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Open Source means that users have the freedom to see how software works, adapt it for the own needs, fix bugs and limitations and contribute back to the community.

Microsoft’s Office 12 standards move draws mixed reactions

By on December 1, 2005 in Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports that Pundits Give Microsoft’s Open XML Play Mixed Marks. “While the Massachusetts governor’s office (and attorney Larry Rosen, an open-source specialist) may be upbeat about Microsoft’s decision to push the Office 12 Open XML document format through the ECMA standards process, not everyone is equally bullish about Microsoft’s move.”

I was impressed with the positive tone of Larry Rosen’s review. A fair playing field benefits all, and it looks like Microsoft has taken some good first steps. However, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ column cites several serious concerns. The best point in that article is the last: When the O-12 standard is a legitimate standards-body-approved standard, only then should it be considered as a peer to competing standards at that level. Before that, it’s just another proprietary, encumbered under-documented binary file format.

DLSLUG: Bill Stearns on LVM

By on November 30, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

Bill McGonigle posts: “The next regular monthly meeting of the DLSLUG will be held: Thursday, December 1st, 7-9 PM at:Dartmouth College, Carson Hall Room L01. All are welcome, free of charge.” Bill Stearns will present LVM – Logical Volume Management.

“Bill Stearns has trained folks on LVM professionally for a nationally-renowned training organization and packages some LVM utilities. He’ll give us the 1.5-hour overview version of what LVM is and how to make it work.”

I noted on a recent install that Fedora Core 4 uses LVM by default. This is a session well worth attending. Bill’s a great presenter and I’ve never failed to pick up some new tips.

FireFox 1.5 released

By on November 29, 2005 in OpenSource

InfoWorld: Top News reports Mozilla releases Firefox 1.5 on schedule. (InfoWorld) – “The wait is over for the Firefox faithful, as the Mozilla Foundation released the new version of the browser as planned Tuesday.”

The 1.5 release improves performance, smoother updating, support for SVG, JavaScript 1.6, better security and pop-up blocking. I’ve been working with the release candidates and FireFox looks solid and reliable. Check it out!

CentraLUG: 5 December: James Fogg on Windows-Linux Interoperability

By on November 29, 2005 in LAMP, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

Please note the change in location: we will be meeting in Little Hall Room 230, a lab with computers. On the NHTI map located at http://www.nhti.edu/welcome/nhtimap.pdf (warning: 1 Mb+ PDF), the building is marked “K”

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

This month’s meeting will feature James Fogg discussing Windows-Linux interoperability. James Fogg is a principal with JDFogg Technology Consulting, where he is a network engineer specializing in delivering IT, Telecommunications and Computer Services, Systems, Sales and Consulting to the Fortune 500.

Many companies now operate mixed environments and managers expect their technical staff to be able to “make it work.” James will provide some ideas on how to do it. He’ll be covering interoperability methods between Microsoft Windows products and Linux/Unix systems. File Sharing, Application Sharing, network Services (DNS, DHCP, NTP, etc.), Mail and Printing. Also included will be the basics of Linux, Unix and Active Directory authentication, authorization and auditing.

I was pleased to learn that in the most recent editions of Microsoft’s Services for Unix, Microsoft is including an NFS client. SFU is a downloadable component for the currently supported versions of Windows and Microsoft has committed to including some of the functionality future OS releases. Interoperability is Good. SFU is one of several things James plans to cover.

Hope to see you there!

Microsoft to seek ISO standardization for Office 12 formats

By on November 22, 2005 in Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

InfoWorld: Top News reports “Update: Microsoft to open Office document format. (InfoWorld) – Microsoftæon Monday said it will offer its Word, Excel, and PowerPoint document formats as open standards, a move that could spark a war with technology rivals over standard document formats.”

Interesting. I wonder if ISO standardization will really change the basic positioning. Will use of Microsoft’s mis-named “Open XML” be free from RAND licensing fees, patent encumberances, or the onerous licensing terms that made it inaccessible from GPL software?

Viewing OpenDocument Files in FireFox

By on November 16, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

OSNews posts an exclusive article, *Why Browsers Should Be Able to Display OpenDocument*. “OpenDocument got a lot of publicity lately. StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org 2.0 finally arrived, and all the other makers of office suites (with the notable exception of Microsoft) have started implementing the new standard into their programs. Massachusetts recently decided to use OpenDocument as the standard file format, effectively locking out MS Office as soon as January 1st, 2007. Other countries are on their way to do the same. Also, OpenDocument recently got submitted to become an ISO standard.”

An interesting tidbit I picked up from the article: you can view OpenDocument files in FireFox! If you have both FireFox and OpenOffice.org 2 installed on your machine, start OpenOffice.org and navigate the usual menu/dialog/treeview to Tools | Options, Internet, Mozilla Plug-In, and check the Enable checkbox. Shut down and restart Firefox. Now, you can open OpenDocument documents for viewing in the browser! A toolbar appears that allows editing (opening the doc in OpenOffice.org), direct printing, direct export to PDF, searching and more. Pretty cool stuff.

Dabo does DataSets!

By on November 8, 2005 in OpenSource, Python, Technology

Ten-time Microsoft MVP Ed Leafe and Fox/Wine/Python guru Paul McNett have been working on a Free (price and license) framework in Python to create data-intensive rich client applications that will run on all major platforms (thanks to Python) and support all major databases.

On his ProFox mailing list, Ed Leafe announces Dabo reaches another milestone:

If you had to give one reason why Fox rocks, what would it be? The UI and reporting tools are good, but there are other products out there that do those things as well or better. The language is OO and can be quite elegant, but it is also procedural and can be quite ugly. And DBFs are not exactly the ultimate data store around.

No, if I had to name the killer feature, it would be this: an internal data engine. With this, you can do things that other languages simply cannot. You can pull a data set from SQL Server or Postgres, and then manipulate that data quickly and powerfully, using Fox’s SQL engine as well as its Xbase commands. You can select a subset from that cursor, and then join that subset to another cursor. All in Fox, and all natively.

This was the piece that Dabo lacked, and that I felt would take it from a second-rate data framework to a first-class product. Well, I’m thrilled to announce that Dabo now has such an internal data engine! Data in Dabo is held in objects called DataSets, but which are very much like Fox cursors. These DataSet objects now understand SQL, allowing you to send it any valid SQL statement and get back the results in another DataSet object.

http://dabodev.com/wiki/DataSet

Congratulations, Ed! This is a really exciting step! Fox Rocks because it has a rich development environment, a powerful means of iterative development using the command window, and a very capable local data engine for cursor manipulation. With the integration of SQLite (via pySQLite) into the data layer, Dabo developers can still use the backend data of their choice and have a powerful local engine for manipulation, the best of both worlds.

DLSLUG/GNHLUG Quarterly Meeting, 3 Nov 2005

By on November 7, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

What a great meeting last week! Forty-three attendees made this the most attended Greater New Hampshire Linux User Groupquarterly meeting of the year.

Thanks to Doug McIlroy for a fascinating presentation on his memories of growing up with the computer industry. Doug ran the department at Bell Labs where Kernighan and Ritchie came up with C, studied at MIT with WhirlWind, and had many fascinating adventures along the way. Doug put on a great show featuring significant and memorable milestones and wonderful anecdotes. Several people took notes, audio and video recordings. We hope to see something on the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee LUG site soon!

Thanks also to Bill McGonigle for arranging and emceeing the meeting. Bill started with the usual announcements about the group, thanking PTR/Addison Wesley for providing some books to raffle as well as paying for the delicious refreshments. Bill had been contacted by a survey firm claiming to be looking for cases of Linux cost of ownership situations other than those that have been popularly reported. Bill expressed some scepticism on the legitimacy of this information and asked to contact him if you want to look into it. A raffle after Doug’s presentation gave away a couple of Addison-Wesley books and some RedHat promotional DVDs.

Bill Stearns announced the results of the project to bring some networking gear to Pass Christian schools following Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of their schools, and pointed to a link with pictures. Great job, Bill!

At the end, I spoke for a few minutes on the on-going effort to gather feedback for the development of by-laws and the registration of GNHLUG as a non-profit organization. Reception was generally positive. Several attendees offered to send along by-laws for their organizations, so we can examine what others have done.

Finally, we announced the next quarterly meeting. We’ll be joining with the New Hampshire Chapters of the ACM and IEEE for a presentation by Rik van Riel showing off spamikaze, an automated spam block system. The meeting will take place at Robert Frost Hall in the Walker Auditorium at Southern New Hampshire University. Note the unusual time: the main presentation is 5 Pm to 6 Pm, to allow evening graduate school students to attend. Hope to see you there! Thanks to all who attended!

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