Older blog entries for AlanHorkan (starting at number 180)

Abiword News: The Best Word Processor Money Can't Buy

High Praise for Mac version of Abiword from the Technology section of the Detroit News.

The best word processor money can't buy: AbiWord (free, from http://www.abisource.com/). Wow. I installed Microsoft Office 2003 for OSX on the Mini, and was mostly underwhelmed by the Mac version of Word - especially when you consider the price tag. So I set out to find a word processor that wouldn't set me back too much. I found AbiWord and it quickly has become my word processor of choice, even more so than the writing tools Apple includes in the box. AbiWord is quick, intuitive and reads and writes other document formats - including Word's - to make sharing files easy and painless.

Strictly speaking though if you want to pay for Abiword we are more than happy to accept donations and we welcome people to get invovled and help out in any way they can. Donate to Abiword.

Final Word on Abiword Usabilty
As usual Dom Lachowicz shows us why he's in charge and has the some final insightful words on streamlining Abiword.

Planet AbiSource
Sweet! I'm honoured to have been added to Planet Abiword.
Current location http://www.abisource.com/planet
Future location http://planet.abisource.com

The Future of AbiWord

I have seen the future! Abiword 2.6. I think maybe the nice people at React OS got the version number slightly wrong. At the time of writing the current stable version of Abiword is 2.2.5 and the developement versions is progressing nicely towards Abiword 2.4. Martin Sevior continues to do excellent work with grammar checking and improving the Mathematics support in Abiword (Same screenshot alternative link: Mathematics support in Abiword).

AbiWord; AbiWrite; AbiText: Abiword as a Text Editor?

In the past Abiword has been rudely compared to Microsoft Wordpad but even in its earliest days I always thought of Abiword as being far beyond wordpad (due in no small part to it including spell checking). There has been recent dicussions about the dissappointment of Abiword being removed from Fedora Core and what might be done to get back in the default install. It is unfortunately that Abiword has such a small niche, most users move to bigger software suites simply because they already need to have it installed for one reason or another. Abiword has continued to improve and move up closer and closer to the wealth of features of the likes of Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer but I believe there are some things Abiword could do to better exploit its niche. As well as moving upwards and gaining users from other Word Processors there is room to expand downwards and make Abiword a better choice for quick text editing. A Word Processor is different from a Text Editor but any good Word Processor will have a superset of the features of the ordinary Text Editor (like Notepad or Gedit). Abiword is extremely fast to start up (a problem in most other word processors and even some text editors) and it has the benefit of already being installed on my system (conversely if Abiword is more useful for quick text editing it will be more likely to get installed). I already have it installed so I would very much like if it were more suitable chocie for the kinds of short notes or brief text editing jobs I usually do using programs like Gedit. Essential to this is Abiword fixing up Normal Mode.

Update: Luis has a good point but Abiword getting the quick editing basics right should be in addition to whatever complex functionality it offers. I'm sure there are ideas we could learn from in Pages, but I haven't had the chance to try it out yet. From what little I know if Pages it started as Desktop Publishing software for NeXT computers which makes it quite a different beast from Abiword (would hurt for us to have more templates but I'm not volunteering so I'll say no more). Now that Abiword is more mature there does seem to some interest in giving abiword a new focus and streamlining it in some way. On the matter of toolbars, we could break the Abiword toolbars up in smaller chunks more managable chunks tomorrow if GTK actually had a properly working toolbar dock and allowed toolbars to be layed end to end. Microsoft Word does it quite nicely, their main toolbars are about 500 pixels wide so you can fit easily on smaller displays but also fit two end to end on a larger display. Ideally though we'd have some really clever solution to entirely avoid the big mess of toolbars.

A slice of Irish Life: An amusing article about the Dublin to Cork Train

House of Flying Daggers
Finally it has arrived. After the dissappointing realisation on St. Stephens day that I had been deceived by the British release dates finally the prints have made it to Ireland and I have a chance to see more of the lovely Zhang Ziyi (or Ziyi Zhang if you prefer). The film doesn't even officially open in Ireland for another week or so. The Sunday Times were offering tickets to preview screenings and luckily enough (for a change) both the ticket collection time and the screening time fit in with my schedule. It having been my Dads Birthday on Monday I invited him to come along.
Without giving anything away The House of Flying Daggers was immensely enjoyable. The film started relatively slowly and the musical number had me worried for a while but thing got more interesting and the things built up nicely as the film went along and despite being almost two hours it didn't seem long at all.
Although not as beautiful and colourful as Hero I enjoyed it much more. The beautiful forest scenery didn't fit in with my preconceptions of what China looks like but I figure China is a large and very diverse place. From taking a closer look at the credits it seems that some of the movie was filmed in the Ukraine so my intuition might not have been too far wrong. There is no shortage of fighting but at the core of the film is a love story set against the backdrop of a group of rebels trying to overthrow a corrupt government. The subversive rebels of The House of Flying Daggers are far more appealling than the nationalist propoganda of Hero and a love story is a far more universal theme. I like cinema to provide me with escapist fantasy not preach at me with with serious moral or political messages. Perhaps when I watch it again I'll notice deeper themes but I was well entertained thoroughly enjoyed the film, almost as much as Crouching Tiger but in a different way.
I would happily recommend Flying Daggers to most people, more than just those who are happy to watch films with subtitles or anything with martial arts in it. I would definately give it 4 out of 5, and I may well reconsider and revise that to 5 out of 5 later after watching it a few more times.

I wonder if I'd get in trouble if I used the Advogato project system to create projects that describe films? I don't suppose it would work all that well, the developers section wouldn't make much sense for one thing but it could be interesting forming a chain based on who like what films and allow people at Advogato to express other interests and add another layer of association beyond software developement? It is an idea, but I am not enthusiastic to go and setup a whole new site for it. cinema.advogato.org?

The Life Aquatic
If you liked the Royal Tenenbaums you will probably also enjoy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. It is certainly intersting, dare I say quirky and although it was amusing I would not say it was very funny.
Owen Wilson is ugly, Cate Blanchett is beautiful.

Watched the Naked Man. It is a comedy co-written by one of the Coen brothers and resembles their style. Where did Rachel Leigh Cook disappear to? (And I week or two later I watched a quirky British attempt at comedy called Blow Dry also featuring the lovely Rachel Leight Cook).

Watched Spy Game with my father. I think he's pretty cool for an old age pensioner :)

Linux User and Developer Issue 57 features a roundup of graphic design applictions including Inkscape.
Interesting. More criticial than your average review but fair.

Beatings will continue until morale improves
Child who suffered beatings gets to decide who will have custody. Not the BBC news, look closer.
Even funnier than last years article at World-CNN.com about the arrest of George W. Bush in Canada for War Crimes. Hopefully these kinds of articles will encourage people to have a healthy sense of scepticism when it comes to online news.

Interactive Gradients in Inkscape
Inkscape now has interactive gradients. What this means is that there are extra handles on objects with gradients and you can adjust the gradient angle and positioning directly on the canvase by dragging the handles. Macromedia Fireworks also has similar fucntionality but Bulia Byak (the developer who implemented the feature) seems to be heavily influenced by Xara. Resident artist Andy Fitzsimon quickly demonstrated the new functionality by creating an example entitled Chrome that features beautiful buttons like those seen on the Macintosh, I almost didn't believe it was done entirely using vector graphics.
Other great examples of what people are already creating using Inkscape are available at the Inkscape Deviant Art Website.

More cliches than you can shake a stick at!
Watched most of The Scorpion King last night, featuring the Rock, real name Dwayne Johnson. I missed the start but the film was extremely predicatable and we had great fun guessing (almost always correctly) what was about to happen next. It was a bit like a cross between Conan the Barbarian and The Mummy. Despite massive lack of orginality it was a fun movie and about as mentally engaging as watching wrestling. Good silly fun

Breakfast Club
Never seen it before, have now. Good movie, captures the era but also something timeless. It seemed terribly familiar as it had been ripped off by more than a few formulaic teen drama shows. (Movie has aged better than the actors. Brat Pack. Blah, blah, blah. Dont feel like writing, will change later.)

Fun in the Sun
More layoffs from Sun Microsystems. The version of events I read in the Irish Times drew particular attention to the layoff of 14 StarOffice staff in Dublin.

Fun with Flash
First Beer of the Day the latest flash creation from Joel Veitch. It is rathergood.com.