Blackmoor Vituperative

I just had a panic moment when I thought that a Google document I’d spent the better part of a week writing had vanished. This is what I plan to do from now on, once a week, until I forget about it and stop doing it.

1. In Google Docs, go down to the far left bottom menu item, and select “More V” and then “All Items”.
2. Click the select box at the top of the screen next to “TITLE” to select all items.
3. Click the “More V” button at the top middle of the screen, next to the eyeball (“Preview”) icon, and select “Download”.
4. Select “Change all formats to… OpenOffice”, and click the “Download” button.
5. Wait a couple of minutes and then download the file somewhere.

I just spent too much time pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to get Google Docs to paste spaces and keep them spaces, rather than turning the spaces into tabs. I couldn’t find a way to prevent it, so here is what I did.

1. Paste my text into a text editor, such as Notepad++.
2. In the text editor, find & replace every instance of a space ” ” with a character that does not already exist in the text, nor in the document you intend to paste that text into. In my case, I used a tilde “~”.
3. Copy this modified text, and paste it into Google Docs.
4. In Google Docs, find & replace every instance of the placeholder character with a space ” “.

Is it ridiculous that you need to do this to keep Google Docs from corrupting what you are pasting? Yes. Yes, it is.

Here is how to remove the Facebook tab from Skype 5:

Stop Skype from running on your computer (Quit). Go to Windows Start. In the search box type %appdata%\skype and press Enter. In the Skype user folder, that will open, locate the folder with your Skype user name. Open this folder and find file with name config.xml. Open this file in any text editor, e.g. Notepad++ or similar. Scroll down until you find section starting with the key . In this section you should see following items

<FlamingoDisconnected>1</FlamingoDisconnected>
<FlamingoLastRead>0</FlamingoLastRead>
<FlamingoLastUpdate>0</FlamingoLastUpdate>

The first item is the one controlling whether the Facebook tab is present or not. If the value is 1, the tab is disconnected, 0 means the tab is connected. If the mentioned item is missing, then you should just add it in front of the two other items. Save the config.xml file and restart Skype. The Facebook tab will no longer be there.

(with thanks to ruwim)

Oracle announced a proposal this week to transfer the OpenOffice.org (OOo) project to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The move would put OOo under the umbrella of the Apache Incubator program and involve transitioning the project’s source code to the permissive Apache License. The proposal is currently under review by the Apache Incubator Project Management Committee, which has not yet issued a decision.

[...]

Dumping the largely abandoned husk of OOo into the Apache Incubator so that it can continue to be developed parallel to LibreOffice is not a particularly constructive maneuver. If Oracle had opted to take this route last year before its friction with the community necessitated the LibreOffice fork, it would likely have been welcomed by all parties. But handing the project to the ASF at this point, when a significant portion of the OOo community has already chosen to back TDF, is just petty and distasteful.

[...]

This parting shot from Oracle punctuates the company’s legacy of bad stewardship and mishandling of OpenOffice.org. It’s not clear yet whether the proposed Apache OOo will find its footing, but it seems likely that LibreOffice will continue to flourish as OOo’s successor despite this move by Oracle and IBM to fragment the community.

In a statement issued on Friday, Oracle announced that it intends to discontinue commercial development of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The move comes several months after key members of the OOo community and a number of major corporate contributors forked OOo to create a vendor-neutral alternative.

OOo is one of many open source software projects that Oracle obtained in its acquisition of Sun. OOo has long been plagued by governance issues and friction between its corporate stakeholders. Sun’s copyright assignment policies and bureaucratic code review process significantly hindered community participation in the project. Oracle declined to address these issues after its acquisition of Sun and exacerbated the friction by failing to engage with the OOo community in a transparent and open way.

A group of prominent OOo contributors eventually decided to fork the project, creating an alternative called LibreOffice. They founded a nonprofit organization called The Document Foundation (TDF) in order to create a truly vendor-neutral governance body for the software. LibreOffice is based on the OOo source code, but it also incorporates a large number of other improvements driven by its own developer community. [...]

The community defections eventually made OOo financially untenable for Oracle, which is why the company has finally thrown in the towel. Oracle says that it is ready to hand over control of the project to the community, but doing so at this point would be little more than a symbolic gesture; the community has already moved on of its own accord. [...]

The LibreOffice escape from Oracle is a powerful demonstration of how open source forking can be used to protect community autonomy and lock out exploitative stakeholders.

(from Oracle gives up on OpenOffice after community forks the project, ArsTechnica)

You might be tempted to applaud. You shouldn’t. We would all be better off if Oracle had participated in the OpenOffice project in a transparent and open way. Users would be better off, because Oracle brings a lot to the table, and Oracle would be better off, because they would have a foundation for their commercial Cloud Office project (which appears to have been terminated along with their participation in OpenOffice). So, we all lose here, in the short term.

However, in the long term, the project continues, under better conditions that Oracle permitted, and we all benefit from that. It’s just a shame that Oracle was so short-sighted.

Hexographer and Dungeonographer received major updates a week or two ago. If you’ve used either tool since then, you’ve probably noticed the changes.

Both tools received layout changes which reduced the number of menu items by placing buttons for many of those features in panels dedicated to those features. For example, the ability to add custom map items is now a button on the map items tab/toolbox.

There were a great many other changes, as well. You can read more about it at the Inkwell Ideas web site.

There are a lot of people asking about this, and a great many sites which tell you how to set it up. They all entail copying DLL files and registering them, etc. Sadly, these methods do not work on 64-bit Windows Vista/Windows 7. Here is what works:

• Ardfry Imaging‘s PSD codec for Adobe Photoshop Documents
• MysticThumbs Thumbnail provider for Windows 7, Vista and XP

They both cost money ($20 and $25, as of this moment).

Some disappointing news from the Ninth Circuit Court.

On Friday, 10 September, three judges in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, covering the nine western states of the US, handed down a decision that effectively means the end of the doctrine of first sale for commercial software. Speaking of the limited monopoly power granted by copyright law to a copyright holder, the 9th Circuit decision reads:

The exclusive distribution right is limited by the first sale doctrine, an affirmative defense to copyright infringement that allows owners of copies of copyrighted works to resell those copies. The exclusive reproduction right is limited within the software context by the essential step defense, another affirmative defense to copyright infringement that is discussed further infra. Both of these affirmative defenses are unavailable to those who are only licensed to use their copies of copyrighted works.

A fair bit of a fuss is being made over the restrictions imposed by this interpretation of the applicability of the first sale doctrine. Wired offers an article that focuses quite a bit of attention on the subject: Guess What, You Don’t Own That Software You Bought.

(from Court decision clamps down on our rights to software that we ‘own’, TechRepublic)

The author of Hexographer, Joe, has revised the “lifetime” license of Hexographer so that it no longer self-destructs after one year. The flaws in the “free” and “one year” versions remain, however, so those should be avoided. However, if you like the software and feel it is worth paying for (and it certainly does seem worth paying for), the “lifetime license” now appears to be what it says it is: a lifetime license. I have updated my original Hexographer article to reflect the revised license terms.

I also bought the software.

I view this as good news:

New Zealand’s parliament is preparing to vote on a major patent reform bill that will tighten the country’s standards of patentability. One of the most significant changes in the proposed bill is a specific patentability exclusion for software. If the bill receives parliamentary approval in its current form, it will broadly eliminate conventional software patents in New Zealand.

(from New Zealand patent reform bill says no to software patents, Ars Technica)

You may also find this interesting:

Are Software Patents Evil?