Listening to TWIG today I was reminded of my reputation online, and I start looking for my links on Google and saw many sites outdated with my name on it. So I decided to update as much as possible and also refresh some of my public pictures online.
The future… Entrpreneurship in Mexico
This is the second post from the event this week about web 2.0, new media and entrpreneurship in my hometown. The great thing I took from this event was the grounded view of the environment. The innovation was not just some pie in the sky but they wanted to challenge the audience for real. Something that I seldomly see on the FLOSS events, something to challenge the mind of the n00bs but also put it clear on paper. Tell them to be active and do something, the best idea at least on this event was a hack-a-ton which even if it fails producing a good generation of apps developers this weekend. But the point is that they tried and even if they end up frustrated it could encourage them to try again and shape their criteria moving forward.
So things about entrepreneurship in Mexico is that is not only about what happens in the US. You still have to fight bureacracy, bad infrastructure, and just not a place designed to build corporations. However those are the question that you usually seek answers about on these events and documenting the answers about these virtual organizations and constitutions.
The event in general still struggled to address about how to monetize in Mexico. How to move money around and also raise capital on the internet. Not much mentions of monetization models versus growth based companies.
Day three of OOoCon 2010
So far I haven’t been going to any technical talks, and today (the last day) was a now or never. I went to the Juerguen talk about extension, he talked about the metadata of the extension integration. New things like update information with a more custom icons options, license, and descriptions of the extension. He show the the anatomy of the description.XML Things like version, identifier language, and xlink:href to the text files.
Option page and help integration makes also added support for complex user interfaces. The help-files can be useful, a tip is use the parameter HELP_DEBUG=1 (environmental variable) to display help identifier, this makes it easier to make a relationship between the help id.
Option page will be integrated in the OpenOffice.org Writer section so it’s possible to make it more seamless with the OOo interface. The same goes with help integration.
Juerguen later showed the netbean project to show how the license worked as well as the options integrated with the stored options interface of OOo.
He later talked about the external libraries and how to handle external libraries through a getClasses() function to load external files.
Secure connections through HTTPS and certification handling is now supported which allow you to validate and verify the the validation of the certification so there are many functions develop for the handling of the connection.
Other feature was the password container which integrates with the internal password manager. The passwordContainer() interface under the star.tasks.Password container uses the interactionHandler().
The new UI controls looked great including the TreeControl, GridControl as well as tool panels that are more accessible. This will make the extension presentation much appealing to users. All of them are on the com.sun.star.ui.XUIElementFactory/XUIElement/XToolPanel. The XCU to be used under the Factories.xcu which will include the new element under the “FactoryImplementation” reference. Another xcu is the custom WriterWindowsState.xcu.
Next talk was also another developer talks about UNO components by Mihaela Kavikova. This time it was the new AWT UNO visual components that where mentioned during the extension presentation. The grid control could be the star of the presentation, the AWT means abstract window toolkit the api is at com.sun.star.awt.
The way Dialogs are handled and explained using the AWT service with the different interfaces like UnoControlDialog, XControlModel, and the different properties using the XPropertySet like the position values like the setPropertyValue(“property”, Integer(value)); example:
sPSetButton1.setPropertyValue(“PositionY”, new Integer(230));
She showed the different controls and later went into more complex UI’s. She went on into the use case which I thought was quite neat, and how an application that drop info into a listbox, then she address the issues of what a listbox could have including the lack of flexibility. That’s when the grid control came to show, the control is quite neat, it allows you to create columns and rows, the code comes from the com.sun.star.awt.grid.GridColumn which you intangible through the xMultiComponentFactory.createInstanceWithContext();
There are some methods to the grid columns such as setTitle setColumnWidth, or setResizable(flase/true). The grid also supports integer and graphics, which I thought was quite neat. Other properties includes the propertyValue such as column, grid data and others like the Tabstop to be able to browse through tabstop. Other optionals properties includes background color, line color, text color, and alignments on vertical or top. Most of the Grid stuff can be found here(http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/API/UNO_AWT/Grid_Control). Future improvements include sort columns edit cells and more complex data input such as tab control, frame control. Biggest drawback is that is not usable from basic, just Java which probably is not available on the scriptable framework.
After the conference I had a good talk with Juerguen about the things that we might need to cover to really improve the development environment. It seems that we have the issue that everyone is contributing on their own little bubble but don’t really communicate with the rest of the community. Things as simple as adding a commenting functionality to the development documentation seems to be a daunting task that he can just not provide. Yet like other comments from the talk happened, if the users are asking for it, it becomes more important than what it seems.
The ODF Framework sounded a bit jargony, it was a study on quality assurance for ODF. First it was a study on the client, the vendors and the Developer for ODF based products. The ODF alliance seems to be in the middle of this and they pushed the technology across the industry. The study had specific goals to each profile, includes the comparison of products based on their quality, vendors evaluate the increase of costumers based on a clearer whitepaper report.
To build the report they identify the requirement against the evaluation process, took the existing evaluation and measured the process against the requirement. After a bit I had to change the presentation to a lighter one about Italo’s PLIO organization and how OpenOffice.org. The talks seemed great since he explains some of his encounters with Microsoft. He faced the Microsoft organization and how the whole standards debacle. He also document the whole process and show the likes and the unlikes on the article. He even put the google search to albergati and openoffice.org and the document comes first and he is listed 12 on the google images from the search.
First day of OOoCon 2010
Interesting first day of the OOoCon, I arrived at Budapest quite late to do much that day. However the day was quite productive at the final hour after having met up with my friends from the Koffice who went to the hotel pub for a great talk about my projects and the future models for my O4Biz project and the viability of implementing some concepts on the BizDev project.
The night went into quite good questioning by my friends but maybe some tiresome from the day forced up to call it a night. The next day started very early and a good bath prepared me for the day, breakfast went quite good with Emacs jokes and sharing thoughts about OOo scripting, specifically python development.
After breakfast we had a nice run at the parliament which could have been morel complicated if I have done it by myself. Arriving to the parliament I discover that my name was not on the list even when as a speaker I should be there by default. In the end I manage to attend the talks on the parliament which had a magestic look.
The conferences itself were a bid boring except to the last speaker who talked about proprietary companies practices and impact on society including MICROSOFT and ORACLE. He also contradict some FLOSS believes however it was a big too long for my preference then again it always is. Michael Bremer talked about his relationship to Budapest. He told a story about his motorbike, and how he drove to Budapest from Germany and talked about how OOo fits in the Oracle stack of other products then he just started sounding like a salesguy about the support. OpenOffice.org project evolution from its inception in 2000 up to now 2010.
We had a nice coffee break where I talked to famous OOo author and macro developer Dimitri aka Crazylegs and talked to him about our ideas for python development and other things.
The next talk was about the migration of the Munich government. He talk about challenges and setbacks they experiences as well as some of the reasoning to push organizations to use ODF. So even if they use MS Office they should operate with ODF because otherwise you force them to become costumers of a company. This propell the mandate which now makes OOo more feasable to implement.
The next talk was more focused on ODF and standards. About how they went on comparing microsoft products and questioning the convenience to use OOo. We finally left to the CEU center to the more technical conference. The first one was about the future of OOo by Charles Schultz where we got to question the OOo project as we advance in the use of technology. I got to suggest think about completely modify the OpenOffice.org web into a data authoring tool.
We went to lunch followed by a talk by Rosana about OOo branding and guidelines and trademark currently addressed for the project. Then it was Rafaella Braconi on the future of l10n and how we will get faster and quicker translation during the development cycle and a new server for pootle and new testing platform.
Ideas, thoughts and Free Software 