Business applications of unstructured text

Interresting article in the ACM Communications.

A widely touted IT factoid states that
80% of the information produced by
and contained in most organizations
is stored in the form of unstructured
data. Most of it is text (such as memoranda,
internal documents, email,
organizational Web pages, and comments
from customers and from
internal service personnel), and most
of the applications that reflect the
value of unstructured data are able to
process it. Although unstructured
data takes other forms, including
images and audio, here I focus on the
applications, technologies, and architectures
for unstructured text acquisition
and analysis (UTAA).

New OpenOffice.org target.

Many of you probaly know the “WONT FIX” target in the OpenOffice.org issue tracker.

What about introducing a new target: “HELPS MICROSOFT”.

But why do we need this? These days many people --- especially from the file formats camps --- are extremely sensitive of anything related to compatiblity 'cause they believe it helps Microsoft.

So lets give the ODF warriors an opportinity to clearly communicate with the users. Give them the “HELPS MICROSOFT” target to publicly exposing the issuer of the bug and the people working on it.

Last Saturday Linux day 2007 took place.

Linux Day is an Italian manifestation that promotes Linux and FOSS. During this day different organizations (mostly Linux User Groups) arrange events with speeches, installation parties and more.

Since lot of people requested it, I gave a speech about KDE 4 during the Linux day organized by my LUG (BGLug).

The presentation covers the main changes and features introduced by KDE 4. I took inspiration from Troy’s “Road to KDE 4” articles (I like them really much).

People liked the speech and, most important of all, showed great interest for KDE 4.

Skip Paul, a Novell mate working for the Open Platform Services (OPS) Sales for the East Coast of United States, forwarded me a message from one of our pilot customers, John Halamka - CIO of Caregroup. John, in his mail said:

Could you pass this along to your developers -

Today I installed Evolution 2.12.0 as part of the Ubuntu Gusty release.

Every issue I have had with Evolution is now resolved. Performance is spectacular, caching is perfect and I no longer have to use OWA to ensure reliability.

John has been piloting various operating systems for more than a year now and when he tried SLED 10, he quoted saying:

My concern is that Evolution/Exchange connector is such a negative experience that it threatens the success of the entire SLED platform.

He shared the same in a CIO.com article, saying:

The Evolution e-mail client presented the biggest problem. Every time he launched the application, he had to wait five minutes to use it, until it synced with CareGroup’s Microsoft Exchange server. If he deleted an e-mail before the entire store of deleted e-mails had synced, or if he tried sending an e-mail before all stored e-mails had synced, the application would crash.

As Evolution-Exchange maintainer, I teamed up with Skip and provided him various levels of optimization fixes and all of it were released as part of Evolution/Exchange 2.12.0. Skip front ended the efforts by ensuring timely delivery of patches and his feedbacks both ways. As mentioned in my blog, the performance was greatly improved by these patches and the same is appreciated by John in his recent blog, saying:

Congrats to the folks at Canonical who maintain Ubuntu and to the folks at Novell who have significantly upgraded their Evolution email client to meet the needs of Microsoft Exchange users.

It feels great to see your efforts/work gets directly appreciated by the users.

John: Thank you for your honest reviews and Skip - for the wonderful support provided both ways.

Update: Fixed some font weirdness.

Field update --- preview for Windows.

I now have a preview for Windows available at http://download.go-oo.org/preview/oodemo.zip.

Simply download it and unzip it. To start execute soffice.exe in ooo2.3/program/.

Same features as the Linux Version. So no saving at this point.

And don't forget to give feedback :-)

Thanks,

~Florian

IBM's Symphony.

Downloaded IBM's Symphony today to follow up on some of the problems discussed at the ODF Interop Camp. (Btw. its sad that the ODF Camp people want to treat the problems as confidential.).

So back to Symphony. Why the hell did they crippled all the cool OpenOffice.org easter eggs?

So why is =game("StarWars") crippled?

And look what they done to the lovely picture of the Calc team:


I think that contradicts the SISSL :-)

After the release of Evolution/Exchange 2.12, I moved to one of the highly motivated, determined and focussed teams that extends the cutting edge technologies from other platforms to Linux.

using System;

class HelloWorld
{
public static void Main()
{
Console.WriteLine("Hello World !!!");
}
}

Yes, I am a proud Mono hacker now and will be working in ADO.NET. Presently, I am just finding my ways to understand the requirements and roadmaps of the component with the help of, my mentor and the maintainer of ADO.NET, Nagappan.

I will continue to be available in #evolution channel and answer any Evolution/Exchange related queries. Thanks to everyone that supported me during the development of Evolution/Exchange 2.12.0.

ATV will soon be running a channel on XM Radio (XM159).

They're saying that it will include live cricket coverage.

How's that?

Are you really interested about what is FreeBSD and how the FreBSD project works? I found a very nice presentation, about 50 minutes, talking about this, so, enjoy to listen:

Update on field work --- Early preview available for Linux.

In a previous post I talked about my field-proof-of-concept. I continued to work on the issue and I'm happy to give an update on that front.

You can download a preview version of my work here:

http://download.go-oo.org/preview/oodemo.tgz
(Linux only. Just untar the archive tar xzf oodemo.tgz and then cd oodemo/program and start ./soffice). This is a preview version. Do not use it for productive work! The preview demo shows

• the core enhancements (tabbing!), and


• .DOC import.

The work for .DOC export, ODF import/export is not done and not included in the demo.

For testing you can download the sample file formc1new.doc which is taken from issue 79720. It should look like this:


Again --- this is work in progress. So do not expect everything to work. However if you have issues please let me know. And remember “saving does not work yet :-)”.

I really hope I get some feedback,

~Florian

P.S.
I will make the patch available ASAP. It is the result of some weekend hacking --- it really needs some polishing first.