Author: sjan

OS X

Aqua port of OpenOffice.org in alpha release

It has been a long time coming, but OpenOffice.org have moved a step closer to a native OS X port. The first development snapshot was released this morning. This is an alpha release, and they warn:

THESE BUILDS SHOULD BE USED AT YOUR OWN RISK FOR TESTING PURPOSES ONLY. THEY MAY CRASH OR CAUSE DATA LOSS.

As with any early development release there are lots of things that don’t work yet, such as printing, exporting to PDF, copy/paste, drang and drop, multiple monitors, etc. That’s to be expected. While I am a little tempted to run the alpha release and provide feedback to the development team, I don’t know that I actually have the time to devote to that sort of endeavor right now. Instead, I think I will jump on the first beta, and install it alongside the X11 version, so that I can chime in on testing at that stage.

For those who are interested, the Mac Porting team have blogs and a news section where you can keep up with development if you wish.

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Community

Shape of the Future?

Is the end of our notions of privacy the shape of the future? While most ‘What does the future hold’ articles seem to be full of overly wishful thinking and fluff, this is an interesting and thought-provoking article from SF author Charlie Stross. This is a talk he presented in Munich at a TNG Technology Consulting technology open day. (transcript: Charlie’s Diary: Shaping the future) He brings up some interesting possibilities – from an always-on, completely connected populace, to complete “lifelogs” housed in synthetic diamond storage devices.

Community

Spoke too soon? Formal Objections filed in W3C vote

While the vote totals in the poll are still positive by a large majority, there have been a couple formal objections lodged which could overturn the vote. The W3C‘s process for consensus and dissent allows for formal objections to either be remedied by compromise, or in a case where that compromise is not possible a Chair may record a decision in spite of dissent in order for a group to move on. According to the same process document:

Groups should favor proposals that create the weakest objections. This is preferred over proposals that are supported by a large majority but that cause strong objections from a few people. As part of making a decision where there is dissent, the Chair is expected to be aware of which participants work for the same (or related) Member organizations and weigh their input accordingly.

While there doesn’t seem to be much interest outside the W3C and WHATWG on this issue right now (at least none that I am seeing online) I will be keeping a close eye on the developments and announcements from W3C to see how this all plays out.

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Community

Looks like WHATWG’s HTML 5 is a go

Although the poll hasn’t closed yet (it is open until May 4) 90 96 of the 115 voting members of the HTML Working Group have cast their vote, and the results are:

Shall we Adopt HTML5 as our specification text for review?

Yes: 78 84
No: 2
Concur: 7
Abstain: 3

So, even if the remaining 25 19 votes are all no, the vote is to adopt the WHATWG HTML5 (comprised of the Web Apps 1.0 and Web Forms 2.0 specifications) as a starting point for the next HTML version.

Other votes on the page include the decision to name the next HTML specification “HTML 5” and to appoint Ian Hickson and Dave Hyatt as the specification editors. I highly recommend reading the results, in order to see the rationale given by many of the members for their vote on each of the questions, as this gives a valuable insight into where the group currently is and in what direction they are looking to move.

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Edits: updated numbers on 5/3

OS

Still waiting for Ubuntu Studio

While the first release of Ubuntu Studio was supposed ot happen in April, it is now May and still no release. The only info from the wiki as regards an expected release date is:

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the release of Ubuntu Studio 7.04 will be delayed. Progress is happening rapidly, but we will not be estimating the duration of the delay.

Many of the links on the main wiki page result in 404 errors, including the ‘Ubuntu Studio News’. As a musician and fan of Open Source tools and operating systems I can say that I am a little disheartened by the delay and lack of any apparent movement. I’m not saying that nothing is happening in Ubuntu Studio development, just that a wiki which gives no indication of how things are progressing, frankly, gives me the feeling that it may not actually be released this year.

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Development

One to watch?

Sun is proposing an alternative to AJAX, called Project Flair, which is set for early release later this year. In an InfoWorld article, Sun engineer and principal investor Dan Ingalls describes it as being more like the old style of of desktop application programming (using a JavaScript programming kernel) that adds collaboration and web access.

How this actually ends up performing is anyone’s guess, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

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Alaska

Seward trip

We just got back from a few days in Seward, and it felt great to get out of town and spend some time on the beach. Our cabin was right on the beach (I highly recommend Angel’s Rest cabins) and we were able to watch sea otters, sea lions, whales and countless sea birds right out the front windows.

We took a short 1/2 day whale watching cruise, (the whole day cruises don’t start up until tourist season actually begins) and even though we saw more wildlife from the cabin than we did on the boat, it felt good just to be out on the water.

Cabin-from-the-water.jpg View-from-cabin-window-2.jpg View-from-cabin-window-1.jpg

Community

WHATWG Pitches HTML5 to W3C

The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) has sent a Proposal to Adopt HTML5 to the HTML Working Group of the WorldWide Web Consortium (W3C).

HTML5, currently in working draft status is comprised of the Web Apps 1.0 and Web Forms 2.0 specifications. While the W3C XHTML2 Working Group has just been chartered in March 2007, with a goal date for completion of December 2009, the work of WHATWG on the HTML5 recommendation has been ongoing since 2004 and has support from Apple, Opera and Mozilla. In explaining the relationship between XHTML2 and HTML5 the Web Apps 1.0 draft has this to say:

1.3.4. Relationship to XHTML2

This section is non-normative.

XHTML2 [XHTML2] defines a new HTML vocabulary with better features for hyperlinks, multimedia content, annotating document edits, rich metadata, declarative interactive forms, and describing the semantics of human literary works such as poems and scientific papers.

However, it lacks elements to express the semantics of many of the non-document types of content often seen on the Web. For instance, forum sites, auction sites, search engines, online shops, and the like, do not fit the document metaphor well, and are not covered by XHTML2.

This specification aims to extend HTML so that it is also suitable in these contexts.

XHTML2 and this specification use different namespaces and therefore can both be implemented in the same XML processor.

It will be interesting to see if the WHATWG proposal is taken as the HTML Working Group, like the XHTML2 Working Group, was only chartered in March of 2007, and as such, failure to adopt the proposed HTML5 draft would mean the need to reinvent the wheel.

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OS X

Boot Camp + Parallels + XP = Validation Nightmare

I have been running XP (WinXP Pro, SP2, retail version) under Parallels for a bit, and decided I wanted to give the Boot Camp with Parallels option a try. After finding some rather lengthy and questionable instructions on moving a Parallels image to a Boot Camp partition I decided to go the clean install route.

I deleted my Parallels XP image (and subsequently ended up wishing I hadn’t) and used the Boot Camp assistant to set up my hard drive and install XP. I got XP set up and running, but had to call Microsoft to get it ‘activated’ since it saw it as a new install. Once that was taken care of I installed Office, and got the same kind of headache there – where the key wouldn’t work, because it said it had been installed on too many machines. I decided to leave that be for the time until I felt like waiting on the MS phone queue again.

I rebooted into OS X and loaded my now ‘active’ and ‘valid’ Windows XP under Parallels. As soon as it booted it gave me the message that I had 3 days to activate it as the hardware had changed significantly and it was no longer valid. I ddn’t feel like fighting it so I closed down Parallels and rebooted into XP where, surprise, I got the 3 day warning again!

So not only does loading the same image in a VM result in XP thinking it isn’t a valid copy, but it changes something in the registry somewhere, so that booting back into natively results in the same thing. I thought the concept of hardware profiles would help with this sort of thing, but apparently not. This is something that MS needs to address sooner rather than later as multicore machines make virtualization more common and loading a native image in a VM becomes a more common way of doing that.

An interesting side note: I got fed up with the whole validation issue and removed the XP partition and re-installed XP under Parallels the same way I did originally. I expected the phone calls for the XP key and the Office key etc, etc – but, it just accepted the keys and validated no questions asked.

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