Stats for the OpenOffice.org download bouncer

Many of the OpenOffice.org national language teams will be happy with the following announcement.

There are now Download Statistics being produced for the downloads from the bouncer. The stats are generated once daily around 08:05 UTC. Inside the stats folder you will find a series of folders with dates as their name. Inside each of these, you will find a series of files that contain a few different breakdowns of the stats for each particular day. 

For example, 20070621/macos-alllangs.txt shows the number of downloads on the 21st of June 2007, broken down by download for each possible download. I find it strange that there has been 135 downloads for the Mac OS X PPC en-US version of 2.1.0, which is a very old build. The newer OpenOffice.org 2.2.0 for Mac OS X PPC en-US has less than 3 times more downloads. I'm wondering where the 2.1.0 build is linked from.

For a language example, 20070621/allos-de.txt shows a count of all the German downloads on the 21st of June 2007. The most popular German build on that day being Mac OS X Intel, with 102 downloads.

Thanks go to Michael Marineau from OSUOSL for setting up the script.

Please note that these are simply raw requests and and the script that produces them doesn't take into account builds that don't exist, but were requested for. Unfortunately there is no week, month or year view of the data at this time. 

The files do mention all version of OpenOffice.org from 2.1.0 up to and including 2.4.0. This has been done so that they will not need to be updated for each release.

OpenOffice.org Download Bouncer Stats

Spaces around colons

Today I discovered why it is that the French have been placing a space in front of colons (:), and it has been driving me mad. 

In English it is usually seen as being wrong to place a space before a colon. However according to Lars Aronsson on the lingu-dev mailing list, it is normal practice in French to place a space before the colon.

You learn something new every day.

Cycling: Edinburgh to North Berwick

Last Night I took a cycle out to Prestonpans. I then took the train to North Berwick for £2.50, and cycled all the way back to Edinburgh. 

I was originally going to cycle to North Berwick, though unfortunately I had a head wind, which would have meant I would have missed the last train from North Berwick towards Edinburgh. The route that I changed to was also cheaper, because if I had gone all the way to North Berwick to take the train back, I would have taken the train all the way back to Edinburgh. That would have cost nearly twice as much.

I have also got the North Berwick branch line and the coast road into Edinburgh mapped on to OpenStreetMap.org. The signal of the GPS on the train wasn't perfect the whole way

Maps:

Edinburgh -> Presontpans (16 miles about 1 hour 20 minutes)

North Berwick -> Edinburgh (30 miles about 2 and a half hours)

Dissertation Finally Complete

I've now completed my dissertation and handed it in. I completed the presentation this morning. So now that it's over, I can get on with some real work and hopefully earn some money.

I found the presentation quite tough to write (though no where near as tough as the dissertation), as I didn't think I would be able to stand up for 20 minutes to talk, with 10 minutes questions. I realised after I started the talk, I would run out of time.

If your interested you can take a read.

Full Dissertation

Presentation

Just a few weeks now, and I'll know what level of degree that I will have.

Safari 3.0 Beta

I'm taking the new Safari 3.0 Beta for a test drive. I have to say, I'm quite impressed with it in many ways. For the past few months I've been using Camino, as it has had a few features that Safari didn't have.

Safari is now a lot faster than before. Buttons are being custom drawn like in other browsers. A new history feature of being able to open the last closed window is quite handy. 

The RSS hasn't changed much, so I'll just keep to Google Reader. It would be nice if there was the Camino option that allows you to open links that are meant to open in a separate window to open in a new tab instead.

UK Government gives response to OpenDocument online petition

The UK (Westminster) Government has given a response to the petition on a petition calling on the UK Government to use the OpenDocument format for the storage of documents.
Read the UK Government's response to the OpenDocument Petition

It seems that they are making no firm commitment to use the OpenDocument format, though are continually reviewing the format to store documents in, and converting them accordingly. They welcome the newer open standards, as it makes it easier to convert from one format to another.

OpenOffice.org Aqua's first in depth review

The first in depth review of OpenOffice.org Aqua that I have come across is by Greg Kefalas. This is a four part series starting today, so more information in the coming days. I'll add links to the other parts of the review as they become available.

Part one
Part two
Part three Many of the problems mentioned are already fixed, or will be fixed for the next developer preview. Also the new chart, which is coming in OpenOffice.org 2.3 will be there too.
Part four Some of the issues raised have already been fixed and will be in the next developer snapshot. Having separate application for Writer, Calc, Impress etc. takes a lot of work to redesign the way ooo works otherwise it would have been implemented by now. The first steps in the project is to simply use native controls and get the most important features of Mac OS X implemented. We will then make a stable release. Thereafter we will look into other things like Applescript and re-organising the menus of OpenOffice.org into palettes. However if someone with a special passion for implementing Applescript support into applications comes along today and that's all they want to do, we won't stop them, if they are following our coding guidelines.

First OpenOffice.org Aqua snapshot released

The first development snapshot of OpenOffice.org Aqua has been released into the wild. There is still a lot of work to do, and there has been some progress already since the snapshot was produced.

This snapshot can be downloaded from the OpenOffice.org Aqua Mac Download page

There are a number of things that still don't work, including printing, exporting to a PDF, copy and paste, drag and drop, and multiple monitors.

There will be some more snapshots in the near future.

EIS and tinderbox now show buildbot builds

Michael Leibowtiz and Christian Lohmaier have finished the bug fixing with the sending of buildbot slave results from the build master to the tinderbox.

This now means that EIS has up to date buildbot results too (except from the bots attached to the old build master).

This now means that the Mac OS X Intel platform is now in EIS.

Google Maps has new "Avoid Highways" option

Google Maps now has a great route planning feature called "avoid highways". This produces routes that don't go on to motorways and some trunk routes, such as the Edinburgh City Bypass, where cyclists are not allowed.

It still isn't perfect for cyclists as it doesn't allow for some
roads that cyclists are not allowed on. However it is a step in the right direction for route planning for more experienced cyclists who are happy to cycle on main roads rather than the quieter National Cycle Routes.

It also still routes cyclists on some roads that cyclists are banned from using, such as the West Approach Road in Edinburgh.
See example map that shows this problem.

Another problem is where the route planner takes you a much longer way than you would expect. For example Edinburgh to Dundee avoiding highways takes you via the Kincardine Bridge, this is fine if there is high winds and the Forth Road Bridge is closed to high sided vehicles and pedestrians/cyclists. However that is significantly longer than going via the Forth Road Bridge.