OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X Leopard

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was launched by Apple Inc. about one month ago.

OpenOffice.org, with the exception of the Java features will work on Leopard. If you require the Java features of OpenOffice.org on Leopard, you require to use milestone m237 or later. 

The problem essentially boils down to the way that OpenOffice.org detects Java, and the fact that "Apple Computer Inc." is NOT the same as "Apple Inc.". (There are a few other build issues too.)

Thanks should go to Florian, Philip and Eric Bachard for their work on this issue.

The past 2 months

It has been a couple of months now since I've properly written a blog post. So here is a longish catchup post.

I have been busy doing agency work mostly in staff restaurants as a Kitchen Porter. I've even bumped into the Lead of the Marketing Project in our home town, rather than having to go to some OpenOffice.org conference. I did spend 3 weeks commuting by train (a novelty for me), to Stirling to work as a caretaker. Unfortunately the work is rather dull, though there are bills to be paid. Hopefully I'll get around to updating my CV and sending it off to relevant people to hopefully get a degree related job.

Now back to 2 months ago.

I managed to get up and do my Buildbot presentation at ooocon2007 without any breakfast. The presentation has been really useful, as I have received some very useful feedback from developers on what they want from the system.

Code writers are interested in seeing if their code breaks on some other platform as early as possible. They want this to be reliable, and ideally the same configuration as the officially released builds.

The QA project are looking for install sets for testing new code that is about to be introduced into the main code line. Again they ideally want to have the same configuration as the officially released builds.

At the moment the source code statistics aren't interesting enough for developers to want them. Also the basics don't currently work well enough.

My presentation in PDF My presentation in ODF

I have finally got around to Geotagging my photos from this years OpenOffice.org conference in the past few days. As I have upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5, I found that my previous geotagging solution (GPSPhotoLinker) has stopped working as a library has stopped working due to a perl version mismatch. So I have headed to the command line with a perl script. gpsPhoto.pl seems to do the trick, though it is a pain to get the command line right as it isn't as easy to just drag a load of photos from iPhoto. I'm not upgrading to iLife 08, as there is no GPS tagging support. Leopard's Preview has a feature that allows you to go to a Google map of where the photo was taken. However, what I really want it to tell iPhoto: look in this folder for GPS traces, and geo tag all these photos automatically.

For future reference (as I was in mainland Europe with daylight saving the offset from UTC is minus 2 hours):

./gpsPhoto.pl --gpsdir 2007-09 --timeoffset -7200 --maxtimediff 7200 --overwrite-geotagged --dir /Users/shaunmcdonald/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/Originals/2007/ooocon2007/

Photos from ooocon2007. I've also added the photos to Flickr with the ooocon2007 tag.

As many people have already seen. I am now the lead for the Mac Port of the OpenOffice.org. Eric Bachard made the announcement some time ago. I have posted my vision to the Mac porting mailing list. Due to time constraints as mentioned at the start of this blog post, I won't be spending as much time as Eric Bachard on the project. I'm sure Eric will do a great job as the lead of the Education project, which tries to get more students involved in the OpenOffice.org project.

I am currently moving broadband provider from VirginMedia to Be*. For the same price I'm getting about 4 times the speed, with a slightly greater dropout for the same £18 per month.

When I was working out in Stirling I cycled home, or part of the way home. I have managed to map and tag most of the National Cycle Network route 76 from Stirling to Kincardine/Grangemouth. The south of the Kincardine Bridge is rather difficult to map and cycle just now as there is a lot of major road works and changes to the road network happening there.

About a fortnight ago I cycle 73 miles from Edinburgh to Ayr along the A70. I left quite late just before midday, and took about 6 hours. With the winter setting in, the last hour was pitch black. I lazily took the train back home for £8.80 with my Young Person Railcard. (Rather than cycling back home.) I have mapped and tagged the A70 with my GPS trace for the OpenStreetMap project. My ride on MapMyRide.com. I probably won't cycle the A71 to Kilmarnock as it is a more dangerous road.

I have created a count down dashboard widget to State of the Map 2008. Download the SOTM countdown widget. 

Finally, I have partnered with Manager-Pro. To translate and distribute and English version of their software. All exported reports require the usage of OpenOffice.org. Either as the document reader as the exported documents are in the OpenOffice.org 1 format. If a user wants the reports in PDF, Word or Excel formats, OpenOffice.org requires to be installed for the file format translators within OpenOffice.org.

ooocon2007: Presentations

All the presentation slides for this years conference that have been submitted to ooocon2007@openoffice.org have been made available on the conference web pages. There is still about 12 presentations where the slides still have not been submitted for. Frank Peters has made a list of the missing presentations.

Can all presenters please send them to the above e-mail address so that they can be uploaded? 

If you didn't use any slides for your talk can you please also send a short message to the above e-mail address to say that. This will allow us to remove any links to non-existent presentations.

OOOCON2007 Presentations

If any presenters do not currently have their presentation available on the programme pages, then please send your presentation to ooocon2007@openoffice.org. We would like to have both an OpenDocument Impress presentation and a PDF generated from it.

If you would like to update your presentation, please send it to the above address, also stating that you would like to update the presentation.

Due to a limitation in the OpenOffice.org infrastructure, we can only receive e-mails less than 2MB in size. If your presentation is larger than this, please send a short mail, and we will help you get it online using a different method.

Programme Wednesday

Programme Thursday

Programme Friday

Who said Barcelona was going to be cold?

In fact it is rather roasting compared to Edinburgh.

The direct flight with ClickAir was pretty smooth, except for a short time when coming in to land at Barcelona, due to going through a cloud.

Seems that the rumours were true about the iPhone coming to the UK, as reported by Macworld UK. However at £35 per month, I'll give it a miss until I have some decent income. My current Pay As You Go Sony Ericsson still has plenty of life left in it. It currently takes me about 4 to 8 months to go through £35.

One thing that I found a pain, was the fact that Google suddenly decides to change the language to Spanish (or maybe even Catalan). I found a way around it! All I did was add ?hl=en_GB to the end of the Google URL. UK English not your language, just change en_GB to your own language code.

It has been great to see many of the contributors again from last year. Barcelona seems to be a city to easily get lost in. They too seem to have the tickets that allow you transfer for a period of time after the ticket is first validated. Why isn't that possible in Scotland?

OOOCON2007: Incoming Flight Just Arrived

The incoming flight for my flight was delayed by about 20 minutes. The passengers are now getting off, so I should be getting on my flight soon. Seem I'll be walking straight on. 

South of Edinburgh seems to be clear sky, whereas north is rather dark cloud. No fog here unlike Pavel.

Barcelona seems like it will be roasting compared to Edinburgh last night, which was down to 1°C.

Seems my mobile is cheaper than the wifi hotspots here.

Hopefully the iPhone will be able to be used as a Bluetooth modem when it is rumoured to come to the UK later today.

OpenStreetMap: Edinburgh Mapping Party Review

Last weekend's Edinburgh Mapping Party went well. We had around 10 mappers at the meet up. Most of FIXME land has now disappeared.

There was a few debates on what things should tagged. After some discussion it was decided the West Approach Road tagged highway=primary rather than tertiary, as it has all the characteristics of a primary, even so it doesn't have a reference number. Also Princes Street hasn't been a primary road since it was restricted some years ago to allow only buses along it east bound.

Hopefully there will be some more meetups in the future.

OpenStreetMap: Edinburgh Mapping Party: August 2007

This weekend is the first OpenStreetMap mapping party in Scotland. It will start with a get together starting in the Doctors Pub, in the centre of Edinburgh, on Friday at 1800. (Map (with the pub marked)) From there we may find some show at the Edinburgh International Festival to go to.

On the Saturday and Sunday we will meet-up around 0930 in InfoSeed, who have donated their space for the mapping party. At the start of each day we will decide the specifics of where/when/what to do, depending on who is there, and what they want to do. The general idea is to start off with a quick introduction about the project, and the mapping party. Then head out to the streets to do some mapping. Then back to base to upload the results and have lunch. For the afternoon, we head back out on to the streets and do some more mapping. Back to base to upload the results. On the Saturday evening there will probably be some form of spontaneous evening entertainment.

The main aim is to get the city centre fully mapped. There is a sketch of the area that we are looking to complete. There are many unnamed roads, and missing roads in the area. There are also some smaller things like post boxes and pubs that need to be added to the map too.

Hopefully the really nice weather, with a pure blue sky, is going to continue until the end of the weekend.

More information is available on the OpenStreetMap wiki.

Cycling: Back on the Road

Today my dad came round and helped me to clean and re-grease my rear hub gears. Now the bike is running a lot better. Almost as though it's now.

However I still need to replace the cogs and chain some time soon, before they wear out completely. As I have internal gears, I can get away with wearing away the cogs for a lot longer compared to other external derailleur gears.

Hopefully I won't need to take it apart for the next 6 months to a year to do another re-grease.

Clean re-install of Mac OS X

Today I have spent some time re-installing Mac OS X on my MacBook. It has been over a year now since I have bought the MacBook, and have only once done a clean install on it so far. 

It is now a lot faster as I don't have any junk lying around running in the background. That's one problem of installing various bits of software to see what it does and then not using it again. Maybe I should unsubscribe from the VersionTracker daily mail of new software releases. I've also gained around 20GB on my internal hard drive. 

Of course prior to the clean re-install, I had create a complete bootable backup of my hard drive, thus allowing me to selectively recover anything that I need.

I should now be able to use the OpenOffice.org CWS tools again as I'll setup my local cvs server on a different port than the default port.