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.

Mouse woke up from hibernation because we took him to Mamma Rosa with guardian angel sheep and poured some Ouzo down his throat. We had to do so as he soon has to go to the US and to Brazil. Without me.. hope he'll send me a postcard or two. Edith will carry him in one of her security gadgets. As soon as he's away, I'll start planning my own -shorter, and not so far away- holiday. Hope it goes beyond the stage of planning this time. Other news: Chief chicken got a veil and the clay animals are back. Christina went into production again.

Please bear in mind that this is not a review; it is just a few initial observations after installing openSUSE 10.3 and using it for an hour or so. I'm not a journalist, so even after using it for a week I wouldn't be able to write a well balanced review of openSUSE 10.3. And I'm biased, because I've been using SUSE for at least seven years.

I downloaded the openSUSE 10.3 yesterday and upgraded my laptop from 10.2 in the evening. The upgrade went reasonably smoothly, with just the usual problems: the wireless network couldn't be connected during installation so it couldn't find any online repositories, so I ended up telling it to remove quite a few packages which it couldn't upgrade, and after the installation it had got my hard drives the wrong way round in grub's menu.list - but that's my fault for booting from an external USB drive, which confuses things as the drives do get renumbered on boot.

After installing, everything still worked just as it did before, which was great. They've even put the intel graphics card hack into the boot scripts now so I don't have to have it in boot.local. I switched the graphics driver from i810 to the new intel one, and the wireless driver from ipw3945 to iwl3945, and now my wireless connection comes up reliably. I used to have to connect to a neighbour's unsecured network before it would allow me to connect to my secured one.

Upon trying to play an mp3 file, a message popped up prompting me to install the mp3 codecs, so I followed the instructions, and it gave me a nice wizard which allowed me to choose a whole load of codecs and other 'restricted' stuff. It then proceeded to download it all, complain that all the files on the DVD were corrupt (thought they weren't - they installed fine later), installed the stuff which had worked, and I had mp3 playability. It was much easier than before, except for the spurious corruption messages.

The package management seems to have been overhauled considerably, but it still has the problem of not giving much feedback as to what is going on: instead of showing an overall progress bar and then working its way through all the sub tasks, it'll show a progress bar for one task, and when that has finished it'll show another progress bar. You have no way of knowing whether you have a minute left to wait or three hours. Also, if you move the dialog to the corner of the screen, when the next progress bar appears it'll be back in the default position, which is really annoying. I imagine I'll probably continue using Smart because it is so, well, smart.

The boot and login graphics are back to green, which I like because it means my computer looks different from most. And the graphics are much sharper and more professional-looking, in my mind at least. Especially the welcome graphic when you boot from DVD. I have switched my desktop wallpaper back to the openSUSE 10.1 one though, as I prefer a blue wallpaper to a green one. The icons in YaST have all changed - they don't look better though - they're all grey and nondescript.

I'd like to keep playing with openSUSE 10.3 today, but I have to go to the Grand Designs Live show now. Oh, what a hardship!

Yesterday, Alma and I went bike riding along some of Mexico City's largest streets. We were able to do this because they were closed to regular traffic during much of the day.

The route we took is barely visible at MUÉVETE EN BICI. Unfortunately, the map is very low res, and zooming in won't help.

We picked up the trail at the junction of División del Norte and Churubusco, went through a stretch of Patriotismo, and then went through parts of Condesa, Roma (where the stopped for a brunch of barbacoa), and the Zona Rosa. From there we picked up the Paseo de la Reforma towards the Centro Histórico, rode along the edge the Zócalo, skirted Merced, and went on to areas where I've never been on foot (and much less on a bike) and don't really know. When time ran out -- the streets were only closed from 7am till 2pm -- we were close to the Palacio de Deportes. There we got on the Metro and went home under someone else's power.

Along the route, there were police protecting every major intersection and most if not all of the minor ones too.

It was a great way to spend the day, although I wish we'd started earlier, or, better yet, that it went until later in the day. It was very nice to see Mexico City from a new perspective. It was kind of like being in a car, yet without the traffic and all that the traffic entails. And it was kind of like being on foot, except we were going much faster. I won't say that Mexico City would become paradise if everyone got out of their cars and started walking or cycling, but it sure would be a lot nicer. Seeing the surrounding mountains clearly would be a daily occurrence instead of a rare treat, and there would be much less noise. For many people, daily commutes would be substantially shorter. I am not joking about this last point.

Biking here is usually a harrowing experience. But not yesterday.



Here's a picture of me by the Ángel of Independencia.