OpenOffice.org

If you are using OpenOffice.org 2.4 (or any earlier version) for X11 on Mac OS X, Leopard version, you might be getting a curious Command Time Out Error. The page offers a script fix that seems to fix the problem.

This issue apparently arose Apple changed the way X11 interact with the applications.

Deep Thought

Microsoft accumulated a huge amount of empathy deficit. Hence, not many people sympathize with the failure of its latest operating system.

Dear Microsoft,

Rather than be afraid of people having Windows installed on a Mac, you should revel in it. At last, people can compare between two operating systems on the same platform. You have the chance to make your OS nimble and quick.

Alas, your history of focusing on monopolizing, and not innovating, makes me think this is unlikely. You have accumulated too much of an empathy deficit for people to care about you anymore.

Sincerely,
Alan

less reason to trust apple

Amazing. The iPhone price dropped by $200 with no compensation (as yet) to the early adopter. What I find disturbing is someone who saved two paychecks to buy an iPhone. What? If you can't afford it, why would you buy one, and then complain about it? It's similar to the idea of finding a nice, big-screen TV in a house owned by those "below the poverty level."

We really should teach children how to resist advertising messages that are designed to distort reality. So when they grow up, they will avoid being so easily seduced.

Two paychecks!? And as I said, Apple is fundamentally a proprietary company that, as I recall, support Microsoft Office Open XML over the OpenDocument Format. This price drop could also be regarded as a way to screw the hackers that cracked the iPhone. It could also be a response to China's distribution of an iPhone clone.

It's a splendid business move for Apple, admirable in its scope, suddenness and perhaps greed. It gives one more reason for me to remain attached to free-software and/or open-source cause. You never have to worry about buyer's remorse because there are no secrets. Milestones are acknowledged with little steps taken along the way, not announced dramatically or teased. Everything is open. You can read about Ubuntu's newest version (Gutsy Gibbons) to be released in October, and know which features are successfully completed, and which are not.

I would rather be a rebel than a soldier fighting for an emperor with Force Reality Distortion Field and Force Lightning. Bill Gates was vilified as "The Borg," assimilating everything in its path, trying to achieve "perfection." If Apple does compensate for the early adopters, then maybe all is forgiven. Maybe.

That doesn't mean, of course, I don't want an iPhone or an iPod Touch. There's something to be said about Jobs' penchant for beautiful design of software and hardware.

document format wars

Office Open XML was shot down by practical tie. The OpenXML format was created to compete with OpenDocument Format, and to permit a supposedly lossless conversion from .DOC format.

What I found interesting was Apple voted in favor of the Office Open XML. It shows the extent of which Apple and Microsoft rely on each other as a David-and-Goliath relationship. Apple has beated Microsoft by releasing iWork '08, which implements the Office Open XML format, before it could release another Office for Mac. Unfortunately, iWork '08 doesn't support OpenDocument Format.

But, there is a post about TextEdit in Leopard (10.5) release that might handle OpenDocument, regardless of the poster's boredom at the ODF.

Slashdot comments: Summary of history and economic cost.

Google, Star Office, and Mac

I caught the new Google Maps feature, which is that you can drag the route to change it. Now it's possible to create your own tour. Let's say you want to go to the Yellowstone National Park. It is now possible for you to designate stops at other famous places along the way.

I noticed that Google Pack (for PC) now offers an option to download a free copy of Star Office 8. Aside from the fruitfulness of this alliance, the promotion of Star Office is also the promotion of the OpenDocument format, accepted as a United Nations standard, ISO/IEC 26300 to permit flow of information regardless of which software is used.

Similarly with the metric system (known as ISO 31, from which the Imperial inch is defined as 2.54 cm) and paper size (known as ISO 216, from which you see A4 paper option in many printers), both of which are adopted around the world, the OpenDocument format will join them in precisely not being well-adopted in the United States.

Microsoft Office and its .doc format is too rooted here to be easily changed. If you receive an OpenDocument file and do not have Star or Open Office, you can download the Sun ODF Plugin. Currently it only supports ODT, for text document, but Calc (like Excel) and Impress (like PowerPoint) are being developed. You are encouraged, however, to install OpenOffice.org. It is superbly stable, and similar enough to Microsoft Word. This may be more ubiquitous if Google's plans for world domination succeed.

Alas, there is no Google Pack for the Apple Mac.

If you want to run OpenOffice on the Mac, you will need to have X11 installed. X11 is known as a "windowing system" like Mac Aqua and Vista Aero, that allows programmers to build the GUI, placing windows and menus just so for people to use. It has been ported to Windows but not the Mac. The Macintosh system is getting popular as people start getting seduced by the iPhone and the iPod, they are beginning to see the power of the Unix-like, BSD-derived Mac OS X. The OS X is the operating system that runs on the iPhone, and is rumored to run on a future generation of iPod. Due to the increasing popularity of the Mac, a version of OpenOffice for the Aqua interface is being developed. It is currently at the alpha stage, meaning that it runs, but is unstable and is not be used except for testing.

google desktop for linux

Without much fanfare apparent, Google Desktop is now available for Linux. There are two packages you can download, one for Red Hat Linux and its derivatives, and the other for Debian-based distributions, including Ubuntu.

I recommend following the instruction for installing Google Desktop from their Linux Software Repositories instead. Once you have added the repository, an update manager for your distribution should automatically notify you of updates to Google Desktop, without your needing to check it manually.

Although Google Desktop is non-free software, I couldn't care less as long as it is good software. I am not a pure-free software advocate. I can't wait to see gadget features and sidebar that I hope will be developed. I love the history that it keeps, even though it can feel like you lost your privacy, but you can find anything you had read just days ago that you thought were lost forever.

An example is Craig's List. As you know, listings expire after seven days. What if you have seen a memorable post that you forgot to save and want to find again? Google Desktop most likely already saved it for you. So, all you need to do is try to remember a key word, a phrase, and look for it in Google Desktop. It saves a history of what you have done, except for https:// sites, which is disabled (unless you choose to enable it).

I hope Google Desktop won't break with each upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu.

Things I read today

From 2006:
When the boughs break
And oranges
Juggling Oranges

microsoft patents

All the years of patenting have built up to this: Pharoah against Moses, the Bald against the Stalling.

There are repeated references to Armageddon. I think all this money could be used for other things. The expenditure for self-preservation is a reality of capitalism, where companies shark on one another and swim against the current to stay in the same place.

This benefit the consumers, absolutely?

zombie and orphan

I don't understand UNIX-like operating system sometimes. I assume that a parent spawn a child process, then if the child process dies, but the parents have not reaped it, then that child process is named a zombie. If the parent dies, the child becomes an orphan, taken over by the init.

Firefox starts a netstat, which is a zombie until I close firefox.

The six basic ideas are fork, exec, open, close, read, and write. Hmm.

feisty fawn upgrade didn't go well

The Ubuntu upgrade didn't go well at all, unfortunately. After finishing the installation, I went in for the reboot this morning, only to get problem with mounting /dev/hdb1, my /home partition on a separate hard disk drive. After some fiddling, I had to leave my computer alone because I needed to go volunteering at 1 pm.

I noticed in the /dev/. directory that there was no hdb1 device, but there was an sdb1. It was around this time that I had to leave. I had a hunch on what I might needed to do to fix the problem.

Now, coming back at 11 pm, I proceeded to try to "mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /home"

It worked. I then changed fstab to reflect this strangeness and logged on and saw my /home partition with everything still there. Unfortunately, there are still problems. But I have to get to bed because I must get up early in the morning to go to the school for the deaf. When I get home though, I plan to geek out on the computer.

Errrr, maybe not. I'll just download that CD installer and perform a clean install instead.

Ubuntu 7.04 - again

I am lovingly contributing to the apparent problem. For now, it looks like it will take 1 day and some hours to download the upgrade. I started this morning at 10:30 am, when the Update Manager popped up and offered me to upgrade. After checking the website and finding that it seems accessible, but slow, I decided that I would do as they instruct. If they didn't want us to download, why offer it? ;-)

So now, almost nine hours later, I'm download file 241 of a total of 1,599. One thousand five-hundred ninety-nine. Delicious. I feel so much a part of this massive overload. This is what the founder of Ubuntu wants to do with his millions of dollars. I can't speak any better than this. I feel like I have to weep or shed a tear.

There are those who say that information on the Net seems to be increasing faster than the technology, and claim that we are reaching information singularity. I could not help but laugh. No, the information on the web are mundane.

Then again. So much of human DNA would be what scientists consider junk DNA, but we are beginning to find some usefulness. Perhaps they support the structure and the crank of our entire complex being. We exist not because of fundamental genes, but because of junk. If so, then all the vast web with so much chattering and gossips are like Fight Club, part of the vast conglomerate of middle class and the poor, the taxi drivers and the janitors, the migrant workers and the drug lords.

I also plan to download the ISO file through BitTorrent, but later, after the upgrade is done and I see the results for myself.

Now file 246. La dee dah.

Ubuntu 7.04

On this very day, Ubuntu will be released. Not sure what time of April 19, though.

As is expected, the site is slowing down, probably overrun with visitors in high expectation. I wish they offer bittorrent download, but I probably will have to wait for a more opportune time to download.

Feisty Fawn on April 19

Seven days from now. How exciting. Ubuntu Linux 7.04, probably the most popular gnu Linux distribution on the Internet, will be released on this day. I can imagine the servers crashing in anticipation. Feisty Fawn will have the options of Compiz/Beryl, which can create the eye candy consumers will love. I'm composing this on v6.10, the Edgy Eft.

For those who are thinking of switching to Linux to avoid Windows, though, I recommend getting a Mac. Apple uses FreeBSD (and releases Darwin) as its core base, but Mac has such good GUI, Aqua, that the command-line interface is generally unnecessary, whereas with Ubuntu, command line is very much used and relied heavily on. Moreover, Linux as a kernel remains unstable, the changes are frenetic and made by programmers of various skill levels (i.e. some of them might be careless). Basically, it seems the level of activity results in a Wikipedia-like level of reliability, not at all good for those who want the best. Linus Torvalds, the maintainer, has described himself as lazy.

In contrast, FreeBSD is maintained by a committed team. It is, its own words, robustly designed and more mature. I've also read that FreeBSD has a simpler design for managing device drivers, but I can't find where.

Which restriction enzyme to use?

Nate sent the following link to me: EnzymeX Uses Cocoa on Mac OS X, using Cocoa to make a software that can help molecular biologists figure out which restriction site to cut, and therefore the appropriate restriction enzyme to use.

It sounds cool, especially the part where Cocoa, using Objective C, is supposed to save so much time programming so you can focus on other works. Perhaps programmers don't like it, but scientists and people of other disciplines will find it useful.

From what I see, as a practical non-programmer but sufficiently computer-savvy, Python, the open-source programming language, appears to be functionally similar to Objective C, but perhaps does not have the same code base that would permit the creation of fluid animation and beauty that Cocoa has.

As I was saying to a friend, this whets my appetite to know more, and has given me a positive view of future careers.

deaf wikipedians

WikiProject Deaf participants. Currently, there are only 6 members.

Mobile video handset will allow Deaf people and ASL users to sign. hat tip to Nate

In summary: The new technology tries to focus on the face for high-fidelity, the hands and arms for lower fidelity, and the body for lowest-fidelity. This reduces the processing power that tends to make using mobile phone for video conversation difficult, because battery can be used up too quickly.

I look forward to getting an Apple iPhone with this kind of video compression tool. Then I can chat almost anywhere and practically anytime, a big improvement from being stuck at home.

vision

Mindboggling arts I can't find seven horses, just five. I can only find 10 heads in the last picture.

i lurv my ubuntu

I enjoy my Ubuntu Linux. I can't wait for Feisty Fawn to be released. It's going to have Xgl/Compiz on by default, allowing the sort of eye candy seen on the new iMac operating system, though it will not necessarily have the same feature. So far, it looks like Xgl/Compiz will focus on making spinning cube for switching between workspaces, but not for switching between users.

At the heels of the release of Windows Vista, an apparent boondoggle that demands ever larger hard drive, larger memory, and more intensive CPU usage, the search for an alternative operating system has not been as popular as now. Apple's new iMac will be more than sufficient to replace the functions of Windows Vista, provided people can get used to the difference in keyboard commands, among other things.

For people who are looking at Linux, I believe that Linux is still an unfinished work, because the project of Linux development, being reliant on people's contributions, suffer from the same problems as Wikipedia, as well as some creative solutions. The fact is that an open-source project is often at the mercy of the people, both the good and bad. All the people contributing will be different in terms of code-understanding, educational level, and experience. Some people may add codes that are flawed, and yet remain unchecked, much like some Wikipedia entries that are original research or outright malicious character assassination, not only at the most popular articles, but also at the relatively unknown that blew up into a Wikipedia scandal.

This article has good introduction on the issues of Open Source movement.

macworld

Even though Al Gore joined the Apple Macworld via Web Conferencing, I did not see any evidence, while I was there, that Apple was doing anything to be energy-conscious and/or green. Someone should invest in solar panels for the Moscone Center.