Joerg (Jogi) Sievers Weblog

Building OpenOffice.org for the Mac is easy

Yesterday I started the second time building OpenOffice.org (OOo) under the Mac (INTeL) platform. Eric B. has given me the link to the documentation to build the Aqua version under Mac OS X and I started the game again....

Months (years?) before I did the same on the PowerPC version of my iMac to build the X11 version of OOo and it was a hell. You need to get packages downoaded from elsewhere and had to put it under the build tree, the manual and the process was very tricky. It did not work and I have given up. I am not a porter or a developer who is able to understand the problem statements of the build environment, I am a tester and need a build to test as fast a possible...

Today it was totally different and very easy. Only one typo in the Wiki page and the rest was described very easy. I was able to start - after re-installing the Xcode package from Apple where Ant was missing?!? - around 3.40 p.m. and as I looked onto the machine again (on the way to bed) around 10.20 p.m. everything was done and the build was packaged.... Wow!

Gesendet von jogi ( Jul 14 2007, 08:52:40 AM MEST ) Permalink

Flash Player 9 Beta
If you want to watch sometimes videos or going to a newly designed web page where Adobe's Flash Player is being used you could run into trouble because the installed version is outdated. To get things better done you maybe want to give the Flash 9 Beta version for Solaris SPARC and x86 a try.
Gesendet von jogi ( Jun 05 2007, 10:09:25 AM MEST ) Permalink

Do you use OpenOffice.org? / Benutzen Sie OpenOffice.org?
Thomas Krumbein from the German OpenOffice.org community project has created a questionaire to all who wants to help OpenOffice.org to get numbers. Numbers of installed workstations on which operating systems etc. The questionaire is in German.
Thomas Krumbein hat einen Fragebogen erstellt, der OOo helfen soll an Zahlen zu kommen, da die Verkaufszahlen ja nicht gemessen werden. Es wäre toll, wenn Sie sich 2 Minuten Zeit nehmen und mithelfen eine Übersicht der installierten Basis zu erstellen:
http://www.amt-wiesbaden.de/ooo/Fragebogen.html
Fragen: Wieviel Arbeitsplätze (ca.) sind mit OOo ausgestattet?

• Welche Version von OOo wird aktuell genutzt?
• Seit wann wird OOo genutzt? (Jahr oder Versionsnummer)
• Welche Module werden hauptsächlich genutzt?
• Welches Betriebssystem wird überwiegend eingesetzt?

Gesendet von jogi ( Jun 05 2007, 07:16:06 AM MEST ) Permalink

We're back on Mac Sun is supporting the Mac OS X "Aqua" port of OpenOffice.org and the Sun mac users at Hamburg office made a small welcome-party. [Read More] Gesendet von jogi ( Mai 03 2007, 01:56:23 PM MEST ) Permalink

1st OpenSolaris Developer Conference

Yesterday I traveled to Berlin and visited the 1^st OpenSolaris Developer Conference and the German Unix User Group Frühjahrsfachgespräch 2007.

1. Keynote on 1. March 2007 – Simon Phipps

   Simon started the day with the keynote and talked about

   • the participation age

   • Communities and how the OSS¹ economic system works
   • that Open Source not always means free software
   • OSS Business Model 3.0 where the software need to be paid first time when the participant (better word than customer) is using it.
   • Sun as FOSS² Startup & what Sun has already open sourced
2. How to make your program privilege aware - Wolfgang Ley

   Wolfgang (also from the Hamburg Sun office where I am located) held a session about a very, very interesting part in Solaris 10+: The privileges. Sometimes you need a good lecturer to understand things. It isn't complicated, it's great! To make it short: UID 0 isn't needed to do jobs which need more privileges, just add that privilege to the user – or add them to the application if it is called by the specific user :-)

3. Looking into the black-box – How the kernel may impact your application – Thomas Nau

   From the practice Thomas Nau reported what he and his team done with dtrace at the University of Ulm and a T1-processor based T2000 box. First he introduced dtrace and said that this tool “is one of the best, maybe the best innovations in the last ten+ years” (in the IT) – after his session everybody will agree because it was for me the best session of the day where I learned that the move from the old tools (truss(1), apptrace(1), mdb(1), intrstat(1m), busstat(1m), cputrack(1m), ... ) are the old way and dtrace can give us more specific information what really the application dynamically is doing. The “D-Language” which dtrace uses is easy and we have just to start. He also mentioned to spice up our applications and how.

   Really great was the case study about the “slow” Sun T2000 and how they resolved the problem by changing the cache-bin algorithm (coloring) in /etc/system – which seems to be fixed in the meanwhile by newer OpenSolaris build. One small change and the T2000 boost-up as expected.

4. [GUUG] Innovation in Solaris – today and tomorrow – Franz Haberhauer

   The GUUG sessions were held in German but some of them were also a day or some hours later on the Solaris DevCon track – maybe more from the point of an OS developer view but I am a tester with system administration tasks.

   This one from Franz I found only on the GUUG track and was interesting what the projects “Nemo”, “Crossbow” and “Clearview” will bring in the world of networking and zones and what the project “FireEngine” did already in Solaris 10. dladm will be the tool for monitoring and managing network interfaces and will make things easier.

   Also the desktop is back to the focus of Solaris (the Sun distribution of OpenSolaris) development with updating the existing modules GNOME to 2.16, Firefox to 2.0, Thunderbird to 1.5 and StarOffice to version 8 and adding Egika (video conferencing) and Vino (remote desktop solution on a vnc base).

   My favorite in the additions is “tamarck” which implemented a privileged HAL³ who finds new devices (USB plug-in your device and play... yeah!).

5. [GUUG] Solaris Container Best Practices – Detlef Drewanz

   Detlef also held AFAIK only once this session in the GUUG track and his hints are very helpful if you think about using zones. Which use cases are possible? How to deploy Solaris Containers and which questions you need answers for? The different zone-types was nothing new to me but the impact on application architectures was very interesting. Deploying applications outside a zone makes things like moving (!) or cloning a zone much easier. The summary is: Plan you infrastructure to get really the full advantage of Solaris Containers.

6. Back in 2008

   I am looking forward to the next OpenSolaris Developer Conference because the level of sessions was high the small-talks were very interesting.

¹Open Source Software
²Free Open Source Software
³Hardware Abstract Layer

Gesendet von jogi ( Mrz 02 2007, 03:03:33 PM MET ) Permalink

Enhancing automated software test environment on OOo

The automated testing team inside Sun Microsystems maintains at the moment 100% of the GUI testing code of OOo but there is hope that also others will start writing test code in future which can be also shared and used by others. That would be a great test case development.
To get others into the boat we want to get a good set of test scripts [1] and will do some enhancements in these areas:

1. Documentation
   
2. Reuse
   
3. Structured
   
4. Mainenance
   

We know for 1.) that we need to document how to add a new L10N (=localization) language to the framework and also we need to make it easier (4.).

If you have suggestions for the other areas we should think about, subscribe to dev@qa.openoffice.org mailing list and let us know what your barrier is we need to break down.

We want to collect in the next three weeks which enhancements we need to to do to get the barriers down and you into the boat. I will summarize it and maybe you are alos interested to do some work with us...

---

[1]

Software Test Automation, Mark Fewster & Dorothy Graham, Addison Wesley, 1999, ISBN 0-201-33140-3, page 69; table 3.1 "Comparison of good and poor sets of test scripts that perform the same set of test cases"

Gesendet von jogi ( Jan 16 2007, 08:32:39 AM MET ) Permalink

Rightsize your Testing Process

Gesendet von jogi ( Nov 11 2006, 12:40:15 PM MET ) Permalink

Sun Weblog Publisher available for SO and OOo

Gesendet von jogi ( Okt 11 2006, 08:34:29 AM MEST ) Permalink

Sun's flexible office and Sun Ray at home on TV

The German TV station 3sat has visited Sun's German headquarter in Munich and also my personal workplace at home with a Sun Ray. The brodcast nano extra will be shown at 18.30h (MESZ) on 3. October 2006 on 3sat which is also reachable through satellite.

If you understand German you can read an article about the upcoming brodcast at 3sat. It was funny to show the TV team that it saves my time to start my work at home and not in the office and that it is great not to run into the daily rush hour of Hamburg. Also I have much more time with my daughter which I do not want to miss. It is really great to have an quiet area where nobody can enter the room where you are trying to debug some code or reading an interesting technical article.

I haven't seen a preview of the broadcast and hope that my big advantages to work at home for Sun will be shown there.

Gesendet von jogi ( Okt 03 2006, 10:45:26 AM MEST ) Permalink

Test case specification template proposal

After the software specification process and the software specification template have been published on OpenOffice.org (OOo) I have now suggested a test case specification template and what to do with it. Both "processes" should help to get a higher quality into the open source office suite.

The project team of the software specification process will held a presentation about their work at the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) in Lyon, France from 11.-13. SEP 2006. Hopefully see you there!

Gesendet von jogi ( Jul 21 2006, 05:10:41 PM MEST ) Permalink

OpenOffice.org Specification Process published

After a project team of the OpenOffice.org community has launched a specification template (OpenDocument File Format) now the process documentation has been published in OpenOffice.org Wiki. It's the first time that OOo community members will be able to find fastly and clearly written what they need to introduce a new feature with a high quality level into OpenOffice.org.

Gesendet von jogi ( Jun 29 2006, 04:59:38 PM MEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

They needed 24 years to win! Congratulation HSV Hamburg!

They did it! After nearly 24 years the soccer club Hamburger Sportverein (HSV) won against the FC Bayern Muenchen in Munich (1:2) - since a long time the one and only number one in the Bundesliga (premier national soccer league). They also have won the match in Hamburg. They're back in the game!

Gesendet von jogi ( Mrz 04 2006, 05:40:00 PM MET ) Permalink

My biggest personal project nearly finished

We, my wife and I, have finished building our house in Ahrensburg, Germany. It is definitely the biggest personal project my wife and I have succesfull finished. If you understand the German language read in my report how happy we were with our building promoter!

Gesendet von jogi ( Feb 17 2006, 08:30:00 PM MET ) Permalink

A specification template preassigned on improving quality

On OpenOffice.org the quality of created specifications (...) revealed between 5 and 60 defects per page (1 page = 300 words) [1]. Too much variation and I am a member of a team which has analyzed the root causes. The first ouput is a suggestion for a new specification template which makes it much easier to write and to test specifications.

As a tester (and also as the writer of a specification for OpenOffice.org) you find all relevant documentation you need in it. Also the UI elements can be tested now easily because the specification writer needs two clicks to add an UI element and all necessary properties will be added to the specification. The specification writer and the tester won't forget a property in future.

With the ruleset to be complete, clear and simple it should be now much better to get a consistent quality of specifications to optimze the engineering work on features for OpenOffice.org.

[1] http://specs.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=17

Gesendet von jogi ( Jan 06 2006, 09:50:00 AM MET ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

2006: No more documents with a proprietary file format!
I received many files at the end of this year:

• An address list about the involved companies which are building our new house in .doc-format.
• Again an address list from a citizen's initiative to get a better local train to Ahrensburg also in .doc-format.
• A Christmas joke presentation how to put a beer crate as an advent calendar to the wall... as .ppt-format

I gave none of the senders the information that I am owner of an office suite which is able to read the proprietary file format.
I was lucky: OpenOffice.org 2.0 was able to load the files. I wrote the senders that it makes much more sense to use a format which nearly all can read on their machines (OASIS OpenOffice.org XML or PDF) without buying an expensive office suite. There is hope to get next year less proprietary file format documents... Gesendet von jogi ( Dez 30 2005, 04:25:00 PM MET ) Permalink Kommentare [1]