OpenOffice.org Releases New Version of Free Software Alternative to Microsoft Office


The OpenOffice.org Community announces the release of OpenOffice.org 2.4, a new and enhanced version of the leading open-source office suite. The free software package provides a viable alternative to Microsoft’s Office 2007 product – and an easier upgrade path for users of legacy MicrosoftOffice products.

Download OpenOffice.org 2.4 Free of Charge

Edinburgh, UK (PRWEB) March 27, 2008 — The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.4, the latest version of the leading open source office productivity suite. OpenOffice.org 2.4 includes new features, enhancements, and bug fixes to all its core components.

Users will appreciate changes such as usability improvements in printing, and further enhancements to PDF handling (OpenOffice.org creates PDF files ‘out of the box’ to ISO standard). The default font is now DejaVu, which supports more languages/localisations than the previous BitStream Vera -part of a raft of localisation improvements covering languages from Hiligaynon to Quechua. Mac OS X users will appreciate the use of the native Quicktime player and spell-checker.

Writer

OpenOffice.org’s word processor, now has easier selection of the language for spellchecking; users can set options for printing hidden and place holder text and for following hyperlinks; text selection and ‘find and replace’ have been improved; and ‘power users’ will appreciate new extra keyboard shortcuts for paragraph styles.

Calc

Regular users of Calc, OpenOffice.org’s spreadsheet, will appreciate the streamlining of data and formulae entry. Other new features include a ‘smart move and copy’ for blocks of cells; the ability to transform data into columns; and improvements to printing, data filtering, and the Data Pilot.

Draw

Usability improvements have been made to Draw, the drawing and diagramming module, and Impress, OpenOffice.org’s application for creating presentations. Both applications have enhanced PDF export capabilities. In addition, Impress now has a new range of thrilling 3D transition effects supported through an extension.

The Chart module, used throughout OpenOffice.org, continues to evolve rapidly. Novice users benefit from more intelligent default choices from the graphics engine; advanced users have more options allowing them to fine tune a chart exactly the way they want it.

Base
OpenOffice.org’s database application, Base, now supports MS-Access 2007 (accdb files on MS-Windows), and has enhanced capabilities for MySQL, Oracle/jdbc, and native (HSQL) databases. The Query Designer is also improved.

OpenOffice.org 2.4 is the eleventh release in the 2.x series (launched in October 2005) and demonstrates the Community’s commitment to continuous and regular improvement of its software. The next major release – 3.0 – is planned for the autumn/fall this year.

About OpenOffice.org

The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, translate, support, and promote the leading open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org®. OpenOffice.org’s leading edge software technology (UNO) is also available for developers, systems integrators, etc to use in OpenOffice.org extensions or in their own applications.

OpenOffice.org uses the OpenDocument Format OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as well as supporting legacy file formats such as Microsoft Office, and is available on major computing platforms in over 80 languages. OpenOffice.org software is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) and may be used free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial.

The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a number of companies, including Sun Microsystems, the founding sponsor and primary contributor.

Source: PRWeb

[Python] PyCon 2008 attendance jumped 70%!

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) March 27, 2008 — PyCon 2008, the annual community conference for Python developers, business leaders, and fans showcased the tremendous increase in growth among the community last week in Chicago. Attendance jumped 70 percent from 2007.

Over 1,000 people gathered at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare Hotel for PyCon 2008. The influx of proposals was so great this year that organizers could only accept half the proposals received, simply due to lack of space. Demand for tutorials, in particular, rose so high that organizers added an extra timeslot full of new sessions. Twenty-five of the 28 tutorials were sold out and there were 22 open source development sprint projects available for attendees to participate in, up from 13 in 2007. More than 270 people took part in the development sprints, which is more than attended the entire first PyCon in 2003.

The best part about PyCon is the people you get to meet
“As jam-packed as the week’s events were, a number of attendees and speakers remarked to me that they felt the conference this year was the best yet,” said PyCon 2008 chair David Goodger. “It’s great to see months of work come together and have people really enjoy it.”

PyCon 2008 is organized and run entirely by volunteers. A true grassroots movement, it is a community conference put on by the community for the community. Many attendees enjoy the numerous sessions, but more importantly, they believe the real value of the conference is the community all being there together.

“The best part about PyCon is the people you get to meet,” said Chris McAvoy, founder and president of the Chicago Python Users Group, which hosted PyCon 2008. “That, coupled with more than 1,000 attendees, compared to the 600 last year, says to me that Python is really building a market here in Chicago and elsewhere. It’s an exciting time to be a Python developer.”

PyCon 2009 will also be held in Chicago. For more information about PyCon, please visit http://us.pycon.org.

About PyCon

Presented by the Python Software Foundation, the world’s largest Python conference brings together a diverse group of developers, enthusiasts, and organizations to explore new challenges, launch new businesses and forge new connections within the Python community. PyCon provides attendees with the opportunity to delve into the dynamic programming language employed by well-known companies such as Google, Cisco, and the New York Times. PyCon helps people learn new tools and techniques, showcase projects, and meet other Python fans.

Source: PRWeb.com

[Python] ip2num / num2ip – Store an IP string as a 4 byte int.

This is probably everywhere, maybe python also comes with it, but I wanted to have my own implementation, and I’ll leave it here for future reference.

Basically, sometimes you don’t want to store IPs in Strings cause they take too much space, instead you want to be a good programmer and store them as 4 bytes (IPv4 that is).

So here’s a couple of functions in python to illustrate the conversion process between string to 4 byte integer, or viceversa:

def ip2num(ipString):
    if ipString is None:
        raise Exception("Invalid IP")

    try:
       octets = [octet.strip() for octet in ipString.split('.')]
    except Exception,e:
        raise e

    num = (int(octets[0])<<24) + (int(octets[1])<<16) + (int(octets[2])<<8) + int(octets[3])
    return num

def num2ip(numericIp):
    if numericIp is None or type(numericIp) != int:
        raise Exception("Invalid numeric IP. Must be an integer")
    return str(numericIp >> 24) + '.' + str((numericIp >> 16) & 255) + '.' + str((numericIp >> 8) & 255) + '.' + str(numericIp & 255)

Episodio 075 – Myka (Torrent) TV box, Torrent Video Streams y la economia de lo gratis en internet

Agrega a iTunes Agreganos a tu iTunes | Descarga en MP3 | Suscribete a este podcast

Dale Play aqui mismo


Guarda TODOS tus archivos gratis en MyBloop.com!

Durante una Pelea de Almohadas Masiva y Gratuita en New York el pasado sabado 22 de Marzo de 2008
Durante una Pelea de Almohadas Masiva y Gratuita en New York el pasado sabado 22 de Marzo de 2008

Editorial

Por que GRATIS es el futuro de los negocios

Noticias

Internet TV/Video

Ve Torrents en tu TV con Myka
Mininova prueba Streaming de Video directamente desde Bittorrent
Mogulus probara cobrando por cuentas “PRO”
Flickr Video, en Abril pues
Mogulus sobrepasa 8500 usuarios en un solo canal en vivo
YouTube promociona “Get Smart” y se mete $750k

Apple

Safari 3.1 mas veloz
Benchmarks de Safari 3.1 vs Firefox2 y de Safari 3.1 vs Firefox 3b04

MyBloop.com

[VIDEO/SCREENCAST] Como crear un playlist musical y como compartirlo
1,000,000 de archivos subidos a MyBloop.com

Wireless

Intel desarrolla tecnologia Wi-Fi de largo alcance y bajo costo

Adquisiciones/Anuncios

TechCrunch quiere unirse a otros bloggers para tumbar a CNET
LimeWire se pone las pilas

Otras

Las 10 extrañas muertes del Rock and Roll

Patrocinantes de este Episodio

TecnoDiva.com - sacando la diva que llevamos por dentro

Mackinando – Blog y Podcast Mac para super usuarios

Philip Antoniades from Sun-MySQL presents at NYPHP.org

Last night I had the opportunity to attend to my first NYPHP.org meetup. In this ocassion, Philip Antoniades formerly MySQL’s Sales Engineering Manager, now Sun-MySQL’s Sales Engineering Manager gave a talk related to Sun’s recent purchase of MySQL for USD $1,000,000,000.

Project Indiana
I must say at the beginning of the presentation he switched from talking about the MySQL acquisition to selling us a new version of Open Solaris called Project Indiana, which seems to be led by no less than Ian Murdock creator of Debian. I suppose its his job now to sell sun and he had to do it, but things got a lot more interesting specially in the Q&A.

So for Project Indiana, as you can imagine having someone like Ian Murdock there means Open Solaris will have apt capabilities (like Debian or Ubuntu).

The other thing that caught my eye about Project Indiana (coming from the Linux world) is that Sun will require all drivers to be open sourced, otherwise they won’t be accepted to the distribution. I’m not sure if this has done anything for projects like Debian where they’re really strict, but Sun is a monster with a lot of corporate influence, maybe their new Open source approach will help things change (manufacturers releasing drivers with open licenses), and finally we’ll get lots of drivers available for Linux as well.

They also mentioned an “open source” license called CDDL (“cuddle” as they call it), no clue about its differences, if its good or bad, it seems to me there might be something weird behind it, but I’m just talking out of my ass here, I’ve not read it yet. It’d be good if someone could complement this article with their thoughts on CDDL vs GPL2 vs LGPL vs others…

How things have changed

Quoting Antoniades:

“Basically we have an influx of cash”

MySQL AB went from a 400 employee company to being part of an organization of about 34,000 employees, and now they have a lot more cash, the purchase according to Antoniades was mostly paid in cash (and you know cash is king baby!).

Entrance of IBM New York, where the meeting was held for NYPHP.orgPhilip even mentioned they’re hiring 2 SysAdmins for their New York office, (contact him if you’re interested), also, when they need a feature, they just don’t put it in the wish list, if its important enough they get 30 engineers from Sun to help them.

He made a lot of emphasis about how they already got a guru focused on optimization of MySQL and how they’re pushing for more threading (parallel programming) on MySQL. He said that Sun has a lot of DB experience, that they basically helped Oracle in getting their DB to run spotless on Solaris and they have the knowledge about DB development problems as well as a lot of smart people to help them.

On the Q&A session I finally learned that Yes there’s plans between Java/MySQL integration (stored procedures in java could be a project to come, and they mentioned that a couple of the MySQL AB engineers had already done something along those lines, and as the acquisition was happening the people from Sun brought up the fact they knew about such efforts. MySQL AB has always been a good Java shop, and they claimed their jdbc driver was always one of their best products). MySQL basically wants to learn a little more of that engineering discipline from Sun, and it seems like a nice blend between 2 very different cultures.

Other interesting topics of conversation during Q&A were about using Memcached as a storage Engine, so that you can use MySQL as a client for Memcached, maybe it sounds as an extra layer with a certain overhead, but you could certainly do a lot of more complex stuff just by using SQL, seems interesting, didn’t know you could actually do that (actually opens a lot of possibilities in my mind for stuff we need in MyBloop.com that we were planning to use raw key-value-approach on memcached)

Also learned about a new storage engine called Maria, that will be the successor of Innodb.

So I think that now, we can be sure that MySQL will be churning out a lot more fixes (in shorter periods, maybe MySQL 6.0 will come out sooner now) given the cash and new added man power, probably the folks using MySQL enterprise will be even more benefited by this, they talked about a lot of enterprise tools to optimize queries, analyze queries, very interesting stuff.

FrostWire now available on Gentoo Linux’s Portage package system

We want to give thanks to William L. Thomson Jr from Gentoo for making FrostWire available to people running Gentoo ~arch or unstable ~x86 or ~amd64.

If you are a Gentoo Linux user you can now just do:

emerge frostwire

And as William says:

it will bring in all deps, compile, install, make desktop menu entries, launcher, etc 🙂

If you’re interested here’s the package

About Gentoo

The Gentoo Linux operating system (pronounced /ˈdÊ’É›ntuː/) is a Linux distribution based on the Portage package management system. The development project and its products are named after the Gentoo penguin. Gentoo package management is designed to be modular, portable, easy to maintain, flexible, and optimized for the user’s machine. Packages are normally built from source code, continuing the tradition of the ports collection, although for convenience, some large software packages are also available as precompiled binaries for various architectures.

Source: Wikipedia

Cows also share

User luisdrk from Caracas,Venezuela has posted this picture on flickr. Pretty cool stuff. it’s actually a parody of this picture by Jesus Molina.

It’s really funny because we had our inspiration from a similar source, we looked for the words “frost wire” in flickr, and we saw frozen barbed wires, this is the one that caught our eye and then we talked to a great graphic designer who did the logo for us.

Reply with your creations on this post’s comments section.

New York Pillow Fight, Union Square – March 2008

This is the second year I assist to the Union Square Pillow Fight. This time I went with my family and took the SLR camera. During the shoot, by mistake I pressed the button for monochrome mode and serendipity stroke my photo set.

This post is to share with you my favorite pictures. Feel free to share them, they show the spirit of many New Yorkers, and they’re quite a good idea of something to do for free with lots of strangers of your own town.


The very start, in color, for your context


Girl smiling over someone’s shoulders


V for Vendetta


Yes, it’s a Macbook


Air full of feathers


Floor covered in feathers

Now the B&W’s


The battlefield


The arm of evil


Breathing from the top of the Pole


A Beautiful face


Luchador


Probably allergic to feathers


Come and get me, I’m dressed as a chicken (most hilarious moment, they beat him to the ground)


Gas Mask


Pure Joy