Pavel's diary

As I said several times, I build only for active languages. Building every milestone on more platforms is time consuming, thus I can afford to build only for languages that makes sense to be built. It makes sense to build for e.g. Estonian, Czech and Danish because the translator teams are very active - they keep up-to-date with the latest translations in every milestone thus it makes sense to build every milestone for them.

On the other hand, I was building for many languages that were not able to update their translations from pre-2.0.3 times so far. I removed these languages from my list of supported languages.

So starting from SRC680_m187, I'll provide builds for these languages only: be-BY, bg, bn, cs, da, el, et, ga, lo, mk, nb, nn, sk and sl. I'll add few languages like en-US and de because I want to have a reference platform to be able to compare Sun provided builds with my builds.

If you want to have regular builds from my build system, continue reading :-) I'll only integrate languages with active teams. I do not want to build for the language that has old, unmaintained GSI files, because the CPU time, disk space and bandwidth can be used for other active languages instead.

• Please make sure that the data about your language in our table are correct and complete.
• Please send me the URL of your GSI file that is named GSI_cs.sdf.bz2 (bzip2 or gzip compressed GSI file where cs is the ISO code of your language). If you'd like to know the reason for this, see the script updating all GSI files I run just before every build.
• make sure your GSI file is without errors - you can use statically linked gsicheck - see directory TranslationQA in some previously provided build

That's it :-)

I was celebrating a birthday this week and this, together with some other events like preparations of final release candidate for OpenOffice.org, took almost all of my time.

I started OOD680_m5 builds on all platforms I support, and already uploaded most of them (GNU/Linux for both x86 and x86_64 and Windows). Mac OS X/PPC and Solaris/SPARC are still building (PPC machine is slow and I had to respin the OOD680_m5 build on Solaris/SPARC because of stopper issue).

I provided special patched build of RC3 for Javier (Khmer only) because they need some patch from icuupgrade child workspace.

I also started builds of SRC680_m186 (both GNU/Linux builds are already uploaded).

I'll spend some more time on GSIs and cleanup of my build system (inactive languages, wrong URLs, ...) this evening, so I'm able to accept more new languages for it. I have already cleaned up the directory with POT files.

As I wrote earlier this month, I have a new toy - MacBook Pro. I'll summarize my experiences with it here.

If you do not want to read everything, just skip to the end ;-)

Packaging of MB Pro is (as always) perfect - decent black box (its depth is 8 cm) with white Apple logos on it. You can see some photos at Flickr.

Connecting MB Pro to power is easy - MagSafe connector is interesting idea. Its plug is located at the left side of the notebook. It would be nice to have the possibility to plug the power cable on the right side as well. I haven't tried to use USB nor, audio, nor card slot yet.

Keyboard illumination is fantastic - you can control it with F8, F9 and F10. Big icons on the monitor shows the current status when you press one them. When the light conditions are good, you can't turn the illumination at all. Working during night is much easier than it was before!

I had the first revision of MB Pro and its right speaker's sound is not clean. E.g. when you TAB complete commands in the terminal, it is audible very well. This is fixed in later revisions.

The raw compilation speed of the machine is impressive though. Working on battery depends on your workload. All I can write now is that it is very good at least according to my opinion - being able to compile for 3 hours when on battery is enough for me ;-). Wireless reception is quite good.

I'm now using a notebook which is a bit smaller and it is only 1.2 kg, so the new machine is a bit heavy for me. I also do not like the method of opening the display. I had to train myself before get used to it.

At the end, I think I'm now dependent on this machine. It is so impressive that I will cut down my requirements like docking station etc. and will bought new updated machine once available.

Summary: I like this machine. I was doing almost all of my OpenOffice.org related work on it in last days and I found it to be brilliant machine for developers. I have to return it back to Quentin tomorrow and I have to wait for the upgrade of processor from Apple. Hard days to come... I get used to it and going back to slower machine is not ideal ;-) Working with it is like drug - you can't stop :-) And I won't stop.

I'd like to thank again to Quentin and Martin Lér for the time I could spend with it. Good evaluation.

Wednesday was the last official date of the OOoCon2006 in Lyon.

I was mainly interested in Jam and Buildbot presentations because both tools can make my life a bit easier :-) I also went to Rob Weir's presentation to see the technical comparison of ISO/IEC 26300 vs. Microsoft Office Open XML. Interesting points...

I also met with Patrick and Ed from Neo team. Interesting technical discussion. We agreed to disagree on some things and agreed on the rest. I explained my opinion from pure technical point of view - we both (OpenOffice.org and Neo) look like idiots... I do not like to look like idiot though.

I wonder what are the real roots of all "problems" between Neo and OpenOffice.org. We were able to talk (if you forget about my English communication skills) without problems, we were also discussing some technical issues. I offered myself to be "OpenOffice.org proxy" for them and Patrick offered his knowledge. We even had some fun - Ed gave me Neo t-shirt with the sentence "you can use it to wash your car" ;-) Thanks!

Security team meeting (I will try to analyze the patches we apply to external libraries).

Fridrich's presentation about his personal development from newbie in OpenOffice.org into the mentor of Google Summer of Code project was impressive - I especially like the part when he, speaking to the people on the presentation, suddenly turned his face to camera and shouting "yes, developing for OpenOffice.org is sweet!" Good work Fridrich!

Talking with Zaheda about the future of Mac port, localization. I was surprised to see Prague as one of the location where Google is looking for software engineers.

Thorsten's presentation about typical C++ techniques used in OpenOffice.org was very interesting. It was also probably the only one that finished in time. And I mean *in time*! ;-)

To sum up: many users of Apple notebooks at the conference, we have to turn some of them into developers...

Dinner at L'Entrecote restaurants - wonderful again! Moving 200m to the other restaurant near the town hall to catch other folks. Night walk to the hotel. Invoice for accommodation with "Sun Microsystems" on it... 30 minutes to get the right invoice. Ordered taxi for the morning - six cars is probably not typical order, so we had to explain it.

Breakfast in the morning, final hand shaking and taxi to the airport. Nice storm in the morning and not that nice highway reconstruction on the way to the airport. The flight had 30 minutes delay. Really tired after it. Good lunch with Dan, Filip, Zuzka, my wife Mirka and my son Michal.

I'm back from OOoCon 2006 and I started to read through all my mails and there are interesting news there in cws-announce:

Heiner created child workspace hr38 where he plans to clean up obsolete files in binfilter. The description of CWS is long and exhaustive :-)

Ingo created child workspace native62 for introducing the new simple packaging format "zip" and "tar.gz".

SRC680_m184 is ready, OOD680_m4 is also ready (it will be RC2 probably).

In last few weeks, there were many news about Google office in our country. I was at OOoCon 2006 in Lyon this week and I have seen the leaflet from Google people: they are looking for software engineers even in Prague, so if you would like to work for Google, now is the right time to ask them!

The main conference started today. The first talk was conducted by chief of our conference hosting organization, INSA Lyon. It was followed by two keynotes - the first one was done by Debra Anderson, CIO Novell, Inc. She was speaking about successful migration of Novell employees to their own "Ready to Go!" (ninja-chameleon created!) desktop GNU/Linux distribution called SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop or whatever that shortcut means). The demos (video and pictures) were quite impressive. I especially like the ninja-chameleon! Where can we download it? I'd like to have that animation on my next desktop! (unfortunately I only use laptops ;-).

The second keynote was performed by Zaheda Bhorat from Google, Inc. She was speaking about Google's past (I like the picture of several *old* machines located at Stanford university), present (Google Summer of Code, usage of Open Source technologies and Google's contributions to various OSS projects), and the future of Google. Really impressive. Looking for OSS job? Ask Google!

The third presentation I have seen was Louis' "Year 6". Nice summary of the recent and also not so recent stuff. Two interesting points in his presentation I strongly agree with: we are still missing regional development groups. The global development cooperation works very well, but we have to introduce something similar on the local level. Do you have any ideas how to do that in practice? Local dev. conferences, tutorials? Another good point was about marketing: we should start to market our product (and our project as well) actively (very easy to say so, hard way to do it at the end).

Mathias Bauer's presentation is always refreshing - keywords: APIs, UNO, framework, filters, components, controllers and views :-)

After the past experiences with the meal in restaurants in Lyon we have chosen to visit the global monopolist of the fast food market. Nothing interesting (with one small exception...). The same meal as in other restaurants around the world, the same quality of the meal... No surprises (how can you buy something when the global monopolists' front men/women can't speak English?). Actually one surprise: you have to type the code "A52 48" on the keyboard before entering the toilet (it could be problematic in some cases ;-)!

Back to Eric's presentation on Mac OS X native port status. Quite good. Thanks Eric!

In the meantime, the development milestone SRC680_m184 was released thus I downloaded it, updated my build system and started to synchronize it to the ftp.linux.cz server. I have to continue on Wednesday morning. I also had to continue with aquavcl01 cleanup and merging of non-aqua stuff back.

Michael Bemmer was talking about the achievements of Sun Hamburg team in the past and also about their plans to the near future. Interesting. We often forget to thank Sun and especially to Sun Hamburg team. Thanks!

The I had to prepare my own presentation about the OpenOffice.org development model and build of OpenOffice.org source code.

Quite quick meeting with all l10n leads and co-leads (dl, coni, erack, pjanik) about the future of l10n project.

Dan decided to test the temperature of the river near the INSA campus...

Back to the hotel and to the city center to do some shopping. We all wonder when French people do their shopping if everything is closed at 8pm... Only the global monopolist had working wifi very late in the evening... Fipa had to check all Apple news from their media meeting. No MacBook Pro with Intel Core 2 Duo processors yet, maybe next week... Anyone else waiting? ;-)

Sometimes, you have to experiment. We already did so with various flavors of Pepsi here in Lyon. Today, we tried to do the same with Coca-Cola. Dan decided to test "Coca-Cola Blák". I hope I won't get sued by publishing the full recipe to get it: one coke, mixed with one cup of coffee. You can imagine how it tastes ;-)

Lesson 3: the previous Pepsi lesson applies to Coca-Cola as well.

The real conference begins. Several meetings. Community council meeting being the first one, no connectivity. ESC meeting with connectivity. It should be easier to get the connectivity...

Release planning meeting was very productive - we agreed on almost everything with Martin H. and than other people joined us as well. The plan to make OOD680_m4 at the end of this week and m5/RC2 next week. Interesting to discuss with people from RedFlag Chinese 2000 Software Co., Ltd.

Finally met Florian Heckl and his lovely daughter. I was also able to talk with Shaun McDonald, the maintainer of Mac porting team web pages and Eric Bachard, the Mac porting team lead.

The last part of the conference meetings was dedicated to Native Language Community meeting. The largest meeting so far.

Night trip on the boat was also impressive - lot of interesting talks with people, watching the nice views of Lyon in the night. The dinner was again interesting. Again: do not ask for details ;-)

We spent the morning walking around Lyon, no free wireless network access available. Fridrich ordered three drinks - one orange one, red one and blue one. Nice rainbow drink when mixed together ;-)

Perfect lunch - the beefsteak with very good sauce. Unfortunately it took them two hours to prepare it... Fridrich enjoyed four salads because we decided to enjoy looking at him eating that "stuff".

Afternoon was dedicated to another organized trip around Lyon. We especially enjoyed metro because it is a bit different than metro system in Prague. It was a metro and suddenly it turned itself into railway - the elevation angle was impressive. Interesting dinner. Do not ask details please ;-)

Walking around Lyon in the night was also impressive. Thanks Stefan :-)

My wife was kind enough to drive me, Dan and Filip to the PRG airport just after tasting his brilliant tiramisu at Dan's house. CENSORED flirts with the airport personal ("Oh darling, ..." from her..).

We arrived to Lyon at 14:30, no taxis at the airport, only the woman with a walkie-talkie - taxi in 3 minutes :-) The speed limit signs around Lyons roads were probably in km/second or the driver was "rappel". Nice walk all around INSA, strange architecture. Four tram stations from our hotel to the conference place. Meet with Cedric and Sophie.

Fridrich arrived at 20:00, dinner at pizzeria (CENSORED again flirted with the waitress).

The late evening was also very interesting - Filip took a chance to teach me Mac OS X user experience (after we realized he has no Xcode installed on his Powerbook) - the first task for me is to try another RSS reader... Fridrich enjoyed Pepsi Cappuccino (another lesson for me: never experiment with experimental flavors ;-).

I'll be in Lyon, France starting from today afternoon with Dan and Filip. Fridrich will join as a bit later. We will attend OOoCon2006, of course. Join us too!

I already wrote about stuff that makes me nervous (read: the default is set not in line with my expectations). The Terminal's behavior when the application is closed is one of them.

After playing with MacBook Pro, I had to change two characteristics of the trackpad to better suit my working habits. Tapping on trackpack must be click and I should be able to drag without pressing the button, tapping and dragging must work.

Two clicks in System Preferences and it works as I expect :-)

The third milestone on OOD680 branch is finished and will be the base for first release candidate of OpenOffice.org 2.0.4. Please test the build that will be available soon very carefully!

Lunch with Martin Lér, interesting discussion about Neo vs. OpenOffice.org. Martin is old Mac user and his opinions about the problem are interesting. Several days ago we had a long mail exchange about it and Filip was so kind to manage with Martin's company (Quentin) lend of MacBook Pro for me so this was very good occasion to meet in person and discuss. Interesting meeting...

So I have a new toy at home. It is twice as large as my current computer, twice as heavy and (unfortunately ;-) approx. ten times faster than my machine. Packed in a nice black box with white fruit on it, this MacBook Pro has 2 GHz processor and 1GB of memory.

It was fun to connect MagSafe connector. Even my wife tried it - I told her not to be afraid of it, but... It was a surprise for her anyway ;-)

The first test I'm doing on it is installing development environment for native OpenOffice.org and I'm also testing how the system can cope with case sensitive filesystem, because right now, I have 156 conflicting filenames on my GNU/Linux based machine's home partition. The case sensitivity test was OK, I can have files with similar names with only case sensitivity difference. Good. One could think this should be the default in 21st century...

Installing fink, Colloquy and Desktop Manager is a must. For OpenOffice.org, fileutils, pkgconfig, atk1, libidl2, glib2-dev, pango1-xft2-dev and gtk+2-dev from fink are needed as well (and maybe something more, but configure didn't notified me, so I'll file proper bugs for new requirements, should their arise). First native build started at 02:42 of uptime.

Whining: I do not hear it because my Mac Mini with Mini M9 is so loud... But I do not hear it even in very quiet room anyway. The temperature is acceptable.

Ah, I forgot Emacs! ;-)

I have implemented native folder picker. You can now choose the directory in it and it is correctly passed back to the caller. Can be easily tested using Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - Paths.

Still some major issues with file picker unfortunately. I even reported them to carbon-dev mailing list at Apple. Hope to get some answer.