Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

I was invited to speak at Sun a few weeks ago. They've started a new program to bring in outside luminaries to offer differing perspectives on topics important to Sun in an effort to avoid inside-the-beltway thinking (or, put more floridly, to avoid breathing their own exhaust). I was their first speaker in the program and something of a guinea pig.

Here are five (bad) reasons to approve OOXML that are often touted my OOXML proponents, and an explanation of why they are bad.

Etoys is one of the most interesting activities included on the OLPC XO laptops distributed during the Give One Get One program late last year, which gave North Americans a first look at the controversial laptop. The XO's unique vocabulary -- Etoys as an activity instead of application -- underscores the fact that the XO is designed as an educational tool for the classroom.

A little while ago, Gregory Brown announced hisRuby Mendicant Project. He’s trying to raise enough money to work for the Ruby community full time for 6 months (or on a time-share basis if he doesn’t raise the full amount, see the web site for the full details). With just 7 days left, he’s about 40% of the way there.

I get sent a lot of material on OOXML by people around the world, and I presume I’m not the only recipient. A lot of it is, frankly, rather funny, since it assumes that the people reading it won’t ever double check what they’re being told or compare it to methods of past disinformation campaigns. As I’ve said before, the whole OOXML story will probably make several wonderful business school case studies and maybe even one or two from law schools. Anyway, the phrase that caught my eye last night in one of the presentations I was sent was “No IPR problems!”.

The developers of the TrueCrypt open source encryption tool are considering submitting a complaint against Microsoft to the EU Commission if Microsoft is not prepared to lay open the Windows hibernation API. From version 5.1 TrueCrypt supports hibernation for encrypted system partitions. Potential vulnerabilities that could allow the hibernation file to be written to the disk in unencrypted form have been reported in this version in recent weeks. This would allow attackers to read the key and thus decrypt the partition or container. However, [the TrueCrypt developers] see this as a problem for all vendors of drive encryption systems, as no documentation is available for the hibernation API and it is therefore necessary to adapt Windows components

Last month, Stephen Norris, head of the Stephen Norris Capital Partners that is bidding to buy majority interest in the Lindon-based SCO Group, said he hoped the planned investment would spur settlement of the SCO-Novell lawsuit. But Ryan Richards, Novell's acting general counsel, said Monday at the company's BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City that there had been no contact with Norris, and Novell had yet to see details of the proposed takeover. However, Novell President and CEO Ronald Hovsepian indicated his company might be open to a settlement.

Arguments rage over the importance of adding comments to your code versus the importance of writing clear code that speaks for itself, thereby potentially eliminating the need for comments. The dichotomy boils down to this: writing comments versus writing self-commenting code, as if comments and clear code are somehow mutually exclusive.

The official 1.0 release of MonoDevelop was announced late last week. The open source development environment includes a number of advanced features such as project management tools, a graphical user interface designer, a unit testing system, version control integration, and an add-in system that facilitates extensibility. MonoDevelop provides code completion, passive error notification, code navigation, and autoindent functionality for several programming languages, including C#, VB.NET, and C/C++.

The Open Source Initiative, the organization that certifies Open Source software licenses, is holding an executive board election soon. I am standing for election. The board is self-electing, and I'm told I don't have a chance unless I can show community support for my candidacy. One problem I'd like to help solve is the over-representation of vendors, particularly the kind that have an Open Source product as their profit-center rather than part of operations. The vast majority of Open Source developers, paid or volunteer, are not in that sort of business, yet vendors tend to dominate the leadership of organizations like OSI and conferences about Open Source in business.

[I signed. Bruce for president^Wboard member! - Sander]

When I wrote about file managers in my review of KDE 4.0, I noted that several important features had been removed from Konqueror, including the tree-based detailed view. Many power users regard the tree view as the most effective mode for advanced file management and mourned the loss of this feature. Developer Peter Penz reports that the tree view has been restored and that it will be fully functional in time for the KDE 4.1 release.

Overall, Linux is not known as a resource hog. The free operating system is a fairly lean machine out of the box -- some distributions moreso than others. Still, there are some tweaks you can make to any Linux installation to speed things up.

One of the problems with open source is that much of it happens invisibly. Whereas proprietary software, which is sold, has to publicised at some point, open source can simply be written: whether or not it gets used is a question of the author's personal inclinations. Even the big-name open source projects – Linux, Apache, Firefox – have the problem that contributions are made in all sorts of ways, and that there is nobody really tracking who is doing what where. That makes a paper from SAP Research's Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle particularly welcome, since they do the hard work of tracking down just how much coding is going on these days. They start from a hard core of open source activity, ignoring projects that are dormant.

The United States has voted for approval of a modified version of the Office Open XML (OOXML) standard for business documents. The International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) Executive Board is the U.S. Technical Advisory Group for ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, and casts this country's vote on information technology standards. It is comprised of 17 voting members, including three from the federal government: the Homeland Security and Defense departments and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

[In the infamous words of The Ancient Booer from "The Princess Bride": "Booo! Booo! Boooooooo!" - Sander]

I was at the OOXML BRM in Geneva on behalf of my national body. We were trying to improve the Ecma 376 OOXML specification (i.e. what many people think of as the spec for the Microsoft Office 2007 file formats), in preparation for national bodies to make the final decision as to whether it should be accepted by ISO as a standard. I'm not going to blog about the details of it, because that's already been done well by plenty of people already (Antonis Christofides, Tim Bray, Jesper Lund Stocholm, Rob Weir, Yong Yoon Kit, Doug Mahugh, Brian Jones). What I don't think has been covered well is what happens now, and what people can do about it.

It happens to everyone sooner or later: a split second after you hit Enter you realize your mistake, but it's too late; you just deleted a valuable file or directory for which no backup exists. Fortunately, you remember that files are never really deleted, at most overwritten by new content. So, you remount the disk read-only as fast as possible. But now? If you Google for "undelete ext3", almost every article you find will be users asking if it's possible and the answer is every time: no. On February 7th, 2008, I accidently deleted my whole home directory: over 3 GB of data, deleted with rm -rf. The only backup that I had was from June 2007. Not being able to undelete was unacceptable. So, I ignored what everyone tried to tell me and started to learn how an ext3 file system really works, and what exactly happens when files are deleted... Three weeks and nearly 5000 lines of code later, I had recovered every file on my disk.

Have you ever left your terminal logged in, only to find when you came back to it that a (supposed) friend had typed "rm -rf ~/*" and was hovering over the keyboard with threats along the lines of "lend me a fiver 'til Thursday, or I hit return"? Undoubtedly the person in question would not have had the nerve to inflict such a trauma upon you, and was doing it in jest. So you've probably never experienced the worst of such disasters....

[Yes, I know this is from 1986. It's still a great read - Sander]

The rising generation of programmers isn't being fed .Net and Windows. It's growing strong on Linux and its associated LAMP stack, as Robert Guth of the Wall Street Journal notes. Microsoft thinks it has an answer to this trend toward Linux. It is very telling how far from reality Microsoft is by its response:

Every six months, the GNOME team prepares a new and revolutionary release of the ever popular GNOME desktop environment. Today, we are proud to introduce you to the latest and greatest features of an 100% FREE and open source desktop. Whether you are on a Solaris machine or the latest Ubuntu distribution, GNOME is there and with every new release it makes your life... Simply Beautiful! Let's have a look at the new features of GNOME 2.22.

The Banshee development community has been working for months on a major refresh for the popular music player. The first Banshee 1.0 alpha was released today, providing users with an early look at Banshee's new features and vastly improved user interface.