January | 2013 | Steve Woods

Using Firefox Personas in LibreOffice 4.0

14/01/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

LibreOffice developer Jan Holesovsky writes that he has had a late patch included in the LibreOffice 4.0.0 release candidate (posts passim).

The patch in question enables support for Firefox Personas (now better known as lightweight Firefox themes. Ed.) in LibreOffice. Personas are “are easy-to-use themes” that let you personalize the look of your Firefox web browser.

Oliver Hallot, a director of the Document Foundation (the organisation behind LibreOffice. Ed.) thought it would be a good idea to reuse Personas in LibreOffice.

If you’re running LibreOffice 4, to set up Personas, go to Tools > Options > Personalisation > Select Persona. This opens a handy little dialog box, which will launch your web browser. Once you’ve found the Persona you like, you paste its URL (e.g http://www.getpersonas.com/persona/123456) into the appropriate input field, press OK, then OK again in Options and that’s it! Your LibreOffice install will then look similar to the one below.

Firefox Personas applied to LibreOffice Writer
Court interpreting fiasco rumbles on

13/01/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

The Capita/ALS court interpreting fiasco (posts passim) is a story that seems set to run for some time yet.

The crossbench (i.e. independent) peer Baroness Coussins, who is also a Vice-President of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, has tabled an oral question for the government in tomorrow’s House of Lords business.

Her oral question is:

Baroness Coussins to ask Her Majesty’s Government what quality criteria they are using to assess the performance of Capita in delivering interpreting services to the criminal justice system.

Many of us either in or associated to the language and legal professions, as well as those interested in the administration of justice will await the Government’s answer with interest.

Hat tip: Richard McCarthy
LibreOffice 4.0.0 RC1 available for download

12/01/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Today the first release candidate for LibreOffice 4.0.0 has been made available for download for evaluation, quality assurance (QA) testing and the like.

The developers do nevertheless stress that they do not recommend the use of LibreOffice pre-release builds for “mission-critical” purposes. Information about QA testing can be found on the LibreOffice QA testers page.

The developers also suggest reading the release notes.

LibreOffice meets all your office suite needs

If you’re interested in even more bleeding-edge binaries of LibreOffice’s current development, check out the nightly builds. However, these are potentially even less suitable for productive work, provided by individual contributors and not QA-approved in any way. Caveat emptor.

To download LibreOffice 4.0.0.0 RC1 visit the pre-release page. To download the right package for your particular system, you’ll need to select the right package from the two dropdown lists on the page; there is an automatic detection system to help, but this might not work in all cases. The release candidate is available for GNU/Linux (rpm and deb-based package management systems), Mac OS X (both Intel and PowerPC versions) and Windows.
More dodgy spam comment script coding

12/01/2013 Steve WoodsTech

I’ve blogged in the past about blog comment spam (posts passim).

Today another badly coded spam comment script misfired, leaving the comment below in the moderation cue:

I Live THESE {fendi moncler bag|moncler mens clothing|moncler gamme bleu jacket|moncler paris boutique|moncler lucie jacket|moncler 2011 collection|moncler jacket women 2012|men moncler hats|moncler ski|moncler boots uk!!!

Leaving aside the abysmal English – ‘live’ instead of ‘love’ – can you spot where the coding error? That’s right! The missing curly bracket at the end. As Homer Simpson would say: “Doh!”
Greek municipality of Kalamarià installs LibreOffice

12/01/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

The free and open source advocacy organisation GreekLUG reports that the northern Greek Municipality of Kalamarià near Thessaloniki is in the process of installing the cross-platform LibreOffice productivity suite on all of the council’s 170 workstations.

According to the press release (PDF), some 120 installations have been done to date.

It is believed that this move will save the council some €38,000 in licensing fees (including VAT) compared with renewing and/or buying new licences for MS Office. As the Greek public sector is extremely short of money (and getting increasingly shorter thereof in many cases. Ed.), to say the least, this is a very smart move.

GreekLUG welcomes this move, which means that Kalamarià now joins the pioneering municipalities of Heraklion in Crete and Pilea-Hortiatis in pioneering the use of free and open source software in the Greek public sector.
Are social media destroying the rest of the internet?

11/01/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Social Media, Tech

That was one question discussed yesterday evening over a couple of pints of Cotswold Spring’s Stunner ale in Bristol’s Seven Stars pub with a couple of friends from the Easton Cowboys. More specifically, it the question could be rephrased as: are the likes of Facebook and Twitter pulling in so much traffic that they detract from everyone else’s content?

Two of us run websites, so the matter is quite pertinent and can be broken down into a couple of simple aspects.

Firstly, some people thank that if they just post on their organisation’s Facebook wall, everyone in that organisation will see it. They are, of course, mistaken. Some people avoid Facebook for privacy reasons, in addition to which Facebook’s APIs are so obscure, it’s difficult for an organisation’s webmaster to scrape content from Facebook and place it on the organisation’s website.

Turning to Twitter, is the ubiquitous 140 character tweet replacing proper debate on blogs? We noted that if one blogs and tweets a link to the post, feedback is more likely these days to come via tweets than from actual comments on the blog. One of the great aspects of blogging is that comments on posts can encourage debate. This debate has now been reduced to soundbites of no more than 140 characters. However, the situation is more complicated than that. Whereas at one time, the ability to comment was restricted to blogs, the traditional media have now started to catch up, allowing comments on articles and thus have more interaction with their readers instead of just broadcasting at them.

In answer to the question of whether social media are destroying the rest of the internet, only time will tell and the jury is still out. You can help the deliberations by commenting below.

Finally, note that this discussion took place down the pub. Don’t forget that pubs, cafés and their cultural equivalents elsewhere in the world are the original social networking sites. 🙂
The long tail of LibreOffice

10/01/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

In recent years, the term ‘long tail‘, which was originally coined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, has certainly caught on. Anderson’s coining of the phrase drew on a February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky entitled “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”, which noted that a relatively few blogs have many links to them, but there’s a “the long tail” of millions of blogs with only a handful of links each. Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models and later developed it into a book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, published in 2006.

You may be asking what has all this to do with LibreOffice, the popular open source office suite? Well, the Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, has recently published a blog post showing a long tail graph in relation to the developers working on LibreOffice.

The long tail in action on LibreOffice. Click on the image for a full size version. Image courtesy of The Document Foundation

The image depicts developers who worked on LibreOffice’s code base in 2012. Last year a total some 320 developers worked on improving LibreOffice’s code. Of these, a majority were volunteers and a minority were people paid by major open source companies such as SuSE, RedHat and Canonical, as well as many smaller organisations such as Lanedo, which provides customisation services for open source products such as LibreOffice.

The graph of the individual contributions has the shape of a “long tail”, whilst the pie chart illustrates the work done by the top 33 developers with 100+ commits, consisting of 16 volunteers and 17 paid developers (11 from SUSE, 5 from RedHat and 1 from Canonical).
Microsoft burgled; nothing of value stolen

09/01/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

It’s long been known that Microsoft keeps an eye on its competitors, such as open source. As far back as 2006, its open source laboratory at Redmond housed more than 300 servers collectively running more than 15 versions of UNIX and 50 Linux distributions. That facility was in those days run a team of senior-level programmers and system administrators, some of whom were architects of popular Linux distributions or authors of well-regarded books. Doubtless very little has changed.

It also keeps tabs on Apple and develops applications for Apple’s products at its research and development centre in Mountain View.

Courtesy of The Guardian, I was made aware of a recent burglary at Microsoft’s research and development centre.

Palo Alto Daily Post report of the incident

As can be seen, nothing of value was taken. 🙂 By far the most interesting part is that no MS products at all were purloined (was the thief a cool thief? Ed.).

IT news site The Register suggests that the thief might have hold of some unreleased Microsoft apps with his or her Apple devices.

El Reg’s piece concludes:

The office also houses Microsoft Exchange hosting servers, a less tempting target for a light-fingered thief.

Well, most servers do weigh a tad more than your average fondleslab. 🙂

Finally, this comment on The Guardian’s report raised a smile and a laugh:

According to some reports, they stole 50 Microsoft Surfaces at the same time, but they broke back in the next day to return them.
An error message from Microsoft

07/01/2013 Steve WoodsTech
I’m indebted to Charlie Harvey for drawing my attention to the following error message courtesy of the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords

This error message affects the following MS products:
- Microsoft Windows 2000 Server SP1
- Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP1
- Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional SP1
Microsoft’s support for Windows 2000 is now close to running out. Nevertheless, isn’t it reassuring to know that Microsoft is capable of producing such high quality products? 😉

Mind you, some people have difficulty remembering a password of under 10 characters. How could they possibly cope with one of nearly 19,000?
Complex Text Layout in LibreOffice

05/01/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech
I’m currently translating a tender document from a North African Arabic-speaking country. Even though the source language of the translation is French, when I first opened the file in LibreOffice, my office suite of choice, I noticed that the cursor was responding back to front and realised immediately this was going to slow down my progress with the job unless it was sorted out.

Fortunately, a little bit of research and a couple of configuration tweaks soon had it sorted out. Firstly, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi and Thai come under what LibreOffice describes as Complex Text Layout (CTL) languages.

To deal with CTL languages, these first have to be enabled in LibreOffice under Tools > Options > Language Settings.

That done, the LibreOffice Help wiki has instructions for working with CTL.
Currently, LibreOffice supports Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic as CTL languages.

If you select the text flow from right to left, embedded Western text still runs from left to right. The cursor responds to the arrow keys in that Right Arrow moves it “to the text end” and Left Arrow “to the text start”.

You can change the text writing direction directly be pressing one of the following keys:
- Ctrl+Shift+D or Ctrl+Right Shift Key – switch to right-to-left text entry
- Ctrl+Shift+A or Ctrl+Left Shift Key – switch to left-to-right text entry
- The modifier-only key combinations only work when CTL support is enabled.
Once CTL is enabled, LibreOffice also adds a couple of change text direction icons to the text formatting toolbar too.

Formatting toolbar showing text direction change icons

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