OpenOffice.org – Random thoughts and serendipity

The Document Foundation, LibreOffice and the road forward

sankarshan — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 04:30:34 +0000

It is incredibly wonderful to see forward momentum on a somewhat long wait for a Foundation for OpenOffice.org project. The Document Foundation has promised to be an independent self-governing meritocratic Foundation. And, that is actually a lot of good intentions to live up to.

Once the rush of news announcements are over it would be nice to see some concrete time-line driven announcements from the Foundation. These would possibly end up around areas concerning:

how LibreOffice builds upon the existing work done within the fold of OpenOffice.org community
the cohesive nature of participation amongst existing Native Language Communities for OO.o and, LibreOffice
would LibreOffice contributions start off from a point in time

The last two items are specifically close to one’s heart because it goes directly and deeply into how the existing community finds a place within the new infrastructure and, how the contributions keep happening. Whether this would require reaching out to all the existing community/project leaders and seeking consensus is something that the wise heads at TDF know. I would wait to see more decisions being announced around infrastructure, contribution processes and, actual contributions begin to happen at a rapid clip.

Here’s to a new beginning.

Global local

sankarshan — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:20:05 +0000

In all the years that I have been interacting with the various upstream FOSS projects, reasoning and convincing various groups to have a ‘local’ view of issues that complements the global strategy has been an uphill task. Sometimes it is just that interpersonal relations have been able to overcome the curve. At other times, it has just been a constant pegging away with facts, data points and a regular representation of issues that validate the need to approach and integrate local issues within the fold of the greater goals of the project. Either way, it makes me happy to see another project realize the need to align the views and inputs of the local participants and, figure out ways and means to respect their inputs and listen to their feedback.

The Regional Groups aspect of OpenOffice.org has gone a bit unnoticed and somewhat unloved (and, it has been my fault since I do not recall talking too much on this). This would be one area where it would be good to have a few folks stand up and take ownership as a steward.

In other news of the day, I have an @gnome.org alias for myself (thanks SysAdmins). Sadly, it has the usual pain of making a botched job of my actual name and, by now, I am so used to folks chopping up my first name every way they feel that I am more amused and less bewildered at the lack of appreciation of names.

Can OpenOffice.org Writer ‘flip’ my page ?

sankarshan — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 06:54:35 +0000

It has been a while since the angel talked with me, however, I haven’t ended up with a clean solution for getting OpenOffice.org Writer to flip the page when printing out. Currently, one has to do the following steps:

Export to PDF the appropriate pages
Use pdfjam tools (more specifically, pdfnup) to collate the 2 pages into a single page
Use a tool like GIMP to make an image of that PDF
Flip the image

Isn’t it possible to use the print dialog from the software to handle the above as a seamless step ?

Quirky behavior of oocalc

sankarshan — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:21:35 +0000

A quirky behavior of OpenOffice.org Calc was observed. I uploaded the sample spreadsheet here [link to .ods] .

Would be great to know if someone else can reproduce it.

The first 3 columns have three dates and cell D2 uses the DAYS function to find the difference between the dates. Since the result is accurate, we also put that in cell D4 by-hand. We repeat a similar set of actions for E2 and E4.

Having done that, we divide E2 by D2 and E4 by D4 to obtain the results in F2 and F4. The results in G2 and G4 are obtained by F2 by 15 and F4 by 15 respectively. The contents of G6 are input by-hand.

For the cells H2, H4 and H6, the data is input by hand and I2, I4 and I6 are obtained by multiplying H2, H4 and H6 by G2, G4 and G6 respectively. Check the results obtained

All of the above would be obvious if you check the formula bits in the spreadsheet.

The real fun of course is in the remaining rows. G8 is obtained as a result of the expression F8*15 (note: G2 was 15*F2) which is somewhat different and thus we end up with different results on I8.

Check out the spreadsheet. It is fun. The OO.o issuezilla does not seem to work for me, so shall file a bug later.