Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

You have a checkout of the OpenOffice.org tree with a specific workspace. That means you have all the individual modules either stuck to the milestone of the CWS or in the branch of the CWS.

When the CWS get resynchronized to a new milestone, you'll need to update your tree. Two solutions:

1. For each module, cd into that module, if the module is not in the CWS, cvs update -r NEWTAG -Pd. If the module is in the CWS, cvs update -Pd. Maybe there is a faster solution, but I don't know it, so look at solution 2.
2. Use cws-cvsrebase. Just call cws-cvsrebase NEWTAG and it will do what is described in 1.

It proved to be helpful this time again to update xmlfilter02 that had been resynced to SRC680_m239.

You'll find cws-cvsrebase in the ooo-build tree. See in the subversion tree

Things I still have to do:

• report CVS conflicts. For now, check the update.log file in the current directory.
• use EIS to check the status of the modules instead of poking the CVS directories.

I just added Jan to Planet OOo. Jan recently joined our team at Novell and is working on the UI layout system that was started by Ricardo as part of the summer of code. Read back the history of is blog if you are really interested.

But what is this UI layout system about? It is about making VCL layout widgets as boxed containers instead of pixel sized container. This will allow dialogs to looks nicer on the different platforms (like with Gtk+), and be resizable dynamically (people doing localization will understand).

Welcom Jan.

I finally flipped the switch on go-oo.org and tinderbox. They are on the new hosting we have for the project.

It is the time where we discover a lot of problems (forgotten things, etc). Feel free to poke me if that is the case.

Last Sunday I returned from Barcelona where I was attending OOoCon 2007, the OpenOffice.org. I intended to blog earlier about it, but Smith law^[1] decided to come into effect and make my server hard drive die, said server hosting my various services.

Astute readers will notice that the title of this post if "Back from Iceland" this is not completely inaccurate. I flew from BCN (Barcelona) to AMS (Amsterdam Schiphol), waited a few hours and then from AMS to YYZ (Toronto). But that last leg got rerouted to Kevlavik, Iceland because some passenger had decided to not board the plane. In that case, the regulation is to off-load their luggages, but we all know how airports and airlines are good at tracking luggages, we ended up taking with 3 extra piece of luggages than we had counted for. As a consequence, into the flight we got told that we would be re-routed to Kevlavik, Iceland to off-load them. Technically Iceland is the last country I took off from, and the landscape I saw during the landing did intrigue me. Now I wish to go there to visit.

What happened during OOoCon 2007?

First of all I met the whole team from Novell, again.

Second, on Friday, I gave my talk, in the most gorgeous auditorium I have seen, about our work on implementing Office Open XML import in OpenOffice.org. Fridrich had done one about the Writer filter (along with his Sun counterpart), I did one on the other part of the filter, the Impress and Calc filters.

To be continued...

There is a new bonsai setup running for go-oo.org. It is located at http://bonsai.go-oo.org/. The old bonsai is still running as tinderbox still relies on it (ie it needs to access the local files from bonsai).

I just pulled the plug to force people to use the new LXR server for OpenOffice, located at http://lxr.go-oo.org/. It should be much faster. You'll be redirected automatically.

One of the good things with being employed to work on a Free Software project like OpenOffice.org is that you can blog about it, since the code is publicly available. My day to day work is current PowerPoint 2007 import for Impress. This is a joint work between Sun and Novell.

A few weeks ago I implemented the text import from PresentationML (actually from DrawingML). It is far from perfect, but it is getting there. See the example:

It imports the text, the characters and paragraph properties, etc.

I went ahead and solved the problem on my own with planet OpenOffice.org: I changed the RSS template files to escape their content. I don't know why the behaviour is different between two Python installation, and actually I don't wanna know ;-)

It looks like grep is still one of my best friends.

People aggregating the planet should no longer have issue. Sorry for the mess.

Dear Lazyweb,

Since I moved planet OpenOffice, it generates invalid RSS feed because it does not escape the content of <dc:creator>. The planet version is the same, but the Python version likely is different. I have no power on the version of Python that is installed.

This invalid feed cause problems for people aggregating planet in a feed reader (like I do).

Oh Lazyweb, do you have a magical solution? Your friend Google seems to not have been helpful.

Thanks, love,

Hub

Update: I meant <dc:creator>. Silly me. Oops

I just migrated Planet OpenOffice.org to a new ISP. Nothing should be changed for you readers, but if you notice any problem, feel free to contact me.

We will also be moving the rest of go-oo.org progressively, there might be disturbances. We will try to minimize them.

Thanks.

As Michael mentionned Monday, I joined the OpenOffice team at Novell. I'm thrilled and I would like to thanks Novell for offering me the opportunity to work on a major Open Source project.

In the mean time I have been added to both Planet OpenOffice.org and Planet SuSE.