Plan-B for Software Documentation

Google webmaster transparency – a mystery

Kaj Kandler — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:05:53 +0000

A few days ago I did become aware that mozilla.org was hit with a notification about spam content on its website. But the message was so generic that the webmaster could not make any sense of where to find the offending content and how to remove it.

Well, count me in the camp of puzzled webmasters, that see huge drops in Google search featuring my main website, http:://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/. I used to get large numbers of visitors, but two waves of Panda and Penguin updates to Google’s algorithm did cut that stream by ~90%. Well nothing gave me any indication as to why Google search feels now basically unable to match people that search with my web-site. And I found it utterly frustrating to have to experiment based on speculation as to what Google dislikes on my website and what I could do to help my audience find me on Google.

However, the discussion about this "Mozilla" incident on http://searchengineland.com/ did gave me some new ideas how to find out.

[Google's Jake] Hubert said that if people file a reconsideration request, they should “get a clear answer” about what’s wrong. There’s a bit of a Catch-22 there. How can you file a reconsideration request showing you’ve removed the bad stuff, if the only way you can get a clear answer about the bad stuff to remove is to file a reconsideration request?

The answer is that technically, you can request reconsideration without removing anything. The form doesn’t actually require you to remove bad stuff. That’s just the general advice you’ll often hear Google say, when it comes to making such a request. That’s also good advice if you do know what’s wrong.

But if you’re confused and need more advice, you can file the form asking for specifics about what needs to be removed. Then have patience. Officially, a response might take several weeks.

Well, technically this has been said in the context of a webmaster message triggered by manual penalties. I wonder if that also works with algorithmic penalties that are unknown. Stay tuned

How to disable Fast Boot in Android

Kaj Kandler — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:15:09 +0000

Sure I’d like my phone to boot fast. So I checked the “Fast Boot” option in the settings without much thought.

But wait it says “Not recommended with some Market apps.” Well that is funny! How do I know which “Market apps” will not work well with this setting? And what are the effects of that? And why does it say “Market’, when Google did rename the “market” to “Play Store” a long while ago.

Well, I guess the best option is to wait a little longer for a boot and do:
* Go to your settings app
* Select Power
* Deselect the “Fast boot” check box

UX vs screen animations

Kaj Kandler — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:09:27 +0000

I’m having trouble with my HTC Sensation 4G (T-Mobile). It has been slow and bee getting slower. I was able to get back some speed by doing a factory reset and only installing, what I use absolutely daily. But still simple things like getting into settings from the notification shade took 1.5 seconds which is long if you are waiting for it and if ti shows you the home screen in between.

Now I pieced together some steps that help make this bearable:
* Turn off fast boot
* Disable ‘Window animation’ and ‘Transition Animation’
* Limit Background processing to max 2 processes

Voila, animated beauty is rather dispensable, when responsiveness is impeded. I’d rather work with my device day to day, then show it off to friends how cool it is.

It’s about time – upgrades and performance improvements

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:56:10 +0000

Users of Plan-B-for-OpenOffice.org can enjoy faster page loads and more stability of the website.

I wanted to do improve performance and stability on http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org for a long time. But never seemed to be the moment or my projects stalled due to the underlying Apache Cocoon framework (Version 2.1) not being maintained anymore.

Several attempts to fix some of the excessive loading of dojo related java script files where doomed. I never got anywhere. When I heard that some good souls decided it is time to update the stable 2.1 branch of the cocoon framework, instead of chasing major re-architecting with maven/spring/hibernate w/o clear goals for improvement, I saw my chance coming.

And the team that put together the release cocoon-2.1.12 a few days ago, did a great job. I had usually struggled upgrading the framework underneath my application. In part I only do it so infrequently. Not so this time. The source actually built flawlessly, and the error messages guide my path to fix issue by issue.

Feel free to report any issues you discover as a comment below.

P.S.: We also had to change hosting companies recently. Our long time partner VPSFarm has closed its business. Now the site is hosted on a VPS fully backed by SSD drives.

Twist App – On My Way! My review

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 16:50:11 +0000

The app is a great idea. Share with people you are about to meet your status in traffic, and that you are on time or late. Allowing the other party to make appropriate plans. You can use Twist to let your family know that you will arrive in a few minutes for dinner or you can let your buddies for the evening know you are already at location.

The basic functionality works alright. It sends e-mails or text messages to one or multiple parties. It starts the session, called a Twist) only once you appear to be moving.

However, the user experience needs polish everywhere.

The UI is unresponsive, it takes too long to load and to respond to any action. It is also cumbersome and not intuitive. case in point, I can’t figure out how to leave the app. I don’t see any quit button/menu item and the standard back button does not react on the main screen. It seems to wait for a GPS lock, which it will never get when I’m in a building.

Twists, the sessions that keep another party up to date, do not end on arrival. I’d expect them to end automatically and or to display a big “DONE” button. It takes three tabs (and the wait in between) to end a twist. Not funny.

Twist adds messages to the message screen about sending notifications. These messages stay forever in the notification screen, instead of self delete when one has arrived or ended the Twist.

The short cut feature (put a particular favorite Twist on the home screen) is of little help. It still requires to start the Twist (two taps) and loads slow.

Phone book search is sloooow and works marginally, when it should be fast and a good default hit.

On the other side, my counter parts find the number of messages the right amount and feel better informed.

TheReverseStartup.org Kickoff in Cambridge

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 13:18:04 +0000

Yesterday night I did attend a new Meetup group, “The Reverse Startup.org“, founded by Michael Bourque, of BostonPHP fame.

Michael wants to teach budding entrepreneurs and those with an entrepreneurial spirit to bootstrap their startup ideas by producing a perfect pitch first, a story backed by as good a mockup that one can produce and put it in front of the two audiences that matter. The pitch needs to be made to experts and investors, as well as to the potential buyers. If the pitch finds resonance there is motivation and help to build a prototype and to field test it with the audience that showed interest in the product/service.

Michael wants to build such pitches together in this Meetup group. He has >25 product/startup ideas and wants to use them as “material” to build pitches in an open group, so that everybody can learn in the process. I’m not quite sure what exactly Michael is expecting from the group members in terms of participation and commitment. I’d also like to know what he thinks will happen with the ideas that find some resonance?

I have to give credit to Michael Bourque and his main collaborators Lance Perry and Jonathan Baronville for pulling off an entertaining pitch for their idea in itself. They scripted a version of the TV show “Shark Tank” and called it “Spark Tank” to demonstrate the idea of pitches and presentations. Michael took a great risk to ask volunteers of the audience to play the roles of “Spark” investors.

I can emphasize with Michael for having lots of product/service ideas that seem great but it is not easy to find collaborators to realize. I like the idea of a focused process to develop the idea to a pitch that can be field tested with an audience and to find collaborators and investors. I look forward to Michael filling in the details of this new venture and how different folks play a role in it. I guess Michael does not know himself, the answers to many of the questions. But I give him credit for getting out there and trying to invent a new process to launch ideas into products and services.

If you live in the greater Boston area and have an entrepreneurial spark in you, you owe it to yourself to sign up and give it a try. Remember it is not about your idea, but about collaborating in a process how to turn ideas into startups. So bring your skills in product development, mockups, prototyping, marketing, etc. and join an exciting experiment in hands on learning! You have little to loose and all to win.

Twist App fixes it’s bugs

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 12:36:09 +0000

Alright, so I installed Twist on my HTC Sensation phone. Trying to set up my first twist, seemed more complicated than it need to be. When I tried to establish the party I wanted to notify, there was no search through my contacts. I found that odd, as it is one of the advertised features.

Well, it seemed to work anyway. I just had to enter the full phone number myself. Twist seems to send an initial SMS, when I start the twist and then get moving. The SMS contains the expected arrival time. It sends another SMS, when I arrive at my destination. In case I’m traveling slower than expected, because of traffic or a stop for gas, Twist sends an additional SMS with an updated arrival time. Neat, I wished, I could control a bit more how many SMS are sent and when.

Contacting support about the issue above, I was told “that is a known bug and will be resolved with today’s update.” Patiently waiting for the update to become available, I downloaded and installed. But my attempt to edit the existing twist in my favorites, did not do the trick. A couple of days later a second update did fix the issue and allows me to search my contacts. But it is rather slow.

Twist for communicating when you’ll arrive

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:57:42 +0000

I read today about an interesting service (in form of a phone app) called Twist that helps communicate to your friends, family or business partners, when you’ll arrive at a meeting/destination. It’s supposed to track your position on a map and update the expected arrival time.

As so often with Phone apps there is lots of marketing and little information of how it is supposed to work. it’s all exploring the abilities. I downloaded it and tried to understand it. After 15 min. here is my list of questions:
* How is it going to communicate with my other party? According to the support FAQ (one liners at best), the other party does not need the app, only an e-mail address or an SMS capable phone. Still how often does Twist update the other party?
* Does the app integrate with my contacts? According to the FAQ, yes! But when I create a Twist, then it can’t find my other party not by phone nor by name or e-mail address.
* How does it integrate with navigation? Does it integrate with Waze, my favorite navigation app. when I start a twist I’m shown a map, at it seems to integrate some directions too. But I don’t see any choice of navigation app. I have three different navigation apps on my phone and I don’t want to substitute my preferred app with the one the Twist does provide for me. And I don’t want to have to run both apps for battery drain reasons?

Performance degradation for websites

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 19:31:33 +0000

This confession on Google+ reminds me of my experience on Sept 11th 2001.

As my personal blog still struggles with the load caused by the not-expected #1 Hacker News promotion this morning, you might want to read on over at Gizmodo.

More then a decade ago I was huddled with my colleagues at work, around some computers to get the latest (shocking) news around highjacked airplanes flying into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Besides the emotions I remember vividly, how the power houses of news, CNN.com, NY Times.com, Washington Post.com and Boston Globe.com were all unable to deliver their web pages before timeout. The solution was the Rhein-Zeitung a small town news-paper in Mainz, Germany.

How could this provincial news paper withstand the onslaught of requests, when the best financed news organizations of the world could not? The answer was mart performance degradation. Someone at the www.rhein-zeitung.de website had the smarts to switch off all non essential styling and deliver the raw text w/o images, masthead, or advertisement.

Upgrading from TracksApp 2.1 to 2.1.1

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:44:25 +0000

I run TracksApp on an older version of Ubuntu and upgrading from 2.1 to 2.1.1 failed at the bundle install step with:
Installing mysql (2.9.0) with native extensions Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb ... *** extconf.rb failed *** Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more details. You may need configuration options. ... Gem files will remain installed in /home/conficio/.bundler/tmp/2409/gems/mysql-2.9.0 for inspection. Results logged to /home/conficio/.bundler/tmp/2409/gems/mysql-2.9.0/ext/mysql_api/gem_make.out An error occurred while installing mysql (2.9.0), and Bundler cannot continue. Make sure that `gem install mysql -v '2.9.0'` succeeds before bundling.

The cause is an added dependency on libmysqlclient-dev, which is easily solved by
$ sudo sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev

Slow Google ping

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 01:42:08 +0000

In the recent months I noticed hat I had rather slow ping times to www.google.com or mail.google.com. The latency to Google’s servers was in the 200 – 300 ms. In addition I noticed that when my workstation was on the Corporate VPN, I had *.google.com pings of < 40ms. As Google these days is the network contacted by so many websites for analytics or as CDN for JavaScript, etc. , it is of vital importance to have a fast connection to Google.

Some quick analysis revealed, that a typical traceroute to www.google.com from my home went through 12 hops of Internet and then another 17 hops in Google's network and the latency jumped by 100ms four hops into Google's network. I found that rather odd. However, when I'm on the corporate VPN, the number of hops inside the Google network shrinks to 6-8 and their latency is much smaller.

I also noticed that www.google.com had a different IP address if I used the corporate network. Measuring the latency to the IP address that I got when on the VPN showed similar latency and traceroute results. So my configured DNS servers were to blame.

Back when Verizon started to break the DNS protocol in their servers I had configured some public DNS server from Level 3, namely 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.5 as they had the best latency at the time. I had to reconsider that decision.

Armed with a free open source tool named namebench I found the fastest DNS server’s available for my connection. But it turned out that their IPs for *.google.com were as bad as the previous one’s. So I tested the two name servers that Verizon configures automatically and they provide IP addresses with 20 – 40 ms ping times and much shorter traceroutes. I guess with multi homing the Internet’s architecture has fundamentally changed. That said, Verizon still uses an intentionally broken implementation of DNS, which does not return a failure if a request can’t be resolved, instead it returns it’s own web server. I almost considered to leave it at that, as better performance seemed more important then a broken DNS. However, the usability of this “helpful” Verizon server is horrible, as it redirects to its own URL, so if I make a typo I have to essentially retype my address or edit the original request in my URL bar to correct it.

As a last resort, I tested Google’s public DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. While Google’s DNS servers do not answer as fast as my local verizon servers, they are only marginally slower and can deliver the proper IP addresses for the Google network without breaking the DNS protocol in the process.

Booting to single user mode in Mac OS X with Windows keyboard

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 23:18:06 +0000

I love my ergonomic MS Elite keyboard, so I use it on my Mac Pro workstation. However, today I needed to boot into single user mode to repair the filesystem of the boot partition. Normally you hold down the Command+S keys, but that only works with original Apple keyboards (and even then it seems to be unreliable for bluetooth keyboards). Apparently the key mapping happens in the drivers or some later stage of the OS and this is not loaded at the boot time.

I found out that the boot manager rEFIt has an option to boot n single user mode as well. Simply select the Mac OS X you want to boot and hit F2 to get a menu of different boot modes, such as safe mode or single user mode.

Mac OS X: Window management for multiple monitors

Wed, 02 May 2012 12:43:39 +0000

I just started to use multiple monitors on Mac OS X (Leopard) and immediately encountered issues with Outlook for Mac OS X. When I open a new window, to write a new e-mail, it positions the window on the main monitor and not on the second monitor where I have Outlook open.

That becomes very annoying when you use Screen Sharing and look only at one monitor at a time.

A small tool, SizeUp, comes to the rescue. SizeUp lets me most of all move the current active window to the other monitor, using a keystroke. So when I open a new window and it appears on the wrong monitor I can easily put it into its place.

SizeUp also allows to size the currently active window to the right or left half so I can have two windows side by side on a monitor, which is great for copying comparing documents.

Is Google+ author ship the end of scraper sites?

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:39:10 +0000

If you run a website of some mild success, then you have come across so called “scraper” sites. A scraper site copies content form RSS feeds and potentially the web pages of a site and re-publishes it as their own content. Tonight I read a blog post about “benign scraper sites” by AK John.

Scraper sites hope to attract visitors that then click on advertisement and so make money for their owners. If they are combined with Search Engine Optiomization, they can outrank the original. Scraper sites are certainly a violation of copyright. John thinks that even benign scrapes, those that link back to the original source are harmful duplication of content that cloggs the arteries of the Internet.

When I also read Johns recent post on Google’s ambitions with “AuthorRank and the rel=author verification”. It became clear to me that Google can/will use the author verification of content to know which site has the original content and which site has the copy. Because the Google+ Author profile will point back only to the original site.

So to outrun the Scraper sites I will claim author ship for my content.

Here is the question for my readers, will Google be able to detect if the scraper site sets up fake Google+ profiles and modifies the author links? Does Google have a way to detect who published first?

Is valid HTML obsolete? BestBuy.com thinks so…

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:48:45 +0000

Tonight I happened to read an article that made a claim about the BestBuy.com website and its use of certain semantic web technology. I was curious how they employed the technology so I looked at one of their web pages for a random TV.

I was amused that even such a large retailer could make some simple mistakes. I found numerous places where invalid HTML was used, due to using reserved characters in regular text. Proper HTML should use substitues called entities. The error is triggered by a TV’s screen size being measured in Inches, which is often expressed with the double quote sign (“). However the double quote is a reserved character in HTML and so needs to be replaced by " where ever it is used.

Here are a few examples from BestBuy.com

Dynex™ 42" Class / LED / 1080p / 60Hz / HDTV

Its funny that the page encodes one special character properly (the Trademark symbol as ™), but not the other. But then in other places it messes up the trademark symbol and encodes the double quote correctly

As it happens this error is in the area of code I was interested in. And yes, in one place both are correct.



<br />
Dynex™ - 42" Class / LED / 1080p / 60Hz / HDTV - DX-42E250A12

If you read the source code it is peppered with things like tracking codes and semantic web data to make it attractive for search engines and other programs that analyze code automatically. I think these encoding mistakes do mitigate those efforts to a certain degree.

For that reason I check all (most of) my pages with an HTML syntax validator. Not that I correct all mistakes, because most browsers can handle some of the mistakes just fine (including this one, except for the third example). However, every browser (and other programs reading HTML, such as search engine crawlers) is different in their ability to handle invalid code. So I try to take as little chances as necessary.

LibreOffice 3.5 released

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 03:04:02 +0000

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 3.5. The new release has above all improved performance due to the elimination of dead code that is not used anymore or not really needed. This made the application lighter and faster. The most gained has LibreOffice Calc, the spreadsheet application.

Another focus has been interoperability, that allow documents from the Microsoft Office suite and Office Open XML documents to be read. Especially, scalable symbols from PPTX files are not imported correctly and various SmartArt is understood by LibreOffice 3.5. I’m sure that many office users will welcome the new ability to import Visio diagrams and reproduce them correctly. Also the import of RTF formatted documents has been improved.

LibreOffice 3.5 does now also support more completely the Open Document Format specification 1.2. Various graph forms are smoothed better, new data point and line ending symbols have been added. Unfortunately documents saved in the new version of the format are not yet recognized as valid by the Microsoft Office family. Lets hope the “leading” office suite does make its product interoperable soon.

Another major addition is a new and improved grammar checking tool, packaged with the Libre Office suite.

What is a good/bad/average bounce rate?

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 03:31:47 +0000

I did start working the user experience of Plan-B for Openoffice.org because I thought that 70% of a bounce rate is rather high. While I succeeded with some first steps to encourage visitors to explore the site, some other steps did not do as much as I had hoped. However I was wondering what my target should be? What would be a good bounce rate, specifically a good bounce rate for my type of site? I wondered if there is a benchmark that I could measure myself against?

Today I read the Google Help article about high bounce rate. Most informative is the video from Avinash Kaushik @ MarketingProfs.com. He states:
* Marketing metrics are different for every website
* Typical bounce rates are between 40 and 60%
* There are two reasons for a visitor bouncing:
* The visitor found what she was looking for (satisfied customer?)
* The visitor did not think she found what she was looking for (window shopping, in the wrong place, different expectations)
* It is hard (impossible) to know which is the reason for a bounce
* However changes in bounce rate are significant. The trend is your friend!
* Bounce rate is a great qualifier metric!

So here it is some number I can compare with. However, the nugget I learned is to read the bounce rate in conjunction with other metrics:
* How does the bounce rate for different traffic sources (Google vs. Bing, Search vs. Direct Link vs. Mail campaign, AdWords vs Organic search)
* How does the bounce rate differ per keyword on the same landing page?
* How does the bounce rate differ on the top 20 landing pages?

Implementing Google Custom Search inline with the menu bar

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:05:14 +0000

I recently decided to replace the lucene based search engine on Plan-B for OpenOffice.org with a Google Custom Search engine. At first glance this seems to be an easy task. Remove the old code and replace it with some Google Java scripts. However this is not how it turned out to be.
I targeted a layout, where the search box is part of the general navigation menu bar and results appear on their own page. However the HTML/CSS code generated by Google is rather inflexible. The two page template came the closest as it generates two separate code snippets, one for the search box and button and one for the search results.
So I had to add some CSS to make the divs and its generated child elements inline elements
div#cse-search-form { display: inline-block; zoom: 1; ... } div#cse-search-form * { display: inline; ... }
Another inconvenience is that the JavaScript includes an absolute URL for the results page. But it also works when I omit the protocol and hostname part
options.enableSearchboxOnly("/search/index");

Replacing local search with Google Custom Search

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:58:13 +0000

I have replaced the Plan-B for OpenOffice / LibreOffice search engine with Google Custom Search.

The local search engine based on lucene was heavy on resource consumption and did require a lot of effort to keep up the indices with new or changing content. So I decided to switch to a Google Custom Search Engine.

I hope this change makes the site an even better resource or OpenOffice and LibreOffice users. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on how to improve search on the site.

Making first Impressions

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 02:59:11 +0000

In my quest to improve the user experience at Plan-B for OpenOffice/LibreOffice, I did change the over 1,000 video pages, such as “Export a presentation in PDF format” or “How to create an Agenda Template with Writer.”

All video pages were constructed the same. Front and center was a massive frame for the 800×600 video player. Every video started instantly when the page loaded. I replaced the frame it with a simple “play video” button that brings up an overlay to play the video. This button is much smaller and allows you to start the video multiple times.

I have read that starting video instantly is not appreciated by most users and I sympathize. Although our videos are silent, and do not draw attention immediately from everybody around, it feels better to be in control.

This change brings the textual content of the pages above the fold and I hope this will stimulate users to explore the site more fully. if I’m right this should influence lower the bounce rate and increase the average time spend on the site.

54% have no need to view ODF docs on their Android device

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 02:44:11 +0000

Three days ago I asked the question “How often do you view OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents on your Android device?” on Plan-B for OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice The 100 free answers came in fast. The survey was closed in less than two days.

Thank you to all that participated, here are the results

Clearly ODF documents are not very popular on Android devices. 54% that did take the time to answer the question said, they never needed to do so. 27% replied they don’t have an Android device. I assume the real number of users w/o an Android device is even higher, as it was self selecting to answer the question in the first place.

However 13% did view an ODF document at least once and 4% do it more often than once a week. I think we can assume that nearly 100% of Android devices are phones. The answers might be different when we ask the question for iOS, the Apple mobile operating system.

Your thoughts?

Do you view OpenOffice/LibreOffice docs on Android?

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:18:12 +0000

Today I added a survey to all video pages on Plan-B for Open Office / LibreOffice.

The survey asks “How often do you view OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents on your Android device?”

Never, I don’t have an Android device
Never, did not need to
Tried once, did not work
Tried once, successful
Several times
Once a month
Once a week
More Often

I used SurveyMonkey with a free account.

Plan-B for OpenOffice.org is alive

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 01:51:46 +0000

After a longer time of minimal maintenance at Plan-B for OpenOffice.org, I find more time to edit and improve the site.

I did clean up some broken links, updated the statistics to reflect that we now have over 1,000 videos and worked on some spelling errors.

I have decided I have to move this web site project of mine from an altruistic endeavor to something that sustains itself. I’ll experiment how to change things to make this resource more attractive to its users and also how to generate some income from it. I can’t continue to foot the bill for hosting and if I can get revenue from the site I can invest it back into adding content and improving the service to its users.

The first step will be to re-vamp its analytics, as to measure what works and what does not. Next I’ll experiment with changes to the site so that traffic increases but also to engage users in different ways and more deeply. The web has been a different place when I designed the site in 2004 and much has changed. Search engine optimization has changed a lot and still remains the same. And social network websites such as Twitter, Facebook or Google+ have become a medium for users to gather and share ideas. In addition users consume their content on cell phone and small screen tabled computers. I will have to adapt the site’s content and marketing accordingly.

But also OpenOffice has developed a good deal. There is an evolved look and feel and new features and especially the fork of LibreOffice has added a whole lot of new functionality to cover in tutorials and videos.

If you care bout these topics, please drop me a line or comment.

GNOME 3 desktop brain storming

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:42:12 +0000

The recent GNOME 3 hackfest in the UK got me thinking of my ideal desktop design – task oriented and controlling interrrupts

Here would be my vision of this:

Have separate desktops for each task (open documents, web pages, chat sessions, e-mails, contacts, bookmarks, browser/search history, …) and that persists across login sessions (under a name) and ideally across machines (web sync like Mozilla Weave)
When I start a task I might want to start with the desktop of another task (snapshot) or a blank slate
Have a system to do fast task switching (like the multi screen desktops, but not limited to the number of those) and also a system that notifies me of activities that belong to other tasks (like chat responses, mail replies, etc.) Ideally filtered by a priority/importance level of the task intruding (or filter by the planned work – stuff relevant to tasks that I have planned to work on today or tomorrow –> scheduling)
Make task contexts such as personal/work/hobby/moonlighting (or even sub contexts like projects) and allow me to switch between those and filter notifications with different filters for disruptions in those. For example notify me of the important private reply at work, but not of the important reply on hobby. But while in hobby notify me of anything that is important.
Allow to set availability levels for IM with switching contexts (tasks with different priorities and task contexts) automatically. Sometimes even separate profiles.
Allow the kind of scheduling that is indicated with the Task popper and within the time buckets a simple order/ranking to make a plan
Give me desktop search with clear priority for task local results over global results.
All tasks are archived, the waste basked is only task specific. May be have a Shredder to really delete things across tasks?

In simple terms give me a desktop per task (where I can have the relevant documents, contacts, e-mails, etc. just persistent around, even if they may be shared across tasks) that I can switch between easily and a virtual room that I can control what communication comes through the walls to intrude with the tasks that I’m at.

And I don’t start talking about sharing resources/documents across users for collaboration. That would be the ultimate virtual room/desktop, although who loves someone else rearranging one’s desktop, so I probably wanted my private view

Switching to a Mac and Mac OS X

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 01:42:02 +0000

For over 8 months I have been working on a Mac Pro now. Let me share some of my experience with the you.

First I ran the beast with Windows XP on it. And this machine is a beast! It’s quad core server type processors are fast and the box in itself is put together in a way that it deserves the “Pro” for professional in its name. After realizing that memory under Windows XP was limited to 2 GB for some reason and we could not get it to even accept 3 GB of the 6 that it was configured with, I decided to switch to its native Mac OS X.

Let me share a few of my impressions to use a Mac OS X for programming, lots of reading/browsing, e-mail and Office work:

It does use memory economical. I can run way more apps at the same time than on my Windows XP laptop with the same amount of RAM (only 4 GB of the 6 GB it originally had). Not to mention that is stays responsive even with my usual 20 – 30 tabs in Firefox.
It is rock solid. It runs weeks w/o reboot, unless I start Windows in Parallels. The Windows VM does bring the machine to a crawls after a day or two. Don’t know if it is Windows or Mac OS X.

BBBOnline lowered security of its application form

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 01:02:25 +0000

Today, I re-checked to see if the BBBOnline website is still unsecured.

The good news is, the expired SSL Certificate is gone. Instead the online form which asks all kind of confidential business and personal information is completely unsecured (http:// instead of https://).

Apparently they BBB is not willing to invest $50-$200 in a SSL Certificate to secure my data I submit to them. Way to go Better Business Bureau!

Shame on the Better Business Bureau (BBB)

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:23:17 +0000

My trust in the Better Business Bureau® just got shattered. I always thought of it as a useful and trustworthy institution. Here is why I don’t think of them highly anymore.

I was researching good practices in privacy policies for websites and came across a terrific page by BBBOnline.org How to craft your privacy policy. It is really well written and I found it very helpful. So I decided to learn more about their BBBOnline Seal program. So far so good.

It hit me in the face, when I did click on the little “Apply now” button at the bottom of the page. The SSL certificate of this terrific site is expired over a month ago.

An expired SSL certificate is more than a glitch, especially expired five and a half weeks. The very company that tries to dispense trust on the Internet can’t manage its trust certificate for a secure transaction? Shame on the webmaster of bbbonline.org and shame on the business leaders that have no control mechanism to detect such a vital issue.

Innovation in Software Manuals

Fri, 02 May 2008 14:06:09 +0000

This week, Ingots, a group dedicated to teach IT skills based on open source, has published “Introduction to OpenOffice.org for Windows and Linux” (Use “Login as a guest”, to view the material).

I like the concept and the content of the course. However, I’m curious how it compares to the innovative approach of “Plan-B for OpenOffice.org. What is your opinion?

Do you prefer a traditional course offering like the one from Ingot or do you prefer the video based Software manuals from Plan-B?

Would you like to have course material with demo documents and quizzes on Plan-B for OpenOffice.org?

Please leave your comments about innovation in software manuals.

OpenOffice.org 2.4 released

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 15:09:40 +0000

OpenOffice.org Release 2.4 is now available for free download.

Curious about what changed?

Release 2.4 has improved

Ease of use for setting languages for selected text in multi language documents
The chart module with
- improved label formatting and positioning,
- regression charts,
- and inverted axis
The presentation application (Impress) has added
- 3d slide transitions
- Pictures as slide background
The spreadsheet application (Calc) has added
- Splitting text into separate columns
- Start formula entry with “+” for faster data entry from the numeric key pad
- Better flow when entering rows of data
- Drag and drop cells and columns to move them
- Performance for loading large spreadsheets
The word processor application (Writer) has added
- more powerful regular expressions for find and replace
Update notification for application and extensions
Performance in general
Improved localization and spell checking for 10+ languages.

OpenOffice.org Ninja has an excellent introduction to new features in Open Office 2.4. Screencasts about the new features are coming soon.

Walmart $200 PC only Available Online

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:08:05 +0000

According to InfoWorld, Walmart discontinued selling its $200 gPC from Everex in stores.

The $200 PC loaded with Google applications will continue to be available at the Walmart.com website.

As reason, Walmart’s spokes person, O’Brien said “The idea was to see if shoppers in our stores would respond as they do online to the offering. The answer is that customers did not respond to expectations, so we decided not to restock.” This is an interesting contrast to the many reports that the low cost, low energy PC has sold out in some stores and Walmarts pride to be able to manage inventory best. Also, Paul Kim, director of marketing at Everex, says “The sell-through [at Walmart stores] was brisk, I am surprised at the decision,” said Paul Kim, director of marketing at Everex.

Interestingly, O’Brian felt compelled to say “We did not ‘pull’ Linux from our shelves or make any kind of ‘announcement’ on this,” she said.

Comparing Office Applications in the Trenches

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:04:58 +0000

At ZDNet, Christopher Dawson compares NeoOffice vs. OpenOffice vs. Office 2008 vs. iWork. He obviously comprares them on Mac OS X, as GeoOffice or iWork and Office 2008 are special releases for the Apple Mac platform.

His report is influenced by his experience managing the IT for a school in Western Massachusetts. Chris concludes:

iWork is very slick and integrates well brilliantly with iLife. Itâ€™s easy to use, but powerful enough for serious users. However, itâ€™s lack of compatibility with open file formats is of concern. Office 2008 is also slick and highly functional but not nearly as effortless to navigate. Even with academic pricing (iWork is priced around $10/license academic versus almost $70/license for Office), Office is a bit pricey and hard to justify when cheaper or free alternatives exist. OpenOffice for the Mac really isnâ€™t worth a second look right now given its lack of integration and compatibility. NeoOffice has its niggles, but is generally a solid, easy to use office suite. Even if you choose iWork of Office, it should be installed on all of your usersâ€™ machines to ensure compatibility with their students. It could certainly stand alone, as well, but the relatively inexpensive iWork is a hard bit of kit to pass up.

Stumbledupon Plan-B for OpenOffice.org

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:06:02 +0000

This weekend something amazing happened to the traffic at Plan-B for OpenOffice.org. It doubled!

Why? Someone discovered the Open Office Calc video table of content page using the StumbledUpon Toolbar and must have shared it with her friends. And the crowd was really interested. Visitors that came from Stumbledupon stayed 35% longer than average visitors and their bounce rate was half of the usual average.

Don’t you love feedback for your work?

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:06:25 +0000

We at Plan-B for OpenOffice.org do love feedback from our users. On average, about 50% send us back a thank you for our answers to their OpenOffice questions. Some of the best we publish on our testimonials pages.

Dear users and readers keep them coming. We love your feedback and appreciate a thank you any time. It is so rewarding!

OpenOffice goes wireless

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:35:35 +0000

I just stumbled upon this quote

The design uses the same hardware platform as existing WiMax base stations, bearing out assertions from Airspan and others, that a WiMax base station can be sold as an LTE base station, using a different software load. “It’s just like a PC that can run either OpenOffice or MS Office,” said Baines. “We can build a card with the same hardware and run either WiMax or LTE.”

about OpenOffice in an unusual place. It is part of a report about 4th generation wireless equipment. Thanks Mr. Baines, you made my day!

Consider migrating to OpenOffice.org!

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:35:23 +0000

Solveig Haugland, one of the best known trainers and consultants for OpenOffice.org offers free presentations about migrating to Open Office, to organizations that are interested in such a task.

Solveig is the author of many books, teaching Open Office software. Her latest book is “OpenOffice.org 2.0 Guidebook“, which you can also order from Amazon.

OpenOffice.org Community Challenge

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:07:05 +0000

Sun Microsystems wants to encourage more participation in the Open Office community. For that purpose Sun sponsors a contest for contributions to OpenOffice.org offering $175,000 in price money and public acknowledgment of achievement.

The contest asks not just for development contributions, such as source code or extensions. The contest also solicits documentation, artwork, marketing materials and methods, tools to improve the community in areas such as distribution, translation, etc. It even accepts improvements to OpenDocument Format (ODF) and other creative ideas.

There are a few conditions for entry: You must create original work free of other people’s rights and be of legal age. You also must be a member of the OpenOffice.org community (registered at OpenOffice.org). For the cash prizes you need to live or be a legal resident of certain countries and territories. You can enter the contest as an individual or a group.

If you are interested, read the rules carefully. Determine if you are eligible for cash prizes. If you live in Austria or the Philippines, you are out of luck in this category. Also make sure that what you produce does comply with the licenses of OpenOffice.org and can be contributed to the OpenOffice.org project under the Contributer Agreement (different from the licenses). You should also be willing to have Sun Microsystems use your work for publicizing the Contest and the OpenOffice.org software.

Can’t wait for Native Mac OS X Open Office?

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:55:20 +0000

If you are an Apple MAC fan and want to use OpenOffice, you are stuck with a version that needs X Windows, which is reportedly slow and looks and works like an alien in NY. Your alternative is NeoOffice, which has a more integrated look and feel but still is reportedly slow.

However, there is hope. The Open Office community has started a project to port the program to Mac OS X and do the work required to integrate the Aqua UI and other Mac OS X goodies. The bad news is that this work will only be included in Release 3.0, scheduled for the fall of 2008. But I found developer snapshots of native Open Office for Mac OS X and reportedly the version “OOH680_m4″ is quite stable and does its work surprisingly fast.

Is there still Gold in Montana?

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:17:59 +0000

I just discovered Tomahawk Gold from Native Winds of Montana. It looks like an attractive software package to print booklets from a variety of formats such as ODF, OOXML, txt, RTF, and XML.

This application does include its own editor to correct potential import glitches and reformatted files ready for printing in various formats, such as 1up, 2up (booklet) and 4up so proof your layout while saving paper. It allows you as well to produce PDF files directly for electronic distribution and printing by the end-user. The product sells for $36, download only.

The same company also produces a document converter from MS-OOXML or ODF to RTF. This is a freeware program, just to download from their website. Freeware Genius thinks the Converter is worth its money

Portable OpenOffice Release 2.3.1 is out

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:32:48 +0000

My dialog from yesterday, regarding am OpenOffice.org document viewer for presentations, did continue today. The user explained to me "The need [for an OOo Impress viewer] arises when you prepare a presentation using OO and take it on a flash drive to client site where there is no OO already installed. Hence the need!"

I believe this is a case for OpenOffice.org Portable, a build in the Open Office Eco System that allows to run the full application set from a portable drive, such as a USB Stick or USB hard drive.

Incidentally, the PortableApps team has released the latest OpenOffice.org version 2.3.1 a couple of weeks ago.

Do you need an OOo Player?

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:15:19 +0000

Over the holidays, one of the users of Plan-B for OpenOffice.org asked me “Is there something equivalent to Powerpoint [Viewer]?” so you do not need to own the software to receive and view ODF files.

To the best of my knowledge there is not. Actually I would think there is not need. As anybody can download Open Office for free and install the full package it is about as much work as downloading the free MS Office PowerPoint Viewer.

One could argue that this is not equivalent, because you want to only install the viewer for presentations and not the whole application. However you can install only Impress the Open Office application for presentations and the difference in file size is minimal. You even get as a goody the presenter mode, allowing you to not only view the presentation but also present it on an external monitor. Free open source has its benefits I guess.

Why You Should Update Before the Holidays

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:45:49 +0000

OpenOffice.org has released a bug fix release 2.3.1 for its popular Open Office productivity suite.

If you are using the product you should upgrade, especially if you use and exchange OOo Base database applications. Because up to release 2.3 the internal database application has a security risk that allows an attacker to execute raw Java code within the database. Basically he can do anything with it, from destroying your data to sending a copy to himself over the Internet.

So, do it quick, do it now and update OpenOffice.org to release 2.3.1.

New Open Source E-Magazine

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:42:28 +0000

There is a new magazine on the electronic newsstand. It is called o3 magazine and published by Spliced Networks.

The magazine reports on news in the open source world and is distributed as PDF document. The complete magazine is produced using open source tools, namely Open Office for writing articles, Scribus for page layout and Gimp for image production.

I read the recent #9: Open Source Publishing and found it rather unimpressive. The black and white design schema looks rather morbid and the overall layout is not very consistent. My pet peeve is gray text on black background for the table of content. Why make it hard instead of easier for readers to find what is in the magazine?

As to the content, it did not strike me as impressive. One article about publishing images with Gimp, and another one using Scribus, and two articles about OpenOffice, the very same tools that are used in the production of the magazine. The two articles about using OpenOffice are about writing a newsletter and about collaborative writing with the Open Office word processor Writer. Both articles lack a vivid writing style and any usable detail. What I learned from it was “Open Office can do both, collaborative writing and publish a newsletter”, no more. I didn’t learn anything how particular good OOo is at performing the task or how bad, how I actually do it, what steps to take, what pitfalls to avoid or where the programs limits are. Both articles did not even contain one screenshot to dazzle me with a marvelously appealing result.

Live Documents Promises OpenOffice.org Support

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:56:43 +0000

I never cared for Hotmail, the Microsoft online mail account. I always found it not very user friendly. Hotmail was bought by Miscrosoft in 1997 to compete with the then dominant online mail provider Yahoo! Now, Sabeer Bhatia one of Hotmails founders, has launched an new venture in Online Office document software, called Live-Documents.

Mr. Bhatia is Chairman of Bangalore based, InstaColl and wants to compete with Google, Microsoft, Adobe and many others with a browser based application to create, edit and manage office documents. Documents can be shared with anyone who has an e-mail for notification of changes and edited online in a Adobe Flex based application. Live documents also supports off line work on documents through a plugin for MS Office 2003. The company also plans support for Open Office as well as a Flash based local client program from the company itself. Offline documents are synced back to the central service ASAP. The storage server allows light document management services such as permissions to edit or print a document as well as attaching workflow tasks like review and approval.

The new service is available on an invitation only preview basis. The company plans to offer free service for personal use and business use for a fee.

Is OpenSoical the new spamming platform?

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 23:45:36 +0000

Today I had to read a proud account of Plaxo that its new Plaxo Pulse Web 2.0 networking platform has seen a traffic surge since it announced to offer the OpenSocial API.

My personal experience with Plaxo Stream is rather negative. For several weeks now Thomas Power, Chairman at Ecademy and Owner, Ecademy.com sends to my Plaxo account and my Inbox messages reading:

Thomas Power shared something with the Jon… Network group.

You can view it here: http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/events/…/

Thanks!
The Plaxo team

I don’t find this funny in any way. It is plain and simple spam. I don’t know the guy and as a spammer I will certainly not network with him.

Plaxo, fix your spamming issue and while you are at it fix your broken plugin for Thunderbird, which produces duplicates, if you want to do some good for your services.

How to Build an Ultra Low Cost PC for $100

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:31:39 +0000

While Everex started selling its low cost PC for <$200 at WalMart, it now offers the motherboard, CPU and OS bundled for $60. Add some memory and a hard drive ($40) and salvage an old computer case, power supply, keyboard and mouse ($0) and your are up and running for $100 and a little sweat equity.

LinuxDevices.com has an in depth report about Everex’s plans for its Linux and Google applications based $200 PC. LinuxDevices reports that Everex hopes to sell 50,000 to 60,000 PC’s through WalMart. The main concern for profitability are the support costs, which Everex hopes to keep under $30 per sale.

The developer board comes with the CPU and a DVD containing the ready to install gOS Operating System. According to the article, gOS is an Ubuntu based Linux distribution with the Enlightenment Window manager for the low cost PC is called gOS like in Google OS for its inclusion of all Google online tools available and pre installed. The vision is to use online Google tools for Search, E-Mail, Calendar, Bookmarks, Text Documents, Spreadsheets, and more. If needed local applications, such as the office suite OpenOffice.org are included as well. gOS is also open source and available for download, but it appears the version delivered with the board or the PC is pre configured to the hardware and adds programs for multimedia (playing mp3, DVD, etc.). You can’t expect an abundance of performance from the Via C7 processor, however, it does a good job with web browsing and running basic applications and multi media playback.

Would you Trust a WalMart PC for Under $200?

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:39:22 +0000

Gee, WalMart is becoming a major outlet for Open Source PCs. It just announced a desktop PC for under $200, including mouse and keyboard and even speakers. The machine is rather green than powerful, as it uses a 1.5 Ghz VIA G7 processor, which has enough juice for homework and playing mp3s, and in turn is quite energy efficient. This machine needs just 2 Watt power on average (how ever that is measured) and is almost not to be heard, with 28db noise levels.

The kicker is this is a PC with lots of open source software and w/o MS Windows. It runs a Debian based Linux distribution called gOS, including OpenOffice 2.2 and uses lots of Google, YouTube, Facebook and other web applications pre-installed. Some might see the Google web applications as bloatware, but at last they are not try & buy versions.

You have to buy an extra monitor or use one of those that are discarded in perfect working order. I know a few people who have dumped their nice 19″ tubes for flat screens. So if you have more space than money, ask around their might be a good monitor for free in some garage. Did anybody say Craig’s List?

Surprise, Open Standards are not Free of Business Interest

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:22:04 +0000

OpenDocument Format (ODF), the standard accepted as ISO 26300 norm, has been mired in some controversy. The OpenDocument Foundation, a group formed to promote the standard format across different applications and platforms, has now denounced its support for ODF. The reasons cited is that Sun Microsystems, in control of OpenOffice.org/StarOffice the largest application supporting ODF, does not allow more compatibility to legacy formats such as .doc or MS OOXML. Sun favors supporting legacy document formats in the application, with appropriate import/export filters, while the ODF Foundation thinks it should become part of the format itself.

Recently, Sun has come under scrutiny for its policies surrounding OpenOffice.org and ODF. Some have even speculated if Novel instituted a fork of the OpenOffice.org project. It should come at no surprise that standards, as open as they may be, are a business tool. The ODF standard and the fact that it offers transparency which enables safety in archiving documents and having access centuries into the future forced Microsoft to rethink its own document formats. Now the ODF Foundation is surprised that Sun does want to keep out direct compatibility with the rival format(s).

However, having witnessed the discussions of ODFoundation members on some mailing lists, there also seem to be some strong personalities at work. Or is it the rivalry between MS Office Plug-in developments from the ODFoundation and Sun Microsystems that is causing all the bad blood?

The sad fallout of this is that the ODFoundation wants to morph itself into a CDF Foundation, CDF being another document format proposed by the influential standard body W3C. It will stop developing its MS Office plugin to seemlessly read and write ODF documents.

ODF gets a Bite at the Apple

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:57:47 +0000

Apple releases tomorrow its latest version of Mac OS X called Leopard. It’s build-in text editor TextEdit now supports ODF and MS OOXML. This means it can exchange text documents with OpenOffice.org Writer, NeoOffice Writer and also with MS Word 2007.

Many Mac OS X fans now hope that Apple will soon support the ISO standard ODF in the iApplications such as iWork.

OpenOffice Release 2.3 well received

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:43:25 +0000

Can 900,000+ users a week be wrong? It appears that nearly a million people download OpenOffice.org since the release of 2.3. Mark Herring, Senior Director, Marketing, StarOffice/OpenOffice.org at Sun Microsystems Inc. reports in details about the uptick in weekly download triggered by the latest release and the publicity of the OOoCon 2007 in Barcelona.

While the numbers are impressive, I think Mark’s speculation of cost for a regular markerting campaign to reach the same results is excessive. I think it is safe to assume that the majority of extra downloads are upgrades by existing users. If this would be a commercial product, one would not need to buy millions of e-mail addresses to reach the existing users. In a traditional proprietary software model, users register their software and with that allow the company to inform them of new releases. So there is no cost of 10c per e-mail to reach the existing user base. And some proprietary products get their users to even download automatically what ever they throw at them. I see this comparison as a bit shaky.

The other OpenOffice from Siemens

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:06:04 +0000

Siemens jsut annouced its latest offering in small business VOIP solutions and called it “HiPath OpenOffice ME”.

This has abolutely nothing to do with the free open source OpenOffice.org productivity suite for individuals, small and larg businesses as well as education or government.