The Final Zone project

20:10 Pacific Time, a French channel TV5 reported about OLPC XO with Red Hat France. I am glad to see that project has a very good international covering.

For the first I can now see other XO machines through mesh networking with the recent Sugar build 426. John J5 reported the XO he used is in Cambridge while I am located in Vancouver, Canada. It is hard to believe the OLPC XO can contact other XO from a very far distance, at the same time it is utterly impressive. The activities (equivalent to applications ) got some change. Writer (slim Abiword) now uses tables, it will be possible to share that activities. The camera activities is now fullscreen mode. There is a journal activities that report the action of the user. The Sugar is have some way to go with some broken activites like Tam Tam and the inability to close them.

I came back from Montreal where Linux Graphics Meeting occured. Too tired after a long journey back to Vancouver, I did not feel to give summary. For now, ZZZ.

Better late than never. This was my first time in Libre Graphics Meeting where I met Máirín Duffy in the first day of conference and Andy Fitzsimon on the third and final day. The whole experience was great for the following reasons: Exchange of ideas among developers and users. Presentations in two languages: English and French Meeting new people. For this 2007 of Libre Graphics Meeting, here is the summary for each applications: Blender 3D : the next version 2.44 will come with full support of 64bit architectures. It is the transition for the incoming 2.5 release at the end of 2007. Also display is the first open-source movie Elephant Dreams. Inkscape : the main attraction given the fact it has the most presentation. The ability to provide a photorealistic art was one of impressive features. Scribus : Announcement of 1.3.4 that provide new features like improved text layout. One of example of the use of Scribus is Le Tigre , a French ad-free newspaper. Gimp : preview release of G...

I arrived in Montreal last Wednesday night. Looking for the right place for the LGM conference turned out to be complicated because of the lack of information from the website. After getting the right information, I brought the OLPC XO-2 machine to the Polytechnique computer retailer in order to fix the keyboard issues. It was an opportunity to take picture of the disassembled XO-2 machine which was surprisely easy to remount confirming its educational purpose. After finding the room where LGM will occur, I contacted Mairin, Red Hat employee, who recently arrived. For the information, LGM is using Fedora Core 6 for the presentation. Je suis arrivé à Montreal mercredi soir. Chercher le bon endroit pour le LGM s'est averé compliqué en raison du manque d'information du site. Apres en avoir obtenu, j'ai amené le portable OLPC XO-2 pour fixed le problème du clavier. C'était aussi l'occasion de voir la machine demontée et d'en prendre les photos. La facilité d'ass...

Read this blog MS Office 2007 versus Open Office 2.2 shootout . The test was already flawed from the beginning for the following reasons: The author did not upload the original file which is probably a Excel 97 xsl file as a reference Instead, two different formats were used: one from OpenOffice 2.0 beta sxw which is a compressed file and other a xml file from Microsoft Office 2003 . Since two different formats were used, the test is automatically void of meaning because of the lack of the original file. Renaming the xml file to xsl like the author, I verified if it can be read with OpenOffice 2.2. It does not because the data is interpreted as xml which will exceed the limit of row in Calc application. Office Excel 2003 will render like a spreadsheet due to proprietary XML parser. However, Excel 2003 cannot read sxc nor OpendDocument Spreadsheet unless SUN's Open Document Format plugin is used. The test is unrealistic in real world business because of the size (273 Mib of spread...