Discovering Physics, Hacking AbiWord

Username:	Password:
Forgot your password?	Remember Me

Math Exported to HTML for AbiWord 2.8
AbiWord uses Itex as it's math composition language. We then use Itex2MML to convert this to MathML and GtkMathView to display this within AbiWord. Having created this MathML we can export it to HTML, which together with a cool piece of javascript written by Sam Ruby, enables this to be displayed in firefox or any other MathML compliant browser.

Behold a cool new feature for AbiWord-2.8

Click to see the image in it's full glory.

The source *.abw file is here.
The complete exported *.html is here.

BTW these files are the reference documentation for Itex commands. As you can see, Itex and MathML are very expressive and allow a very wide range of Mathematical expressions. AbiWord supports a significant fraction of Itex but unfortunately not all. We need to work GtkMathView and itex2MML to get complete coverage.

OLPC Laptops for indigenous Australian Children
Although Australia is a First World country, to our shame, many indigenous Australians, particularly those in remote communities, have far fewer choices and live a marginalized existence.

It is great to see that OLPC Australia has set a program to help indigenous Australian children and is apparently already making a difference.

http://www.olpc.org.au/news/27May09.shtml

Also great to see that they've lined up a major corporate sponsor, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to support their work.

Stories like these make all those hours hacking away on AbiWord and Write worthwhile.

The real impact of hackers...
I was happily chatting away with my great friend uwog (Marc Maurer) on #abiword this morning, when my 15 year-old daughter looked over my shoulder and asked:

"How come you talk like a teenage girl on the internet?"

Well that kind of blew me away and I thought about it and realized that that..

Teenage girls talk like us!

All those LOLs, ROTFLs 313313 -speak etc came from us :-)

So no matter how much cool free software we make, at least one substantial impact we've made is to influence the way Generation Y talks on the internet :-)

AbiWord back for Google Summer of Code in 2009
We're back and looking for students to mentor in AbiWord hacking for Google Summer of Code in 2009. Thanks Google! We really appreciate your support.

Here is a screencast of SVN AbiWord demonstrating Multipage view. The core of this feature was implemented by James Denton for his AbiWord GSoC 2008 project.

Warning 55 MB ogg!

This document is the 226 page RTF Specification, imported from RTF format.

Our list of suggested projects for 2009 is here. Feel free to suggest your own cool ideas too!

February 7th, 2009
February 7th, 2009 was the day I turned 50. It was also the hottest day ever recorded in Melbourne, reaching 46.4 degrees, a good 0.8 degrees hotter than the previous record set way back in 1939. I was planning to writing a long blog post about this but it feels so wrong.

On February 7th, Australia suffered its biggest natural disaster on record from unbelievable bushfires. Over 126 people are confirmed dead already. My sister lost her beloved home in the once-beautiful little town of Marysville. It is totally gone now.

Turn On
Last night my time, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN successfully circulated beam in both directions. We also recorded beam-gas interactions in the ATLAS detector. So all in all it was great start to a grand experiment which has been under development for 20 years.

I woke this morning to find both Google and xkcd joined in the celebrations.

Congratulations everyone!

Stupid script to kill evolution
Evolution has a number of great features that make it the best way to interface to our stupid MS Exchange server at work. However it does tend to hang on average once or twice a day while moving email back and forth to the Exchange IMAP service. At this point I find I need to find and kill all the separate processes used by evolution and restart. This got tedious enough that I wrote a stupid python script to do the work.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#!/usr/bin/python
#
# Remove all instances of evolution
#
import os
os.system('ps -aux | grep -i evo | cat > /tmp/killevo.txt')
fs = open('/tmp/killevo.txt')
ll = fs.readlines()
for l in ll:
    bignore = 0
    l.expandtabs()
    lc = ''
    bsp = 0
    for c in l:
        if((bsp == 0) or (c != ' ')):
            lc = lc + c
        if c == ' ':
            bsp = 1
        else:
            bsp = 0
    ls = lc.split(' ')
    pid = ''
    for ss in ls:
        if ss == 'grep' or ss == 'emacs' or (ss.find('killevo') > -1):
            bignore = 1
    pid = ls[1]
    if bignore == 0:
        kills = 'kill -9 '+pid
        print 'Executing.. ',kills
        os.system(kills)
fs.close()
os.system('rm /tmp/killevo.txt')

-------------------------------------------------------------

I'm 100% certain that a real python/perl/bash hacker could this in 1/3rd the LOC but hey it works :-)

Stealing ideas and http://abicollab.net in action
Due to an overwhelming response from our users we've ~~stolen~~ reimplemented user colorization for abicollab. See the screenshot below. Colors for different users in the collaboration can be toggled on and off as needed.

In addition I've made a little screencast showing http://abicollab.net in action. Note that collaborating users see changes and connect immediately just by openning the desired document. Click on the image to see it working.

(Warning, huge, (78 MB) ogg file.)

James Denton GSoC progress
I'm mentoring James Denton's Google Summer of Code project which is to enable multipage layout for sufficiently wide pages in AbiWord.

Here is a nice screenshot showing the feature so far.

James Denton's MultiPage July20_2008

James Denton's MultiPage Google Summer of Code project as of July 20, 2008

Great stuff James!

Netbooks on GNOME radar?
I read with interest Chris Blizzards post and I scanned through the GUADEC talks. One topic which did not seem to be much talked about were netbooks like the EEE PC. This new market segment expects to have 10 million units this year with hundreds of millions over the next few years. A large fraction of these will run Linux.

Is it just me or does this not seem a like HUGE opportunity for GNOME? We've concentrated on making a simple, easy to use desktop, why don't we have hackers jumping up and and down with excitement at the real opportunity to put our technology into the hands of hundreds of millions of people? Isn't this what we've wanted to do from the start?

This is certainly a direction we're keen on taking AbiWord + http://abicollab.net.

Is there a cabal somewhere that is plotting how to make use of this massive opportunity that I'm not part of?

I must admit I'm mystified that at this moment when we finally have some genuine desktop traction, people are talking about decadence. Geeze lets make great apps and keep our desktop stable so ISV's will use us for their products.

Yet another opinion on GTK-3.0
From the point of view of AbiWord, the big issues with GTK+ and GNOME are fonts, complex text, Input Methods, printing and precision positioning of text on screen.

In principle all these are being addressed in the current GTK+2.x series, along with font-config, pango and cairo.

It's not clear that GTK+ 3.0 will make fixing any of this easier. If it will please let me know. Otherwise I agree with Miguel, Morten and HP. Why make the development of large applications harder than it already is?

BTW I have not given up on GNOME as a workstation and I especially feel that with small netbooks running linux appearing at the rate of tens of millions per year, that now is exactly the wrong time to do so.

http://abicollab.net beta
As Marc recently posted, our http://abicollab.net beta is now accepting people interested in in testing the abiword/web service we've created. This service allows users to easily setup and maintain a collection of collaborative created documents. Users can simulatanously edit these documents via single click on the website or by connecting directly through their local abiword instance. Perhaps the most practicle outcome of the service is that if you place a document on the webservice you can always be certain of seeing the most recent version of the document because connecting with abiword starts up a collaborative session. So there is no need to wait for your friends and colleagues to commit their changes to a document before you can see what they're doing. You see their changes in real time and can make your own changes as well.

We're really excited about this and we believe we're created a unique service that provides users with a significantly improved user experience over Google docs and MicroSoft sharepoint. Which are our most obvious competitors.

One additional feature Marc has just added is full, end-to-end encryption between abiword connections. With this the chances of someone being able to either snoop or inject false packets into your session is virtually zero.

To get the full experinece you'll need the latest stable version of abiword from svn. Here are Marc's instructions for how to build it.

Compile AbiWord 2.6.x, together with the AbiCollab plugin (make sure you have at least the libsoup, gnutls and asio developer packages installed;)

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

make && make install

Then you need to register at http://abicollab.net and for that you'll need a key.

Our first batch of keys went very quickly. Here is another set for people who missed out yesterday.

063EC8D1BC1C10F4-89A99EDA-DEAD9AC0	<input ... > <input ... >
7112E7F6F22296CF-2960B8D4-44FB26E9	<input ... > <input ... >
76CE17921EA66232-EC4E20AF-06ACF8C2	<input ... > <input ... >
994E6F6A7CD8E44A-3988E534-60F67BBB	<input ... > <input ... >
9B9A77A3E9EB1AC2-07738AF4-C2656C30	<input ... > <input ... >
CE10ADEB25805D44-64E370E9-6CC59FE8	<input ... > <input ... >
E9F36334BFC80F83-1FDA7032-0965E706	<input ... > <input ... >
EFE57E08871D6CEC-03FC8709-1D968A93	<input ... > <input ... >
F651E2852A789E2C-9506FD36-5D3E2051	<input ... > <input ... >
0393BC7C5B04E830-77438F03-261B1E01	<input ... > <input ... >
1B2A481A2259D9BE-6B1F65BC-DB9C6ED6	<input ... > <input ... >
4BEB4027ECB892B5-DB37B2FA-BB12CF33	<input ... > <input ... >
60229B94B8ED1C7A-672E48AD-64849FBF	<input ... > <input ... >
9CF4399815E9C0F1-C54AB9BF-86D0BF4A	<input ... > <input ... >
06B32EFFDBF61E02-070A20A2-D7531825	<input ... > <input ... >
12FFCA08CF7E2994-B737803F-8504074F	<input ... > <input ... >
23C57A0348E70F8B-6FF5DFC2-494A978B	<input ... > <input ... >
25509C7C546D8569-51A0D9F2-B4267FD1	<input ... > <input ... >
30BC52CA03689704-0FD6E3A0-D224D51A	<input ... > <input ... >
34CBDA2708AD2419-20F8D735-2FB912EA	<input ... > <input ... >
358E15920ED6BFCE-5D23FD49-61D9A49A	<input ... > <input ... >
3FB6015343494E17-31F1A470-998EC0EC	<input ... > <input ... >
4618864EA441F273-9D2068F6-C9C85CD6	<input ... > <input ... >
48846CF8C4A60A1B-B827535A-42912533	<input ... > <input ... >
607B56F6AE60E5AA-E06CBBAC-BEC0F2B9	<input ... > <input ... >
66B3C647A7340899-FCB3A952-1C347C56	<input ... > <input ... >
80B15C2DB0B511BA-A52BB32E-8AFFBF4B	<input ... > <input ... >
9886A8F476663CA1-881CD671-846E3AEE	<input ... > <input ... >
9CFAF4A89507D59C-9E0FCCFC-FEE67799	<input ... > <input ... >
A74D14E4904002AA-7D1ED424-85400D71	<input ... > <input ... >
AAF5314007CC27AD-C51AEBB5-271F800E	<input ... > <input ... >
ABC9419DE1C92656-0DDE0A07-433212E3	<input ... > <input ... >
B885AD1EE228BEC1-58A17074-879ED9A7	<input ... > <input ... >
FD0F9CDE7917A087-118A2E01-DD0AE144	<input ... > <input ... >

Fedora 9 on the desktop
I recently upgraded my desktop at work to an intel duo 3 Ghz, 3 GB RAM, 500 GB disk, Nvidia graphics and lovely 22 inch 1920x1200 resolution display. I promptly installed Fedora 9 with livna rpms. The whole thing works wonderfully well. Compiz-fusion plus gnome is a joy. In all the desktop experience is substantially higher than my previous 6-year-old system.

I haven't used OSX but it's hard to imagine it getting better than this and I frankly don't understand why Free Software hackers want to use it. If you must use MS Office or the usual Windows apps, Wine works great! I have MS Office 2003 for the rare occasions when AbiWord and Gnumeric don't provide sufficient interoperability.

My laptops DVD drive is misbehaving so I did a network upgrade to fedora 9 via preupgrade. This Just Worked. No mucking around with anything so far.

All in all very impressive. Congrats to all the Free Software hackers who have given me this system! Keep up the good work and don't worry about decadence. This is what I and I'm sure most knowledge workers want. A system that just works, keeps out of your way and lets you do your job.

High Petrol prices
There is a lot of noise in Australia now about high petrol prices. Neither large political party appears to have the courage to tell people what is really going on.

If you would like to know why Petrol or Gasoline prices are very high and likely to keep increasing, read the following article by Euan Mearns at this link.

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4007

Nice interview in redhatmagazine

In which our heros (mostly uwog) talk about all things AbiWord.

http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/05/08/abiword-team-interview/

</shamlessplug>

Thanks mether!

AbiWord-2.6 packages for Ubuntu.
Despite his heroic efforts, Ryan Pavlik has been unable to get AbiWord-2.6 into the official Ubuntu repositories.

Nevertheless Ubuntu users can grab Ryan's packages for AbiWord-2.6 by following these instructions

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

All the cool kids are doing it...
[msevior@seviorlap ~]$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
220 cd
147 make
137 gdb
120 ls
46 svn
43 abiword
35 loccp
33 emacs
31 ssh
18 abib

"loccp" essentially runs grep over *.cpp
"abib" does cd /home/msevior/abidir/bin

Yep I develop abiword in 15 gnome-terminals. Who needs a fancy IDE?