15 Apr 2005 Uraeus   » (Master)

Visions

Discovered NASA' s vision statement is 'To improve life here, To extend life to there, To find life beyond.' Not sure if I think its cute or just cheesy. It definetly sounds like something written by a comitee.

Lederhosen

Also learned today that Wingo had never seen lederhosen before. So I think I need to dig up some old photos of me wearing lederhosen to put onto my webpage. Maybe I can get Julien to get us all Fluendo lederhosen for GUADEC in Stuttgart, would make people really notice the Fluendo team at GUADEC. I know lederhosen even come in female cuts these days, so even Kristien and Noelle could get them.

OpenOffice and GNOME Office

The issue of Open Office and GNOME office is a hard one. On one side you have a huge lump of code called OpenOffice which have a everything you normally need, but being big and bloated and while improving the GNOME integration still have some way to go. On the other side you have some mean and lean and tightly GNOME integrated applications like Gnumeric and Abiword.

Problem with GNOME Office is that its still missing some critical componets, a presentation program being the killer for me and they are not really integrated with eachother as much as you expect from an office suite (cross application embeding for instance).

Maybe its time for GNOME Office to trying to be an alternative to Open Office and instead being alternatives for the specific sub components in Open Office. I mean if Gnumeric get the same suite integration features with the other Open Office applications that OpenCalc have then it could mean that a distribution maker could decide to ditch OpenCalc and go with Gnumeric instead, and still offer an integrated Office suite.

This would of couse demand some heavy work, I would think that UNO would need to be split out in a separate library so Gnumeric and Abiword could utilize it for instance. On the other side componentizing Open Office is something already on the todo list. And with Novell having people like Jody Goldberg and Michael Meeks working in the office suite space it could be a task worthwhile for them to undertake.

On the other side I have no clue what would be involved, so going this route might be mission impossible :)

Ubuntu and Nautilus

As someone running Nautilus Plus so that I got a GUI option to switch to the exact behaviour Ubuntu is now using by default I might be disqualified from making a comment.

But if I do make one anyway I am not sure if the high level of indignation felt by some people is warranted. Yes, it would be nice if GNOME behaved the same accross distributions, but if changes are to be made to GNOME by distributions (and I think there will always be such changes being made) it is relativly small/mild IMHO. I thought the KDE community where whiners when they complained about the behaviour changes Red Hat made to KDE some time ago, and I think the GNOME community is whiners when they now complain about the change made by Ubuntu. Free software means giving up control, live with it.

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