Web 2.0 … is basically a collection of random unspecified features written by 23-year-old goth acidheads at Netscape in 1995 [a funny and incisive post on Android]

… we at the OpenDocument Foundation have been displeased with the direction of ODF development this year. We find that ODF is not the open format with the open process we thought it was or originally intended it to be. … [it] does not adequately respect existing standards and does not address the market’s requirements for a single Universal Document Format with which any and all applications can work on an equal basis. [1]

It escapes me how anyone apart from those uninitiated to the word processing netherworld could have expected anything else from the mighty Re and his high priest. It all feels like an Indiana Jones sequel — I wonder, is the holy grail there to be found, or will we all just have to put up with our mortality?

P.S. If we all ask Santa nicely, we will find a universal file format in our stockings this festive season (if it does not turn up, it will be because were up to no good; Santa, as we all know, does not like that).

I would much recommend Kalymnos as a climbing destination for anyone leading a French 5 and above; the rock is excellent, as is the bolting standard (only came across one poorly bolted route during the week, called Hibiscus Market), and the routes are plentiful. We stayed at the Melina’s (also to be recommended) in Myrties, which is a bit further away from the cliffs than Massouri, but the main climbing area is pretty compact and it turned out to be of no real consequence (and for the further away places scooter / car can be rented in any case). Plenty of places to eat, and eat well; the Agean was probably the best place we ate at, but none of the other places we tried was anything but excellent. The locals are very friendly, helpful, and everyone seems to speak English.

Some observations. First of all on OpenGL programming for windows: in the year 2007 you only get a 1997 version of OpenGL (v1.1); probably not surprising, considering M$ investment in DirectX. Anyway, it makes no difference thanks to the nice idea behind the GLee library by Ben Woodhouse, which transparently handles the extension API for you — basically, you do #include <gl/glee.h> instead of #include <gl/gl.h>, add the (static) glee.lib to the linker command line, and then can use OpenGL API up to 2.2 plus any vendor extensions the HW might support (and it works on *nix, win32 and Mac OSX!).

Second, all *nix programmers should time from time be made to do something on windows, it makes you appreciate what a nice and powerful environment for software development *nix is (really, cmd.exe is a pathetic excuse for a shell, and any time you want do anything slightly more than trivial with MSVC, you end up using it and cursing it).

Third, as much as simple and integrated working on an established project with MSVC can be, and as much as unpleasant autofoo stuff is time from time, setting up even a quite small project in MSVC makes you realize that all that lovely GUI is in fact pretty unproductive when it comes to controlling project and sub-project settings — you end up having to go through endless combo boxes and all sorts of confirmation dialogues, thinking ‘this would be just a one line change in configure.ac’ (I reckon that half of the time it took to set up was spent clicking the GUI).

It would be nice to have some alternative build system for windows to the MSVC, like Dev-C++ + mingw project, if some felt like contributing it (or perhaps some truly hardcore autofoo hacker can manage to use the existing autofoo setup, who knows).

Once I got the necessary dependencies set up (mostly thanks to all the ready made packages provided by Tor Lillqvist, building clutter 0.4.2 using MSVC turned out quite straight-forward, and only a handful of modifications to the sources was needed; some tweaking is still needed to make the build process work out of the box, but you can expect the project files soon.

I have taken great care to follow the Ubuntu instructions, and all seemed to run rather smoothly to start with; after about an hour of downloading and another or so of installing, the Update Manager finished. I was expecting the system to reboot, but it did not. There was no disk activity, and quick check verified that the update process was indeed gone; the system appeared to be functional on the surface, but various applications would not run without any error message; this included Update Manager itself, and the shutdown command. So I have resorted to a ‘hard’ shutdown (something that I expect all ATI driver users have experience with anyway), and restarted. The kernel decompressed, and then just sat there. I have tried two other kernels that grub would let me access, in normal and emergency mode, but without success, just few more messages, the last of which said, ‘waiting for root file system’.

At the end I booted up my wife’s computer, downloaded the Ubuntu installation CD image and booted from it; on past experience with the Ubuntu CD I was expecting to loose the contents of the partition on which the original rootfs lived, so I was pleasantly surprised when the live CD just worked. I mounted the original rootfs under /mnt and chrooted under there; apt-get check revealed that ‘dpkg was interrupted’ (presumably something crashed ?) and suggested running ‘dpkg –configure -a’. This looked promising, and after rerunning it with –force-depends to get around not being able to run some post install scripts correctly, I got a system that, while not completely fixed, nevertheless successfully booted (even the X server started!). Then one more round of dpkg –configure -a, and building of the ATI proprietary drivers (why, o why, when Ubuntu is distributing these, they cannot keep them reasonably current?), and behold, eight hours later, I have a Feisty. Now I just have to purify it by removing OpenOffice (long live AbiWord and Gnumeric!) and Evolution (for some reason I prefer the intelligent design of Thunderbird).