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
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