• Istanbul looks great. Many cats. Helpful people. Lots of beatiful things everywhere. And I went to Asia for the first time in my life yesterday evening. Sure, it was only the asian side of Istanbul, but still, big event!

• Quite easy to spot GUADEC people when you walk around. And hard to eat somewhere and not find some of them :-)

• Lucas really is my evil twin. Proof: those two posts that also summarize my first two days. Lots of discussion with him. Hard to not fall in love with him ;-)

• Doctor Don is here. And it seems he's talking about pulse to lots of people because Shaun promised him eternal glory.

• Had a BoF about release notes. Hopefully, this has helped make people aware of the various issues we have when writing release notes. Important thing that most people seem to not know: the most consuming part of the release notes is doing research about what to put in there, not writing -- so no need to be a good writer to help! Oh, and if you're here in Istanbul, you should really go and talk to Davyd or Murray to get them excited about new 2.24 material that they should put in the release notes.

• Andreas still loves to tell this story about his ancestors, the woodmen. Explains a lot of things.

• Also had a talk/BoF about translation tools. I think we really have a good plan, and Dimtiris is so great. Good to see my beloved Danilo again and glad to see his positive feelings about all this.

• Couldn't attend many sessions so far because of meetings. That's a bit sad, but on the other hand, everything went well and there are some exciting stuff.

• I'm Silvia again this year. Still no progress in catalan.

• I also have two nametags, so I'm ready in case somebody starts stealing all nametags.

• Couldn't play the FreeFA tournament, but I heard Bastien lost. Don't know if I can go and ask him to check it's true :-)

• No Love/Hate wall yet? Any volunteer to set this up?

GUADEC in Istanbul. Baring a few initial problems (transfer to the hotel never arrived, the taxi took me to the wrong hotel and my Visa didn't initally work), things have been pretty awesome so far. In a word, I would describe Istanbul as 'odd'.


It's like having Europeans that have been relocated to south-east Asia. Road rules appear to mostly be guidelines. Taxis will do 120kph weaving between traffic without seatbelts. The roads are also really slick (as in very smooth). Shopkeepers and restaurant owners will constantly try to get you into their store.

Vegetarian food seems easily enough come by, but vegan food is a little more challenging. Some of the food I've had looked vegan (but how can you really be sure?), but I've also ended up with a meal that appeared to be spinach and sour cream.


The GUADEC startup days were suitably relaxed; catching up with people and such.

Release Notes
Although it's really Murray's turn, he's going to be a little bit busy in the coming months, so I've agreed to run the release notes effort for 2.24. I'm hoping that we can get an early start this time around, and I'm hoping to restart the Sneak Peak articles, but I need your help.

Don't worry that you're not a strong English speaker or a good writer. You can still help with the release notes effort and you can help with the most important part. The most important task in creating release notes is research. This means looking at all of the GNOME modules, reading their NEWS entries, talking to their maintainers and writing bullet points with exciting user visible changes on the wiki page. It also means looking at the Roadmap, finding out what has actually been implemented and checking that it works as described (or describe it better).

Unlike previous efforts, this time around we're using roadmap-list to coordinate the effort. Subscribe and get involved.

Finally, if you're a maintainer, or you want to help out and you're here at GUADEC; come and have a chat with me. Luis has already fingered me out, but I'd love to actually chat with you about what needs to be done. Remember, good release notes mean people see a good release.

Does anyone have an example of a site which:

1. Offers OpenID login
2. Has a remote API that allows you to log in using your OpenID rather than a username and password

How do you provide this, as a site owner? It’s not clear to me that OpenID works for machines to log into things (unless I go and set my OpenID to “always allow access” and then write a screen-scraper module for my OpenID provider).

This seems like something of a flaw in the OpenID concept. Hopefully I’m missing something.

Update: OAuth isn’t the answer here. My use-case for this is, say, a little script that allows me to post to Identi.ca. OAuth requires me (the “Consumer”) to request a “Consumer Secret” and a “Consumer Key” from Identi.ca. From my reading of the OAuth spec, that’s supposed to be specific to the script, not specific to the person running the script, which means that I can’t open-source the script (because then everyone will know my Consumer Secret). So in order for me to write an application that uses OAuth to authenticate to a site, either I can’t open source it, or everyone using the application has to apply for their own Consumer Secret and Consumer Key; at that point you might as well just set a password and not use OpenID! The OAuth spec says that “Service Providers should not use the Consumer Secret alone to verify the identity of the Consumer“, and goes on to “Where possible, other factors such as IP address should be used as well“, which as far as I can tell means “we like closed-source programs; if you want to open source something, then we don’t know how to solve that problem, so you lose”. Correct me if I’m wrong.

An introductory session on Python is being arranged by the LinuxChix team on the 13th of this month at the Red Hat offices. More details on the first link. With a little bit of Fedora stuff being talked about, it should turn out to be a nice day for learning new stuff.

As I wait for people to start, I shall do a drive-by blog post.
* Some people can be really different when they've had a drink. You haven't lived till you've heard <censored> in a tirade of swearing. He knows who he is.
* OpenOffice is driving me insane while trying to write a presentation.
* As ever, I'm / we're looking for people to hack on my / our projects. If you're around and would like to contribute to yelp, rarian, labyrinth, documentation, FoieGras or anything else related to documentation, find me. Or come to my talk.
* Last night, I decided on having the "quiet night of GUADEC". However, after visiting 2 bars, we found random GNOMEies on the steps of the hotel and I stayed until 3am. That's going to be torture for the next few days.
* On the plus side, after a shaky start the wireless seems to be good now.
* Vuntz, as ever, is my hero. No explanation, he just is.

Highlights of this release
* Performance fix, which improves the LDTP execution time drastically
* 3 crasher fixes in LDTP execution engine
* LDTP editor bug fixes reported by Shreyank Gupta
* Added 2 new API required for VMware Workstation automation
* API manual is updated
* Moved from CVS to GIT - Thanks to FreeDesktop administrators
* Thanks to Ubuntu automation team for using / evaluating LDTP
* LDTP is being evaluated by the project Open Source based Desktop Benchmark of the Linux Solutions Group e.V. (LiSoG) in Germany, Switzerland and Austria

Download source

I finally got some time to update my development tree to the new Diablo code and built a new kernel with my high-speed SD/MMC patch. Additionally, it will speed up access to the internal 2GB flash (eMMC) in the n810. For those with long memories, the Maemo bug which slows down card access when the CPU is idle is still present although there has been a little bit of activity on the Nokia side recently (They have an internal bug open for it now)

You can find my custom kernel, patches and instructions here.

Things:

• Sigh, along with seemingly every other broadcaster in the world, the ABC has gone the Silverlight route. All so they can over-charge for rentals for crappy old tv shows with DRM attached ($3/week for 1 show?). It’s amazing what influence money can buy (it only seems to be called bribery in third world countries). The ABC is funded by the government.
• Of course there is a complete microsoft dick-sucking love-fest going on in general in the aust govt and businesses, so it should come as no surprise really. And if it isn’t them, it’s Oracle. It’s amazing what a corporate box at the rugby can buy you.
• Firefox 3 appears to be getting (even) slower - this is on windoze too. I wonder if it’s an installation-age related thing? There seem to be plenty of threads on the mozilla support forums about it, and recently growing. Although they’re mostly ignored or censored.
• The aweless bar isn’t getting any easier to use either, I’d rather it at least preferentially showed what i’ve actually typed in, and if it wasn’t so bulky (on my laptop i twiddled with the oh-so user-friendly ‘userChrome.js’ to at least stop it taking up the whole screen).
• Kevin Rudd (Australia’s current Prime Minister) is getting all hot and bothered about naked children in art, and trying to impose his religious-right moralities on the nation. If he is so disgusted by childhood nudity I wonder how on earth he ever bathed his own children. It is disturbing that he (and most of the country I might add) can’t tell the difference between art and porn and turn pictures which simply represent the innocence of youth into salacious filth. Not that this sort of offensive attitude wasn’t unexpected of him, and is one reason I could never vote for him. Why not look at those poor-starving-african-sponsor-a-child adverts? There’s some good honest child exploitation if ever there was some.
• Some vegetarian organisation is trying to ‘cash in’ on the ‘world food crisis’ and global warming and has cynically started running and ad campaign at the moment saying we should all stop eating meat so we don’t kill the planet. Not going to work. If we all ‘went veg’ the planet would just be able to support more people (apparently), and so we would just take longer to reach the limit of sustainability. History (and nature) shows us that every resource-constrained population with no controlling mechanism (e.g. predation, disease) will grow to exceed it’s resources and must move on to greener pastures and/or collapse. It might take a while to do it for the entire planet but it was only ever a matter of time once disease was conquered. It isn’t what we’re putting in our mouths, it is how many mouths there are in the first place. Watch what happens to The Philippines in the coming years, as their Catholic heritage comes to bear fruit (quite literally). Of course nature may beat us to it - Tuberculosis and other diseases are making a come-back, and the shifting climate will only make things worse.
• I wonder when petrol will make $2/litre? Might take some cars off the road and make cycling a bit safer. Certainly the way roads are being built around here will not.
• I hate winter. I’m sick of the cold. You Canadians may scoff at 10-15 degrees being ‘cold’, but with low building standards, insufficient clothing, and inefficient heating systems you’d be surprised how unpleasant it is sitting around in that.

Stuff:

• Our project is in temporary(?) limbo, so we’ve been mothballing the code and data. Utterly, utterly boring, but I should get to have some time off soon, which I seem to need more often these days.
• I’ve been poking away at my CMS - slowly. Not sleeping very well, or staying up late to watch The Tour so my concentration isn’t fantastic. I figured out how to do indices - it took longer than it should have but I think I have a simple and scalable solution worked out.
  1. Each time a node is updated I parse and extract index (and chapter structure) information.
  2. For each index entry:
  3.   Form a key of the form ‘type byte’[.’namespace/’].’index word’,'target node index’
  4.   Write the entry revision record as the ‘data’, sorted in reverse (i.e. newest first).

  So I can easily look up all records by type: “find key > ‘type byte’”, or all records in a given namespace “find key > ‘type byte’.'namespace/’”, etc. With the way Berkeley DB stores duplicate records I can then skip to each separate node easily as well (and hopefully quickly too) once i’ve found the latest/live revision which will normally be the first one. One thing I haven’t worked out yet is directing entries with a finer granularity than per node (page).

• I’ve got some very preliminary code working to order nodes to generate table of contents. I’m already writing the meta-data records recording structural elements that is required to do the next step efficiently. I’m trying to use the @node node,next,prev,up links to order nodes (the hard part), but of course the tricky bit is doing sane things when the details aren’t fully specified or contradict themselves. The @node thing seems a little clumsy too, and I really have to nail down the namespace semantics fully.

  This sort of processing is one area where C (and any related imperative language - Java, C-hash, etc) seems to fall down a bit, scanning, searching, reordering lists and trees. It isn’t difficult to do, but it seems a bit clumsy and messy.

• I needed a hashtable for linking up the nodes, and the one I wrote earlier was on a machine in another room and I was too lazy to get it - so I wrote one from scratch. Ok so I need a better hash function and add a re-hash loop (actually for this use I probably don’t), but hash tables are so awesomely simple I didn’t mind writing another one, and it only took a few minutes. I improved and simplified the node iterator anyway (iirc).

  I’m starting to settle on the api I most like for hash tables too (in c):

  typedef void *key; — key is anything
  struct ht_node { struct ht_node *next; }; — node you embed in your own structure, also note no ‘key’ - your own structure holds the key, perhaps implicitly. chain link only. it needn’t be embedded as first object either, and you can embed more for different tables
  struct ht_iterator { int index; struct ht_node *next; }; — iterator, set to 0 on first call.
  struct ht_table; — anonymous

  table = ht_create(hash node func, hash key func, compare node and key func);
  ht_destroy(ht); — frees only hash meta-data
  node = ht_add(ht, key, node); — It returns an existing node (and does nothing) if the key exists - this means you don’t have to perform a separate lookup first.
  node = ht_lookup(ht, key);
  node = ht_remove(ht, key); — remove by key. remove by address needs to look up the key anyway so why bother. returns the node removed if it was there.
  node = ht_iterate(ht, iterator struct); — list all nodes in unknown order. The node returned can be removed if you want. returns NULL and resets when done.

  Why I like this vs the 30 odd function monster in glib2, or even C-hash’s version?

  1. Memory management is simpler. The hash table only manages its base structure and the bucket array. You manage everything else. And you only manage one object, not two (key, data). No need for a special (and glib-unique?) ’steal’ function either.
  2. Memory use is lower. No need for redundant ‘key’ OR ‘data’ pointers. Often the key is in the structure anyway so why duplicate it. You usually only store data in one table, so why not make that tables data structure’s part of yours. And if you really want a separate tuple-object you can do that too.
  3. Should have better locality of reference for certain data. But with modern cpu’s it’s hard to tell what will happen.
  4. The insert-existing key semantics are much simpler and clearer. With glib it isn’t obvious if the key or the data (or both) are replaced (without reading the documentation), leading to the rather unique ‘replace’ function. And c-hash throws an exception which is just a pita (it does it for lookups and removes too which is just silly, so you need an additional totally redundant ‘has key’ look up before looking it up again).
  5. Iterator mutability rules are clear and simple. In c-hash you often have to jump loops to do simple things which should be simple (e.g. remove some matching data), glib adds extra redundant api.
  6. Can be ’sub-classed’ and extended. e.g. the base object could implement a ’string’ hash table, and you could just embed that and use a different create function.
  7. In this case less is just more.

  What is bad about it though?

  1. Need at least 3 callbacks - hash key, hash node, compare key and node (could have compare node and node if you wanted to add ht_remove_node(ht, node)). And the node callbacks will have to be unique for that data type (although you could always extend and share that way).
  2. The node callbacks might need to do funny address arithmetic if the ht_node isn’t the first element or there are more than one.
  3. You must explicitly include details of the table it belongs to. e.g. one ht_node struct per table you might belong to. Of course you could create a basic tuple node-key-data table and use that too.
• Some of the code is getting quite messy, and other bits are growing quite large. Most of the complication is actually in the database layer, but most of that code isn’t too bad. The texinfo parser is also generally pretty clean. The glue is all over the place at the moment, but i’m still feeling my way in the dark there a bit.
• I had a little look at scheme. It seems quite a large language (compared to C, the language is much bigger, even if the syntax is much smaller). I think I will learn more of scheme when I have time, although because I think in terms of assembly language it will probably be tough going. One thing that convinced me that it is worth looking into is the way you can implement objects. I’ve implemented objects a few times in C, and although there’s nothing special about either (they both work more or less the same way once they’re going), in scheme it’s all done in a couple of dozen lines rather than a couple of hundred (admittedly the c objects had more features). It seems like it is simple and elegant, even if I don’t fully understand it yet (and hopefully that isn’t why it seems simple and elegant).

Thanks to Behdad and the organizers at GUADEC, I will be having a BOF/discussion session tomorrow at 4:30pm to discuss a new class of applications built on Silverlight or Flash and how they relate to the future of the Linux Desktop.

Some of the ideas are clearly derived from Alex and Chris thinking about the desktop; it is heavily influenced by our work on Moonlight; by the recent strides that Adobe has made on creating great looking applications on the web (Buzzword and Photoshop Express) and the future of Gnome.

Join me tomorrow for a discussion on how to launch an effort to create an open-source, RIA-based desktop applications.

I am very excited.

Come and see David Comay, among others, talk about OpenSolaris in SecondLife - join us at the Sun Campus, or the live stream on Wednesday 07:30 PT 9th July.

More quick comments:

• Saw half of two talks by Vincent about release notes and translation web tools and process. Cool stuff, as usual.
• Spent most of the day on the advisory board meeting (which was a much better because of Stormy’s coordination).
• Unfortunately, because of the advisory board meeting, I couldn’t play soccer. Maybe next year?
• Went for dinner with a bunch GNOME people.
• After dinner, long conversation with Vincent about several GNOME topics (future of the project, board, new contributors, current situation, etc).
• Tomorrow: one more release team meeting, one more board meeting, maybe will see some talks, and jam session at GUADEC’s opening cocktail (you can’t miss this!).

So I buckled under temptation and bought myself a 32GB CF card and a CF-IDE converter board off eBay just now; whole lot came to about 74 pounds including postage, which I think is not too shabby for what should be a fairly good 32GB SSD solution.

Claimed read/write speeds for the card are 36/40MBps which would be very nice if true, but I’m expecting it’ll probably be around half that at best. Still, I’ll do some rudimentary tests with hdparm to see how it is; hopefully it won’t be slower than the 4200rpm 1.8” disk that’s currently in there!

I also hope the battery life improves… I’ve only ever had the X40 down to about 7 or 8W power consumption at minimum; with this setup I hope to inch an extra watt out of it!

Nautilus 2.24 will have tab support:

Thanks to Jared Moore for making the tab user interface consistent with Epiphany and GNOME Terminal.

Yesterday, a BoF was scheduled for discussion of distributed version control systems with GNOME.  The BoF session did not end up really discussing the issues of what GNOME needs out of a revision control system, and some of the examples Federico used were a bit snarky.

We had a more productive meeting in the session afterwards where we went over some of the concrete goals for the system.  The list from the blackboard was:

• Contributor collaboration (i.e. let anyone use the tool rather than just core developers).
• Distro ⇔ distro and distro ⇔ upstream collaboration.
• Host GNOME source code repositories
• Code review
• Server side hooks
• Translators: what to do?
• Enforced checks
• Offline operations
• Documentation authors?
• Support Win32/Mac (important for GTK)

The sys admin tasks were broken down to:

• MAINTAINERS file syntax checking
• PO file syntax checking
• CIA integration.
• Commits mailing list
• Check that commit messages are not empty
• Trigger updates from commits (e.g. the web site module).
• Release notes tarballs
• Damned Lies support

It was clear from the discussion that neither Git or Bazaar satisfied all of the criteria.

The Playground

John Carr did a great job setting up Bazaar mirrors of all the GNOME modules.  This provided an easy way for people to see play around with Bazaar.  However, it only gave you half the experience since it didn’t provide a way to publish code and collaborate.

To aid in this, we have set up the bzr-playground.gnome.org machine, which any GNOME developer should be able to use to publish branches based on John’s imports.  Instructions on getting set up can be found on the wiki.  I hope that we will get a lot of people trying out this infrastructure.

We gave a presentation today on some of the things Bazaar provides that could be useful when hacking on GNOME.  Demoing bzr-playground was a bit problematic due to the internet connection problems at the venue, but I think we still showed some useful tools for local collaboration, searching and code review.

Meanwhile, Robert Collins has been working on some of the GNOME sysadmin features that Bazaar was lacking.  Among other things, he got Damned Lies working with both Subversion and Bazaar, with a test installation on the playground machine.

We are already in the mid-term evaluation!

This week, I spent my time to continue the integration of the new libstream-engine.

I have been confronted with many small problem due to poor understanding of some classes of telepathy and empathy, but thanks to my mentor and a few other developer, I should be achieved by this weekend (the deadline is set for July 10).

In the worst case, I will possibly change my planning.

Olivier has filled his mid-term survey today, I hope it will not be too bad!
I'm going to write mine now.

I go back to work.

Moving to the new flat took longer than expected. But I think the extra time was worth it. The whole flat and my room look pretty nice and comfortable now. Most things are organized, only for the party on friday there is some planing left to do . Internet is still an issue after two weeks of having (almost) no internet-access. Currently we are using the neighbours WLAN until our ISP is done with installing the new connection.

The Southside festival was great too. Radiohead and Sigur Ros, yeah! Tegan and Sara were also amazing. Looking back I would say it was one of the best music festivals I’ve been to so far.

Nevertheless, being away for two weeks kept me slightly behind my schedule. Version 0.1 is ready but not released, because of organizational reasons. In the meantime I’m already working on v0.2.

Last week I finished the foundation of libsoylent. That basically means I thought in greater detail of the architecture (see below), designed the needed GObject classes and made stubs for most functions and methods. From now on there should be a release every week, and a solid foundation will help a lot.

The libsoylent architecture as shown in the diagram: SlBook is the addressbook where people (SlPerson) and groups (SlGroup) are stored. People and Groups are entities (i.e. objects with attributes that can be modified etc.). SlEntities are backed by SlEntityHandlers. For SlPerson there will be an EDS-handler and for SlGroup a file-handler. More handlers can easily be added (if needed).

The storage of attributes (SlAttribute) is managed by attribute-handlers (SlAttributeHandler). They are responsible to convert runtime-values to values that can be stored by the entity-handlers (e.g. a SlAddress C-struct to a VCard-string for EDS).

If you have any thoughts on the architecture I’d be glad to hear them. This week I will have more time and work on people, group and addressbook management. And of course on the first release .

I watched the 4th of July fireworks from the 11th Floor offices of VMWare in Cambridge this year with some friends.

dscn0265.jpg, originally uploaded by jstedfast.


dscn0343.jpg, originally uploaded by jstedfast.


dscn0349.jpg, originally uploaded by jstedfast.


dscn0400.jpg, originally uploaded by jstedfast.


dscn0401.jpg, originally uploaded by jstedfast.

Update: I should note that these photos were made possible thanks to Alan McGovern's 256 MB CF card he mailed me last week. So thanks, Alan! ;-)

After the question of "who's taking care of the baby?" the most common questions I get about travel are all about traveling alone. I usually just shrug and say it's no big deal - it's not. But last week my grandma (who's 91) was asking me lots of questions about my trip to Istanbul. Are you flying by yourself? How do you get to your hotel? Will you know anybody there? Will you be eating alone all the time? She wasn't worried about me, she was just very curious. Her whole life she's wanted to go see her "cousins in Holland" and she's never gone. (I've always regretted I didn't just book tickets and take her. It would be hard to take her now for health reasons.)

So this trip I paid attention to how I do things and I realized I'm always thinking about logistics and safety. For example, here are some of the things I do:

• Money.
  
  • Before I clear customs I get cash from an ATM machine. This trip was one of those interesting times - the machine only displayed Turkish. The last screen stumped me for a minute. I was pretty sure one option was something like "do another transaction" and the other was "I'm done." But they were both one word, same color, same number of letters, ... I picked the bottom one and my card came back out. (And once again I forgot to check the exchange rate ahead of time so I just guessed at how many Turkish lira I needed. My usual approach is to withdraw the maximum option - only in Norway that turned out to be more than my bank would let me take out in any 24 hour period. Norway turned out to be expensive.)
  • I also always make sure that I have a backup id and a credit card - one in my wallet and another set in my rollaboard. If I lose my briefcase or misplace my wallet I want something to fall back on. I've heard too many horror stories of people far from home that suddenly have nothing. I think it's far more likely I would lose my wallet than I'd get robbed, but either would be a major pain.
• Transportation.
  
  • Leaving customs I looked for a guy with a sign with my name on it. The hotel had included my ride. This always makes me (unjustifiably) nervous. What if they take you somewhere else? What if they knocked out the real guy and this is some bad guy holding the sign. Too many movies! The guy holding the sign turned out to be a very polite young man who was a very cautious driver and he didn't speak any English. So I wasn't able to do my normal cab ride conversation - my Turkish wasn't quite up for it. (Usually I do public transportation or a cab.)
  • When I get to the hotel I ask about public transportation to the conference venue. If it's less than a couple of miles, I usually walk. (Dan Frye from IBM actually gave me that tip - he said he always picks a hotel he can walk from. It's his exercise in days full of meetings.)
• Lodging. I found the hotel on Tripadvisor - I searched for cheap, top ranking hotels and then I used Google maps to see how far they were from the conference venue. (Actually, first I checked the conference hotels and then I started looking for other ones.) The hotel must have internet access and positive reviews. I used to look for a gym too - a hotel with a gym is very hard to find in Europe. I also like hotels with restaurants or room service or near lots of restaurants in case I end up eating alone late at night.
• Eating. The one thing I don't like about traveling alone is eating out alone all the time so I'll try to arrange dinner with different folks if I'm in a city or at a conference where I know a lot of people. Eating out alone bothers me less now than it used to but I always remember the Denny's guy who said "You're eating alone? How sad!" If I'm eating alone, I usually end up eating with a book or my laptop open. Or I find a good people watching place - I love sitting at an outdoor restaurant watching people.

So as you can see, other than eating, traveling alone is a lot like traveling with friends and family. Just a little more quiet time to read or work on the airplane and in the hotel!

For those of us who couldn’t attend GUADEC this year, let’s build our own lil’ party!

Martin, Better.be and I (all three of us founders AbiSource Corporation B.V.) have been hacking away at our new online collaboration service called AbiCollab.net. Tons of kudos to all the work done by Foddex as well; it was a good idea to talk him into joining Better.be :)

The AbiCollab.net service allows you to store and collaborate on your documents online using AbiWord. You can use the service free of charge.

Now this service is still very much a work in progress (especially noticable by the still rather technical user interface), so we don’t want to bother the general public with it at the moment. However, if you don’t mind compiling software, and don’t mind the occasional service outage, we welcome you to try it out!

To use it, you’ll need to do 2 things:

1. Compile AbiWord 2.6.x, together with the AbiCollab plugin (make sure you have at least the libsoup, gnutls and asio developer packages installed; Ubuntu users: see update 2 at the bottom of this post):

svn co http://svn.abisource.com/abiword/branches/ABI-2-6-0-STABLE/ abiword-2.6 svn co http://svn.abisource.com/abiword-plugins/branches/ABI-2-6-0-STABLE/ abiword-plugins-2.6 cd abiword-2.6 && ./autogen.sh --prefix=<your_prefix> && make && make install cd ../abiword-plugins-2.6 && ./autogen.sh --prefix=<your_prefix> \ --with-abiword=../abiword-2.6 --disable-all --enable-abicollab \ --with-abicollab-service-backend && \ make && make install

Don’t forget to replace <your_prefix> with the prefix you want to use (or just leave out the option alltogether).

2. Register an account. You’ll need an invite key (so be quick):

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

Then start uploading some of your documents. You can open and edit them directly from the website (make sure to register *.abicollab files with AbiWord), or directly from within AbiWord using Collaborate -> Shared Documents. Note: If you use the second method, then you’ll need to create an account first using Collaborate -> Accounts.

Nifty feature of the day: Upload your CV to AbiCollab.net. Then create a permalink to the latest version of your CV in PDF form. Use this link on your homepage, just as I did on http://uwog.net/resume/. Now as soon as you hit CTRL-S in AbiWord to save some changes you’ve made to your CV, the PDF will be automagically updated to reflect your changes.

Feedback would be very much appreciated!

Update: Feel free to drop me a line if you want to try it out but didn’t get hold of a valid invite key.

Update 2: The libasio-dev package in the Ubuntu repositories misses the libboost-date-time-dev and libboost-regex-dev dependencies. Make sure to install those as well before you compile the AbiCollab plugin.

So the following must be done for color profile support: (bugs)

• one active icon in Filmstrip.cs has always color strips (when I use the color profile)
• the color profile work incorrect with any picture with transparent color

• save/load color profile settings on hdd

• anything to make the apply color profile faster?

Here is the short screencast which can try to show how slowly is it.