The Pathedral and the Kazoo

Filho's Infographic of Debian with license exception does not allow use of TDF or LibreOffice

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-05-06T20:27:00Z

First when I saw Claudio Filho's new Infographic of Debian Understanding Debian I thought "great work", but then I spotted the license section on the bottom left of the graphic that puts the work under CC BY-NC-SA, but with a restriction

with the exception clause (*): Is forbidden to use, to reference or to use of any material of TDF or LibreOffice in this material or derivatives.

Trying to parse that it seems he wants to say that TDF or LibreOffice or any of its materials may not be used or mentioned in derivatives of his work, i.e. the LibreOffice logo in the Sources section. I'd call that an unfree license. (Yes, the NC in CC is that anyway, but IMHO acceptable in art works).

However, knowing that Claudio Filho is an active supporter of Apache OpenOffice I wonder what good that restriction shall actually do. This is not lowering barriers between both projects. And it certainly is not the right way to promote the spirit of Free Software.

I'm embedding the graphic here, convinced that the entire article does not form a derivative work referencing LibreOffice and embedding would be forbidden.

Does your LibreOffice locale need a date acceptance pattern for incomplete date input?

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-04-30T19:09:00Z

As explained in an earlier article a new feature will be available with LibreOffice 3.6 that limits date recognition of input to predefined locale dependent patterns to prevent erroneous detection of dates. To be able to input incomplete dates a locale needs date acceptance patterns defined in its locale data, quite a lot submissions of such patterns have already been included, but many locales do not have any pattern assigned yet. For these locales date input will only be possible as a complete date, no incomplete dates will be accepted. Maybe your locale should be enabled for incomplete date input but isn't yet? Then please submit the pattern(s), either as a comment to this blog post, or on the LibreOffice l10n mailing list if you are involved with LibO localization anyway, or simply mail me.

Locales without explicit DateAcceptancePattern elements:
(one implicit full date pattern is always generated)

ak_GH ar_DZ ar_EG ar_OM ast_ES az_AZ bn_IN bs_BA cv_RU da_DK de_AT de_CH de_LI de_LU dsb_DE dz_BT ee_GH el_GR en_AU en_CA en_GB en_GH en_JM en_NA en_ZA eo es_AR es_BO es_CL es_CO es_CR es_DO es_EC es_GT es_PE eu fa_IR fo_FO fr_CA fur_IT fy_NL gl_ES gsc_FR gug_PY ha_GH haw_US he_IL hi_IN hil_PH hr_HR hsb_DE ht_HT hu_HU hy_AM ia id_ID it_CH jbo ka_GE kk_KZ kl_GL km_KH ko_KR ku_TR ky_KG la_VA lb_LU lg_UG lif_NP ln_CD lo_LA ltg_LV lv_LV mai_IN mk_MK ml_IN mn_MN mt_MT my_MM myv_RU ne_NP no_NO oc_FR om_ET or_IN pjt_AU pl_PL plt_MG ro_RO rue_SK rw_RW sc_IT sg_CF shs_CA so_SO sr_RS sv_FI sv_SE sw_TZ tg_TJ th_TH ti_ER tk_TM tpi_PG ug_CN uk_UA ur_PK uz_UZ vi_VN wa_BE zh_HK zh_MO zh_SG

Locales with explicit DateAcceptancePattern elements:

an_ES:
- D/M
be_BY:
- D/M/
- D.M.
bg_BG:
- D.M.Y г.
- D.M.Y г.
- D.M.Y Г.
- D.M.Y Г.
br_FR:
- D/M
ca_ES:
- D/M
cs_CZ:
- D.M.
- D. M.
- D. M. Y
- D. M.
- D. M. Y
de_DE:
- D.M.
en_US:
- M/D
es_ES:
- D/M
et_EE:
- D.M
- D. M
- D.M.
- D. M.
fi_FI:
- D.M.
fr_BE:
- D/M
fr_CH:
- D/M
- D.M.
fr_FR:
- D/M
fr_LU:
- D/M
gd_GB:
- D/M
- D-M
is_IS:
- D/M/
- D.M.
it_IT:
- D/M
ja_JP:
- M-D
- M/D
- M／D
- Y.M.D
- Y／M／D
- Y年M月D日
- M月D日
kab_DZ:
- D/M
lt_LT:
- M-D
nl_BE:
- D/M
nl_NL:
- D-M
pt_AO:
- D-M
pt_BR:
- D/M
pt_PT:
- D-M
ru_RU:
- D.M.
- D/M/
sk_SK:
- D.M.
- D. M.
- D. M. Y
- D. M.
- D. M. Y
sl_SI:
- D. M. Y
- D.M.
- D. M.
tr_TR:
- D.M
- D/M
- D-M
zh_CN:
- M-D
- M/D
- M／D
- Y.M.D
- Y/M/D
- Y年M月D日
- M月D日
zh_TW:
- Y.M.D
- M-D
- M/D
- Y年M月D日
- M月D日

If some of the entries seem to be duplicates within a locale and include spaces, that's because they are defined both with normal space and with breaking space to accommodate both input variants.

LibreOffice Hamburg Hackfest 2012

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-04-16T20:19:33Z

Thorsten already summarized it very well and even Björn survived it, the LibreOffice Hamburg Hackfest 2012 was a great success, 25-30 participants hacking, building, exchanging ideas, having fun, too little sleep and Italo's pasta.

So let me just add that with the help of moggi I learned how to add a new file type's (here CSV) filter test to Calc's unit tests in order to prevent regressions in the CSV import filter that I lately changed to some extent and finished polishing at the Hackfest.

Many thanks to co-organizers Thorsten and Björn and of course all who joined and participated and made the Hackfest such a great event. We'll definitely have to do this again.

Going to LibreOffice Hamburg Hackfest

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-04-04T12:06:00Z

I'm going to the LibreOffice Hamburg Hackfest on April 14/15, what about you?

Meet the guys and gals and hack away your favorite itch.

LibreOffice goes collaborating

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-03-26T10:47:00Z

One week of successful hacking at the Cambridge collaboration hackfest.

After I already struggled with Telepathy for some while, trying to implement DBus tubes over XMPP, Michael Meeks arranged a collaborative hackfest at Cambridge, where Collabora Ltd. is situated who to a large part are the maintainers of the Telepathy library. Nice to meet some of these guys (btw, if you happen to be in Cambridge and are into good Indian food go for the Golden Curry).

So last week Will Thompson from Collabora was set aside to work with us, who was of great help and immediately spotted why my tube acceptor never caught any offered tube, silly me, not spinning GMainLoop yet another time to wait for a specific state change ... Before, a connection to DBus could already be setup and a session between two contacts initiated and a tube offered, but I didn't get to the point where a tube was really established.

What we achieved from Tuesday to Thursday / Friday morning:

use Empathy's XMPP account and contact list
establish a DBus tube between an account and a contact
transfer a file over the tube (which shall be the document to be worked on)
intercept Calc input (basic proof of concept)
transfer input as packet through tube
receive on other end and use as input

Kudos again to Will, who made the fast progress on the Telepathy bits possible. And Michael for tearing apart Calc's ScDocFunc. That I now have to glue together again somehow ;-)

All happens on the LibreOffice feature/tubes2 branch. You're more than welcome to help out, especially if you're familiar with Telepathy or like to implement some dialogs in VCL such as an account/contact picker or have ideas how to improve our bits. You might also be interested that further work on this topic is offered as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. There's plenty to do.

Btw, the next opportunity to collaboratively hack on collaboration would be at the Hamburg Hackfest on April 14/15 :-)

Update 2012-03-27T13:25+0200
Michael has some more details with bells and whistles and video over at his blog, video here:

There's No Tomorrow

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-03-04T15:49:03Z

We act as if there's no tomorrow. A cartoon about the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet.

I ♥ Free Software

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-02-13T23:00:00Z

It's fun, it's adventure, it pays my bills, it even saves the world – ♥ a Free Software developer :-)

Come Hacking Calc

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-02-03T08:45:00Z

Meet the LibreOffice team around the LibreOffice Devroom at FOSDEM 2012 room H.1309

Join my Calc Hacking for Starters session on Saturday 16:45, or how to not get trapped in or squashed between cells.

If Tweets Don't Flow ...

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-01-28T23:38:03Z

... consider relocating to Iceland -- at least in Twitter world.

Twitter's new country based censorship feature takes your profile's country setting into account, so if you receive Tweet withheld or @Username withheld in place of the affected tweet or account, you might want to change that setting to something more liberal. I think Iceland is a quite good bet..

I ain't a twit tweeting on twitter, I make my dents on identi.ca instead.

Hacking Calc the other way

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-01-20T12:50:00Z

I've seen many (ab)uses of spreadsheets during my years as an OOo/LibO Calc developer, but this Spreadsheet as Music Tracker-Sequencer is the most hackish one.

You might also be interested in the How-To video.

[via Bjoern's My productivity suite sounds better than yours ...]

LibreOffice date acceptance patterns

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-01-11T19:46:20Z

Abstract: Calc's (and in Writer table) cell input now needs to match locale dependent date acceptance patterns before it is recognized as a valid date.

Previously the number formatter's input scanner was very lax in what it accepted as a "valid" date. All combinations of 2-3 numbers separated by '.' '/' '-' or the locale's date separator even with blanks in between that somehow could be interpreted as a date was accepted as such, which was especially confusing with incomplete dates containing only 2 numbers that in many cases were meant as textual input instead. For example

In en-US locale, M/D is a valid date input to be interpreted as day of month of current year. However, M/D/ and M.D. were accepted as well.
In de-DE locale, D.M. is a valid date input to be interpreted as day of month of current year. However, D.M and D/M and D/M/ were accepted as well.

In case of an input like 1.2 in a de-DE locale or others using '.' separator, meant as some sort of textual numbering, this was extremely annoying, it was interpreted as 1st of February of current year and the user had to prepend a single quote / apostrophe to suppress date recognition. Similar for 1.2.3 in locales that do not use the '.' date separator.

Now, during build time for each locale one full date acceptance pattern is generated from the existing locale data's number format FormatElement with formatindex="21" that is also used to edit dates, taking the DMY order and the defined DateSeparator. For example, in the en-US locale this generates M/D/Y from the MM/DD/YYYY FormatCode, and in the de-DE locale D.M.Y from the DD.MM.YYYY code. For this to work correctly the separator used in the FormatCode must match the DateSeparator element defined in Separators. As for all rules there's one exception though ;) if the format code uses a different separator and that is one of the known '-' '.' '/' separators, a second pattern is generated using the format's separator. This as a generalized case for locales that for example may use an ISO 8601 edit format, as hu-HU does, regardless what the date separator is defined to.

Additionally to the date acceptance pattern every locale of course still accepts input in an ISO 8601 Y-M-D pattern, and since LibreOffice 3.5 that also leads to the YYYY-MM-DD format being applied.

Localizers, HEADS UP please

If in your locale incomplete dates should be accepted or additional patterns that vary from the generated full date pattern are needed, those are to be defined in the locale data LC_FORMAT element for which a new DateAcceptancePattern element exists, of which zero or more can occur before the FormatElement elements. Currently only the following patterns are defined as they are the only ones I knew were plausible:

bg-BG, a trailing breaking or non-breaking space followed by lower case or upper case Cyrillic letter GHE and a dot, as defined in the edit format
- D.M.Y г.
- D.M.Y г.
- D.M.Y Г.
- D.M.Y Г.
de-DE, incomplete date
- D.M.
en-US, incomplete date
- M/D
sl-SI, date separator dot plus space
- D. M. Y

For example see i18npool/source/localedata/data/en_US.xml

Happy date accepting :-)

Update: an updated list of locales and patterns is available in a newer blog post.

Technorati sucks (once again)

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-01-10T19:33:00Z

As can be seen at the top of my blog the description reads

Eike Rathke blogging about LibreOffice and the world (what a claim)

Trying to claim my blog at Technorati I entered the same as description there. After the automatic verification of the token code I had to place in an entry also fed to RSS they made me wait a few more days. Now in their great wisdom the robots pretending to be humans told me in the Claim Status that

The supplied description is inadequate, or does not seem to match the content of the site. Please update your claim with an appropriate description below and choose the "Update Description" button.

Ok you imbeciles, get lost. I can do without.

Belarus 317-3 -- The End of the Internet as they know it

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-01-03T23:00:09Z

Belarus 317-3 -- a law that will change life of Belarusian people. It will be forbidden to use ISPs and sites not registered in Belarus for email, banking, commerce, business, shopping, whatever, you name it. Only on sites and servers in Belarus. Only on machines and by means registered with the government. Only with data retention for one year even in private house holds. Only through filters to be setup by ISPs. With filter criteria defined by the government. Total control.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120103/07193917260/no-belarus-is-not-cut-off-internet-new-restrictions-are-still-pretty-bad.shtml
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Weissrussland-reglementiert-Internetnutzung-1403099.html

Update: The cbronline article is very inaccurate in that it talks about accessing foreign sites would be illegal, which is not the case. Doing business on and by means through foreign sites will be illegal.

Majestät Wulff und der Krieg übern Rubikon

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-01-03T14:16:00Z

Nicht nur dass Der Wulff einen Facebook-Nutzer wegen ~~Majestätsbeleidigung~~Verunglimpfung des Bundespräsidenten angezeigt [1] hat (obwohl wenn dann war das Verunglimpfung seiner Frau, ist das Amt des Bundespraesis sippenbehaftet?), nein er rief auch noch den grossen Kai von der Bild an um auf Unterlassung eines wg. Geld geplanten Artikels zu dringen.

Er klagte, dass ein „Bild“-Journalist seit Monaten eine „unglaubliche“ Geschichte plane, die am nächsten Tag veröffentlicht werden solle. Wulff kündigte für diesen Fall den „endgültigen Bruch“ mit dem „Springer“-Verlag an. Der Präsident bat um eine Unterredung, in der man über alles sprechen könne. Er sprach aber auch vom „Kriegführen“. Für ihn und seine Frau sei der „Rubikon“ überschritten.

Soso, ein endgueltiger Bruch, war ja wohl eine harte Verbindung. Und Krieg fuehren, tja, Schluss mit kuschelig, ist schon bloed so ein Bundespraesi-Amt, nichts fuer Weicheier wenn man sich einmal dumm angestellt hat und dann auch noch darauf beharrt.

Aaaaberrr.. der Rubikon ueberschritten? Ist das nicht zuviel Ehre fuer Diekmann mit Gaius Iulius Caesar verglichen zu werden? Oder hat Wulff einfach etwas verwechselt und dachte der grosse Kaiser waere angegriffen worden und nicht Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus? Wie auch immer, am Ende unterlag nicht der, der den Rubikon ueberschritten hatte..

Tschuess Wulff, das wars dann. Mal sehen wer als naechste(r) auf den Bundespraesidentenschleudersitz gehoben wird. Vielleicht ja zur Abwechslung mal jemand der/die sogar eine ganze regulaere Amtszeit durchsteht..

[kurz vor Save: auch bei Welt am Sonntag hat der Vieltelefonierer mal angerufen um zu intervenieren]

[Update: passend dazu und etwas detailiierter maha's Rubikon]

Happy New Year!

nospam@example.com (erAck) — 2012-01-01T13:10:34Z

Today is Sweetmorn, the 1st day of Chaos in the YOLD 3178.