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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!