Discovering Physics, Hacking AbiWord

Math Exported to HTML for AbiWord 2.8

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:52:14 GMT

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

Thu, 28 May 2009 12:19:24 GMT

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...

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:27:20 GMT

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

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:00:14 GMT

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

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:59:45 GMT

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.

Awesome video of OLPC sugar in action.

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:41:28 GMT

Turn On

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:37:20 GMT

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

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 03:19:06 GMT

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

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 05:31:16 GMT

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

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:34:31 GMT

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?

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:07:58 GMT

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

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:50:33 GMT

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

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:33:44 GMT

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

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:15:29 GMT

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

Thu, 29 May 2008 11:15:52 GMT

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

Fri, 09 May 2008 12:31:18 GMT

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.

Mon, 05 May 2008 13:38:02 GMT

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!

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:34:10 GMT

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

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:51:19 GMT

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...

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:21:11 GMT

[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?

Video of my AbiCollab presentation

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 05:58:01 GMT

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

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:16:48 GMT

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

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 06:43:13 GMT

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.

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 06:16:19 GMT

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).

Source: http://www.benbest.com/science/standard.html

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.

source: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7185/full/nature06827.html

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.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7185/full/452293a.html

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

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:22:45 GMT

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.