Sean’s Mental Walkabout

On Friday I spent the day with IT Staff of a couple of different school districts in Connecticut. We were there to see how they were using Open Source in the schools, and what sort of future plans they have in that area. For me, it was a very eye opening experience. While you may “understand” how constrained our public schools are when it comes to resources, until you spend a day with them, you probably don’t. It is extremely notable if an entire school district has a programmer on staff (almost no one has that). A programmer is defined as someone that knows PHP. For an pen applications to take hold in this space, they must be graphical, and never require dumping out to a shell to configure. While many open source projects are headed in this direction, very few are really there today.

Over the course of the day, The Open CD came up a few times, being discussed by some of the open technology advocates within the CT system. The Open CD is a CD ISO of Open Source applications that run natively on Microsoft Windows, and are considered best in class applications. It includes Open Office (equiv of MS Office), Scribus (page layout), GIMP (photo editing), Audacity (sound editing), Inkscape (vector drawing), Gaim (instant messaging), Firefox, Thunderbird (email), Celestia (astronomy application). As all the programs are under open licenses you can install it as many times as you like, wherever you like, with no fear of violating licenses. This is still a bit foreign to Windows users, but something people can get over the hump on pretty quickly. Prior to this meeting, I wasn’t really aware of The Open CD, but a weekend of stewing on it made me realize it is one of the best things since sliced bread.

While I remain a Linux advocate, and am not planning on running windows on any of my home boxes any time soon, Windows remains a reality on the desktop. But the strangle hold on the desktop is more about the applications than anything else. If you get people over to an Open Office, GIMP, Firefox world, then sitting at a windows machine with those installed is the same as sitting at an LTSP terminal with them installed, at least from a user perspective. This is a huge lesson that Novell learned in it’s mass linux migration: migration the application set to open alternatives first. The transition to Linux is much easier after this. The application stickiness is the big reason that alternative desktops have grown slowly.

Another fact is that nearly every retail computer sold comes with Windows, but you pay extra for MS Office. Instead of going after that which the user sees as part of the hardware for an open replacement, go after the thing that costs that an extra $100 dollars. If you bought the most popular proprietary versions of the applications on the open cd, at retail prices, you’d end up spending a couple thousand dollars for the set: MS Office, Adobe PageMaker, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, etc. And just think, now you are also putting Cellestia and Blender into the hands of kids, and just letting their imagination take them away. How exciting is that!

As MHVLUG starts out on it’s fifth year, we’ve had a bunch of members start to be really interested about ways in which we can tap into this large group of open source experts, and expand into our communities; giving back where it matters most. It seems to me that advocacy around The Open CD is a good place to start, as it provides a very real, very easy on ramp into the world of Open Technology that the 95% of Windows users can participate in as well. We’ll work on getting them over to Linux for critical components later, but just getting people exposed to a world where people write software under open licenses and give it away for free helps a lot to understanding why Linux is special, and why it is often the right answer for the job at hand.

Over the next many months I think we’ll be getting together with this group multiple times to provide some volunteer assistance in navigating the waters of Open Technology. I have to say, after Friday I was seriously energized about all the things we could do to help schools in this area, and can’t wait to see how this plays out over time.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Pidgin 2.0 just released, which has given me a chance to start looking at IM plugins (which I wasn’t going to do during Gaim’s 2 year beta cycle where that interface was always changing). Pidgin 2.0 has some nice changes to it, including final unification of buddy accounts, which I was so used to from Everybuddy years ago.

I’ve already found a couple of bugs in pidgin, but I’m also starting to get familiar enough with the source base that I’m starting to figure out fixes at the same time (at least for the less subtle ones). The last couple of days I spent some time forward porting a private set of plugins from 2.0b2 -> pidgin 2.0 without using the gaim-compat layer. I’ve still got one subtle segfault (looks like a race in buddy status update), but it was a great learning experience on the source base and the API. Hopefully I’ll manage to have enough time to hack up some other plugins over the next many moons.

Popularity: 4% [?]

For the third time I attempted to get a paper in for OSCON, however, unlike the last 2 attempts, this one was accepted.

The paper is entitled “Easy as Pie: Making Graphical Desktop Applications with Perl and Glade”, based on my personal experience learning enough Glade to do the ExifTagger project, though the reality is that the way Gtk2 maps up to other high level languages, such as Python and Ruby, the talk should be pretty broadly applicable to any high level language developers.

Popularity: 3% [?]

While I have no end of gripes about Open Office, and ways that it could be improved, it also has some really shining gems that make me very happy. One of these is the Export to Webcast feature, which is buried beneath so many levels of dialog that you probably don’t know it exists.

The feature can be found via a File -> Export action. File -> Export conveniently defaults you HTML export, under which the webcast option exists.

The export is going to create a lot of little files. As such, you should create a sub directory to put the export into. I usually name it pres, just for consistency. Click Export… to continue.

You’ll want to create a new design (which you can save at the end of the process). Click Next to continue, otherwise you’ll get the defaults for HTML export, which is static content.

Select Webcast option on the left, and Perl on the right. The 2 URLs you’ll be giving are the absolute URLs for where you will host these on your web server. The URL for presentation corresponds to where the image files for each slide will be. The url for perl scripts needs to be a directory where your web server will execute .pl files. I’m using /pres for both, as I have an appropriately pre configured /pres for the webserver that I use. Click Next to continue.

Set image type to PNG, otherwise you’ll get really nasty JPEG artifacting. Select the appropriate screen size as well. A 1024×768 presentation will actually give you 800×600 images, and it probably the size you want.

Now you’ve got a directory ready to be served on an http server for content. On our LUG webserver the document root for mhvlug.org is ‘/var/www/mhvlug/html’. I’ve pushed all the content to ‘/var/www/mhvlug/html/pres’, and set up the following apache stanza:

  <Directory /var/www/mhvlug/html/pres>
      AllowOverride all
      Options +MultiViews +Indexes +ExecCGI
  </Directory>

No you can send your users to a URL like http://mhvlug.org/pres/ and they’ll see something like this:

Notice that green line on the bottom of the page? That’s a 1 pixel high frame that is doing a meta-refresh every 5 seconds, looking for what slide you are on on the server. When it detects a slide change it will turn red, then on it’s next load it will change the main screen. There is as much as a 10 second delay on slide flips, but that is pretty livable for more circumstances.

So, how do you control this, you ask? Well, you go to the fully qualified URL of your exported presentation, in this case http://mhvlug.org/pres/getting_work_done_on_linux.html. You see almost the same thing as everyone else, except your bottom frame as a set of controls. The ‘-’ and ‘+’ buttons do what you expect, as does entering a number and click ‘to a given page’.

There is no security in any of this, it is purely convenience (though a little hacking up of a .htaccess file could restrict things further). While the whole thing is pretty hackish in nature, it turns out to work quite well. The fact that you just tell listeners to point their browser at a short URL, and leave it be drops the barrier to entry on using this really significantly.

I’ve used this approach in 2 presentations in the last week that I gave over the phone, and it has worked really well. While there are definitely ways to make this better, the fact that it is a built in, and it is “good enough” can’t be overstated enough.

Next time you want to give a presentation, instead of just emailing out a PDF, give the web cast approach a try, I think you’ll like it.

Popularity: 3% [?]

If you are a Linux user, and you have ever had to give presentations, you probably used OpenOffice Impress to do it. OpenOffice Impress is a reasonable clone of PowerPoint, though certain things like Animation, work very poorly in OpenOffice, and you can’t insert a table (grrrrr….).

Any good presentation has graphics or diagrams in it. There is a drawing tool in OpenOffice to create them, which is a little clumsy, but works. However, the output looks like poo. While OpenOffice will antialias fonts (making them smooth), it won’t do so for graphic elements. Thus you end up with reasonably nice looking fonts, and graphics that look like MacPaint circa 1996. What is a budding presenter that wants to stay on Linux to do?

About 2 years ago, I found Inkscape. Inkscape is a vector graphics program that would be comparable to Adobe Illustrator (though it’s been 9 years since I last used Illustrator, so I don’t claim any ability to compare them). Inkscape is largely designed for graphic artists (which I will not claim to be by any stretch), and has all the sort of drawing tools you would expect for that. I originally stumbled upon it when creating block diagrams in Dia, which while pretty straight forward, again looks like poo if you’ve got anything that isn’t a vertical or horizontal line in it. While Inkscape requires a little more freehanding of shapes, the control over those graphics, and how pretty they look on export, entire makes up for that.

Inkscape’s native format is SVG, which is vector based, and thus scalable to any size without looking bad. While it has the disadvantage of being a different tool then OpenOffice it has the distinct advantage that nearly anything drawn in Inkscape looks about 10x better than OpenOffice drawings, without even trying. If you try, you can get stuff that is clearly 100x better.

What I’ve recently found works best is to create a base image in inkscape with all your elements you are trying to explain. Don’t add much text or any arrows showing flow, as OpenOffice does this reasonably. Then use that base image for 1 or more slides in OpenOffice where you draw over it with Arrows, Simple Blocks, and Text. OpenOffice objects can be transparent (or partially transparent), which means doing overlays in OpenOffice works pretty well, and looks pretty reasonable. Believe it or not, the final OpenOffice presentation will look better in Adobe Acrobat as a PDF, which has very good scaling algorithms, and will antialias your OpenOffice graphics objects even when OO doesn’t (which, granted, is pretty retarded).

Pictures are worth 1000 words, and good pictures are worth a lot more. But also remember, good pictures take time. Yesterday I spent 3 hours coming up with, and creating 1 graphic which was the basis for 4 slides, then 2 more hours figuring out how to best represent the information on those slides to be clear, simple, and useful. Just like any programming effort, don’t think you can crank it out in the hour before it is due.

Ok, back to diagrams and presentations. Happy Friday!

Popularity: 3% [?]

The Bad

Dear Open Office,

Why can’t you insert a table? All I want is a simple table. Tables are good ways to organize some information. No, I don’t want to embed a full spread sheet, that uses entirely different fonts, and may or may not size correctly in my viewport, depending on the size of my window at any given time. You import tables from Power Point reasonably well, even if it is just a bunch of grouped lines. Why couldn’t you just draw me that in the first place!

The Good

Dear Inkscape,

You are brilliant, and keep getting better. Putting the color palette horizontally right above the status bar is so nice for doing quick fills of objects on the screen. Plus, all your drawings always look incredible once they are done.

Popularity: 3% [?]

For the record, I have OpenOffice a fair shake, trying to use it for our wedding guest list. Had I known going into it that I’d be unable, in any way, to export the data into flat text, I never would have tried. That’s right, 1 year after launching OpenOffice base, the simple task of getting access to that data from any other application, in any other way, is still impossible.
This morning, as we were trying to correlate our wedding gifts with the guest list, I gave up, created a report that made a 17 page text file, and built a Perl filter to turn that into a tab separated file. Now the entire list is in Gnumeric, easy to edit, and share between Susan and I.

Dear OpenOffice,

Please actually provide open access to your data when creating a new product. A move like this with OpenOffice Base is almost as bad as MS would do.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Every once in a while I love to look through my spam folder just to see what makes spamassassin mark something really high. Here is one that got 49 points:

*  4.5 MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS Spam tool pattern in MIME boundary
*  4.4 MSGID_SPAM_CAPS Spam tool Message-Id: (caps variant)
*  0.1 FORGED_RCVD_HELO Received: contains a forged HELO
*  1.5 RCVD_NUMERIC_HELO Received: contains an IP address used for HELO
*  0.0 UNPARSEABLE_RELAY Informational: message has unparseable relay
*      lines
*  2.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
*  5.0 BAYES_99 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 99 to 100%
*      [score: 1.0000]
*  4.5 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
*  3.7 PYZOR_CHECK Listed in Pyzor (http://pyzor.sf.net/)
*  0.2 DNS_FROM_RFC_ABUSE RBL: Envelope sender in abuse.rfc-ignorant.org
*  2.0 RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET RBL: Received via a relay in bl.spamcop.net
*      [Blocked - see ]
*  3.9 RCVD_IN_XBL RBL: Received via a relay in Spamhaus XBL
*      [65.67.110.5 listed in sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org]
*  2.5 FORGED_OUTLOOK_TAGS Outlook can't send HTML in this format
*  2.7 FORGED_OUTLOOK_HTML Outlook can't send HTML message only
*  4.5 MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI Multipart message only has text/html MIME
*      parts
*  2.6 FORGED_MSGID_HOTMAIL Message-ID is forged, (hotmail.com)
*  1.6 MISSING_MIMEOLE Message has X-MSMail-Priority, but no X-MimeOLE
*  4.1 FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK Forged mail pretending to be from MS Outlook

A few of these I’ve cranked up, like MIME_HTML_ONLY, as I don’t get any useful mail that is only text/html formatted. I still like that SA detects things like MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS.

Popularity: 9% [?]

I really wish that Firefox set WM_URGENT when a new tab or window loaded. I need to look into what it would take to make that happen, as my use of Ion would end up being nirvana after that. Click on a link in an application Mod-k k, read the link, Mod-k k back to where you were. I spent a bunch of time on google looking for tihs one, and failed, which isn’t promissing. In my copious spare time, I’ll have to look into this one more.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Ok, I think I’m now sold on the Ion approach to window management. It isn’t all flowers and puppies, but at the Mutt folks say “… it sucks less”.

The good points

• Centralized Alerts from urgent windows - this is just bloody brilliant, and so freaking useful
• Full usage of screen real estate - very handy
• Dock App support (so I can keep my HUD as it was in AfterStep)
• Query interface that always has focus

The bad points

• No xft support. I really got used to antialiased title bars in AfterStep, it’s a bit ugly to go back
• Still on the learning curve for how to really use it
• The Linear workspace layout is still not entirely intuitive to me, after years doing 2D pagers. I’d like a Pager with (you are here)

All in all, a pretty big win. About an hour of hacking put Urgent support hints into the last application I needed it for, which makes it so much nicer for this environment. I just also got frame renaming bound correctly, so my gaim windows are getting shoved into the right places, very nice.

I’ll end up building Mandriva packages for the latest code this weekend, including some ion startup bits to make it easy to launch items on start up from kdm. All in all, a good experiment for the evenings of this week.

Popularity: 2% [?]