Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Poked at mail, waded through bugzilla entries - filing bugs certainly creates lots of work. Apparently USB died on my machine, the hardware flaked which is interesting & unusual. Made some floppy disks to flash the BIOS just in case that helps - brought back some heady memories of using Linux for the first time. I should really build a VM with the DOS games we wrote back in the day in assembler.
The Microsoft announcement that they will natively support ODF is at some level encouraging. And better - MS will join the ODF TC and contribute: which could be really interesting (be careful what you wish for). Of course this may end up being really good for ODF: it all depends if the blatant psuedo-technical competitive marketing continues in the (already dysfunctional) TC context. We'll at least see if all those who kept chanting:
"MS should build the extensions they need for interop on top of ODF"
were actually sincere, or whether they now switch to an equally shrill albeit contradictory:
"They are evily embracing and extending our standard"
Given the feature sub-set problem in ODF, can you have the embrace without the extend ? Of course, it is possible that MS (unlike Novell) have no real interest in improving the serious inadequacies around interop. in ODF, in which case their customers will just get upset:
"why does my document look different when I save as ODF, and re-load it in Word"
or even
"Why, when I select ODF mode, do so many features disappear in the UI"
Can you imagine the synthetic outrage that either of these will generate ? Then again, perhaps they will want to improve interop. in the standard, at which point we will inevitably quickly hit the:
"This can't go into the standard because there is no implementation in OO.o [or perhaps the more sophisticated 'multiple implementations']"
type argument, or will that be waived - in which case we will hit the:
"OO.o can't load & render it's native file format"
chestnut - which of course has always been true of KOffice's ODF use and which we keep hearing re-iterated in various forms about Office 12 and OpenXML. Anyway - at the end of whatever "pick your own fight" session we're in for, when all the dazed, confused and exhausted pundits grind to a halt there are perhaps two lessons that will become obvious here:
- Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to decieve
- Open Standards are good but Free software is far better.
Woke Florian up, while he was on vacation: drat, should have known he would travel to some exotic spot. FreeDos fails to boot on the hardware on which I need to flash the BIOS. Whence, a working DOS boot CD ? finally found a dusty floppy that worked, flashed the BIOS & USB returns: amazing.
Lunch, back - a deadlock in b-a-s: drat; debugged it; it turned out to be an horribly evil nasty - when do you avoid emitting 'broken' callbacks in the mainloop when a connection dies.
Various conf-calls in the evening - found an extraordinary busy-loop in gnome-keyring-daemon, apparently burning up ten+ seconds during login: not ideal.

My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.

In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2008-05-22: Thursday