Pavel's diary

Election campaign is running in our country. As always you hear only promises and lies and some promises are lies by definition too. While listening to the individual that is our prime minister, I came to the conclusion that we should stop the usage of Open Document format. Why?

Take a cup of coffee and watch the logic: Open Document format also defines the structure of storing spreadsheets. Their file extension is .ods. ODS is a party in our country. Prime minister is from ČSSD. Stop using Open Document format.

Yes, our prime minister is using the same logic... Mixing completely unrelated topics into one etc...

Frank Peters implemented script that generates another *.tree file for help content. I have added it to my build system and from now on, every uploaded milestone will contain HelpQA directory with the file allfiles.tree. You can put the file into help/language directory in your installation set and restart OpenOffice.org.

You'll see new topic named "All Help Documents for Debug Purposes" with all help files in tree hierarchy as you see while translating OpenOffice.org (e.g. using PO files).

Very good tool for help QA.

Yesterday, I proposed project for OpenOffice.org's SoC projects.

I'd like to mentor/work on the integration of OpenOffice.org help system into Apple Help on Mac OS X and make it usable even now in OpenOffice.org/X11. Any volunteer (student) to work on it?

We do have 349 issues with target 2.0.3 and status NEW, STARTED, REOPENED (and even three UNCONFIRMED)! We need some bug hunters :-)

OpenOffice.org project has several forks or derived works, if you want to. I was asked privately how do I want forks to cooperate with the mainstream OpenOffice.org. Here is my opinion.

Maintainers of forks do very hard work maintaining their patches/sources in separate CVS/other SCM systems and track both the development of OpenOffice.org and also their own developments containing their specific features and enhancements. Sun is using the same mechanism to work on their StarOffice, Planamesa is using the same mechanism to work on NeoOffice, some (many, in fact) GNU/Linux vendors are closely cooperating on ooo-build etc.

They can save a lot of work on their side (and on our side and all other forks' side as well) by closely cooperating with the mainstream and isolating the changes they need to get their stuff working and submitting the generic changes back to the mainstream and even working on their proper integration. This brings them not only much easier work in the future, better human relationship with the mainstream developers, but also community respect!

I more than welcome the recent change in ooo-build. They accept patches to the code only if the issue has its OpenOffice.org IssueZilla ID assigned. Of course it is not acceptable for all forks and all enhancements (imagine issues like "StarOffice: Prepare UI theme for NASA" or "Remove Patrick's brutal Java hack in dtrans" visible for all) but this is a way to go with general changes. Unfortunately all forks have (sometimes) problems with identifying what is special change and what can be used also by other forks/mainstream. But we have to live with that.

We can't force forks to work with us closely because we have chosen GNU LGPL as our license. But we can ask them to be polite and submit issues with fixes back to us and we can offer community respect to them.

Starting from SRC680_164 on our new platform AMD64 (aka EM64T) will have the same level of support as other platforms in my build system. This means: regular builds for the same set of languages available etc.

I even plan to switch my development platform from GNU/Linux on x86 to AMD64, because my dual Opteron system is a bit (a lot of bits, in fact ;-) faster than my single PIV machine.

Apple released new revision of their portable "wall".

I do not understand it... I hope the next product will be really portable ;-) My current notebook is 2cm high, 27cm wide and its depth is 23 cm. So if I count correctly, two of them cover the new "wall".

I have again extended my sample Mac OS X/Carbon application. When you exit from the application, it will leave the contents of its window saved in PDF format in the file /tmp/CarbonMiniApp.pdf. I had to restructure the code a bit to save a lot of space. i simply call the same function for displaying the content of the windows twice - once with CGContextRef of the window on the screen and once with the context of the PDF file.

You can download source code and also the final diskimage and even its PDF output.

Hmm, I have got three (update: four now) independent reports about Microsoft organizing a meeting titled "Microsoft Office versus OpenOffice.org" in our countries. Meetings will be held in Prague, Brno and Bratislava (SK). The meeting will be moderated discussion between two people. I wonder why people from Czech OpenOffice.org Native-Language project were not invited.

What is more interesting that all three people asked me to not publish their names/connections to Microsoft. This is more than interesting...

I have extended my sample Mac OS X/Carbon application. It can now generate disk image with the application bundle and you can simply drag and drop the whole application to your Applications directory. See the Makefile's diskimage target.

You can download both source code (124K) and also the final diskimage (142K).

Next item in my TODO is to add specific application icon.

There are several methods to create temporary files and directories in OpenOffice.org. Module sal has some functionality in osl/unx/tempfile.c (depends on TEMP, TMP and P_tmpdir) and module tools contains complete TempFile class. Despite of that, there are several other "independent" implementations of similar stuff...

And to complete the mess, some systems do not use TEMP or TMP, but TEMPDIR and define P_tmpdir to be "/var/tmp" but it is not deleted on system startup. And to make it even more complicated, authors of this operating system do not want you to hardcode "/tmp", but use some API to query for the path (and of course they do not return "/tmp" ;-).

I hope this temporary mess is only temporary.

Google announced Google Calendar. Yet another way of organizing your time...

I have tried *many* methods to organize my time. I started with my memory. Than I decided that I'd like to use my memory for other stuff and I bought paper diary. It was good, but I wanted to try some electronic device to manage my diary and time plan. I have tried Palms, I have tried computer programs, web calendars, now I even have iCal on my Mac and calendar in my mobile phone. And now Google produced its Calendar. And I'm back and still use my paper diary and it works great.

Sure, I can't share my calendar data (of course I can - it is as simple as creating photo copy or scan of the page from diary). My diary doesn't have alarm, so I still have to use my alarm-clock or mobile phone (OpenOffice.org doesn't have e-mail too ;-). But I like it, my diary is simple, works and fulfills my needs.

There can be tools and methods that are more efficient than my current approach, so I keep on trying new stuff. But I always have to delete action item from my paper diary after I try it.

I think that calendar application can only be useful if connected with mail client. Inviting someone else to some meeting should be done via mail. Rejecting or accepting the meeting should also be done via mail. Otherwise you'll have another "activity" once you reach the network (read calendar events/...). I already do read my mail, I already do read several websites. Why yet another similar activity?

Who will be the first to get it and get it right?

Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

... looks like I have got a lot of free time today ;-)

I had some free time today so I decided to dive into Mac OS X documentation again. Two documents were waiting for me on my desk - Internationalization Programming Topics and Bundle Programming Guide. Interesting reading about the differences between bundles and packages, about localized strings etc.

To practice new knowledge, I extended my sample Carbon application again and added localized window title. New version has number 0.3 ;-)

Access to localized resources is very simple - you can just use the function CFCopyLocalizedStringFromTable and prepare translated versions of the files Resources/language.lproj/tablename.strings in your application bundle (see the source code for very simple example).

My application already contains localized bitmap and I added localized title into 0.3.

English environment	German environment

As you can see above (click on thumbnails to get larger images), the behavior depends on the system International setting.

The milestone SRC680_m163 integrated child workspace onlineupdate1. The specification of online update is available at specs website.

In short, it works as follows: if your program/versionrc file contains non-empty value of UpdateURL variable, the menu item Help -> Check for Updates... is shown. If you click on it, the dialog checking the URL contained in UpdateURL variable is shown. After that there are two (three in fact) possibilities:

• there is no update - if the URL contains "no" as the only text, the message box with "No new update is available" is shown
• some update is available - the dialog where you can open the web browser is opened and you can download the update
• nothing happens - if the answer from the UpdateURL is not valid according to specification

I have implemented it as a proof of concept into my builds. From Build-2 of SRC680_m163 on, I'll apply the patch adding the value for UpdateURL (http://ftp.linux.cz/pub/localization/OpenOffice.org/devel/680/update.php will be used as its value). You can even try it yourself on your own build or in my Build-1 if you simply put this URL as the value of UpdateURL in your file program/versionrc.

The update.php script is very simple PHP script. It contains both variants (no - update is not available and yes - update is available at some URL).

Sun builds will use http://update.services.openoffice.org/ProductUpdateService/check.Update as the URL, but it is not yet ready as you can check by specifying some fake values for all submitted data here.

Who will provide final update.php that could be used for my builds instead of this fake one? ;-)

Resynced sixtyfour05 to m163, verified and closed all my bugs integrated in m163, debugged strange hsql issue to realize it is parallel build issue (thanks Caolan for pointing me to already existing issue that was supposed to fix it but...). Started Build-1 of m163 on all systems (152 issues fixed in m163!), got first Mac OS X crash and reported it to Apple (I wonder what they will do with "It crashed when I exited from gdb running universal binary build of OpenOffice.org created on Mac OS X Intel but running and crashing it on Mac OS X PowerPC" ;-). Filed several SISSL issues.

The first Open Government conference is over. Well organized with many guests!

I was opening the whole conference with my presentation about OpenOffice.org office suite and the project because the minister of informatics (Dana Bérová) was at the press conference.

Some photos from the conference are available here.

It is here again - one of the biggest banks in our country had major services outage this morning. Part of their IT system was down for almost two hours meaning that no clients were serviced at their offices.

The reason (at least according to the Czech Press Agency) was power outage in the IT center of the bank (because of false fire alarm). Interesting.

The UI freeze of OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 UI freeze is planned for tomorrow, 2006/04/06. This means that the deadline for providing updated GSI files for the OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 release is 2006/04/20.

Updated GSI files have to be submitted via IZ, issues assigned to user ihi. You can read more details in dev@10n list.

Do not forget to submit updated files!

I was working on making OpenOffice.org universal application. After I realized that OpenOffice.org build system is unusable for such stuff and stated it publicly on IRC channel, I was contacted by Roz Ho from Microsoft and she asked me if I want to work for Microsoft on making their Office universal.

The offer was so attractive that I immediately agreed to work for them. From now on, you can contact me at Pavel.Janik@microsoft.com. She also gave me URL to their (our!) private SVN server (it runs on old Tablet PC and it serves 1000 developers!) and I was able to change first 30 modules from 401 modules to universal binaries. Yay, it was very easy. I like Office! I even got tickets to Cupertino to present our ideas and visions at Apple party later today instead of Roz Ho.

I'll stay as the member of OpenOffice.org Community Council to help my colleagues with ODF standardization. I hope you understand me.