Free-Office

Hackweek, etc.

2008-08-28T02:59:06+00:00

For hackweek, I have been working on implementating the "rendering" in libopenraw. This mean I need to extract metadata for the various parameters need for the demosaic and color correction, including linearization tables^[1] and camera to XYZ matrices. For this I'm trying to stick to the DNG data model as it likely already abstract the different formats.

Notes

[1] not all files needs that

Daily Links 08/27/2008 (p.m.)

2008-08-27T20:30:01+00:00

‘100 Things’ author dies at 47 - CNN.com

“Dave Freeman, co-author of “100 Things to Do Before You Die,” a travel guide and ode to odd adventures that inspired readers and imitators, died after hitting his head in a fall at his home. He was 47.”

tags: OB, irony

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor's Open Blog, 2008.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Posted under: News.
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AutoRealm

2008-08-27T11:25:16+00:00

I've told the story before: I started working on Krita because I got a graphics tablet and wanted to paint maps for a novel. Well, right now, I've got another reason to draw a map, to do with our ongoing fantasy roleplaying game soap (running for over a decade now gaming time, and about 35 years in-game time. And you know what? Krita isn't yet suitable for drawing maps with yet, although it's getting great for messing with photographs, sketching and painting.

And, actually, map-making software isn't all that close akin to a raster image editor. It's much closer to what Kivio or Karbon are. But there are also dedicated applications. Only one of them is free software software, that I could find: Andy Gryc's AutoREALM. This application started out as for-pay, windows-only Delphi application way back. Then it was open-sourced, and porting was started from Delphi to wx-widgets and C++, before Qt became free software on all main platforms.

Currently, there is some development going on using wxWidgets and Python, but there's not much to show for it. The Windows binary works fine under Wine, though, except for a couple of symbols. The Autorealm binary file format is neatly documented, but has since been superceded by an xml-based file format.

It's often the case that a big porting effort stalls, and then almost or completely kills an open source effort: in fact, I am having a hard time keeping Krita development keep its pace. We might have been too ambitious: port to Qt4 and KDE4, implement a layer model with non-destructive effects, painterly paint engine, recording, metadata, new memory management core, api and code structure refactoring, flake integration, tool system refactor... Maybe we should have been less ambitious, but then, we wouldn't have been able to release before KDE 4.1 was released anyway, and we're still aiming for a release this year. But for that, focus is needed!

And now I'm wondering how hard it would be to port the few features that are missing in the KOffice libraries, like the cute fractal vector painting tool and the random shape placement tool to KOffice and implement an AutoREALM compatible mapping application on top of KOffice and flake. It cannot be much work: we got shapes, vectors, bitmaps, text, text-on-a-path, units (though not days by sailed galley!), import/export, dockers, tool handling -- almost the lot.

The goal would, of course, be to produce maps like Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg's city maps:

But first: focus!

Data Pilot (pivot table) tutorial for OpenOffice Calc

2008-08-27T07:10:14+00:00

This PDF is from my Calc workbooks, and covers Data Pilots, Calc's version of pivot tables.

You'll also need this lab file.

Persuading people that OpenOffice.org is the right choice? Accentuate the negative.

2008-08-27T07:08:31+00:00

I blogged about this item recently.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2008/03/loss-aversion-a.html

It's about how people are more inclined to fear loss than to be motivated by gain. (And also about how a cheap placebo is less effective than an expensive placebo.)

That was pretty depressing because it seemed like people are hard-coded to not be interested in Openoffice.org (free, and gaining money in the budget to do other things with), when they could clearly benefit from switching from MS Office.

(Caveat. Of course, not everyone should switch from MS Office to OpenOffice.org, but pretty much everyone should consider it.)

However. I'm listening to NPR again and here's the flip side.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93872977

People are motivated by fear, by loss. Not just to buy a certain brand of deoderant but it just works. Firefighters who during training are shown or told about the wrong decisions by previous firefighters, ended up performing better than firefighters who were just shown the right decision-making process. Mothers who were told that formula was bad for their babies were more likely to breastfeed than mothers who were told that breastfeeding was good for their babies.

Microsoft certainly does this but without as much emphasis on truth/the whole truth/and nothing but the truth as one might hope.

And when you think about it, it makes sense. Why bother to get up off the chair that's on fire if all you're told is that it's cooler over there on the other side of the room? "You're going to die" is the key information.

So that's one major thing. Emphasize the danger, the disadvantages, of the current choice.

The next major thing I took away from this NPR show is that it's all about "what is everyone else doing." Which is not surprising, but it's very effective. You know the sign you see in hotels, saying please leave your towel on the rack if you want to reuse it. The sign says we should save hot water, save the environment, etc. Hotels in a study increased their towel reuse by guests significantly simply by changing the sign so that it says that 43% (or so) of hotel guests reuse their towels. People look to their peers for approval and guidance of what to do.

Here's a by no means complete but useful list of many implementations of OpenOffice.org. And let's not forget that Sun, Novell, and IBM all have heavy involvement with OpenOffice.org/StarOffice/Symphony.

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments Plus my home town library in Kalispell, Montana; the library uses Userful kiosks. Not a major deployment ;> but it's another stat.

Once you've done the first two things, then of course you need reasons for switching to OpenOffice, or whatever you're trying to explain. And we have those in spades for OOo.

Swedish pop music 24/7

2008-08-26T21:10:40+00:00

Last week my wife and daughter went to see the Mamma Mia! movie, based on the musical based on the songs of ABBA. A few days after that, my wife took me to see it, warning that “it’s not good but it is fun.” Hmmm. It was fun, sort of, and it could have been a lot better, but I quickly learned that being critical and analytical about the film would get me nowhere.

Let’s just say that while Pierce Brosnan can act, he’s not my favorite singer by a long shot. I thought Julie Walters was wrong all around. I’m probably in hot water locally for saying even this, so I’ll leave it at that.

What was good and great and fun, were the songs of ABBA. These came out while I was in high school and college, so they bring me back musically to my late teens and early twenties. I didn’t own any ABBA records, but the songs were all over the radio and so I heard them constantly. For some reason I remember standing in the Ben Franklin store in Carmel, NY, listening to an ABBA song with my mom, probably around 1978.

What I didn’t realize was that ABBA did quite a few music videos, and this was long before MTV came on the scene.

(Remember when MTV actually played music? Remember when The History Channel actually had bona fide shows about history? And what’s with professional wrestling on The SciFi Channel? But I digress.)

My whole family has been watching these videos and listening to an ABBA CD that’s been locked into our car music system for a week. Here are a few YouTube videos of some of ABBA’s more popular songs, with one bonus video at the end.

Dancing Queen, with words so you can sing along.

Waterloo (alternative “cape and boots” version )

Mamma Mia

S.O.S.

Super Trouper

Take a Chance On Me

Special Bonus: Andy Singing “Take a Chance on Me” to Angela in The Office

Ok, lunch is over, back to work.

Daily Links 08/26/2008 (p.m.)

2008-08-26T20:56:53+00:00

Browsers and Privacy

Microsoft to add privacy features to IE8 - Network World

Safari introduced similar features in 2005.

tags: OB, IE, Safari, browser, privacy
Stealther :: Firefox Add-ons

“If there are times you want to surf the web without leaving a trace in your local computer, then this is the right extension for you.”

tags: OB, browser, Firefox, extension, privacy
IEBlog : IE8 and Privacy

“Have you ever wanted to take your web browsing “off the record”? Perhaps you’re using someone else’s computer and you don’t want them to know which sites you visited. Maybe you need to buy a gift for a loved one without ruining the surprise. Maybe you’re at an Internet kiosk and don’t want the next person using it to know at which website you bank.”

tags: OB, IE, browser, privacy

Open Source

New guide from SLFC: Not violating the GPL for dummies

“The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has published a guide that explains the obligations imposed by GNU’s General Public License (GPL). The SFLC, which has recently conducted a string of GPL enforcement lawsuits, released the guide in order to educate companies and help them understand what they need to do in order to comply with the license and avoid legal risks.”

tags: OB, open source, SFLC, GPL
Open Malaysia: The entire State of Pahang moves to OpenOffice.org

“The driving force for this migration seems to be cost of proprietary software and the fear of unlicensed software. OpenOffice.org is the obvious solution to these two pressing problems (thanks, BSA!) What is good is that they have chosen ODF by default, and they are not changing the file format to the binary proprietary ones.”

tags: OB, ODF, Malaysia, OpenOffice.org
Open Malaysia: The State of Kedah moves to OpenOffice.org

“A case study submitted to the Open Source Competency Center by the Center of Information Technology, Office of the Chief Minister and State Secretary of Kedah, has indicated that OpenOffice.org has been installed in 70% of the computers in the Kedah state government agencies. There are currently 2,202 installed seats and by the looks of it, the numbers will just keep rising!”

tags: OB, Malaysia, ODF, OpenOffice.org

Standards Convergence

New direction for ‘JavaScript 2′ | InfoWorld | By Paul Krill

“The biggest change in JavaScript 2’s direction is that the ECMAScript 4 project has been dropped. That change resolves a long-simmering debate as to whether ECMAScript 3.1 or ECMAScript 4 should be the basis of JavaScript 2. (ECMAScript is the formal name for the standard, vendor-neutral version of JavaScript.)”

tags: OB, standards, JavaScript, ECMA

Exercise and Virtual Worlds

Alpha Male » World Of Warcraft On Treadmills

“The Wii might get you involved and more immersed in your gaming experience, thanks to the unique motion control system, but the folks at Manapotions.com decided to go the extra mile where World of Warcraft (WoW) is concerned. This special mod connects treadmills and joysticks to a computer, where running on the treadmill will make you move your character accordingly.”

Follow the link and check out the video.

tags: NP, OB, World of Warcraft, exercise

Provo, etc.

2008-08-26T16:27:49+00:00

I'm at the Novell offices in Provo, UT for hackweek. The YOW -> DTW -> SLC flight was uneventful. There will be attendance at the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 as well.

What are my plans for hackweek? Some libopenraw work in order to have a version releasable with more and more features. If that release can be usable to actually render RAW files, then it will be great. So far I have committed some changes to the test suite and and fixed the detection by content.

ISO and IEC (and ITU) get TV Emmy award

2008-08-26T14:21:36+00:00

Hot off the presses:

Geneva, 25 August 2008 — The US Academy of Television Arts & Sciences awarded the prestigious Primetime Emmy Award for Excellence to ITU, ISO and IEC — global leaders in making standards — for their work in producing an advanced video coding standard, formally known as Recommendation ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC Standard 14496-10 on Advanced Video Coding (AVC).

The Joint Video Team (JVT), made up of experts from the three international standards organizations, received industry recognition for its landmark achievement in developing a “high profile” that extends the reach of high quality video from mobile telephones right through to High Definition Television (HDTV). The JVT was formed in 2001 by the ITU Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).

I was trying to figure out something funny about whether the award to the ISO/IEC was for a comedy or a drama, but I’ll leave it to you.

The Lion in Winter - or is it Spring? Ted Kennedy Addresses the Democratic Convention

2008-08-26T01:44:02+00:00

This is one of a very occasional series of non-tech essays that I call The Monday Witness. As always, the opinions expressed here are mine alone.

For those of us who are of a certain age, the 1960s were an era not to have been missed. Indeed, they were a time when idealism seemed to be a responsibility of citizenship, rather than an idle pursuit. As John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King spoke out in words that captured the heart as well as the mind, more and more fell in behind. Their goals and ideals demanded to be your goals and ideals, and a...

Daily Links 08/25/2008 (p.m.)

2008-08-25T20:30:00+00:00

John McEnroe Is Still Pretty Complicated - NYTimes.com

“Now, sitting in the Midtown Manhattan conference room of his new accountant, McEnroe was explaining in an animated way why talking about tennis is easier for him than playing was in the early 1980s, when he was at the top of his game, an artist with a wooden racket.”

tags: OB, sports, tennis

Jeroen Sweers Boogie Woogie Band

2008-08-25T12:25:11+00:00

Did I hack on Krita yesterday? Nope -- I did not, because Jeroen Sweers came to Deventer to play on the Grote Kerkhof.

Daily Links 08/22/2008 (p.m.)

2008-08-22T20:30:01+00:00

Poll: Seinfeld and Vista, what gives? | Crave, the gadget blog - CNET

“As CNET News reported earlier Thursday, Microsoft has tapped comedian Jerry Seinfeld to star in a $300 million marketing campaign aimed at countering negative perceptions of its oft-maligned Vista operating system. The comedian, best known for his eponymous NBC sitcom, will reportedly get $10 million for the campaign, which is expected to play off the phrase “Windows, Not Walls,” and to stress the connection between people and ideas.”

tags: OB, Microsoft, Vista, Seinfeld

LinuxWorld 2008 predictions and podcasts

2008-08-22T18:09:54+00:00

I’ve now finished writing up the comments on the eight predictions for free and open source software and recording podcasts for each of them.

Prediction #	Slide and Comments	Link to Podcast
1	Green	podcast
2	Linux and longevity	podcast
3	Linux and x86	podcast
4	Linux and the desktop	podcast
5	SMB	podcast
6	FOSS licenses	podcast
7	Standards	podcast
8	Industry applications	podcast

A couple of notes:

I used GarageBand on a MacBook Pro to record these and it worked pretty well.
The comments and the podcasts get longer toward the end. I think this is because they were done later.

Linux and digital photography

2008-08-21T15:19:00+00:00

Joel Cornuz posted and excellent summary about Linux and digital photography.

That summarize pretty well my goals with ''Niepce Digital", with one more priority added: Freedom. Not that it is the exhaustive list of what you'll find at first, but it clearly describe what I think needs fixing. Fortunately, with the power of Free Software, lot of thing can be reused and/or shared.

LinuxWorld 2008 Prediction #8: Industry applications

2008-08-21T15:17:23+00:00

Although I’ve previously published the slides for the talk I gave at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco, I thought it might be useful to add some additional comments in the blog about each of the eight predictions I made. This is not the full text of what I said nor a full discussion of the slide, but just some ideas that flesh out what I meant.

If we consider a simplified software stack, right above the hardware is the operating system. Clearly with Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, and others, free and open source have had great success.

Above this we have what IBM and others call middleware: http servers, Java web servers, databases, email servers, groupware, and other types of servers. Apache rules the http server space, both open source and proprietary, while the other categories have strong proprietary and open source entries. Apache Geronimo, Red Hat JBoss, MySQL, Postgres, Apache Derby, Yahoo Zimbra, Scalix, and many other open source projects have been successful in getting developers and users to adopt them.

Above this we have the cross-industry application areas like ERP and CRM. Compiere is well known in the open source ERP space, though there are other contenders and people seem to be looking seriously at what open source providers are developing in this area. In the CRM area there are many projects, though SugarCRM is probably the best known.

As an alternative to “CRM on my server,” there is also the SalesForce.com software-as-a-service offering. Of course, in the proprietary space, Oracle and SAP aren’t doing so badly.

Just about every industry has customers that need to be managed, even if you call them “clients” or “donors.” Every industry deals with payroll. Every industry has supply chain, even if it’s to order beverages for the vending machine down the hall. I call this category “generic businessware.”

The big systems provide common modules and then allow you to extend the system in various ways. So if you have an “enterprise application suite” then it might have the usual software but also custom developed applications or user-designed reports, for example.

Above either the operating system, middleware, or the generic businessware levels it is possible to build applications that only work in one specific industry. It is these industry-specific applications that I am addressing in this prediction.

So far we have seen very few open source industry specific applications or frameworks outside the public sector. In Education, both Sakai and Moodle are doing well and compete vigorously against each other.

Over at Eclipse there is the Open Healthcare Framework (OHF) Project which is described as

… a project within Eclipse formed for the purpose of expediting healthcare informatics technology. The project is composed of extensible frameworks and tools which emphasize the use of existing and emerging standards in order to encourage interoperable open source infrastructure, thereby lowering integration barriers. We currently provide tools and Frameworks for HL7, IHE, Terminology, Devices, and Public Healthcare Maintenance.

Outside the public sector, I’m aware of the OpenQuote project for the insurance industry. Beyond that … not so much.

I’ve been quoted in a couple of articles because during the talk I said that I’m tired of waiting for more open source industry applications. That is, if more are coming, they are taking their time!

Given the open source industry applications that already exist, we know that the future is not one that only has proprietary industry applications. Will all such applications eventually be open source? If not, what will be the balance between open source and proprietary applications in this area? Right now it is overwhelmingly in favor of proprietary.

Maybe that’s the way it will stay. There’s no guarantee we will see a huge movement to open source industry applications. Will the wait for the “Year of Desktop Linux” be replaced by that for the “Year of Open Source Industry Applications”?

I don’t think we need to wait forever to find out. Open source in general has huge momentum but there may end up being market categories that are resistant to the movement. At some point you have to look at what is going on and say “you know, I really don’t think it’s going to happen.”

I’m offering this observation as someone who has looked at open source for some time, not as someone who is particularly bemoaning the absence of these applications. That is, I don’t personally need the open source apps just as I don’t personally even need the proprietary ones.

The public sector really seems different here and I think it’s important not to extrapolate to other industries. That is, don’t say that just because open source is so strong in Education that means it is just a matter of time before it becomes dominant in Chemical/Petroleum.

Now if you disagree with me here, just as you might disagree with what I’ve said in the other predictions, you have a great opportunity to prove me wrong.

Start coding!

Get a community together. Figure out your business model. Evangelize. Build to real requirements of industry. Do it better than the proprietary guys. Don’t just solve the problems that were figured out before, offer solutions to the really thorny issues that affect us now and are growing worse.

Of course, the “proprietary guys” won’t be sitting still either. Competition will drive innovation and value for the customer.

Unless something changes drastically, I don’t see open source growing rapidly and soon in the broad industry application space. Maybe it will just take more than ten years, but as I said in the talk, “either it will happen or it won’t.”

If you want it to happen, make it so. That’s the power of the model and the community for important software that solves real problems.

Previous: LinuxWorld 2008 Prediction #7: Standards

Direct book sales are on again

2008-08-21T13:10:12+00:00

I'm back home, and ready to ship books!

See this URL.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/bookresources/2008/04/ordering-the-op.html

Daily Links 08/21/2008 (a.m.)

2008-08-21T08:30:29+00:00

Basics - How to Travel at a Million Files a Minute - NYTimes.com

“When that day comes, there will be much rejoicing. But until then, there are things users can do to make sure their connections are as fast as possible. Here are a few ways”

tags: OB, internet, speed, DSL, cable, Firefox

Course on free and open source

2008-08-20T18:38:13+00:00

Marko Schuetz sent me a note saying that he has now placed online materials for a course on free and open source software. Links: main website, text, slides.

Disclaimer: I haven’t had a chance to go through it, but thought some readers might find it useful.

OpenOffice.org Conference in Beijing

2008-08-20T18:08:53+00:00

This year’s OpenOffice.org Conference will take in place in Beijing from November 5th through 7th. I was hoping to get over there for it but I have a travel conflict. The program looks great!

Wrath of the Lich King

2008-08-20T17:55:02+00:00

My son and I just got invited into The Wrath of the Lich King beta program for World of Warcraft. Tres cool. We’re psyched.

Daily Links 08/19/2008 (p.m.)

2008-08-19T20:30:00+00:00

Editorial: Collaboration is the new revolution | Comment is free | The Guardian

“Big corporations, such as IBM, Google and Amazon, are devourers of open source software because they find it cheap, efficient, low-maintenance and reliable. But UK government departments, including health and the foreign office, have proved risk-averse with hardly any open source in their infrastructure.”

tags: OB, open source, UK
Open Source Copyrights Legally Enforceable, Appeals Court Rules — Open Source — InformationWeek

“Ruling on an appeal brought by software developer Robert Jacobsen, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said Wednesday that open source users that do not comply with the software’s strict licensing terms can, in fact, be sued for copyright infringement — even if the software is free.”

tags: OB, open source, legal
Play more ‘Warcraft,’ get sued for malpractice less | Crave, the gadget blog - CNET

“OK, first off, the idea that video games are good for you is not a new one. I mean, I’ve seen plenty of studies saying video games improve everything from hand-eye coordination to driving skills. This is, however, the first time I’ve seen the benefits directed at surgeons. I guess some surgeons needed to justify the increased amount of raiding they’ve been doing lately. According to the study, laparoscopic surgeons who play video games are apparently 27 percent faster at advanced surgical procedures and made 37 percent fewer errors than surgeons who do not game. Hmmm, I guess the most interesting part of that for me was that there was that much room for improvement in advanced surgical procedures.”

tags: OB, NP, medicine, World of Warcraft

Debugging the blog

2008-08-18T22:20:21+00:00

For several weeks now I’ve been wondering why I’ve occasionally had problems where I hit the CPU limit for the sutor.com site on the webserver. As some of you may remember, I had a lot of problems with this last year until I until I coughed up more cash per month for more cycles. I just discovered that the cross-linker WordPress plugin was spitting out errors every time it was used. I don’t know how long this was happening, but it generated immense error logs (175Mb file, anyone?). This would slow things down.

I’ve deactivated this plugin for now, but since I moved to it from aLinks, I’m without software that automatically inserts links around terms like “ODF”, “Ubuntu,” and “WordPress.” I had the latest version of cross-linker. Maybe I’ll check out the latest version of aLinks or just write my own plugin.

I did a podcast today for one of the LinuxWorld predictons (#7) as an experiment, and I discovered that the RSS feed of entries with attached podcasts was pointing to the old category URL rather than the tag URL. That’s now been fixed.

Giving the Finger to the DIS 29500 Appellants

2008-08-18T21:36:07+00:00

The news broke on Friday, with the ISO press release, and additional coverage and analysis by Andy Updegrove and on Groklaw. But it would be remiss if I did not share a few details on how, true to form, the end of this DIS 29500 process was botched.

First, let's put this in perspective. We're talking about members of an organization, in this case four members of ISO/IEC JTC1, raising an appeal under the rules of that organization, alleging that the organization failed to follow its own rules. Almost every organization has a provision for dispute resolution, including the rights of members to appeal the decisions of elected officers or staff. This is a basic part of governance.

It is a worthwhile exercise to see how this "right to appeal" is handled by other SDO's. Let's take a few examples from other organizations that deal with tech standards.

First, let's look at OASIS, a consortium that creates XML standards, like ODF. Any three OASIS members may lodge an appeal if they believe that OASIS procedures have been violated. Resolution is first attempted via correspondence, but if that fails to satisfy the appellants, they then may request a in-person hearing at the next OASIS Board of Directors meeting, where they can present their complaint. This request cannot be denied. It is a right of the members.

INCITS, the US NB in JTC1 has a different approach to appeals, detailed in section 5.8 of their RD-2 [pdf] Procedures guide. Appeals in INCITS are based on the following principles:

Appeals shall be addressed promptly and a decision made expeditiously.
The right of the involved parties to present their cases shall not be denied.
These procedures shall provide for participation by all parties concerned without imposing an undue burden on them.
Consideration of appeals shall be fair and unbiased and shall fully address the concerns expressed.
Records of appeals shall be kept and made available upon request. The INCITS Secretariat may levy a nominal charge to cover the cost of reproduction, handling and distribution for requests received from other than the involved parties.

Any INCITS member may lodge an appeal, and if an informal attempt at resolution with the INCITS Secretariat fails, an appeals panel is formed to hear the appeal. The impartiality and balance of the appeals panel is explicitly considered:

The appeals panel shall consist of three individuals who have not been directly involved in the matter in dispute. At least two members shall be acceptable to the appellant and at least two shall be acceptable to the INCITS Secretariat.

From large consortia, to NB's, let's poke around further and look at a industry group, AIIM, with a standards program focused on enterprise content management (ECM) technologies. Section 7.0 of their Policies and Procedures [pdf] manual defines their appeals process.

Persons who have directly and materially affected interests and who believe they have been or will be adversely affected by any procedural action or inaction by AIIM as a standards developer with regard to the development of a proposed American National Standard or the revision, reaffirmation, or withdrawal of an existing American National Standard, have the right to appeal.

The appeal is heard by three member panel, selected as in INCITS to be impartial and balanced:

The appeals panel shall consist of three members selected from the AIIM membership in addition to the Chairperson. The Chairperson of the panel shall be the Standards Board Chairperson, and shall not have a vote in the decision of the panel. The voting members of the panel shall not have been directly involved in the matter in dispute, and not be currently involved in the development of the standard(s) in question, and shall not represent or be an employee of an interest that can be made directly or materially affected by any decision made by or to be made in the dispute. The voting members of the appeals panel shall be agreed to by both the appellant and the respondent.

Perhaps readers can post other summaries of SDO appeals procedures, to give a broader sense of what the common features are. From what I can tell, the best practices are:

Members have a right to appeal decisions of the organization, and to have their appeal heard and considered, in person, by a panel chosen to be impartial and balanced. Although the appellants are not guaranteed that their views will prevail, the rules do no allow the organization to repress the appeal and not let it be heard.

So with that as background, it is interesting so observe how ISO/IEC JTC1's antiquated cold war era rules in effect serve to stifle criticism, repress dissent, and prevent even a hearing on the merits of an appeal. As I'll show, even with this strong organizational bias against appeals, the current DIS 29500 were only dismissed with assistance from a poorly written ballot question, NB confusion resulting in contradictory votes, and an unwillingness of committee chairs to attempt to reach consensus. Organizational failures, in the end, are usually leadership failures.

For an appeal in JTC1 to be heard, two different committees, ISO/TMB and IEC/SMB must first agree to allow the appeal to be heard. The reader should note the increased difficulty of getting two different committees to agree on the same decision, and consider the following mathematical diversion.

---------

Suppose you are pushing for an proposal that has, on average, 50% support within a given organization. It is put to a vote in a subcommittee drawn randomly from that population. What is the probability that the proposal will pass a vote in that subcommittee?

50%. I think most of us have an intuitive sense of that.

But what if there are two subcommittees drawn randomly from that organization, and the proposal must win a vote in each one of the subcommittees, what is the chance it will pass?

Is it still 50%? No. I hope most of us have that intuitive sense that the need to pass two committees is harder than passing a single committee. In fact, your chances of approval could be as low as 25%, depending on whether the two committees make independent decisions, or whether there are factors that cause their votes to be partially correlated.

But the general rule is: the more stages of approval required, the less your chances of success

---------

In the particular case of the DIS 29500 appeals, the IEC/SMB requires a 2/3 super majority to approve a ballot. ISO/TMB presumably requires only simple majority. (Like most of JTC1 Directives, this is not explicitly defined).

The astute reader will note that the odds are against the appellants even getting their appeal considered by a panel. In fact, these committee odds match what is required to impeach a U.S. President (50% in House) and remove him from office (2/3 in the Senate).

Given these odds, how did the appellants fair? In ISO/TMB the first irony comes with the title of the ballot:

Remember, a core matter of the appeals is the mistreatment of the contradiction phase of the DIS process, and one of the core matters of the contradiction arguments raised was that the official name of the DIS, "Office Open XML" bore a close and confusing resemblance to the submitters main competitor, Open Office, and that this would lead to confusion in the name of the standard. Well here we are, and in denying this appeal ISO/TMB commits that same error, giving the incorrect name of the standard!

Looking at the actual results, for each of the 4 appeals, ISO/TMB tied on two of them, 6-6, and voted not to pursue two others by 7-5 and 8-3 votes. So, it was very close. In fact I am a bit surprised they simply dropped further consideration of the appeals when they had tied votes like that.

A basic rule that applies to voting is JTC1 Directives, 9.1.3:

The Chairman has no vote and questions on which the vote is equally divided shall be subject to further discussion.

In this case, the Chair (Denmark) did not vote. That is correct. But why did the procedure end with two appeals showing a 6-6 "equally divided" vote? According to the rules this should be leading to further discussion. An equally divided vote is as far from consensus as one can get. Is this how they want to leave it, just hanging like this?

In IEC/SMB, the voting results are even more bizarre. I don't know quite what to make of them. So just a few quick observations.

First, a motion should be carefully worded to it is clear what will happen if the motion passes, and what will happen if the motion fails. A Chair should insist on this, and indeed that is one of their primary duties as Chair, to ensure that questions put to their committee are clear. However, in the case of the DIS 29500 appeals, the ballot questions, as dictated by the Secretaries General, were muddled. I remarked on this in a previous blog post, and other readers observed this as well. Whether done by malice or incompetence, the ballot questions were destined to cause confusion.

The reported results indeed were muddled, as you can see here:

Of the 15 SMB members only two (China and the Netherlands) followed the explicit instructions and voted either the questions in Part A or in Part B (but not both). Both China and the Netherlands voted in one part, and abstained in the other part.

Most members voted both sections, but while expressing a consistent intent, e.g., vote No for not processing Brazil's appeal further, but vote Yes for processing Brazil's appeal further.

However, it appears that three other NB's voted inconsistent, contradictory instructions. In fact one NB (Canada) gave exactly the same votes on section B as in section A, essentially canceling out their vote on every single question. This was from an NB whose written comments stated they they strongly supported hearing the appeals further. Similarly, the votes from Korea are partially contradictory.

We can attempt to reconstruct what a less-confusing ballot would have yielded. For example, take the questions in part A, whether "not to process the appeal any further", where the recorded results were 8-4-3 for the Brazilian appeal, yielding a 2/3 super majority (ignoring the 3 abstentions). But note then that two of the three abstaining NB's (China and the Netherlands) in fact voted in the affirmative for the question on whether to process the Brazil's appeal in part B. It looks like the only reason why they abstained in Part A is that they actually followed the ballot instructions and cast a vote in Section A or Section B. If we apply their clear intent consistently to the Part A question, then the results become 8-6-1 and the motion to "not process the appeal any further" would have failed for lack of 2/3 majority.

I cannot make sense of Korea's votes. Although they seem to have supported two appeals, while not supporting two other appeals, their inconsistent votes make it impossible to tell which ones they supported and which ones they did not.

Needless to say, a ballot that yields results where it is impossible to tell what the voters wanted is a hallmark of a seriously flawed, useless ballot. The SMB results are tainted by a poorly written ballot question, given to them by the Secretaries General, which has clearly caused confusion among the SMB voters, and which had a material effect on the results. My analysis of IEC/SMB shows that, like ISO/TMB's vote, the results are nearly equally divided, and IEC/SMB should hang their head in shame if they persist in denying a hearing to these four appeals because of ambiguous results from a poorly written, botched ballot.

This is why ballot results should be released publicly and subject to scrutiny. I do not believe we can trust ISO/IEC to perform quality control on their own processes. The rot is too deep.

Sketching on Saturday

2008-08-17T12:25:11+00:00

Yesterday afternoon I played hookey from hacking on Krita's brush engine and settings management code and grabbed pen, ink, pencil and paper and did some analog sketching. I feel I'm slowly getting back a little certainty of purpose in my lines; sketching really is something one should do every day, like coding. Behind the fold, also because there is some full dorsal nudity.

Akademy 2008: Album with pictures

2008-08-16T18:28:32+00:00

After a lot of deliberating this, I decided to put online an album with a lot of the pictures I took at Akademy. Since most people at (big) conferences and community gatherings like it when they can have some form of memento (including me!) of themselves and the event, I think this outweighs the (very few) people who didn't seem to like their picture being taken. Especially since most of the people actually tried posing in different positions when I came near them with my camera, which I think means obviously that they would want to see themselves afterwards

To the best of my abilities of remembering those who did not like pictures being taken, I have not put online the pictures of those people, neither have I uploaded the pictures of somewhat embarrassing nature (like people sleeping during the presentations ). I've also not uploaded the worst out-of-focus ones, blurry ones, moved ones, etc. This brings me to a total of 685 pictures currently being available, out of 939 in my local album, which I still think is rather much (This means it's also rather much bandwith that this will suck, so please be kind to my webhost )

If you really don't want to be in one of the pics I put online, give me a sign and I'll try to fix it (to make sure it's not being indexed by the web archive and then you start complaining your pic is being archived over there, I put up a robots.txt over this, which is very very sad, but I really don't want people complaining afterwards). Similarly, if you really like a certain picture of you and want the original-sized one, also don't hesitate to ask for it.

So, after all that, here are my photos of Akademy 2008

PS: The weird ordering of the pictures (seemingly not chronological or alphabetically sorted by filename) is not my fault: I blame digiKam

Update 17/08/08: Removed 5 photos but added a few more, bringing us to a total of 690 pictures. Also added an explicit license: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

Detailed IEC Voting Results on OOXML Appeals

2008-08-16T15:14:02+00:00

As I reported yesterday, the OOXML appeals brought by Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela have been rejected by the Technical Management Board (TMB) and Standardization Management Board (SMB) of ISO and IEC, respectively. I have now received the actual voting results for the IEC vote, and an indecipherable screenshot of the ISO votes. I'll hope to add the ISO votes later on when I get more comprehensible information, but in the meantime, here are the IEC results.

In each case, the questions included in the ballot were the same:

Street organs

2008-08-16T09:25:12+00:00

One of the advantages of living in the old town centre of a provincial town like Deventer is the street organ -- and Deventer has a very good one. Radio en Televsie orgel de Turk has been carefully restored last winter and now sounds better than ever. This street organ is exactly one hundred years old this year -- it was built in France by the brothers Limonaire in 1908. From Paris to Amsterdam to Leyden to the Hague to Deventer -- where it's been doing its rounds since 1961.

Image cropped and scaled by Krita 2.0

The current owner has a really great choice in music: there's mostly something new every Saturday and there's a nice mix between jazz, old rock, classical stuff and folksy tunes. And it's great coding to all that up-beat music :-)

Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

2008-08-15T20:46:02+00:00

We are coming down to the last week for JTC1 to decide on whether to hear the four NB appeals concerning various claimed errors in the processing of DIS 29500 (OOXML), or whether summarily to dismiss these appeals without hearing them. The decision lies with two committees, the Technical Management Board (TMB) in ISO and the Standards Management Board (SMB) in the IEC.

Back on July 4th, the Secretaries General of ISO and the IEC referred the four NB appeals, with their comments, to the TMB/SMB. Groklaw has the text of these comments, in PDF format, as well as HTML transcription.

The comments of the Secretary General are accompanied by a ballot, asking the question:

ACTION

The members of the Technical Management Board are invited to indicate, by replying yes, no or
abstention on EITHER a) OR b) for each of the four appeals (see item 14 in annex A):

a) not to process the appeal any further:
Item 1 ABNT
Item 2 BIS
Item 3 FONDONORMA
Item 4 SABS

OR

b) to process one or more of the appeals, which would require setting up of a conciliation panel

Item 5 ABNT
Item 6 BIS
Item 7 FONDONORMA
Item 8 SABS

by no later than 4 August 2008.

This is quite a strange animal to see. Why are we having a ballot at all, and only a 30-day one? This is questionable from several perspectives.

First, why are the Secretaries General the ones calling for a ballot? The Directives do not call for them to do so. In fact the Secretaries General are not even called upon to make a recommendation. They are only asked for comments. The Directives say:

11.3.3 The Secretaries-General shall, following whatever consultations they deem appropriate, refer the appeal together with their comments to the TMB/SMB within one month after receipt of the appeal.

11.3.4 The TMB/SMB shall decide whether an appeal shall be further processed or not. If the decision is in favour of proceeding, the Chairmen of the TMB/SMB shall form a conciliation panel (see 9.2).

But deciding is not the same as voting. One of the cardinal principles of JTC1 is to discuss and seek consensus, not rush to a vote. Indeed, this is one of the matters under appeal, the rush to voting at the OOXML BRM. JTC1 Directives, section 1.2 says (my emphasis):

These Directives are inspired by the principle that the objective in the development of International Standards should be the achievement of consensus between those concerned rather than a decision based on counting votes.

But here we are, with a vote pushed on the TMB/SMB.

The sense of the vote is wrong as well. The Directives call for a decision on "whether an appeal shall be further processed or not." Note the wording. It did not call for a decision on "whether to accept the recommendation of the Secretaries General". But somehow, we skip discussion, skip over consensus and get a ballot question which asks the opposite question first "not to process the appeal any further". In an environment where many parties automatically vote Yes to the ballot question, changing the sense of the question in this way is prejudicial to the appellants.

So it is clear from the start that the powers that be do not want to give these four NB's the opportunity to make their case or be heard. In any case, let's take a deeper look at some of the subjects under appeal and see if we can detect what it is exactly that cannot bear the scrutiny of a duly processed appeal.

First up is the alleged mishandling of the contradiction period last year. The Secretaries General dismiss this complaint, saying that it was a matter of judgment:

The Directives give the JTC 1 Secretariat and ITTF latitude to use judgement as to whether a meeting should be organized to address alleged contradictions. Considering that other issues could potentially be identified during the DIS ballot, the JTC 1 secretariat and ITTF concluded that it was preferable to initiate the ballot and to allow all issues to be addressed by the BRM. The NBs were fully informed of all the claimed contradictions and Ecma's responses to them.

This argument doesn't hold water. Although the JTC1 Secretariat and ITTF are allowed judgment, this is not an absolute license which cannot be questioned. The Secretariat and ITTF also have defined duties, and their actions or inactions with respect to these duties can be questioned and are subject to appeal. Specifically, an NB may appeal the issue of an inaction of JTC1, according to JTC1 Directives, 11.3. So for the Secretaries General to suggest that this inaction cannot be appealed because it is a matter of judgment is nonsense. Judgment and duty are the proper matters for an appeal.

So what is the duty in this case? As stated in JTC1 Directives, 13.4:

If a contradiction is alleged, the JTC 1 Secretariat and ITTF shall make a best effort to resolve the matter in no more than a three month period, consulting with the proposer of the fast-track document, the NB(s) raising the claim of contradiction and others, as they deem necessary. A meeting of these parties, open to all NBs, may be convened by the JTC 1 Secretariat, if required.

If the resolution requires a change to the document submitted for fast-track processing, the initial document submitted will be considered withdrawn. The proposer may submit a revised document, to be processed as a new proposal.

If the resolution results in no change to the document or if a resolution cannot be reached, the five month fast-track ballot commences immediately after such a determination is made.

The Directives call for the JTC1 Secretariat to make a best effort to resolve the matter (JTC1 Directives, 13.4). The JTC1 Secretariat is not given latitude to do nothing, or allowed discretion to immediately defer this question to the ballot period, without making a best effort to resolve the matter.

When a new 6,000 page DIS is submitted to JTC1 only one month after the publication of another standard (ODF) in the exact same space (XML document formats for office applications) and 19 NB's submit contradiction statements, and the JTC1 Secretariat's "best effort" is to hold no consultations with the NB's claiming contradictions, to hold no meeting, to make no attempt to resolve the question, then I believe that any NB would has a legitimate grounds for appeal on the inaction of JTC1 with regards to contradictions. There is no evidence that a "best effort" was made here to resolve the contradictions. Doing nothing is clearly incompatible with the required “best effort”.

It should be noted that JTC1 has had challenges in the past getting ITTF to carry out their responsibilities with respect to contradictions, which lead to this resolution adopted unamimously at the 2000 JTC1 Plenary:

Resolution 27 - Consistency of JTC 1 Products

JTC 1 stresses the strong need for consistency of its products (ISs and TRs) irrespective of the route through which they were developed. Any inconsistency will confuse users of JTC 1 standards and, hence, jeopardize JTC 1's reputation. Therefore, referring to clauses 13.2 (Fast Track) and 18.4.3.2 (PAS) of its Directives, JTC 1 reminds ITTF of its obligation to ascertain that a proposed DIS contains no evident contradiction with other ISO/IEC standards. JTC 1 offers any help to ITTF in such undertaking. However, should an inconsistency be detected at any point in the ratification process, JTC 1 together with ITTF will take immediate action to cure the problem.

Perhaps it is time to give ITTF another reminder of their obligations in this regard?

Further, the determination claimed to have been made by the JTC1 Secretariat and ITTF was not communicated to JTC1 NB's. Instead, the JTC1 Secretariat merely forwarded Ecma's responses to the contradiction submissions along with a notification that the DIS ballot should then commence. No statement was made as to whether the ballot was commencing because the contradictions had in fact been resolved, or because a resolution could not be made, which are the only two outcomes allowed by the Directives in 13.4. Not to notify NB's of the actual state of the resolution of the contradictions submissions is incompatible with the JTC1 Secretariat's duty to make a best effort to resolve the matter.

This failure by JTC1 materially effected the ensuing ballot, since Microsoft was then able to take advantage of this procedural nonperformance and repeatedly represent to NB's that the contradictions had been rejected as invalid and could not be considered in the DIS ballot. In fact, this led to several NB's issuing explicit, but erroneous instructions to their members that the contradictions had been resolved and thus could not be raised again as a criterion for determining their national position, e.g., in Australia.

Further, although the Secretaries General claim that “the JTC 1 secretariat and ITTF concluded that it was preferable to initiate the ballot and to allow all issues to be addressed by the BRM” the documented fact is that the BRM Convenor explicitly disallowed any discussion of contradictions at the BRM.

Another subject of appeal was the irregular voting procedures used at the DIS 29500 BRM in February. This is the P-member versus O-member question. The Secretaries General dismiss this appeal in this way:

2e. Correct but inapplicable. The BRM was neither a meeting of JTC 1 nor of SC 34 but was open to all 87 national bodies which submitted a vote (including abstentions) on the DIS. Applying 9.1.4 would have disenfranchised the voting NBs present at the BRM which were not P-members. The fact that any votes in the BRM would be open to all national delegations present was communicated over three months prior to the BRM.

This argument presented is flawed, and amounts to saying, “The voting was done by P- and O-members because the meeting was attended by delegations from P- and O-members”. Who attended the meeting is immaterial. Liaisons such as Ecma also attended the BRM? Should they have been able to vote merely because they attended? No, of course not. Voting rights are defined in JTC1 Directives, and this must not be set aside in favor of an ad-hoc rule made without NB consultation or approval.

Asserting that applying 9.1.4 would disenfranchise NB's is an example of circular reasoning. One can only be disenfranchised if one first has the right to vote. So the statement by the Secretaries General is arguing a conclusion (O-members are permitted to vote at BRM's) by assuming the very thing it tries to prove.

JTC1 Directives 14.4.3.9, which defines the parallel BRM process for the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) transposition process, reads: “At the ballot resolution group meeting, decisions should be reached preferably by consensus. If a vote is unavoidable, the approval criteria in the subclause 9.1.4 is applied.” So here we see 9.1.4 explicitly called for. By the argument put forth by the Secretaries General, all PAS BRM's which follow the Directives are also flawed because they “disenfranchise” those NB's who are not P-members of JTC1. I believe this is a tortured reading of the Directives. The voting rules of 9.1.4 are explicitly and unambiguously called for in PAS BRM's, so one cannot dismiss their application to Fast Track on general principles that would apply equally to PAS. When Fast Track rules say that the BRM vote shall ("if a vote is unavoidable") "be taken according to normal JTC 1 procedures" then we are faced with two alternatives:

Use the voting rules of 9.1.4, which declares itself to be the normal voting procedures ("In a meeting, except as otherwise specified in these directives, questions are decided by a majority of the votes cast at the meeting by P-members expressing either approval or disapproval.")
Or use a voting rule which is not to be found anywhere within the Directives.

Which one is "normal JTC 1 procedures"? Where is the basis in the Directives for believing that O-members had the right to vote at the BRM?

Finally, neither BRM Convenor, Alex Brown, nor ITTF, nor indeed the assembled delegations at the BRM were competent nor had the mandate to make or change voting rules for a DIS BRM. The rules are set in JTC1 Directives, and must be followed. “These Directives shall be complied with in all respects and no deviations can be made without the consent of the Secretaries-General.” (JTC1 Directives 1.2).

Notifications made by the BRM Convenor in advance of the BRM have no weight on matters which exceed his mandate and authority. The communication referred to by the Secretaries General, which was given in advance by the BRM Convenor, was from this FAQ:

6.8 If votes are taken during the BRM, who votes?

Those present.

This in fact was not the rule applied at the BRM. For example, Liaison representatives could not vote, though they were undoubtedly present at the BRM and participated fully in other ways. Also individual participants could not vote, only delegations, via their HoD could vote. So the Convenor's glib communication should not be taken as notification of a novel voting procedure.

Additionally, the BRM Convenor was unambiguous in his communications on his blog where he clearly stated that the voting rules of 9.1.4 would be applied:

...Now, paper balloting follows normal JTC 1 in-meeting rules: In a meeting, except as otherwise specified in these directives, questions are decided by a majority of the votes cast at the meeting by P-members expressing either approval or disapproval. (9.1.4)

(After the BRM the Convenor dutifully went back and “corrected” his earlier blog post to reflect how the BRM actually operated.)

The Secretaries General further dismiss the concerns regarding BRM voting procedure, saying:

4e. Not correct. Decisions on the comments not discussed during the BRM and proposed dispositions were taken by a process agreed by the BRM itself (29 votes in favour, none against and 2 abstentions).

On the contrary, the BRM was not competent and had not the mandate to set its own voting rules or to negate the provisions for consensus stated in JTC1 Directives 1.2:

These Directives are inspired by the principle that the objective in the development of International Standards should be the achievement of consensus between those concerned rather than a decision based on counting votes.

[Note: Consensus is defined as general agreement, characterised by the absence of sustained opposition to substantial issues by any important part of the concerned interests and by a process that involves seeking to take into account the views of all parties concerned and to reconcile any conflicting arguments. Consensus need not imply unanimity. (ISO/IEC Guide 2:1996)]

The Directives specify the rules. If NB's do not like the rules, then NB's may work with SWG-Directives to define new rules and then vote on them using the defined process. But if the rules are not applied correctly, then the proper course is for NB's to appeal against the actions or inactions of those with a duty to carry out the rules. This is the essential governance model of JTC1. NB's rule, but they rule through the rules. We may not merely decide by majority vote to ignore rules for this DIS, or to institute new rules for that DIS, or to substitute different rules for another DIS, in an ad-hoc fashion, based on a BRM vote.

Using the logic given by the Secretaries General, what in principle would prevent a BRM from voting itself an Augur in addition to a Convenor for the purpose of observing the flights of birds to decide whether a given change to the DIS text was auspicious or not? Is there any voting procedure that would not be permitted them once we say that a BRM, by majority vote, can institute their own voting rules? Are TMB/SMB certain that this is the principle that they want affirmed by their rejection of the NB's appeals?

Further, NB's were not duly notified that their BRM delegations would be determining their own voting rules, so few if any of them had NB instructions on that matter. An agreement among BRM HoD's to set aside cardinal principles of JTC1, in the absence of NB consultations, should not be allowed to stand.

Finally, the existence of a vote at the BRM is not incompatible with the assertion that the BRM was “too short, arbitrarily short, or otherwise incorrectly conducted”. When given the choice between several bad alternatives, the delegations made a choice. That does not legitimatize the flawed application of JTC1 process that incorrectly gave them only bad choices and forced upon them a vote which they did not have the mandate to hold.

I could go on and on, but I'll spare you all more of the same. I am sorry to report that I find the response by the Secretaries General to be perfunctory, poorly reasoned and self-serving. It does not serve to resolve the issues, including important issues where clarification is needed. Majority rule, within the rules, should be encouraged. But to dismiss legitimate complaints by arguing that the majority agreed to not follow the rules, this is to substitute mob rule (or orchestrated monopoly rule) for the rule of law. We know where that leads to -- curtailed rights for those with minority opinions. And that should concern everyone.

The Secretary General of ISO, Alan Bryden, retires at the end of the year. August vacation is approaching, and before you know it there will be a retirement party with the cake and gifts, maybe a wall plaque or pewter paperweight. I am sure he does not need or desire to spend more time being reminded of the OOXML disaster that occurred during his last year at ISO. TMB/SMB members all want vacation as well. So do I. But out of respect for Mr. Bryden's eventual successor, and our shared mission in JTC1, shouldn't we urge TMB/SMB to do their job and not leave this all unresolved for the next guy to deal with? Dismissing an appeal with so many open unresolved issue is not expediency. It is merely creating more dissent, more distrust and more trouble that we'll all need to deal with next time around. It is better, I think, to hear the appeals, get to the bottom of this, seek resolution, consensus and closure, and then to move on. Ignoring mistakes will not make them go away.