Latex rules! To follow up on Marc's post, Google Summer of Code students really wanted to work on our Latex exporter. I think we had 10 applications to enhance that feature but we had none to work on ODF.
Another example that Words != Action in the Open Source world.
Pango In Action Thanks to Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay who recently provided a nice example of how far the freedesktop community has come in supporting complex text such as Indic scripts. I simply copied his post and pasted it into abiword and got the following.
This was just copied from Sankarshan's blog post in firefox and pasted into abiword-2.6. Congrats to the pango hackers and Tomas Frydrych who made this "just work" :-) (Plus it's a nice example of the quality of our X11 clipboard support :-)
Update: Changed the screen shot to show the font Lohit Bengali
Video of my AbiCollab presentation Last Tuesday I gave my abicollab presentation at the Linux Users group of Victoria. The presentation was recorded and is now on the web in the place where my LCA 2008 presentation was meant to be.
The audience was great and asked me lots of insightful questions. Unfortunately my inexperience at being recorded was obvious as I often forgot to repeat the question for the recording. I also spent a lot of time explaining our upcoming web service to support abicollab but unfortunately I couldn't demonstrate it. My laptop refused to work with the video projector. The first that that has happened to me in 6 years :-(
A special thanks to Peter Lieverdink who organised things.
Ubuntu - Suffering Sclerosis Well I guess it is almost inevitable. After a few years as being first on ball and dynamic as anything, it appears Ubuntu is suffering the Sclerosis its supporters have accused other distros of having. Case in point. Look at the officious bureaucracy we're dealing with trying to get abiword-2.6 into the next Ubuntu builds.
It is worth noting that Fedora, SuSE, Foresight Linux and Mandriva have all managed to get AbiWord-2.6 into their distros. These all have similar release dates to Ubuntu.
Fedora and other distros have developed ways to be far more dynamic in their support of upstream projects. Ubuntu should take a look to see if they can learn something from them.
As it stands Ubuntu users look to be frozen out of the next wave of collaborative document creation available to Windows and other linux users. It's all pretty ironic since the initial impetus for abicollab came from a former Canonical employee, Jeff Waugh.
AbiWord Back for GSoC in 2008 If you're a student, interested in getting paid to work on the project that provides "Word processing for Everyone", then head on over to the Google Summer of Code homepage and write up an application for AbiWord.
You don't have long! Applications close on March 31st!
A hint of Physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Last Thursday, Nature published a result from my experiment, Belle that shows an unexpected imbalance in how matter as opposed to anti-matter behaves in nature. Our paper was covered by slashdot.
The reason for the widespread interest is that it could be the first clue to both solving a puzzle that originated with the Big Bang Model of Universal creation and for a deeper level of understanding of particle physics than that provided by the standard model of particle physics.
The standard model assumes that there are 3 generation of quarks (fractionally charged particles) and leptons (integrally charged particles).
Interactions amongst these particles are mediated by the strong, electroweak and higgs fields. Of the particles shown above, only the Higgs particle has not yet been discovered. Each quark and lepton also has a corresponding anti-particle with identical mass but opposite charge. The are many general descriptions of the standard model on the web but I'll summerize the relevant points. It works extremely well but it is highly unlikely to be the final word on how particles interact. There are almost certainly new principles in nature that operate at very small distance scales that are not incorporated in the standard model. There are 3 powerful pieces of evidence for this.
Firstly: the masses of the neutrinos are much too small to be generated from the Higgs field. Secondly: calculations of the mass of the Higgs yield nonsensical results at energies above 1 TeV Thirdly: there is mass in the Universe.
It is this last point that our result addresses. In the bIg Bang, particles and anti-particles were created in equal amounts. As the Universe expanded and cooled these annihilated one another and were transformed back to energy. In order for the matter that makes up the stars and galaxies to exist, there must have been an imbalance in how nature behaves with respect to matter and anti-matter. This imbalance would mean that a bit more matter survived this annihilation process and remained to form the stars, galaxies, planets and people of the universe. We call this imbalance "CP-violation".
OK, now the standard model does provide a means for favouring matter over anti-matter, however it is too small by about 10 orders of magnitude. If the standard models was all there was, matter would not have been dense enough to form a single star.
So here is one big hint for a new principle of physics. Whatever new principles of nature exist, one or more of them must provide additional CP violation. My experiment, Belle, has found many examples of CP violation in the decays of B-mesons. In the result cited in our paper we look at how the rates of:
Anti_B0 => K -+ decays compared to B0 => K+- . We find that the former is 20% less likely than the latter. This clearly demonstrates CP violation happening in nature.
In addition we measured the rates for:
B- => K -0 and B+ => K +0 In this case the former process is about 14% more likely than the latter. The histograms showing these results are shown below and one can see by eye the imbalance in the numbers of observed events.
The Standard Model can't predict absolute results for these processes because of the difficulties the theory has forming mesons from quarks. However the most obvious calculations do predict that the asymmetries should be the same. The fact that they're not is quite surprising. It is possible to stretch the hadronic corrections to the model so that they agree with the measurements but such efforts are both contrived and serve to make other measurements we've made disagree with calculations.
So what does it all mean?
A nice and far more detailed commentary on our results is provided by Michael Peskin in the same edition of Nature.
It could be that hadronic corrections will explain our result. However, the result could also be the tip of the iceberg. The first hint of some new principle in nature that was previously hidden from our view. If so, it has the profound effect of making life in this universe possible through ensuring matter is the predominant form of ordinary mass.
Linux Conf au 2008 I have been to many, many conferences over the past 25 years but none have been as interesting and fun as Linux.conf.au 2008.
We had awesome talks that ranged trige's clustered samba presentation where he demo'd the cool features that enable 30,000 windows boxes to share a single file structure (100's of millions of dollars of gear required). To how you can physically interact with the second life virtual world, ($30 interface board). A demonstration of a self replicating machine (some human intervention still required) and Keith Packard's description of the awesome work at Intel with their fully documented and open source graphics drivers.
I even had a decent audience at my highly technical description of abicollab (odp warning) our real-time document collaboration feature for AbiWord. There were some excellent questions and very informed discussion. Aaron Seigo(of KDE fame) and I had some long talks on how other projects could re-use our algorithms. If your application has Model-View split and can represent locations in the document with a unique integer mapping, it is possible to use what we've done in abicollab for real-time collaboration. Aaron is keen to generisize what we've done and make it available to the wider Open Source community.
OLPC (pdf warning) had a huge impact at the conference and I spent Open Day talking about it to many, many interested people. There is great interest in trialling it all over Australia. Pia Waugh (ogg waring) is in the process of setting up OLPC Australia (http://olpc.org.au)to facilitate this process and allow interested people in Australia/New Zealand and the Pacific Islands to contribute as they like. As of February 7th 2008, that domain does not yet resolve, Pia assures us it will Real Soon Now.
There was tons of other great stuff along with numerous high bandwidth conversations with great people in the free software world. I think the fun, excitement and technical focus is brilliantly encapsulated in Paul Fenwick's 3 minute talk: 'Fixing the Web'
Enjoy!
Finally, the crew down in Tasmania won the bid to host linux.conf.au 2009. I'm really looking forward to a conference hosted by people who put together this totally awesome mascot.
AbiCollab vs MicroSoft On Wednesday week I will give my presentation on our AbiCollab real-time collaboration tool at LinuxConf.au 2008.
I was also asked if I wanted to have a table at the OpenDay on Saturday. I thought it would be fun to have two or more OLPC XO's on hand to allow interested people to try out AbiCollab in the "write" activity. I asked on the LCA chat mailing list and jdub, Pia Waugh, James Cameron and Joel Stanely very kindly have offered some XO's for the stand. Joel also sent this lovely email..
<snip>
Hi Martin,
I have 3 XO's that are >= B4, and would be happy for you to use to demo.
I love Write's collaboration feature. The most notable demo I did using it was at a IT summer camp in Romania. I had an XO sitting out the front, sharing a Write session, with a camera projecting the screen for all to see. As I continued my talk, I passed around a second XO which joined the session, and let the audience type up "hello world" messages for all to see. They loved it! The technical awesomeness of AbiCollab was demonstrated with the Microsoft guys came to do their presentation about their word processor collaboration tool; they spent 45 minutes getting the server up and running, and then it crashed while they were demoing!
<snip>
Joel is also leading an OLPC BOF so if you're interested and in Melbourne, come along!
A new state of matter! Although I very rarely blog about it, my research interests in Physics are in the field of experimental particle physics. I'm a collaborator within the Belle experiment The main goal of Belle is to investigate CP violation, which provides a means to distinguish matter from anti-matter. We have made many important discoveries about CP-violation since we began collecting data in 2000.
However I'm not going to talk about that today. What I want to talk about today is the discovery of a new type of matter we observed at Belle.
The nuclei of atoms are made of protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are made of still smaller particles called quarks. Up until now quarks were known to make stable configurations in sets of 3, like protons and neutrons, or configurations of two quarks, formed as quark -antiquark pairs called mesons.
At Belle we collide electrons and positrons are exactly the right energy to make "B-meson" pairs. A B meson consists of a b quark, which is very heavy quark and a light quark of opposite flavour like a u or d. See the table below for three generations of quarks.
Quark
Antiquark
Charge
Generation
I
II
III
up
charm
top
down
strange
bottom
Charge
Generation
I
II
III
anti-up
anti-charm
anti-top
anti-down
anti-strange
anti-bottom
(source the Belle Press release above)
Over the last 4 years Belle and our friendly competitors at BaBar (SLAC) have observed a number of unexplained resonances in the charm - anti-charm meson system. The origin of some of these states is a mystery but one of the most interesting explanations is that they are actual 4-quark states.
An example of a previously observed state is the X(3872) resonance which could be described as a four-quark state or alternatively as a very unusual 2 quark state.
Recently my colleagues submitted a paper to Physical Review Letters describing the discovery of the Z(4430). We observed this particle with a 6.5 sigma significance and unlike the earlier resonances, the Z(4430) is charged. This could only happen if in addition to the charm -anti-charm quark pair, the resonance also contains up and anti-down quarks. So the Z(4430) is almost certainly a 4 quark state. The first ever observed and the first ever observation of a state of matter that that is not made of either 2 or 3 quarks.
(from Belle Press release.)
The histogram showing the 6.5 sigma signal for the Z(4430)
Surprised by KOffice interview Today I read an interview from the KOffice developers where they imply that they will not support the ooXML file format. This sparked a slashdot story, the gist of which was that KDE is principled and GNOME has gone over to the dark side because of their sponsership of Jody Goldberg's attemts to improve the ooXML specification. ie KDE supports ODF (Yay!), GNOME supports ooXML, (boo hiss!)
This whole discussion is rather a rather clueless storm in a teacup and misses many different points.
First neither AbiWord nor Gnumeric are GNOME projects. They're not part of the GNOME platform, nor are they installed by default in any of the large distros that use GNOME as their default desktop. Whether or not we (Gnumeric and AbiWord) manage to support ODF or ooXML is not a GNOME project decision. GNOME decided back in 2001 to NOT have productivity applications as part of the project.
Secondly, there are paid hackers working for various companies whose job it is to make sure OpenOffice can support ooXML. Why? Because it makes OpenOffice more useful to its users.
AbiWord had a GSOC student whose project was to add ooXML support for us. He managed to get the basics imported and exported by the end of his project. Why did we do this? Because it makes AbiWord more useful to our users.
I find it surprising that KOffice would deliberately NOT support a file format that will be very useful to their users. Like it or not there will be a large number of ooXML documents flowing around the internet over the next few years and it will happen whether not it becomes any sort of official standard. KOffice is shooting itself in the foot by ignoring it.
Given all this it makes perfect sense to me Jody should try to get the best information out of MicroSoft that he can and I applaud the GNOME foundation for making this as easy as possible for him.
None of this means that AbiWord and Gnumeric are abandoning ODF or even lessening our commitment to it. Our biggest deployment will be on the OLPC machines where we've set things to import/export to ODF by default. What we want to do is to provide the most useful applications we can to our users.
Update:
The text above might across as the GNOME community being uncaring about AbiWord and Gnumeric. I think a quote from Jeff Waugh's recent statement on ooXML nicely sums up the situation.
"In 2000, the GNOME community de-emphasised its own office software products, choosing to support the nascent OpenOffice.org project. As a result, there are no office products released on our six-month time-based release schedule today, although we encourage and support projects such as AbiWord, Glom and Gnumeric."
The OLPC XO the the next step for GNOME? I came across this rave review of the OLPC XO at laptopmag.com
Some quotes:
Not only is the learning curve simple, but the interface is intuitive. The home screen is succinct, and the shortcuts that run along the bottom of the screen are easy to remember. The journal application, which logs all of the activity on the laptop, is a perfect productivity tool.
and
Google Docs and Zoho Writer provide good third-party applications for collaborating on documents or spreadsheets, but XO's collaborating software, combined with its mesh-networking capabilities, makes editing happen in real time, without an Internet connection. Assembling PowerPoint presentations would run a lot smoother with the Write program, as multiple users can add images and text. Mesh-networking capabilities built into systems would also enable software developers to improve enterprise communication, including internal VoIP and chat programs.
I'm chuffed about the review of Write. That has been pretty much our vision for AbiCollab.
Now imagine GNOME with pervasive collaboration, a Journal View for Nautilus and the cool clipbaord interface of sugar. It would be a substantial step up from competing desktops. Many of the people who work on Sugar/AbiWord/Telepathy are also members of the GNOME community. We should be able to bring this "heart stopping technology" to GNOME. How can we make this happen?
At jdub's suggestion I've proposed a session for the GNOME miniconf at linuxconf.au. "What can we learn and steal from sugar?". Hopefully we can make some progress on this topic before then.
Inspirational page at OLPC Wiki The OLPC wiki page describing the trial of the OLPC at Khairat is one of the most inspirational things I've ever seen on the internet. It is so beautiful to see and read about the ordinary humanity of inspired people.
Sayamindu please let the AbiWord people know of any rendering bugs you find in Write and thanks for blogging about that wiki page!
ODF vs RTF. AbiWord has had the ability to read and write to the ODF format for quite a while. These filters have received quite a lot of attention and in general they work quite well. From the point of view of a volunteer Free Software developer, I generally only work on features that interest me. I haven't feel the need to contribute to the ODF filters since I almost never use OpenOffice nor do the vast majority of my work colleagues. For my part, AbiWord has a far superior interface and has all the features I need for my day to day work. I'm particularly happy with our maths feature which, from my point of view, is easily the best of any WYSIWYG Word Processors. (On the other hand I'm an old Latex junkie so I guess this is not surprising.)
Anyway, OLPC in their wisdom, have decided to make Write (which employs libAbiword,) save to ODF by default. I had heard that our ODF filters for reading/writing tables with merged cells had a number of issues so I thought I'd better see if they could be fixed. I downloaded the ODF file format description, all 750 pages, but found it rather easy to find the bits pertaining to tables. Tables in ODF are FAR saner than for the crazy RTF file format and it didn't take long to fix up the AbiWord bugs with merged cells. All in all, it's pretty clear that ODF is far easier to implement than RTF.
"In the zone." A few years ago I had a very interesting chat with a student. He was doing an Arts/Science degree majoring in Physics and Psychology. Since I knew what he was studying in Physics I asked him about his research in Psychology. He told me that the rage in Psychology was to relate current human behaviour to traits that would enhance survival in hunter-gather communities. He, on the other hand, wanted to do something that he believed to be totally different. He wanted to study the state of mind Buddhists call "enlightenment".
I asked him if he could explain what this state of mind is to me, someone with no experience of the Buddhist religion. His answer was to compare enlightenment to the state one achieves at high levels of concentration. When time passes in a blink, such as when one is "in the zone" programming and code just flows into the computer.
I have experienced this effect. It is the true joy of software development where I feel the height of a creative process that turns pure thought into concrete outcomes. I literally feel at one with the Universe and that every thing I do will work (and it does). Lately I realized that I've felt the same feelings in very different pursuits. At various times in my life, I've been "In the zone" playing sport and most recently in the second hour of a training run when a really great song comes on my mp3 player. It just feels so good to be alive, being fit, healthy and letting the emotions of the song course through me. I definitely feel at one with the Universe doing that.
Thanks dosbox Free Software is fantastic. Today I used dosbox to run some old dos simulations of Maxwell's equations for my lecture on ElectroDynamics.
The simulations no longer run on Windows XP but "Just Worked" on dosbox.
Thanks Guys! It's real pleasure to acknowledge you.
Unexpected Consequences. My old TV has been taken away so I needed a new one. I decided to buy the best TV I could afford, which turns out to be a 81 cm wide screen LCD HD TV. High Definition TV is absolutely beautiful and I have been watching it far more than I usually do. I guess it's the usual new toy effect in action. Yesterday afternoon I was flipping through the free to air TV here when I came across a documentary on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) about an Australian Indigenous art exhibition in Musee Du Quai Branly, Paris. I was just captivated by the quality of the various art displayed, and I would love to see it some day.
Later after my training run for a half marathon next week I turned on the TV again and stumbled across Sunday Arts also on ABC. Sunday arts was running an interview with Spencer Platt, who won world photo journalist of the year in 2006 for the photo "Beiriut aftermath". As interesting the photo looks on your monitor, it was just amazing on High Definition TV. I am very confronted by that photo as the beauty it displays is juxtaposed against the ugliness and destruction of war. Spencer Platt is an interesting and very talented photographer and the interview was fascinating.
So against all expectations my consumerism has broadened my mind.
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msevior's journal
+ decays compared to B0 => K+
