We’ll be using the OCS software to manage the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference this year (and any other  OpenOffice.org Conferences that want to use it). If you want a sneak preview of the site, look here

Grateful thanks to the Public Knowledge Project for a great piece of open-source software.

I’ve just finished reading the last edition of The Ecologist magazine, which is now continuing as a website only. From time to time the magazine hit the spot with a piece of solid investigative journalism. However, most months I skimmed through it out of a sense of duty rather than out of enjoyment. It invariably left me depressed about the state of the world rather than fired up with enthusiasm to do something about it. Other magazines in a similar space - e.g. Permaculture - manage to present a more positive message. So, even with the Goldsmith family fortunes behind you, you can only depress people for so long before they take their green interests elsewhere…

The download counter at OpenOffice.org is showing that downloads of OpenOffice.org from the OpenOffice.org download page have passed the ten million mark (the counter was reset when OpenOffice,org 3.1 was launched on 7th May).

That’s a lot of happy users!

Well, I got my wet weekend, so I’m writing this on my Eee PC 701 with Ubuntu replaced by Eeebuntu,  a derivative of Ubuntu specially tailored for Eees. So how much of an improvement is it?

Fn F2 is a bit of an odd one - it switches off WiFi, but it doesn’t toggle back on again until you reboot. Skype still isn’t working.

So there’s not a huge difference, but to be honest, Ubuntu 9.04 out of the box works pretty well, so that isn’t surprising.

However,there are a couple of interesting toys - there’s a little ‘Eee PC Tray’ which allows you to switch modes between Power Saver / Reduced Performance / Super High Performance - I’ve not really played with these, so I can’t comment. It also allows you to other things (see the screenshot) like rotate the screen in steps of 90 degrees (why?).

Unless my eyes are deceiving me, Eeebuntu also has tiny tiny fonts, and it certainly has a much more attractive theme than the standard Ubuntu mudbath scheme. So I guess I’ll stick with it for a while

Eebuntu gets a rave review in El Reg:

If you have an Eee PC, this is certainly the version of Ubuntu to go for.

Well, if we get a wet weekend, I suppose I’ll have to give it a try, although Ubuntu 9.04 is serving me well just now.

There’s an interesting conversation going on just now on one of the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project mailing lists. When you start up OpenOffice.org, you can either go straight to an application like Writer, or else go to the Start Screen (that’s it below). While that’s all very well and good, it is a little … err … boring?

Ben Horst has posted a suggesting for replacing this with a Dashboard (below), and has posted a mock-up for what it might look like. The key is that users could ‘do their own thing’ with it - it would be a portal to a range of services provided by the OpenOffice.org Community - or anyone else. It’s certainly a neat idea, and something we’ll be recommending to the User Experience Project.

When I was taking some screenshots to illustrate the new features page for OpenOffice.org 3.1, I discovered a bug in the way that Chart handles missing values in certain circumstances. After a bit of testing, I convinced myself it was a genuine bug, and created a simple test Calc file to show the problem. I then filed a bug report.

As this wasn’t a particularly big issue in what was a new feature, I didn’t expect it to be a reason for delaying the release of 3.1. Maybe if I’d tested it sooner, it would have been fixed in 3.1 However, I was happy to receive emails from the developers, first of all confirming that they agreed it was a bug, and then shortly afterwards, telling me they had it fixed. You can follow the process via the bug tracking system.

So, the system is open, accessible, and it works. If you want to help OpenOffice.org, I’d encourage you to download the test versions and give them a try. Don’t assume you can just start using them for your everyday work - they may corrupt your documents - but do try them out, especially if you do something unusual with OpenOffice.org. If you find something odd, please report it - there are full details of how to do this in the QA project pages. Helping in the QA activity is a great way for ordinary folk to help the OpenOffice.org project!