Leadership by example

This is something I deeply believe in and where Open Source seems to lag behind. Am I wrong?

I say we should train our leaders better.

St. Pepper's not so lonely heart

Seems that on developed countries when strange things happen people get worried. Well, Steve Pepper, the chairman of SN/K185 - the "Norwegian mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34" - for 13 years is worried with the state of affairs on Standard Norge.

In fact, he is worried enough to have lead a public demonstration in front of an SC34 meeting in Oslo. When someone that chaired a Tecnhical Comitee for 13 years goes in public with a megaphone... one starts to wonder.


Among the demonstrants was Hakon Lie , who invented CSS, and many other known and unknown Norwegians.

Talk about informed citizenship.

Steve Pepper with Hakon Lie

References:

http://zak.greant.com/ooxml-go-to-hell/
http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2340
http://www.computerworld.dk/art/45252
http://www.digi.no/php/art.php?id=519531

Interoperability, the odd way

This may hurt the more purist ones, but when the company manager says he likes Linux but wants to keep Microsoft Office on his laptop (although he thinks OpenOffice is excellent - for all the others) Wine is a lifesaver.



Ms Office XP and 2003 are certified by Codeweavers. It runs fast and rock solid on Linux. Office 2007 support is coming soon.

KDE programming in bash

So you're just about to tell a customer how he can automatically convert a bunch of recently scanned images to a PDF:

"That's easy with cd $TARGETDIR; convert -adjoin *.jpg *.JPG *.jpeg final.pdf"

Err.... why not providing a nice desktop integrated GUI?

KDE provides a way to present the user most of the dialog boxes directly from the shell. It's called kdialog. It is very useful and incredibly simple to use.

For example, one can make a quick JPG -> PDF converter with a couple of lines:

#!/bin/bash

DIRNAME=`kdialog --title "Choose the source directory from JPG files" --getexistingdirectory ~ `
cd "$DIRNAME"
convert -adjoin *.jpg *.JPG *.jpeg final.pdf
kdialog --msgbox "Done"

Other simples examples:

kdialog --error "Error connecting to server0.intranet"


kdialog --combobox "Choose an import filter" ODF OOXML CSV



KDialog provides a flexible interface for presenting KDE Dialog Boxes directly from the shell. Any magic script can interact with end users in a way the matches your desktop. It is used on the AMSN KDE integration.

Norwegian Wood

An April Fool's song about OOXML in Norway:

There once was a man come to Bergen
Who promised that everything's working
He came to the fjord
And bought off the board
Now we're all autospacelikeWord'ing.

There once was a man who said "Trust us!
Just take this and please make no fuss
It comes with special langcodes,
Great compatibility modes!"
I wonder how much this will cost us

There once was a man talking smart
Who told us about file format art
He was talking so nice,
Made us reverse our dice
And now we'll be thrown off the cart

Shamelessly adapted from:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=505908&cid=22927584

Telepac premiada: melhor helpdesk ADSL

Acabámos de receber a notícia em primeira mão. A Telepac foi distinguida com o mais alto galardão nacional do apoio técnico. Em causa está a seguinte performance:

RJ: Serviço de Apoio Técnico boa noite, fala Rosinha Jacinto em que posso ser útil?
op654321: Boa noite minha senhora estamos aqui com um problema

RJ: Qual é a situação?
op654321: O Modem ADSL está sincronizado a nível físico e a o nosso servidor de acesso aqui da empresa tem a sessão PPPoE estabelecida. O problema é que lhe foi servido um daqueles IPs da rede 196.65.... e por isso apesar da sessão estabelecida não passa tráfego!

RJ: Por favor desligue o modem e volte a ligar.
op654321: Mas eu já fiz isso várias vezes. Temos o problema há uma semana e já falei com 10 colegas seus!

RJ: Nesse caso deverá limpar as cookies do seu browser e voltar a iniciar a ligação. Qual é o seu sistema operativo?

Neste preciso momento que o jornal de noite relatava que um homem enraivecido estava a tentar destruir todos os postes telefónicos da zona da Sintra. Mas qualquer correlação entre os factos é mera coincidência.