Pavel's diary

The first news is "political": Sun Microsystems, GmbH in Germany, Hamburg is hiring! If you want to e.g. "Improve the operating system abstraction layer of OpenOffice.org / StarOffice on Mac OS X" you are welcome!

The second interesting news is technical. Today, Mac porters were successfully able to run aqua native testtool. We were even able to finish the first.bas testsuite without errors! We still have some minor issue with native menus in testtool (see #i78905#).

... another interesting meeting. This time it was more technical and thus more interesting for me.

The first (non-technical) presentation was held by Filip Molčan. It was followed by very interesting technical presentation by Arnd Layer, IBM Germany and by my presentation of problems programmers have with this proposal.

Interesting discussions in between and after presentations. Better food than the catering available at the first conference ;-)

The last week, we had a lot of fun around OOXML in our country. Some people take this as a death match or something that can influence their salary and other people have fun with it.

Martin Hassman wrote this blog entry. It is in Czech, but here is the translation:

New Ideal Office Format

I have created a new format for office applications. Its documentation is very short to prevent some Linux fans from criticism of its size.

It consists of five rules:

1. Document content is in plaintext and in the most suitable encoding of your OS. This has to satisfy everyone.
2. The whole document content is inserted as Base64 inside a <document> </document> element, so it becomes XML. And XML is a buzzworld, XML is cool, so it MUST be XML.
3. Don't forget to pack it as a ZIP file. It becomes small even for slow networks.
4. Concerning special formats: Dates in the document are in the format which is used on the noticeboard by Mrs. Kotas from our 1st floor. If you are not familiar with it, you should come and find out yourself.
5. The file suffix is *.ibm. No, it doesn't mean ANY company name (we would be accused of being financially influenced if it does). It stands for Ideal Buzzword Metaformat.

Let's vote for it as an international standard. It's said even stupid format could be proposed as a standard this year. Why not this one?

Martin Hassman

Just out of curiosity, I have checked the list of issues to be fixed for OpenOffice.org 2.3. We still have to fix 500 issues! Lot of work!

I'm now back (both physically and now also in my TODO list ;-) from my vacation at Dodecanese islands. Our central place was hotel Princess of Kos, Mastichari bay area, Kos island.

Our hotel was almost completely filled with German speaking tourists, I was not surprised to find this MoinMoin sign in the local bus...

The hotel was quite good (with the exception of food, but if you know me, you know why...). My son especially loved the biscuits provided at bars during the day. But I was a bit disappointed by the quality of the meals. I like Greek kitchen and every meal I had outside of the hotel met my expectations ;-) One of the best meal was Suvlaki with Greek salad and tzatziki prepared by mariner on our trip to Pserimos island.

We have even tried the local wine called Retsina, wine of gods. My taste cells were not ready for it though.

Galaktoboureko at Kalymnos island was another story. We knew this desert from our beloved hotel Albatros at Prachatice, CZ. But eating the original version was yet another culinary experience.

During our stay there, we have been at Kalymnos island (once via organized trip, the second visit was adventurous - we went by local Kalymnos Star regular boat which was - how to say it properly - very fast), jumped from the boat at Pserimos island and Platí islet. Visiting the city of Kos, Asklepeio, Kefalos and drinking frapee in the Zia village was our obligation.

To sum up: great holiday with family and friends.