots don't have) for anyone wanting to use the latest code.

I did my first real patch for OpenOffice.org: Support for multiscreen displays in Impress is now beginning to work (but more work to do as you'll see in the bug).