Category: software

The proud developers of AbiWord

Once upon a time, I translated into Hebrew part of the AbiWord GUI and beta-tested it on WIN32 platform.
I ceased to beta-test it when I stopped using MS-Windows 2000 altogether.

Recently, I saw a review of AbiWord in ynet (http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3042644,00.html) and told the AbiWord developers’ mailing list about it.

One of the developers then complained that neither he nor Babelfish understand Hebrew and can I provide a summary of the article?

I provided a summary of the article, which said that it is an excellent word processor, but is not fully stable.

The developers went ballistic. I reached the conclusion that they are very proud of the stability which they achieved during the last few months (and indeed version 2.2.3, the most recent one which made to Debian Testing, so far did not crash on me).

Lacking knowledge of the operational profile which the reviewer used, I could not help the developers pinpoint the scenarios which cause AbiWord to crash when working in Hebrew (if at all). But I did report a bug in handling of modifying Hebrew text by deleting and then inserting Hebrew characters and spaces (bug 8407).

Push toward excellent Hebrew support in OpenOffice 2.0!

I urge all users of Hebrew office software products (such as word processor, presentation editor, spreadsheet, etc.) to vote for higher priority of bugs, which harm the usability of OpenOffice for serious Hebrew word processing.

Details can be found at http://www.xslf.com/archives/000122.html

The process of registration to bugzilla of OpenOffice is amazingly easy, so is the process of voting for the bugs.
Spend 10 minutes now (some people claim it took them less than 3 minutes) and save lots of grief in the future thanks to not having to deal with closed source office software.

The brave new business buzzwords

Eric Sink (blog at http://software.ericsink.com/) wrote about Micro-ISVs – one-man companies which develop software. His articles are: Exploring Micro-ISVs and First Report from My Micro-ISV.

Some enterprising souls started a special Web site for Micro-ISVs at http://www.microisv.com/.

I wonder how many months will elapse before we are swamped by Web sites, courses, seminars, How-to-do books and other merchandise about Micro-ISVs and Micro-business in general.

Risk management is often not culturally acceptable

Yesterday I at last received the book “Waltzing with Bears” by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. The book is about managing risk on software projects. The book was ordered few weeks ago (together with few other books) from Com.Books. Due to difficulties in obtaining this out-of-print book, it arrived few weeks after the other books.

As I read the book, and as I recall an argument I had yesterday with someone, I notice the fact that several people, even apparently rational ones, employ magic based thinking. They say that if you mention a risk, the very fact that you mention, or even think about, a risk dramatically increases the probability it will materialize. They say it when I want to practice risk management together with me.

I would like to suggest the following magic antidote: while it may be magicallytrue that if you think about a risk, you may cause it to materialize. However, if you think about a risk with the mindset of managing it, and then you do something to mitigate the risk, and you have a plan how to deal with the risk, should it materialize – then the very fact you are thinking about all those things magically reduces the probability of materialization of the risk. Furthermore, even if risk does materialize, then it would do so in a tempered way, without incurring annoyance, anger. Sometimes even with a feeling of excitement about the unexpected adventure, which brings some interest to one’s life.

Hafuch al hafuch (literal translation from Hebrew: reverse on reverse)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/20/atm_viral_peril/ (ATMs in peril from computer worms)

Instead of using MS-Windows XP and adding anti-worm, anti-virus and anti-anti-anti-missile missiles, why don’t the banks insist that the ATM vendors use a secure OS? Or at least hold them contractually liable to any damage due to insecurity holes of the OS being used?

My first Debian bug report

Today I filed my first Debian bug report.

I commanded the system to upgrade to the most recent version of Debian Testing packages, as I do each few days (except for mandatory-stable-software freeze periods before important lectures or demonstrations).

This time, upgrade of the hal package failed, due to failure of the /etc/init.d/dbus-1 script to start. I worked around the problem by stopping dbus-1 and rerunning the installer.

Then, I filed a bug report using ‘reportbug’. It was assigned the bug number 277179. The nicest thing was that I did not have to manually collect information about my system configuration or package versions. ‘reportbug’ did this automatically for me.

(Then I found that other people already reported the bug (bug No. 274702).)

Isn’t it great that it is so easy to report bugs!

Lecture About Accessibility in Linux

Yesterday I at last could tick off the top item in my ToDo list.

The Linux accessibility lecture has finally been delivered to the Haifux club in the Technion, Haifa (http://www.haifux.org/lectures/112/ and if you have trouble opening one of the *.pdf files linked to the page in your Web browser, download it and view it offline using acroread).

In this context, the subject of accessibility in Linux is naturally divided into three sub-topics:

  • General introduction to the world of disabilities – for people who are not familiar with the subject.
  • Accessibility provisions in Linux.
  • Comparison between Linux and MS-Windows.

So, after some planning, negotiations and buttonholing, a bit of interleaving was retained. At beginning I spoke about disabilities (except for blindness). Then Ori Idan spoke about computer usage by blind people, and entertained us with tales about some amazing (to us sighted) feats of blind people.

Then I declared 15-minute break (somehow I was silently nominated as the host of the “mini-seminar”). After the break it was surprisingly easy to get the attention of the people for the second part of my lecture. At least, for me it was surprising, because I am used to the difficulty of getting the attention of a group of deaf persons at break. This time, I did not have to ask the room lights to be blinked few times to get attention.

Then I spoke and demonstrated what Linux (X-Window, Gnome) has to offer in way of accessibility.

I did not notice signs of sleepiness or boredom among the participants. Some brave souls asked questions or made comments. Ori Idan’s lecture (being delivered by an hearing person) drew out much more comments, questions and anecdotes from the audience.

After the lecture I was rewarded by a can of beer (comment: “free as in free beer”).

There were two disappointments:

  • Ladypine, who suggested that Ori collaborate with me, and who organized the meeting – could not show up after all due to personal reasons.
  • Interpreting assignments, in which the deaf person delivers a technical lecture to hearing audience (rather than an hearing person delivering a non-technical lecture to a group having deaf persons) are very rare. The Sign Language interpreter, whom I booked for the event, needed to meet me before the evening to prepare for the assignment, but this was not possible due to geographic reasons. So there were some difficulties in communication between me, the interpreter and the audience.

I also botched up the demonstration of the virtual keyboard utility. But I did not consider this to be an important part of the lecture. The demonstration of the Emacs visual beep feature went well, however ((setq visible-bell t)). This was more important, as Gnome does not handle visual beeping in behalf of applications (as far as I saw). Someone from the audience pointed out that KDE does handle this.

Debian, at last

Those days I am installing Debian in my IBM ThinkPad R40e laptop.
The installation is not fully OK yet. The USB mouse does not work after I disabled BIOS USB support to prevent keyboard lockup at boot time. The internal mouse causes the graphic cursor to jump to the lower left corner at the slightest provocation. I am still learning my way through Debian.

However, I can already start appreciating the power of Debian relative to RedHat and Fedora Core, which I have been using so far.

Debian has reputation of being more difficult to install than several other distributions. What I find is that Debian installer does not hide from you the complexity of what it is doing. But if you are not afraid of scrolling messages and of doing hand editing once in while and of learning new things, Debian is not difficult.

It seems to me that there are few kinds of people. One kind want the control provided by Debian and are willing to pay the price of messing around when this becomes necessary. Another kind want the software to handhold them – hide from them complexity. But when something goes wrong, they are left with having to try things randomly or asking for help from the local guru.

Once I get it to work to my satisfaction, I’ll check the Debian installation and if its Hebrew support is good enough, I’ll consider adopting the dictatorial policy of helping my friends with their computer problems only if they work with Debian (even if today they use MS-Windows XP).

Accessibility in Linux

Some time ago I made the mistake of stressing the desirability of having a lecture about accessibility in a meeting of a Linux Users’ Group. Now I am stuck with researching for the lecture.

Among other things, I found this link:
http://www.washington.edu/accessit/articles?197 – How does accessible Web design benefit all Web users.

This is an important link, in view of the current campaign to make several Israeli Web sites accessible to Mozilla users.