Spread the word, share this ODF artwork

Red Hat graphic designers have designed a logo and poster to help liberate your documents.

ODF is an open standard for electronic office documents. It’s important for a lot of reasons :

• ODF is an open standard and you are free to implement it (for example in your office suite and tools).
• No vendor lock-in. All major office suites use ODF (except MS Office).
• In ten years time you can still open your documents
• …

read and share this :

• Spread the word, share this ODF artwork (Scribus,SVG (Inkscape) and PDF files are available)

• ODF: The inevitable format

a related blog post : Say NO to OO-XML

Say NO to OO-XML

Microsoft is trying to push their inferior OO-XML office file format specification as a standard. The existing ODF office file format standard is superior and is already implemented by all major office suites (except by MS Office). The OO-XML specification has big problems and is designed to be hard to implement. For example to be able to implement “autoSpaceLikeWord95” or “useWord97LineBreakRules” you would have to reverse-engineer these proprietary applications.

Sign the petition and say NO to OO-XML.

If you are dutch read : 1 and2

update :

More reasons why you should sign the petition against OO-XML :

• The Formula for Failure
• MS-OOXML conversion hoax
• The Inquirer on MS-OOXML and ODF
• Microsoft probably can’t answer these questions to everyone’s satisfaction.

Some links for July 12th

• Linux.com interviews Mako : Newest FSF board member Hill discusses free software goals
• New FCC rules may impact Linux-based devices but the Software Freedom Law Center disagrees. IMHO people shouldn’t be forced to run non-free software to be able to use their hardware properly. My prediction regarding wireless chipsets that have good FLOSS drivers other than their FCC rules blob : I think hardware manufacturers probably won’t supply FLOSS implementations of the FCC rules but eventually independent FLOSS developers will replace these parts.

I won’t be working at Google

I was contacted by Google. The first two phone interviews went very well. But sadly the third interview didn’t go so well (I was a little bit nervous) so I won’t be working at Google.

I’m open to other interesting opportunities so if you want my Curriculum Vitae feel free to ask. You can find my e-mail on my launchpad account.

Some interesting stuff :

• Congratulations to Mako for joining the FSF board of directors!
• I booted from a Gutsy Tribe 2 cd. Gutsy looks to be shaping up nicely. Thumbs up to everyone who is working on Gutsy! Sometimes gnome-appearances-properties hangs my entire system. GUTSY GIBBON SHOULD NOT BE USED FOR YOUR DESKTOP UNTIL RELEASE IN OCTOBER 2007 other than for testing that is.
• Compiz Fusion looks very nice and is enabled by default for video chipsets that support it in Gutsy (there is a fallback to metacity). Try it out yourself by downloading Tribe 2 and booting from the cd or search youtube for some nice videos.
• I’m using Pidgin on Feisty. It looks very good! I backported it using prevu.
• iPhone restricts users, GPLv3 frees them Today both the iPhone and GPLv3 will be launched
• I would much rather have a MID running Ubuntu (UME) with Gnome than an iPhone running proprietary software. More links : 1 , 2
• Gnome is taking Mobile and Embedded seriously
• *guessing and hoping* : It’s exciting to see Intel, Canonical and Nokia working together to create something which IMHO has the potential to be an iPhone killer. It would be very cool to browse the web, read e-mail and rss and use python,ssh,voip and im on a MID running Ubuntu with Gnome. I hope this MID will also be a regular phone and will support hsdpa. I hope it will be available in Europe and will work with european frequencies and dutch providers. I hope dutch providers won’t try to prevent using voip. I hope for long battery life.

Learning resources for Python

I got a nice e-mail today from someone who is searching for good resources for learning python. I’m quoting the relevant part :

I wanted you impression on the best resource to begin learning Python. I will
be using the geany IDE for starting out unless you have a stronger impression else where.

Would love to have your input.

One of the best learning resources for me was Dive Into Python. Dive Into Python is a book about Python written for experienced programmers by Mark Pilgrim. The complete text is also available online and as a package (diveintopython). If you install the package you can find the book in /usr/share/doc/diveintopython/html/index.html

• official python tutorial : http://www.python.org/doc/tut/tut.html
• another tutorial : http://www.hetland.org/python/instant-python.php
  
• python wiki beginners start : http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide
• python wiki beginners start for Programmers : http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Programmers
• if you like doing puzzles : http://www.pythonchallenge.com
• http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Python_Programming

Once you start coding I’m sure you need to look up things :

• official python documentation : http://www.python.org/doc/ if you install the python-doc package it will become available in /usr/share/doc/python/html/index.html
• official python documentation by module : http://docs.python.org/modindex.html
• python sidebar for mozilla/firefox : http://projects.edgewall.com/python-sidebar

Once you feel comfortable with python you might be interested in these links :

• http://pycheesecake.org/wiki/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy Unit Testing Tools (unittest,doctest,..,) and Source Code Checking Tools(pychecker,pyflakes,pylint) seem to be most useful.
• http://www.ferg.org/papers/debugging_in_python.html

Picking the right editor is mostly a matter of personal taste. Some people prefer emacs, vim or vi and feel very strong about it. Personally I’ve been using nano and gedit until I discovered Geany this week. If you have been using windows I would personally recommend you to start with Geany.

If you are into videos try searching http://video.google.com. If you like reading programming related geek news then take a look at http://programming.reddit.com which sometimes has an interesting Python related story.

If you know other great resources feel free to reply to this blog post :).

Google here I come :)

I’m master student Articial Intelligence aiming to graduate this schoolyear (07/08). I want to start on my first full time job after graduating so that will probably be somewhere between November and January. So I am going to do some job hunting this summer.

I got a similar mail as Aaron Toponce got from Dan McCarthy, a talent scout for the engineering team at Google. I replied by sending my Curriculum Vitae. I got through the first phone screening. There are still multiple phone screenings ahead. I would love to work at Google, learn how they do what they do and work in a challenging environment.

A subset of reasons “Why would I like to work at Google ?” :

• Google develops (web) apps which use AI which “just works”

• Google does AI research

• Google supports the free software community in various ways

• Google uses Python a lot. I started using Python in December (it seems longer ago) and I have a developed a strong preference for Python above other programming languages since.

• When working at Google you get the ability to spend time on your own (free software) projects

I’m not going to say anymore about Googles recruiting process or my “possibly getting recruited at Google progress” so I won’t answer any questions regarding that. You will just have to wait until I blog about it again.

I’m open to other interesting opportunities so if you want my Curriculum Vitae feel free to ask. You can find my e-mail on my launchpad account.

Geany

Up to now I’ve primarily used nano and gedit as my editor of choice. But now I’ve tried Geany thanks to a few people who have blogged about it. It’s a fast and lightweight editor with some nice features such as :

• syntax highlighting
• code folding
• code completion
• auto completion of often used constructs like if, for and while
• auto completion of XML and HTML tags
• call tips
• many supported filetypes like C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, Pascal (full list)
• symbol lists

For details, visit the official ubuntuforums (2)

Yesterday I blogged together with fellow ubuntuforums staff members Bapoumba and Vorian about www.ubuntu.com/dell not linking to the official ubuntuforums but to Dell’s Linux Community Forums. Today this is already fixed. Thanks for listening to us.

For details, visit the official ubuntuforums

Ubuntu has an extensive and vibrant community who work through on-line forums to provide guidance and help for beginners and experts alike. For details, visit the official ubuntuforums.

That’s what I would have liked to read on www.ubuntu.com/dell. But this is the real text :

Ubuntu has an extensive and vibrant community who work through on-line forums to provide guidance and help for beginners and experts alike. For details, visit the help forum.

Vorian I agree with your blogpost. In my humble opinion www.ubuntu.com/dell should link to the official ubuntuforums instead of Dell’s Linux Community Forums.

disclaimer :

This is just my personal opinion as an ubuntuforums volunteer. I’m happy that Canonical and Dell made a business deal and that Dell decided to make Ubuntu available on some of their systems. I would like to see this happen worldwide instead of only in the USA. If you would like to buy a system with Ubuntu on it in the Netherlands you are lucky as this is possible at : http://www.mingos.nl

UDS-Sevilla / Ubucon : don’t forget to register

If you are attending UDS-Sevilla in physical form don’t forget to register your attendence here and here. If you are attending ubucon don’t forget to register here.

I will stay in the Triana Backpackers hostel with a few others.