Anthony Barker's Weblog on Linux, Technology & the Economy

Python - Pycon summary

Pycon 2005.

I didn't get a chance to attend (again). So I am happy that people did such a good job of summerizing the goings on...

Microsoft to kill RIM

Microsoft could do a simple one two chop to kill RIM and it could look something like this:

1) Create proprietary Middleware Wireless Messaging API for Exchange
which 3rd party companies could write adapters for MSN Messenger, POP3, IMAP, and Notes as well as clients for different OSs (Palm, Symbian). Ensure it is illegal/impossible to access Exchange through any other way. (Use Kerberos/X.509 Key Exchange)

Client <-> MS Wireless API <-> Exchange Server / POP3 /Hotmail

in MS world it would like
Outlook <-> MS Wireless API <-> Exchange Server

or it could look like
PALM OS <-> MS Wireless API <-> Exchange Server

or
Symbian (Nokia) <-> MS Wireless API <-> POP3/SMTP

2) Once you've got client support for PALM etc and sufficient market share pull support for different clients so only Outlook is supported.

iRiver iFp-799 review

I've had the iFP-780 for a while (the 128 Meg version) and recently BestBuy had the 1 GIG version on sale for roughly $170 USD(about what I paid for the 128 Meg version a while ago). My wife wanted an MP3 player so I picked it up. I upgraded the Flash to 1.28 which supports UMS.

Here is what I like:
- I can use it for files at work (presentations etc) as long as I have the cable
- Ogg support
- MIC, External MIC support
- Radio, Radio recording on schedule
- Tons of features
- UMS support so you don't need any special drivers (so Linux mounts it perfectly)
-Excellent battery support (40 hrs on a AA). No proprietary battery.

Lacking:
- Ogg Vorbis support is only 96 kbs as a min bitrate, so I can't rip audio books in Ogg format
- Have to use a cable - I know some of the Creative ones plug directly into the USB port
- When using UMS the files are ordered in the date they are copied, not alphanumeric sorting. It is very annoying if you are trying to listen to an audiobook. It ends up jumping around eg chapter 1 and then chapter 6 and then chapter 2 etc.
- People complain that it only records in @96Kbs when you use it in UMS format. Not a big deal for me, but I understand why that is so annoying.

I'm still waiting for the all in one device that will be a phone, email client, mp3 player, recorder and pda for a reasonable price. The Treo 650 looks promising, but still has some growing pains. Until then the iriver is an excellent tool.

Media Manipulation

I watched The Revolution will not be Televised, last night. A film about the short-lived coup d'etat to topple Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's left-wing president, who was elected by a landslide in 1998. The wealthy manipulate the media to create a coup. Very worth watching and somewhat shocking.

In Electronics, U.S. Companies Seize Momentum From Japan

Today's WSJ describes how US firms, specifically Apple, Kodak and others are taking the leadership technology by focusing on the pc platform. US leadership in software is allowing US firms to lead in technology again. While this may be partially true I think the real story is that China is taking away Japanese leadership in electronics manufacturing and US Brands are leading the way to the US market. So this shift is really about US Marketing + Taiwanese electronics manufacturing + China cheaper labour.

The article makes it sound like the US is winning back the business. In reality Chinese firms have tendency of moving up market to seek improved profit margins: BENQ, ACER, GIANT, ASUS, Trend Micro, Hyer.

MS Infopath XSLT vs xForms

I've been testing out InfoPath. I is fairly easy to get started, In typical microsoft fashion they try to make the path of entry fairly easy. Also in typical MS fashion it looks really nice and only works in Windows. The one thing it is really lacking when compared with Lotus Notes or other form applications is a security model. This is really a huge gap, ok for a simple workgroup form but really no good for complex enterprise forms.

They say it supports and impressive set of technologies: XML 1.0, Namespaces, DOM 1.0, XML DSIG, Parts of XSD 1.0, XSLT 1.0, XHTML 1.0, UDDI 1.0, WSDL 1.1 and SOAP 1.1.

I noticed from the MS website: "InfoPath supports W3C’s XSLT 1.0 instead of W3C’s XForms."

Maybe someone should tell them that XSLT is not a replacement for xForms - in fact the technologies don't really compete. Extensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations (XSLT) is a language specifically designed to take XML of one form or structure and convert it into XML of another form or structure. XSLT deals with all kinds of information and doesn't really try to draw any meaning from it; it simply converts the source into the target. XForms, on the other hand, provides an easy way to take information that starts out not as XML, but as data in a user's head. Think of it as HTML forms on steroids. It has a specific vocabulary, meant to be interpreted by an XForms client such as a browser. The client acts on the XForms elements directly, using them to render in some way form entry fields such as text boxes and pulldown menus.

Microsoft .mhtml is not html!

I've been playing around with InfoPath for use in a simple form. One of the export formats is "Web" which produces a .mht or .mhtml file. This is a single "mime" encoded file which contains all the parts of the html document.

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/related;type="text/html";
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0000_01C52552.A0F56570"
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.2180
...

This is similar to a mime encoded .eml message, except that there are no email headers.

Firefox has a similar tool. It seems that Microsoft follows its own "pseudo standard" instead of with the MIME "Application/Vnd.pwg-multiplexed Content-Type"
in a Microsoft HTML (message/rfc822) RFC3391 file whose suffix is .mht. Note in the RFC3391 it specifically states that "It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.".

Files saved in this manner do have some detrimental side effects in that
images are stored as .bmp.

More on this

xCHM a nice CHM reader for linux

I've been using xCHM chm reader for linux. It works extremely well. It has worked on almost all the chm files I've opened with the exception of MSDN magazine.

From the help it doesn't work with 'proprietary' .chm files, making heavy use of MS-ITS:, mk:@MSITStore: links. With these you can switch to wine and use hh.exe.

Fighting with Linux (I mean PC hardware)

I recently upgraded my home pc by adding a new maxtor harddrive, lite-on dvd burner, and 19' Hyundai L90D LCD. At the same time my friend said I should upgrade my video card. I had an older ATI All in Wonder and I was tempted to upgrade it to a newer Radeon card.

Big mistake....

It took me a week of fiddling with my computer to get it up and running again. I won't bore you with all the details but they were basically as follows. When I got home when the computer booted the linux kernel core dumped with an PCI interrupt error. I disabled all the peripherals in the bios of the computer. It core dumped again. Each dump contained something about the new ATI video card. Knoppix also wouldn't boot. I called my friend - he said that he believed it was a linux problem! In windows you can change the interrupts in the hardware manager. Ya - right. Anyway I reinstalled Ubuntu 4.1 and figured out it was a conflict between the video card and the network card. I tried using the bios to configure the pci cards interrupts without any luck. At least I could boot now as long as I remove or disabled the network card. Tried another network card. Now it would boot but still randomly hang. Finally I went back to the computer store and asked for my old video card back as well as a Aopen Gforce (overkill but why not). I used both "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" as well as "xf86config" to reconfigure it. Now when I used the old card (or the Gforce) it still hung occassionally! I ran a dmesg it still mentioned the video card! Finally after several evenings wasted I went into the bios and kept trying every combination of settings.

Turns out it was the AGP settings - when I set them on default safe settings the issue when away. Almost made me tempted to get a Mac. The screen was a great buy $400 USD and doesn't have any bad pixels. The authorized repair shop is near my office so if I have any problems I won't have to spend a fortune shipping it to the states.

OpenOffice 2.0 preview: OpenOffice 2.0 vs MS Office 2003

I've been itching for the pending release of OpenOffice 2.0 and so decided to give it a trial run. How is OpenOffice 2.0 going to compare with MS Office 2003 or OpenOffice 1.x?

As a quick test of the upcoming OpenOffice 2.0 release I downloaded 1.9.79 version of the software and ran through a set of tasks that an advanced office worker might use. The applications suite is full of new features, and at first glance looks nicer.

Initially I download and unzipped the Linux binary tarball from the Open Office website and ran the following commands to get the package to install in mepis 2004 - debian linux.

convert rpms to deb with "alien -k -c *.rpm"
install debs: dpkg -i --force-overwrite *.deb
chmod a+rx /opt/openoffice.org1.9.74/program/soffice
/opt/openoffice.org1.9.74/program/soffice

Different office workers have differing needs – for example accountants and bankers would be more likely to give Calc a thorough testing. Your average office worker doesn’t use MS Access, so I skipped the testing of the new database functionality. I also skipped testing the drawing functionality, digital signitures, and VBA Scripting, Here are the results with pictures.

Success?	Tests done in Write	Notes
Y	Create a table with formatting	Layout on some of the dialog boxes is clunky – lots of unused space
Y	Table within a table
Y	Add an image – put it in the table
Y	Create a style – use it to format part of the table	The OpenOffice UI is nicer than MS Office 2003 for this.
Y	Manipulate an image	Lots of functions require JRE for image management. The JRE missing window opens 7 times and you have to click ok each time.
Y	Change the first row of table to grey
Y	Rotate text in the first row of the spreadsheet 90 degrees
Y	Track Changes to document
Y	Test the word count feature
Y	Copy formatting (paintbrush)
Y	Create Index for document	Simple nice interface
Y	Check Spelling
Crash but worked.	Save as HTML to check the quality of the output	Looks great except the rotated text was stripped out and the table of contents didn’t work like anchors. Generally fairly clean HTML generated. Crashes have a nice recovery
Y	Open a MS Word 2003 document with Styles, Indexes, Change tracking, and fields. Change the document, save it and open it Word 2003 in windows	Worked excellently with the exception that embedded items were turned into pictures and were squished a bit on the round trip back to word. If you stick to embedding pictures instead of OLE objects you should be fine. Not a huge loss.
N	Edit Python Scripts	The JRE missing window opens 7 times and you have to click ok each time.
Y	Export to pdf
	Tests Done in Calc	Why still no Lotus 123 import filter?
Y	Add a row	Doesn’t have some of the old Lotus 123 keystrokes – CTRL and + keys should give you a new row, CTRL and - keys remove a row.
Y	Sort the spreadsheet
Y	Format the spreadsheet as a List /Autofilter table
Y	Change the text in a cell so that part of it is Bold and in a different font
Y	Change the header of the spreadsheet
Y	Create a basic Chart	Charting functionality doesn’t feel as slick as Excel. Although Improv from Lotus probably had one of the best charting tools I’ve ever used.
Y	Create Pivot Table (DataPilot)	Seems to work like Excel. I don’t often use this feature.
	Impress
Y	Created a basic presentation	I’ve always found Impress met my functionality needs. Really the only “cool” feature that I liked from PowerPoint is the ability to create a webcast with Windows Media and PowerPoint.
Crash	Practice Presentation
	Interoperability
Y	Embed a Calc spreadsheet into Write
Crash	Copy and paste table into a presentation
Somewhat	Copy and paste a table from Write into Calc	Cells didn’t come over cleanly, several spanned columns.
Crash	Paste a table from Write into Impress
No	Paste a Table from Calc into Write	Didn’t work as expected. Either embedded spreadsheet, or pasted all selected data into every cell.

I had a look at the xml (.odt) file that was generated. When I opened it with kwrite it appeared as garbage. I assumed that there are using gzip as they have in the past so I tried unsuccessfully to uncompress the file. Renaming the file with a .gz extension didn’t work either.

If they are able to deal with the crashes and interoperability issues then I would rate this application suite a 7.7 of 10. It hasn't quite caught up with MS Office 2003 in terms of functionality - but who cares? OpenOffice 2.0 is more than good enough for your average office worker. The suite is comparible to older versions of MS Office, which are functioning fine on millions of desktops around the world. The only things that I really disliked was the increased reliance on proprietary software (Java JRE) and the interoperability issues I experienced cutting and pasting tables between calc, write and impress. The Beta is currently a bit slow – however that should improve once it is released and any debugging code is removed. The user interface feels significantly nicer than the previous version; however, the dialog boxes are still not perfect. The suite uses Oasis file format – which may become the holy grail of document formats. HTML editing in write is far superior to MS Word and I recommend OpenOffice as a filter for word documents that require conversion to HTML or Oasis. Write includes a long awaited WordPerfect import filter. Overall I was extremely impressed with the new MS Office interoperability and the application’s overall functionality.

Score Card:

• Very good new functionality

• Oasis file format – may be the new killer feature

• Meets the needs of your average text oriented office worker

• Excellent MS Office Integration

• Annoying Java JRE reliance. Either open source java or remove the dependancy.

• Dialog boxes occasionally still feel clunky

• Crashes and table copy and paste issues need to be cleaned up before gold release

• Free and open source

7.7 out of 10

*This document was created in OpenOffice 1.9.79

Posted by Anthony at 04:24 PM