Updated: 11/1/2005; 7:49:09 PM.
Notes from the Metaverse
Writing, working, open source
        

Saturday, October 22, 2005

There I go promising more frequent contact, and then going away for a month. Excuse of the day: I have yet to find time to upgrade my regular machine to SUSE 10, and I don't really want to go to the trouble of setting up Radio Userland under Wine, only to have to repeat the process after the upgrade. But it's also a pain to have to reboot into Windows just for blogging, so I find myself agonizing over whether what I have to say is worth having to reboot (along with the attendant "update the virus and spyware definitions, etc." tasks required to keep Windows moderately functional). But there's been a lot happening that is indeed reboot worthy, so here we go again.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 released

If you haven't grabbed the latest yet, go do that now (Try the BitTorrent for fast, and community-minded, downloading)!  Steven Vaughn-Nichols does a good job of explaining why, if you have any doubts, even if he emphasizes the free (beer) aspect a little too much. I've been working with the betas under both SUSE and Windows, and the best thing you can say about it is that it is just not annoying--and if you've ever worked with Microsoft Office, you know that's not faint praise!

Although Sams required me to convert to Word for the final format, I wrote SUSE Linux 10 Unleashed (coming any day now, by the way) almost entirely in OOo without a hiccup. Writer accepted and worked with the Word style template Sams sent me, and we just went from there. I don't spend a lot of time in the other components, but they all seem to work pretty well for my purposes. And I'm actually looking forward to playing with the new database tool.

As always, it's good to remember that OOo isn't your only choice for Linux productivity. I like KOffice for some things, and Abiword is a fine word processor as well under continuous development that runs under Windows and the Mac besides. But there's no question that the OOo2 release is a real event in the open-source world, and justifiably so. Congratulations (and Happy 5th Birthday!) to the OOo team!

Muni Wireless in Milwaukee

It's almost old news now, and obviously overshadowed by the big San Francisco project, but Milwaukee may soon be getting citywide wireless access. Here's the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel story. Esme Vos at muniwireless.com has promised a longer look at the project (but I can sympathize with her not being able to do that yet).

These sorts of projects are exciting to think about, but until they happen it's just talk. My first ever freelance technology story (for Isthmus of Madison, WI) was about a plan for free high-speed Internet in public buildings from a small cable company that was going to get Madison's second cable franchise back in 1995. Some months later, the CEO was caught in a campaign finance scandal (after having "helped" write the abominable Telecommunications Act of 1996), and the cable system, much less the community network, was never built.

Midwest Fiber Networks, which has the contract to build the WiFi network, as of this moment hasn't even built a website beyond a placeholder with a mission statement.Perhaps they've only hired networking professionals who just set up hotspots and can't be bothered with building websites, but this is not a good sign for a tech company in 2005.

Meanwhile, if this is really going to mean something, Milwaukeeans are going to have to organize to ensure that this access isn't just another techie toy to bring those cultural creatives into town and revive the job market. A real community network should be organized to provide universal Internet access with this technology. Let's hope that this comes together.

10:12:36 AM    comment []


© Copyright 2005 Mike McCallister.
 
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