Older blog entries for msevior (starting at number 53)

From bug 9362 in the AbiWord bugzilla.

Summary:

abimathview eats babies and crashes your system without the gtkmathview.conf.xml installed

Description: Opened: 2005-08-03 04:31

The file gtkmathview.conf.xml must be copied from \MinGW\etc\gtkmathview\gtkmathview.conf.xml to abi\src\MINGW32_1.0.10_i386_OBJ\AbiSuite\math before attempting to run AbiWord. It will crash the entire system (making each successive process run away with the cpu, and passing this curse along when the offending process is killed) if it is not available.

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The recent set of rock concerts aimed at focussing World Attention to the plight of people in the poorest Countries of the world succeeded. Many people in the richer world looked at this issue with renewed focus.

However, while the aim of the concerts was fantastic, I was left with a bit of a sour taste. To me, it appears that we are condescending to the people we intend to help. The people in these countries are just as human, intelligent and creative as those in the Western World. It is simply that these people, as individuals, do not have access to the successful community we have built in Australia and other Countries.

The importance of sucessful community and culture was really brought home to me when I read this article about Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe travelling to China in an attempt to secure Aid. 20 years ago, China was substantially poorer than Zimbabwe on a per-Capita basis. But for the last 25 years China's economy has been doubling every 8-10 years with so sign of letting up at all.

Clearly the Chinese have learned some powerful lessons and have found a way to unleash the human spirit within their own Country. They did not do this with handouts and massive aid programs.

Why can't every nation on earth do this?

I think that every nation can and will but that the time this transformation takes can be substantially reduced by avoiding the condescention of Aid handouts and by directly encouraging individuals to use their own talents as productively as possible.

The following story on the pitfalls of Aid handouts was written by Dr. Badiul Alam Majumdar head of the Hunger Project in Bangladesh. http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~msevior/Parrot_Story.html

The success of the approach adopted by Dr. Majumdar was witnessed first hand by my good friend, Carol Godham. This is very clever way to foster local economic development by empowering people in local communities. You can read about her experiences here.

The Hunger Project acheives exponential growth by directly empowering people to create their own futures.

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Well since I spend so much time developing a desktop application for Linux, it's very frustrating to watch the two steps forward, one step backwards lurches of Linux-on-the-desktop.

When I installed Fedora Core 1 on my laptop I thought I could finally see it all coming together. Suspend worked out of the box, sound worked out the box. USB mostly worked. HAL and DBUS were coming along nicely, it looked like we would soon be into plug and play Nirvana. Take some random piece of hardware, plug it in and it works :-)

Fast forward to Fedora Core 4. I've installed this onto three different machines. Sound did not work out of the box on a single one of them. My DELL Inspiron Laptop 8100 with it's NVidia chipset won't work with data projectors with the standard "nv" driver. It certainly no longer suspends. I had to do a hurried reboot into windows yesterday so I could make a presentation.

I have not focused on learning how sound, video or the details of how suspend works in Linux. I know a lot about computers, far more than your average person on the street, and like JWZ, I don't see why I should have to know the details about how these sub-systems are supposed to work. I want to install an OS and have these things just work.

Yes FC4 has some great applications like eVince. But it has also removed great apps like AbiWord and Gnumeric and it still screws up with hardware that worked back in the RedHat 9 era.

I've since played with Ubuntu a bit. It also has serious issues with sound and video. It's all a bit depressing. Maybe there needs to be better ways for desktop focussed distros to cooperate to get the basics right, like sound, video, suspend. Give us application developers some reason to actually recommend Linux with a clean conscious to people.

Frankly I can't now unless I'm prepared to spend hours fiddling with different parameters to get everything working.

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Well although I have to concentrate on bug fixing, other AbiWord hackers get to do fun stuff.

Robsta has written python bindings for our new library based AbiWord builds (thanks fjf :-). Here is a great screen shot of his work in action.

http://www.abisource.com/~rob/tmp/pyabiword.png

So now you can get an embedded spell-checked, grammar checked, Word Processor in your app in 18 LOC.

Great work robsta!

After applying a patch from Jean Brefort to Gnumeric CVS and some hacking on AbiWord from me we can now copy and paste charts from Gnumeric into AbiWord.

Obligatory screen shot here:

http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~msevior/abiword/CopyAndPaste.png

There is not much more of these fun new features for a while. We're now doing the final push to get 2.4 out the door.

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Today I read this story as headline news on all the major newspapers in Surfers Paradise.

ASIO raids homes of Islamic extremists

No charges will be laid. Instead we get a whole of of unsubstantiated innuendo. This sort of story really offends me. If ASIO are really using their powers for good then this story should never be reported. Nor should there be runours from "unnamed sources close the the investigation".

Now the the large and vibrant Arabic community in Australia has been tarred by a guilty by association label, when no doubt much of the intelligence that made this raid possible came from within the Arabic community.

I'd hoped that we (Australians) had enough of this sort of crap from the "Tampa Overboard" lies that we would not swallow this anymore.

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I spent yesterday (Queens Birthday holiday in Australia) watching the 3 extended-edition Lord of The Rings DVD's with a friend.

I borrowed a data projector, darkened my living room and projected onto a wall. I ran sound through some amplified computer speakers and the DVD off of my FC3 laptop running mplayer.

It was awesome. 13 hours of indulgence. The extended edition DVD's are so much better than the movie cut and the emersive experience of being 2 meters from a 2 meter by 1 meter image while lounging on my couch or sitting back in comfy chairs can't be beat.

Thanks to the Lord of the Rings and the mplayer teams for truely great software :-)

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I read Hub's rant about Apple and I can well understand his frustration.

The company really does seem out to make sure everybody, including it's independent developers, pay them money as often as possible. Well since they're a for-profit company that makes global sense. However it does kind of leave some people wondering if it really is worth the extra money it costs to be a Mac user.

On the other hand the OSX port of AbiWord has got us a whole more users, more respect and some great bug reports. It is a definite plus for us.

I have these caricatures of OS users:

Windows "gimme, gimme. I'll take what I can get. Since everyone is trying to screw me, I should screw them first." We get very little value per Windows user but on the other hand since there are so many of them, on balance we do get substantial support from our Windows port.

OSX "I love my Mac. Apple is so cool. I'll support people who support it." Our download stats for OSX are about 1/3 that of Windows. Clearly we gain a fair number of users and a reasonable level of support.

FOSS "Excellent and another FOSS project, I wonder if I can help?" Not many users but we get a *lot* of help (and criticism) from the FOSS community.

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You have to read what Tomas says about "harmful books".

Last week I posted a proposal for a new GNOME release to the gnome-hackers mailing list. Here is an edited version of the email.

I've heard no negative feedback from this so I guess GNOME-2.12 will contain a GNOME-productivity release :-)

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In addition to our GNOME-platform, GNOME-desktop and GNOME-bindings collections released every 6 months, I propose we include a GNOME-productivity software collection as well.

I personally guarantee that GNOME-productivity would at least include AbiWord and that there will be stable and improved versions of AbiWord every 6 months for the foreseeable future.

At the current rate of progress we are well on track to offer AbiWord-2.4 for GNOME-2.12.

Since making this announcement, both the Gnumeric and GNOME-DB maintainers have informed me they plan to make their next releases for GNOME-2.12 and will provide future stable releases in synch with the GNOME 6-month release cycle.

What do we as GNOME developers and proponents get from this platform?

First and foremost a new cutting edge for everyone to hack on. As has been pointed out recently, we all enjoy creating things with our minds through software. The GNOME-platform, GNOME-desktop and GNOME-bindings projects are mostly moving into maintenance mode. GNOME-productivity provides a vast range of opportunities for hackers to try new stuff and go one better than proprietary software.

By having our own productivity platform under our control we can shape a new desktop experience far beyond what Apple or Microsoft can do at a far lower price point. We already index MS Word documents via Beagle and wv (the MS Word import library used by AbiWord) and we have a proof of principle we can do the same for PowerPoint through GOffice. Both Apple and MS require at least an $500 per desktop for productively software, which in the case of MS on Apple, can never be as fully integrated as what we can do. By developing GNOME-platform we can significantly improve ease of use to our users at a fantastic price point. (Well zero capital outlay, of course there will be on-going maintenance costs which the GNOME sponsors may want to bid for.)

There are many, many other opportunities for integration with the desktop as well as to make use of our excellent existing communicative software to allow powerful new ways of collaboration. One example is GOCollab . (You'll need AbiWord-2.2.x to read this.) This document has already received lots of excellent comments and will be updated soon.

Why propose this now? Well frankly until now I did not think that AbiWord had the maturity to anchor the job of document production that is the essential task of a modern information worker. However this is no longer the case. AbiWord-2.4 will have the ability to render and print arbitrary content within it's documents as well as providing most of the features required by such workers in their daily use of word processors.

In addition the GOffice project is really picking up steam and contains lots of useful code which will be of interest to many other projects. Gnumeric keeps on getting better and better. GNOME-DB is mature set of interfaces to all the databases of interest. Other projects may also wish to join.

I purposely do not propose to call this platform "GNOME-Office" because I do not think we should be locked into thinking the old standards defined by the marketing men at MS should dictate the useful applications that users want or need.

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