Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

I have been deathly quiet on the Domino front recently, but don’t worry, I have been keeping myself occupied.

Some big news in the UK is that right now a major high street retailer is selling mini laptops, but not just any old mini laptop, this is the new webbook from Elonex (who you may remember I have met before). If you were to go right now to the home page of The Carphone Warehouse you will see a webbook. “nice, but unremarkable” I hear you say. Well that is just the start of the story. Right now on the web they are selling the Windows XP version, however in stores they are selling the much more exciting Ubuntu Linux version, yes you heard correctly Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. The pricing is pretty attractive too. They are giving them away free with a free mobile broadband dongle, but you pay a monthly contract price for bandwidth (the exact pricing will vary so I won’t quote figures here, go to your local store and ask them)

Now all this is really great news and well worth blogging about just as an exciting development in the mainstream adoption of Free and Open Source Software, but I haven’t yet told you what I have been up to. Well I took off my yellow hat for a bit and put on my red mortarboard of The Open Learning Centre and Alan Lord, myself, and some very clever chaps at Canonical and Warp have been working together to build all the software that goes on the webbook, including really great support for mobile broadband dongles.

There is quite a lot to say about the webbook, it is a lovely little computer, so much so that I have started a new blog dedicated to the webbook at webbookblog.com where I will be revealing tricks and hints to get the most out of the webbook.

If you ever considered getting a mobile broadband connection then this is a fantastic deal, get the dongle you want, use it on whatever laptop you have and get a free webbook (which also works with the dongle of course)

Happy Document Freedom day!

Today would be a great day to install OpenOffice.org or Lotus Symphony if you haven’t already. If you already use these great tools then today would be a great day to show them to someone else.

The Open Document Format is a well designed modern format which any system creating documents for use in a wordprocessor, spreadsheet or presentation tool can use. Over the last decade or so the free market in office suites has basically been destroyed by the Microsoft monopoly. This happened not because Microsoft were producing better software, the users of Smartsuite, Wordperfect etc. were really quite happy with their software. It happened because Microsoft got themselves into a position where the format of choice for exchanging documents was .doc and .xls and .ppt. It became the defacto standard. The other products reverse engineered this binary format so they could support this defacto standard, but people discovered that the best way to reliably interchange the Microsoft owned format was to use Microsoft software. Not much of a surprise there really. Microsoft won a lot of business by ensuring a lack of a level playing field.

Open Document Format or ODF is an XML based file format which is designed not to just be the format used by one application but by all of them. Microsoft could support ODF as a native file format for Microsoft Office if they wanted to. It is not a software engineering challenge that they can’t rise to. They don’t want to because it would end their convenient distorted marketplace. Moving to ODF as the normal way of interchanging documents between businesses in future will level the playing field and re-enable a free market and free choice of software applications.

The Microsoft binary formats are at the end of their life. Now is the time to choose which direction to go forward. Microsoft want us to use their OOXML format. They desperately want to protect their position and revenue stream, which is understandable,but not my problem.

Document Freedom is in your interest, tell someone about it today.

My followup article on the visit to BETT has now been posted on the OLPC news website I know it is somewhat off topic for my regular Dominux readers, but the BETT show was pretty amazing. You might be at Lotusphere right now with an estimated 8 kilogeeks, but BETT draws in 30 kiloteachers from all over the world. In the picture on the right I am the one who would need some glue and cotton wool if I was wearing a santa suit.

Well day 3 or so if you count all the days I would have been there if I was. Today is the Opening General Session which I am following live as the expected announcements flood in. So why am I here and not there? Basically when the call for abstracts went out I figured I had nothing much to say this year. Last year was great showing OpenOffice.org integrating with Notes. This year the Productivity Editors AKA Symphony is more of a reality, but I am not that interested in them. I am focusing more and more on work under The Open Learning Centre brand rather than Dominux and I couldn’t really justify the cost. So this year I will spend a week in January wishing I was elsewhere, but on the other hand I will eat in February.

Back in December The Open Learning Centre (which is myself and Alan Lord - The Open Sourcerer ) was invited to meet up with The Open Forum Europe to discuss ways we could work together. They invited us to go to the BETT show and help out on their stand talking about Open Source software. I said I would bring along my OLPC laptop as an example of Open Source in education.

Come last week, my laptop had not arrived. We had nothing to show, not much to say. HELP!! We needed a new plan. I borrowed a bit of space on the olpcnews.com website to appeal for anyone with an OLPC to let us borrow it for BETT. A couple of days later we got a call from Tomi Davis, the chief executive of OLPC Nigeria who lives in North London offering some laptops. Yesterday we went to see him and he lent us three of the most excellent OLPC XO laptops. We had a good play with them whilst munching meatballs in the IKEA restaurant then we were ready. Today was manic. The OLPC laptop was on BBC breakfast news this morning. We had loads of people come up and tell us they had just seen the laptop on the TV. One teacher told us that just seeing the laptop made his vist to BETT worth the effort. Tomi joined us for the afternoon and we were interviewed on camera by the show TV crew. We made loads of interesting contacts in the UK and abroad, everyone wants these laptops and they want Open Source software in their schools. Today BECTA (nice bunch of folk, they liked the laptops too) released a report on Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 I think their conclusions are just as appropriate for business as for schools.

So today we have been demoing someone else’s laptops on someone else’s stand which we got at the last minute through an appeal on someone else’s website and they are all really really happy that we did it!

Google just released a new toy for us to play with, the Google Charts API. It really is very simple, just construct a URL in a particular way and it gives you a png file.

Lets say for example you have 12 months of sales figures in millions of pounds as below (these are not the actual Dominux sales figures)

sales:=12:15:16:18:25:30:28:42:32:35:36;

then you need to encode this by replacing the numbers with letters where A=0, B=1 etc.

valuecodes:="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789";
coded:=@Implode(@Transform(sales;"v";@Middle(valuecodes;v;1));"");

and now generate a url and put it in an img tag
"<img src=\"http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chs=200x125&chd=s:"+coded+"\">"

so shove all that into some computed text and make it passthru html to get

434 1.02 %	387 0.91 %	584 1.37 %	199 0.47 %	205 0.48 %	324 0.76 %	509 1.2 %	245 0.58 %	462 1.09 %	2662 6.27 %	3665 8.63 %	2943 6.93 %	2748 6.47 %	2829 6.66 %	3604 8.48 %	3867 9.1 %	2917 6.87 %	2672 6.29 %	2512 5.91 %	2401 5.65 %	2195 5.17 %	1826 4.3 %	1363 3.21 %	930 2.19 %
0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23

Visits based on day of month

480 1.13 %	1825 4.3 %	1601 3.77 %	26312 61.94 %	195 0.46 %	117 0.28 %	91 0.21 %	118 0.28 %	124 0.29 %	40 0.09 %	369 0.87 %	233 0.55 %	99 0.23 %	84 0.2 %	193 0.45 %	151 0.36 %	59 0.14 %	103 0.24 %	339 0.8 %	127 0.3 %	149 0.35 %	1355 3.19 %	728 1.71 %	487 1.15 %	1579 3.72 %	723 1.7 %	1479 3.48 %	703 1.65 %	1370 3.22 %	923 2.17 %	327 0.77 %
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	3

you copy the contents of

c:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.3\program

and then paste it into

c:\Program Files\lotus\notes\framework\shared\eclipse\plugins\com.ibm.productivity.tools.base.app.win32_3.0.0.20070725-1652

Well Notes starts. . .

File-new-document. . .

oh well. It was worth a try. Anyone know how to tell it what the user interface language is?

I will probably talk more about this later, but in the mean time you (and Googlebot) can check out dis29500.org.

First a bit of history. When Star Office was first released and OpenOffice.org started it was under dual licenses, the SISSL and the LGPL. IBM took a fork and kept their changes private as they are permitted to do under the SISSL. In September 2005 (after the IBM fork) OpenOffice.org retired the SISSL and OOo releases after that are LGPL only. If IBM wanted to freshen their codebase then they would have to comply with the LGPL which means releasing their changes, which might have been a problem. I don’t know exactly the nature of the changes, but at the time they were definitely taking advantage specifically of the SISSL license not the LGPL.

IBM had two choices, carry on developing their fork on their own (they are quite capable of doing this using their rather large and skilled development teams in China plus the Smartsuite team in India) or comply with the LGPL and join the OpenOffice.org community. I wasn’t sure which way they would jump, so privately I was a bit skeptical of the productivity editors, I figured if they were going to go it alone then despite their efforts it would be a bit of a dead end product because an open development process tends to lead to a better product. However, today IBM jumped. They jumped the right way and joined the OpenOffice.org community. IBM will contribute code to OpenOffice.org and they can use OpenOffice.org to keep the productivity editors in Notes fully ODF compliant and with a common API so that code written to automate OpenOffice.org will also run in the Productivity Editors. Now you may be wondering about that last bit - surely there isn’t an automation API for the Productivity Editors? Well yes there is, it is called UNO and here is how you turn it on. . .

In Windows (I haven’t figured it out in Linux yet) open regedit
go to the key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{82154420-0FBF-11d4-8313-005004526AB4}\LocalServer32
change the value to:
C:\Program Files\lotus\notes\framework\shared\eclipse\plugins\com.ibm.productivity.tools.base.app.win32_3.0.0.20070725-1652\soffice.exe -nodefault -nologo

This assumes that you have that registry key already (you will if you have installed OpenOffice.org, you might just have to create it if you don’t - haven’t tested that)

I am also assuming you have notes installed in the default location.

Interesting thing to note: there is a file called soffice.exe within the Notes8 install.

So what has this done? Well, 82154420-0FBF-11d4-8313-005004526AB4 is the guid of com.sun.star.servicemanager and this is the class at the top of the UNO automation API. Kind of analagous to notessession.

Lets start using our new API, create a button in Notes with this Lotusscript code in it:
Sub Click(Source As Button)
Set SM=CreateObject("com.sun.star.ServiceManager")
Set Desktop=SM.createInstance("com.sun.star.frame.Desktop")
Dim args()
Set WriterApplication=Desktop.loadComponentFromURL("private:factory/swriter","_blank",0,args)
Set WriterText=WriterApplication.getText()
Set Cursor=WriterText.createTextCursor()
Call WriterText.insertString(Cursor,"Hello World!",False)
End Sub

That should open the Notes 8 wordprocessor and type in “Hello World!” (if you get an error “can’t create automation object” sometimes it helps if an editor has already been launched.)

The API is very well documented, go to api.openoffice.org and take a look round.

This is a totally unsupported hack, if you use it in production don’t call IBM for help. You can contact me for help if you like, but I may ask you to cross my palm with silver.