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Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Joint meeting of Kanto LibreOffice HackFest & DocFest Tokyo/Fall 2014



Last Saturday, 21st November, we, the LibreOffice Tokyo community, held the second HackFest in Hon-Komagome, Tokyo.  Main target is joining Bug Hunting Session.  As wiki says, we had mainly followed the MozTrap manual test,

This event was a joint event with FLOSS translators' meeting, called DocFest.  My Friend, who arrange the venue, Kentaro Hatori is leading Japanese translation of GNU Health passionately.  And some people from different projects has worked together, and talk about their own projects.

Working so hard

So we need coffee and some sweets :D



We have several kinds of participates:
  • 4 LibreOffice offline, and 1 online (via IRC) bug hunters
  • 1 LibreOffice Impress Remote translator
  • 3 GNU Health translators
  • 1 Debian JP member
  • 1 Fedora / GNOME translator
And what we've done are:
  • Filed bugs: fdo #86552, #86553, #86557
  • Bug confirmation: fdo #86390
  • Developing new LibreOffice extension
  • Impress Remote translation preparation
Fortunately, following day (Sunday, 22nd, November) Fukuoka LibreOffice community held another meeting, and they had a Bug Hunting time slot (great!), so we still have several problems need to investigate:
  • In Draw, sometimes characters disappear some characters with huge Japanese fonts.
  • Base hang up when the "Use Wizard to Create Report..." launched on Windows
    (can't reproduce in Ubuntu)
  • Base hang up when the "Create Report in Design View..." launched on Windows
    (can't reproduce in Ubuntu)
  • In Calc, password lock feature of macro libraries doesn't work well (seems locked, but after save and reopen, it unlocked)
  • (Old bugs till 4.3)  In Calc, when a library is password locked, Japanese strings in the library is broken.

Now we're investigating these issues, and some of these will be filed to fdo.

And thanks to Christian Lohmaier, we had a VM that has a bibisect repo and whole source code.  It helped us pretty well.

Thanks, everyone!  We did well, but still some effort will needed.  Keep going!

This day was "Ni-no-tori," special day in Japan
And there was a festival nearby the venue.  Good!

Monday, November 17, 2014

Preparing next LibreOffice Hackfest, as an offline Bug-hunting session

Short notice :)

We, the Tokyo LibreOffice community now preparing to have the LibreOffice Hackfest on this Saturday (22th, November).   That day is within the LibreOffice Bug Hunting Session, the global event aimed to do as much testing on the 4.4.0 as possible, so our main target is bug-hunting.

Of course we can collaborate IRC channel #libreoffice-qa globally, but chatting in English is a little tough work for some of the Japanese people (includes me :), that's why I want to have an offline bug-hunting, to provide opportunity for discussion in our mother tongue, Japanese.

HackFest in Tokyo is one of Japanese offline bug-hunting events, other people in LibreOffice Japanese Team prepare

I (freenode nick: naruoga) will be online in #libreoffice-qa channel from 1am to 11am UTC on 22th, November.  Because of the time difference, it's not a core mentoring slot, but I hope we'll see you LibreOffice QA people.

Kanto LibreOffice Hackfest & Tokyo-area Debian meeting

This is an later report also, sorry.

The Debian community in Japan is very active.  Debian JP (Japanese) is a Japanese organization to promote Debian in Japan, since 1998 (!).  There are several Debian developers / maintainers,  and they have monthly study parties in Tokyo-area, and Kansai-area.

We, the LibreOffice Tokyo community is much younger than Debian's one (just two years old), but we also have monthly Meetup.


Anyway, as the Debian global project does, Debian JP wants to collaborate on upstream projects like LibreOffice, so we held joint Meetup in 25th October (Thanks Hideki Yamane to offer to do together, and Takahide Nojima to arrange the Meetup), in SQUARE-ENIX's beautiful seminar room.  This is 119th (!) meeting of Tokyo Debian, and our third LibreOffice Hackfest.

Group photo by Hideki.  Thanks!

Hideki already wrote a nice article to report the good Meetup, so I add a little.

Understanding LibreOffice packaging in Debian is so nice for me as an Ubuntu user.  We learned Debian package of LibreOffice has many patches, and had discussed to apply these patches to upstream.

As our Hackfest, I tried my first Easy Hack, since the HackNight of the last LibreOffice conference, Bern (wow, 2 months needed).  I couldn't commit a patch at that time, but after a few days later, I finally sent a patch and accepted.  It was my first commit to LibreOffice.  Yeah!

Others tried to fix a libvisio bug, to translate UI in Pootle, to create a document how to report a problem for Japanese casual users, ...  Pretty nice Hackfest we did :)

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Behind the Great Firewall

It's a little late and very short report.

I've joined openSUSE Asia Summit in Oct, 18th(Sat) and 19th(Sun) in Beihang University, Beijing.  It is the first Asian openSUSE summit.

Entrance of BUAA

Generally speaking, beginning something new is most difficult, and the core team (includes me, it's my honor) worked so hard and, and did it very well!

Organizers, by xxairwolf from Flickr



Because I had trouble with my business, I've arrived 2pm. on Saturday, and left 1pm. on Sunday.  Sorry to join very short time, but I have enjoyed the summit, it's nice talks, good exhibits, lovely fellows, awesome party, and lunch, Yoshinoya!
Yoshinoya is a Japanese fast food chain, but it seems Chinese style :)

Fortunately, I had a opportunity to have a short talk about LibreOffice.  In the talk, I explained LibreOffice as a product and as a community, and asked what we, eastern Asian LibreOffice users / communities, work together.  Here is my slide.


Since my practice was not enough, I have spent a time to talk and had no time to discussion.  However, after the talk, I chatted with some of the attendees about collaboration in the eastern Asia.  To summerize the chat, "We are close geographically, but we aren't close linguistically."
Yes, it's true.  We don't have "Asian" common language, and we have to use English, same as global.  And many people in Japan, China, or some Asian people can't use English well (yes I also).
It's a difficult problem, but I still believe I have something to work together and I'll be looking for what is a first point.


And last comment from me; if you'll attend a conference in China, don't forget to bring your important travel information locally (e.g. your hotel reservation info), not to leave in Google (I mean, Gmail or Google Calendar), and bookmark a search engine other than Google, because we have Great Firewall.  I totally forgot to do this, so I had lots of troubles (of course it's my fault).  But, thanks to my great fellows, everything was solved smoothly.

Thanks everyone, see you next openSUSE Asia Summit!
Group photo, by Bin Li from flickr

PS. You can find lots of nice photos in flickr's openSUSE Asia Summit 2014 group.  Check it out!

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Tokushima prefecture published LibreOffice manuals under CC BY 4.0

A small LibreOffice related news from Japan.

Tokushima prefecture (their English page / Wikipedia), located Shikoku-island in Japan, published their own LibreOffice manuals (in Japanese) under CC BY 4.0 license.


Their migration to LibreOffice is quite an old news.  Japanese journalist already reported it (in Japanese) on August 2013.

Tokushima prefecture had been used OpenOffice.org several years ago with some proprietary software (e.g., Microsoft Office and Ichitaro; Japanese local office suite word processor developed by Justsystems, in Tokushima Pref.) licenses.

Since January 2014, they decided to use LibreOffice as a their primary office software, and not to renew license contracts of their proprietary office software.  The license fee they could reduce was estimated almost 100 million JPY.


And now, they just published their manuals which has been used for their LibreOffice migration.

Here is the rough translation of their comment on the publication page:
Tokushima prefecture utilizes LibreOffice as a fee-free usable office suite.We already created operation manuals for our employees to apply everyday works, and now we decided to publish them on our website to let residents know strength to use fee-free LibreOffice well.  Please use the manual anyone who has an interest, or who want to use LibreOffice but don't know how to use it.
Cool stuff.

They are not first end-user in Japan to publish their own manual under the public license.  JA Fukuoka city (in Japanese), the farmers' union in Fukuoka-city (in Kyushu island) also have published their own LibreOffice manuals (basics / advanced / macros) under CC BY NC 2.1 since December 2011.


Of course we, LibreOffice global community, already has tons of nice manuals/documents/videos as well, but unfortunately using English documents is a little hard for Japanese casual users.
I personally hope we would like to translate global materials into Japanese, but in parallel, it also would be nice that end-users create their own manuals (with community help) and publish them under the public license.

Thanks Tokushima prefecture, and JA Fukuoka city!

Monday, September 8, 2014

LibreOffice Conference 2014 in Bern, Switzerland

Some of our community people already wrote some good reports about this awesome conference, but please let me add some with my poor English ;).

Bern is small but really beautiful city with the quite nice river (as a kayak lover, I checked the river), and University of Bern, which is our venue, is also nice.
Every food provided local crew was so yummy (especially cheese in sandwiches), and "hacker's energy" drink!  I love it.

All of the talks really excited me, and everyone who I met was so kind.  Really nice community, I love all of you!

Thanks to Kohei and Kendy, I had an opportunity to do a lightning talk.  Here is my slide.



Thanks you, and see you next year!
This group photo is taken by a kind passer-by girl using Matthias's camera.

PS. I might add some photo in this post later.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

We've done LibreOffice mini Conference 2014 Tokyo/Japan!

Last Saturday, 7th June, I've done LibreOffice mini Conference 2014 Tokyo/Japan!
Group Photo!


First, We really appreciate to Mr. Taisuke Yamada of IIJ, who sponsored the venue of the great conference room.
Of course, also thanks to all speakers, attendees and our great staffs.


Last year we had the first LibreOffice mini-conf but it this year we took a quite different style.

Last year's one focused community works, and all speakers were from our community.  This year, we called for presentation widely, and speakers had submitted it.  This year we have a good 'conference,' not a fee-free seminar by the community :).

And this year's one focused 'become a LibreOffice developer,' so most of all talks were related building LibreOffice.  Good opportunity to check how to build, debug, test LibreOffice.


Let's go through the whole program from the first to the last.

The first talk is "the backyard talk about articles in Nikkei Linux."  Speaker Mr. Tsuraki Tani had a 6 months series of articles about LibreOffice Basic macro and extension in Japanese famous Linux magazine, Nikkei Linux.  He told background and theme of each articles, and their sample codes with lots of jokes.
Tani-san was introducing his LibO Basic macro sample


Then Mr. Takeshi Abe, LibreOffice committer and TDF member, had a hands-on seminar to build LibreOffice on Linux or Mac OS X, from preparing the build environment to running autogen.sh and running generated Makefile within 1 hour.  Someone succeeds to start running make.  It had been a very nice first step :).
Abe-san is giving an advice about a building step


As a suppliment, I told about very basic of building on Windows.  Unfortunately, I couldn't build LibreOffice on Windows because of lack of my Windows development environments, but building steps seemed much easier than one year ago.


Then we took a coffee break (good coffee from TULLY'S and cheesecake), and we've some lightning talk.  We had four talks:

  • Why we choose LibreOffice? (comparing another software) -- Mr. Senoo
  • Building in OOo era -- Mr. Nakamoto
  • Want to fix the font matching algorithm of LibO! -- Mr. Takeyama
  • LibO in Web 3.0 era -- Mr. Kondoh
  • What's EasyHacks? -- N. Ogasawara

Everything was good :)

Mr. Ryo Onodera had a great talk about LibreOffice building on *BSD with pkgsrc build system; famous build system used on NetBSD, but supports other systems.  He is a maintainer of pkgsrc itself, and in the former presentation he already succeeded building on NetBSD (see his wonderful slide), so at this talk he picked DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.  Oh yeah, great!
His talk was a little difficult, but very exciting.


The last talk was about Quality Assurance by Mr. Shinji Enoki.  He told about unit test, bug submission in Bugzilla, bug triage, Bug Submission Assistant,..., lots of QA related stuff.  Developing and Quality Assurance has a strong relationship so it was nice wrap-up talk of the event.
Mr. Enoki's talk about QA.


Anyway, it was very good step for LibreOffice Japanese community to have a larger, or international event.  Thanks, all of you!


Our small booth :)

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Preparing LibreOffice mini Conference 2014 Tokyo/Japan

Now we, the Japanese LibreOffice community preparing the event titled "LibreOffice mini Conference 2014 Tokyo/Japan" at 7th, June.  The event will focus to become a LibreOffice developer everyone :)

I'm just trying to build LibO on my Windows environment because no one can spend a time to do that.  I'm a Ubuntu guy so it's a little hard job, but my preparing for the presentation slide about building on Windows is almost done.  It will take 40 minutes.

I also will have another 5 minutes lightning talk about EasyHacks; very good opportunity to become a developer.   I'll make slide after I'm back to home today (right now, it is a morning of 6th, June :).

Anyway, tomorrow we'll have a awesome day, I believe!

Saturday, May 31, 2014

GNOME.Asia Summit & FUDCON APAC 2014

I hope someone still watching the blog... :)

I've been Beijin from 23rd to 26th May to attend GNOME.Asia summit & FUDCON APAC 2014 in 24th and 25th.  Actually, I'm not a GNOME guy, but I use Ubuntu (Unity) and Ubuntu uses lots of GNOME components, and this is the biggest FLOSS-desktop related event in the Asia region, that's why I had wanted to join in as a LibreOffice guy.

Anyway, the event had been in the conference hall of Beihang University.  Really a good venue.
Here is a new center building of Beihang Univ.
The conference center is in there.
Really huge building!


I was so stupid to misunderstand the program and I lost some talks in the morning of the first day.  And there was a LibreOffice talk...  But fortunately, someone introduced the speaker Mr. Yifan Jiang and we had been able to discuss how to collaborate Asian LibreOffice communities.
Photo with Yifan (right side. Left side is me)

He had been in SUSE booth and SUSE guys are now preparing to have a openSUSE Asia Summit 2014 in October, so I hope I'll meet him in the summit :).


Other interesting talks we had.  I don't have enough time and English skill to describe all of them, but short summary is:
  • RMS's keynote was really impressed, although I know most of his propositions in FSF's site.  Even if his opinion is so radical (for example, anyone should not write proprietary code to get money), I seemed he was very casual one with enough witness.
  • New input method talk by Daiki Ueno and Anish Patil.  IM is the very important DE component for Japanese (and maybe for Chinese) to use DE.
  • Great talk about Ansible and Docker.
  • I had a good opportunity to inspect inside of the GNOME Foundation in the session "Ramblings from the governing body of the GNOME Foundation."  GNOME Foundation is the elder foundation than The Document Foundation and the governance seems so sophisticated (for example, rules about travel fees in each event such as GNOME. Asia itself).  I think we can learn something from us.
I want to add a thing that lots of people want to have GNOME.Asia in Japan!  Yeah!
But right now I feel it's little hard job for GNOME people in Japan and I can't say "you should do because most of global people wanted" or something.
Anyway, yes, like as a this year's GNOME.Asia (done with FUDCON APAC), works some other communities (of course LibreOffice should be included) together is a good idea.
And dream of myself is to have a LibreOffice Asia conference in the future.  We can share the same goal.  Don't we?

Anyway, I really enjoyed the event, to hear nice talk, to communicate very interesting / fun persons.
And my dream which we'll have a Asian conference of LibreOffice is bigger and bigger.

Thanks all of you who I met :)

Monday, March 3, 2014

Open Source Conference 2014 Tokyo/Spring (pt.2; LibreOffice)

Sorry I've no time to help LibreOffice team in last OSC Tokyo (because I've been very busy about MongoDB), then this post is a short summary of Mr. Enoki's one.


LibreOffice Japanese Team exhibited a booth 2 days in Open Source Conference 2014 Tokyo/Spring, and had a talk titled "What's new in LibreOffice 4.2, with brand-new splash screen" by Mr. Ohmori.

LibreOffice Japanese team booth; with all staffs
Mr. Ohmori had a talk about what's new of LibreOffice 4.2
wearing new LibreOffice T-shirt :)

Lots of people stopped by the booth and leaflet about new features of LibreOffice 4.2 handed out almost 150.  Someone didn't know the name of LibO, but people who already use LibO seems to grow than last year.

Non-active user of LibO have interest about compatibility with Microsoft Office.  We always say,  new MSO sometimes can't read old format of MSO but LibO can, and about OOXML, we keep going to up interoperability each by each of new versions.

The agents of Shiojiri-city, Nagano-pref. stopped by the booth.  Shiojiri-city had been shift from MSO to OOo almost 2 years ago, then have moved to LibO because of development activity.  They told they have no problem with LibreOffice.  Nice :D


It's happy to hear LibreOffice users seems growing in Japan, and we want to help them in the OSC or any other opportunities.

Thanks!

Open Source Conference 2014 Tokyo/Spring (pt. 1; MongoDB JP)

Last Friday (Feb., 28th) and Saturday (Mar., 1st) was a Open Source Conference (OSC) 2014 Tokyo/Spring.


As I wrote wiki page of the Document Foundation, Open Source Conference is the most important event series in the Japanese FLOSS world.

Of course Tokyo is the biggest city in Japan, and we have OSC two time each year; Spring and Fall.  Recently OSC Tokyo had been hosted Meisei University, which is little far from center of Tokyo, but around of 2,000 FLOSS lovers gathers OSC Tokyo. Amazing!


We, MongoDB JP (MongoDB Users Group (MUG) in Japan), exhibited booth 2 days, and had a session in Saturday.  It was our first exhibit to OSC.
Friday morning.  Start quietly...

In the booth, we demonstrated a small Web program to find out nearest shops users want using geospacial index and Google Maps API.  Everyone amazed how simple query can do this.
We made leaflet to explain about very basic of MongoDB, and MongoDB JP ourselves.  According to remaining it, 158 people have it, lots of people have interest about MongoDB.  Great!

Hundreds people in the room, and many people enjoyed our demo and deep tech talk.

And Mr. Watanabe's talk gathered almost hundred people. Wow!


Yes, it was little hard 2 days (I was very tired, haha), but, all of we really enjoyed that great time.

Thanks for everyone visited our booth and attended our talk!
And our fellows, Ogawa-san, Fuzisaki-san, Fukuzaki-san, Kubota-san and Watanabe-san!  Good jop!