LibreOffice mini-Conference 2016 in Osaka

Night view in Osaka, overlooking the Metropolitan Expressway.
Night view in Osaka, overlooking the Metropolitan Expressway.

Keynote

First off, let me just say that it was such an honor and pleasure to have had the opportunity to present a keynote at the LibreOffice mini-Conference in Osaka. It was a bit surreal to be given such an opportunity almost one year after my involvement with LibreOffice as a paid full-time engineer ended, but I’m grateful that I can still give some tales that some people find interesting. I must admit that I haven’t been that active since I left Collabora in terms of the number of git commits to the LibreOffice core repository, but that doesn’t mean that my passion for that project has faded. In reality it is far from it.

There were a lot of topics I could potentially have covered for my keynote, but I chose to talk about the 5-year history of the project, simply because I felt that we all deserved to give ourselves a lot of praises for numerous great things we’ve achieved in this five years time, which not many of us do simply because we are all very humble beings and always too eager to keep moving forward. I felt that, sometimes, we do need to stop for a moment, look back and reflect on what we’ve done, and enjoy the fruits of our labors.

Osaka

Though I had visited Kyoto once before, this was actually my first time in Osaka. Access from the Kansai International Airport (KIX) into the city was pretty straightforward. The venue was located on the 23th floor of Grand Front Osaka North Building Tower B (right outside the north entrance of JR Osaka Station), on the premises of GMO DigiRock who kindly sponsored the space for the event.

Osaka Station north entrance.
Osaka Station north entrance.

Conference

The conference took place on Saturday January 9th of 2016. The conference program consisted of my keynote, followed by four regular-length talks (30 minutes each), five lightning talks (5 minutes each), and round-table discussions at the end. Topics of the talks included: potential use of LibreOffice in high school IT textbooks, real-world experiences of large-scale migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, LibreOffice API how-tos, and to LibreOffice with NVDA the open source screen reader.

After the round-table discussions, we had some social event with beer and pizza before we concluded the event. Overall, 48 participants showed up for the conference.

Conference venue.
Conference venue.

Videos of the conference talks are made available on YouTube thanks to the effort of the LibreOffice Japanese Language Team.

Slides for my keynote are available here.

Hackfest

We also organized a hackfest on the following day at JUSO Coworking. A total of 20 plus people showed up for the hackfest, to work on things like translating the UI strings to Japanese, authoring event-related articles, and of course hacking on LibreOffice. I myself worked on implementing simple event callbacks in the mdds library, which, by the way, was just completed and merged to the master branch today.

Many folks hard at work during hackfest.
Many folks hard at work during hackfest.

Conclusion

It was great to see so many faces, new and old, many of whom traveled long distance to attend the conference. I was fortunate enough to be able to travel all the way from North Carolina across the Pacific, and it was well worth the hassle of a jet lag.

Last but not least, be sure to check out the article (in Japanese) Naruhiko Ogasawara has written up on the conference. The article goes in-depth with my keynote, and is very well written.

Other Pictures

I’ve taken quite a bit of pictures of the conference as well as of the city of Osaka in general. Jump over to this Facebook album I made of this event if you are interested.

Open Source Conference 2013 in Tokyo

I had the pleasure to visit the Open Source Conference (OSC) 2013 in Tokyo, which took place at Meisei University located on the outskirt of Tokyo. They do organize these OSC’s on a very frequent basis throughout the year, being hosted at various cities across Japan.

Background

Normally I don’t travel to Japan just to visit OSC mainly because of the distance; being located in the East Coast of the United States, it’s a big hassle to fly to Japan, not to mention the cost. Despite this, I wanted to visit this particular OSC primarily for two reasons.

  1. I had received an email from someone from the Japan OSS Promotion Forum that I had been nominated for the 2013 OSS Contributor’s Award, and he asked me whether I could participate the award ceremony which would take place during the conference.
  2. The LibreOffice Japanese team had organized a separate track just for LibreOffice related talks, and I wanted to come and see face-to-face the people who are involved in our project in Japan in various capacities, and learn the latest on what’s going in the Japanese community.

There was one difficulty, however. Because I only had one week to arrange the travel (I got the email only a week before the scheduled ceremony date) I could not guarantee my arrival until the very last minute. Luckily everything went smoothly and I was able to book my flight and reserve my hotel despite the short notice.

Meisei University

Tama Monorail that takes you to the venue.
Tama Monorail that takes you to the venue.

This is actually my second time coming to this event. My first visit was in 2010. I was planning my trip to Tokyo to attend a different, work-related meeting. Then I learned about OSC Tokyo 2010 which was scheduled only one day after the meeting was scheduled to end, so I decided to extend my stay in Tokyo for just one more day to visit OSC. OSC 2010 was also held at Meisei University, so at least I didn’t have to research on how to get the conference venue this time.

The easiest way to get to the venue is to take the Keio Line from Shinjuku station to Takahata Fudou station, then transfer to the Tama Monorail and get off at Chu-O Daigaku / Meisei Daigaku station. The university is only 5 to 10 minutes walk from there.

Meisei University main campus.
Meisei University main campus.

Once on campus, there were signs all around the place that would take you to the building where the conference was held. Outside the venue, the campus was pretty quiet, and I didn’t see very many students.

Booths

No conferences are complete without booths. Various projects set up booths to greet the visitors, to distribute fliers and CD/DVD’s, and to inform them of what’s new in the projects. Volunteers from the LibreOffice Japanese team manned our booth throughout the conference. We distributed version 4.0 feature fliers, installer CD’s, T-shirts, stickers and flags.

LibreOffice booth and volunteers from the Japanese team.
LibreOffice booth and volunteers from the Japanese team.

LibreOffice booth, Enoki-san answering questions.
LibreOffice booth, Shinji Enoki (Enoki-san) answering questions.

Also present was the openSUSE project booth. Fuminobu Takeyama was single-handedly manning the booth when I dropped by on Friday. He is a volunteer in the openSUSE project who also manages several packages for Japanese locales. We briefly talked about some issues with Japanese input method in LibreOffice, and how some folks work around it by forcing the GTK VCL backend even if LibreOffice is launched in the KDE environment (because the input method code in the GTK VCL backend is more reliable than that in the KDE VCL). He said he is very much hoping to someday find time to look into LibreOffice code, to solve various Japanese-related issues that are still outstanding in the latest release.

Bunch of Geeko's piled up at the openSUSE booth.
Bunch of Geeko’s piled up at the openSUSE booth. Sitting next to them are Japan’s Firefox mascot Foku-Suke.

Fuminobu Takeyama at the openSUSE booth.
Fuminobu Takeyama looking friendly at the openSUSE booth.

OSS Contributor’s Award

Me receiving a Contributor's Award
Me receiving a Contributor’s Award

The ceremony for the OSS Contributor’s Awards was held on Friday evening. The OSS Contributor’s Awards are given to

“those who have created or managed an influential development project and to developers who have played an important role in a global project or those who have contributed to the promotion of related activities.” (quoted from this slide)

The candidates are nominated publicly, and the winners are selected by the Awards Committee. They select four winners and nine incentive award winners each year, and I was fortunate enough to have been selected as one of the four award winners this year.

My short talk after the ceremony.
My short talk after the ceremony, outlining my current activities etc.

The ceremony was held in a separate, moderately-sized lecture room right next to the booth areas, and was very well attended. Out of four winners, two of us were present to receive the awards: Tetsuo Handa and myself. We each gave a brief 10-minutes talk afterward, outlining our current activities and our future plans.

Handa-san is a well known Linux kernel hacker and he is leading the development of a kernel security module known as TOMOYO Linux. We briefly chatted after the ceremony, and he hinted that he may get a chance to hack on LibreOffice in the distant future (and I encouraged him!) So, let’s keep his name in the back of our mind, and hope we can see him in our project someday. ;-)

You can find two press articles on this here and here. The official announcement from the OSS Forum is here.

LibreOffice mini-Conference

I spent the second day of the conference mostly in the LibreOffice mini-Conference track. According to Naruhiko-san, this is our first ever track dedicated to LibreOffice (and hopefully won’t be the last) held in Japan. We were able to rent a pretty large lecture room for the whole day to host this mini-Conference. Despite the large size, the room was moderately attended.

The first talk was by Miyoshi Ohmori, and his talk was about the company-wide migration from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice at NTT Comware. In his talk, he shared the challenges he faced during the migration and ways to solve them.

Miyoshi Ohmori talks about migration from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice.
Miyoshi Ohmori talks about migration from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice.

Next up was a talk by Shinji Enoki covering new features in LibreOffice 4.0. He covered all aspects of new features in 4.0, from Firefox Personas support, to Calc’s import filter performance improvement, and everything in-between. His talk was followed by Naruhiko Ogasawara who shared his experience with his trip to the 2nd LibreOffice Conference in Berlin, how he decided to join the LibreOffice community, and how he decided to submit paper for the conference and eventually travel there. During his talk, Ogasawara-san played the video message from Italo that was created specifically for the Japanese audience.

Shinji Enoki talks about what's new in LibreOffice 4.0.
Shinji Enoki talks about what’s new in LibreOffice 4.0.

Naruhiko Ogasawara talks about his trip to the 2nd LibreOffice Conference in Berlin.
Naruhiko Ogasawara talks about his trip to the 2nd LibreOffice Conference in Berlin.

Italo's video message with Japanese caption.
Italo’s video message with Japanese caption.

If you thought Enoki-san and Ogasawara-san looked familiar, it was because they came to the Berlin conference to co-present a talk on the topic of the non-English locale communities. The slide for their talk during the Berlin conference is found here. Enoki-san later traveled to Prague with me and the rest of SUSE’ers, to meet with Petr Mladek to learn more about the current QA activities. (Petr couldn’t make it to Berlin due to illness). Anyway, back to the mini-Conf…

The last talk before the lunch break was by Masaki Tamakoshi. In his talk, he presented a good extension to use to add AutoCAD-like functionality to Draw to make Draw easier and more familiar to use for former (or current) AutoCAD users. He also talked about how to convert AutoCAD’s proprietary dwg files to make them loadable into Draw, and how to create playable animation files from Impress slides, using external tools.

Masaki Tamakoshi talks about adding AutoCAD-like functionality to Draw.
Masaki Tamakoshi talks about extension that adds AutoCAD-like functionality to Draw.

Jun Meguro discusses how to make professional use of Draw.
Jun Meguro discusses how to make professional use of Draw.

After the lunch break, Jun Meguro kickstarted the afternoon session with his talk on how to make effective use of Draw to create professional posters. His organization – City of Aizuwakamatsu – is in fact one of the first organizations in Japan that made a large scale adoption of OpenOffice.org when such a move was still not very common, and instantly became the poster child of OpenOffice.org adoption. They had later moved on to LibreOffice, and Meguro-san continues to contribute to the LibreOffice project as a member of the Japanese language team.

In his talk, he emphasized the usefulness of Draw – the application that may not have received the attention and praise it deserves, and how Draw can be used to create professional posters and fliers without purchasing expensive and proprietary alternatives. He also hinted during his talk that, these days, they can send ODF documents to other local government offices without first converting them to MS Office or PDF formats. This was first revealed when he accidentally sent off a native Draw document (odg) without converting it to PDF, and later received a phone call from the recipient of the document to discuss about the details of the drawing! Although this is an isolated incident, an anecdote like this may suggest that the actual rate of ODF adoption may well be higher than we may have expected.

Masahisa Kamataki talks about cloud services that support ODF.
Masahisa Kamataki talks about cloud services that support ODF.

In the next talk, Masahisa Kamataki talked about how to make use of FLOSS office suites such as LibreOffice, combined with non-FLOSS but free as in beer cloud services such as SkyDrive and Google Drive to reduce operation costs. He mentioned that all of this was made possible thanks to the international standard ODF which many major cloud services also support these days. He also demonstrated the level of ODF compatibilities between these cloud services.

Ikuya Awashiro conducts his presentation via Impress Remote.
Ikuya Awashiro conducts his presentation via Impress Remote.

Next up was Ikuya Awashiro. He talked about the specifics of LibreOffice Japanese localization effort. As someone who coordinates the Japanese translation of LibreOffice UI strings, he knows the in’s and out’s of LibreOffice translation which he covered extensively in his talk. He also talked about the detailed history of the translation in this code base, dating back to the old OpenOffice.org days, and how he learned what not to do in order to successfully coordinate the current community-based translation effort in our project.

I should also mention that, of all the presenters we had during this track (including myself), he was the only presenter who used the Impress Remote feature!

Makoto Takizawa talks about ODF interoperability between various ODF producers.
Makoto Takizawa talks about ODF interoperability between various ODF producers, with live demos using SkyDrive and Calligra.

Makoto Takizawa concluded the afternoon session with his ODF PlugFest talk which also happened to be the very last talk in the whole LibreOffice track.

He started off his talk with the basics of ODF, including its standardization history, and went on to talk about various ODF-supporting applications and how each of these apps fares on interoperability test. During his talk he noted that, although in theory the use of ODF ensures seamless interoperability between different supporting applications, in reality there are still some nasty corner cases where different ODF producers interpret ODF differently.

Toward the end of his talk, he performed a live ODF spreadsheet scenario test using Calligra, Gnumeric, SkyDrive and LibreOffice, to test in real life the level of ODF conformance in these spreadsheet applications. In this particular scenario, Calligra, Gnumeric and SkyDrive actually scored higher than LibreOffice. He concluded his talk by pointing out the importance of the ODF user community assessing the conformance level of each ODF-supporting application, and actively giving feedback to the developer community to improve ODF interoperability between the supporting applications.

Lastly, while I was not officially on the list of speakers in this track, I managed to squeeze my talk during the lunch break, to briefly talk about various random development topics. Please refer to my earlier post to get a hold of the slide for my talk. Unfortunately I had to cut it short to give people enough time to eat lunch, but it sort of worked out since I didn’t have much time to prepare my talk to begin with! ;-)

All in all, I believe this was a quite successful LibreOffice track. We were able to see each other face-to-face which is not very easy to do given how widespread we are geographically. That is true even for those inside Japan, and more so for me. It was unfortunate that Takeshi Abe couldn’t make it for this event. Perhaps we should plan another conference during OSC Okinawa so that we get to see him again.

LibreOffice Japanese team members. We all gathered from various parts of Japan (and one from even outside of it).
LibreOffice Japanese language team photo.

LibreOffice 4.0 launch party photo.
LibreOffice 4.0 launch party photo.

Conclusion

This was actually my very first time to participate in OSC Japan as a speaker, and mingle with so many people from various sectors of the Japanese market. I spoke to quite a lot of people in various capacities during the conference, and I was pleasantly surprised with the level of interest that they have toward LibreOffice. Various local governments are aggressively considering a switch to LibreOffice, with Aizuwakamatsu City and JA Fukuoka leading the way. Though the uptake of LibreOffice among Japanese corporations are still slow, Sumitomo Electric has recently announced their adoption of LibreOffice, so others who are still hesitating to switch may eventually follow suit. I also chatted with someone from a local school district working very hard to realize a district-wide adoption of LibreOffice, which suggests that people in the education sector also see value in adopting LibreOffice.

On the other side of the fence, however, we have yet to attract a healthy dose of developers toward LibreOffice from the Japanese developer community. It is my impression that Japan has a sizable Linux kernel developer community, and in fact, many of the participants at OSC Tokyo were kernel hackers. So, whatever reason they may have for not participating in the LibreOffice development, it’s not because of lack of talents and expertize; they are there, contributing to other projects. At the same time, I also saw lots of interest in hacking on LibreOffice from various people. So, the interest is there; what they just need is a means and justification to work on LibreOffice.

While chatting with Ogawa-san from Ashisuto, who provides paid support for LibreOffice, it is apparent that we are not very far from seeing companies emerging who are very eager to find developers to work on LibreOffice. It is therefore my hope that, by increasing the level of LibreOffice adoption amongst users, the level of interest in participating the development of LibreOffice among support vendors will increase proportionally as a result. And my own impression from participating in OSC Tokyo fills me with optimism in this regard.

Slides for my talks at OSC Tokyo 2013

I’ve just uploaded the slides for the two short talks I did at Open Source Conference (OSC) Tokyo.

The first one is the brief talk I did after the OSS Contributor Award ceremony on Friday.

Lightning Talk

This is saved as a hybrid PDF; you can view it in your regular PDF viewer (such as Evince and Adobe PDF viewer), or you can open it in Impress to edit it as a normal Impress document. Use this one in case you need it as a pure Impress document.

And the second one is for the talk I did during the LibreOffice mini-Conference on Saturday.

LibreOffice Kaihatsu Q&A

Like the 1st one, this one is also a hybrid PDF. The regular odp version is available here.

I will write more about OSC Tokyo and especially about the LibreOffice mini-Conference in a separate blog. Stay tuned.

Trip to Japan

I took one week off early this month to fly back to Japan for my vacation. This was my first time in 4 years that I visited my family in Japan, and I spent most of my time in my hometown Niigata. It is so weird that, while certain things were just the way I remembered, other things looked so different from what I had in my mind in all these years of being away from the country.

The thing I really enjoyed there was the food! There are many kinds of food I had missed for all these years, but what I missed most was the Mos Burger, a national fast food chain known for its finest quality burgers. While you can find fine quality burgers in other parts of the world (and certainly in the US), Mos Burger has such a distinct and sophisticated taste that in my mind it ranks one of the highest among all the burger stores I’ve tried. So, if you have a chance to travel to Japan, I would certainly recommend you give Mos a try. My personal favorite is the Mos Cheese Burger. Of course, there are other kinds of good foods in Japan such as Ramen noodles and Sushi.

My only regret is that, because I only had one week to spare, I didn’t have time to stop by Tokyo to see folks there. One week was way too short for this. For my next trip back to Japan, I’d like to take at least two weeks off so that I can spend some days in Tokyo.

Anyway, I took a bunch of pictures while I was there, and these are just some of them. I hope you enjoy.


Keisei Rapid Liner from Narita Airport to Tokyo station. While the fastest way to get to Tokyo from Narita is via Narita Express, Keisei Liner is probably a good economical alternative and reasonably convenient. It takes roughly 1.5 hours to get to Tokyo station from the airport without transfer.
Kendo tournament was taking place in my home town while I was there.
A magnificent view of the sunset at Sea of Japan. The place I stayed at is only 10 minutes walk from the beach. This is one of many infamous vending machines that you see all over Japan. You can think of this as something equivalent of water fountains in the US in terms of its distribution density, though there are certainly more vending machines in Japan per unit area than water fountains in the US.

On the platform for Shinkansen (the Bullet Train) at Niigata station.
A view from Shinkansen overlooking the outlines of local mountains.

A somewhat busy street in Yokohama. Luckily you don’t need to drive as much in the metropolitan areas thanks to the large train network available throughout the areas.

One thing I’ve noticed is the large number of light-weight vehicles (aka Kei cars) with the engine size less than 660 cc. Since owning a car in Japan is pretty expensive, lots of drivers opt to own a Kei car for its lower cost of ownership.

A platform at a local station in Yokohama, waiting for my train.

A view of airplane from Terminal 1 at the Narita Airport. I was stranded there for 6 hours since my return flight to Newark was delayed. Continental airline provided a meal coupon to compensate for the delay, though it was a JAL employee who was manning the check-in counter for Continental and gave me the coupon.

Back from OOoCon 2007

I just came back from OOoCon 2007. It’s great to see those folks whom I had only interacted with on mailing lists and IRCs. And I have to say talking face-to-face is way, way, way different from talking with text only. I was particularly delighted to finally meet with Niklas Nebel of the Calc team. We’d been interacting in various places for ages, but had never met in person. Now we have. :-) It was a real shame to not see Eike Rathke and Daniel Rentz, but I’m sure we’ll have our chance some day.

Also pleased to meet and chat with Ricardo Cruz (IRC nick: blacksheep), who is a Google Summer of Code student working on VCL layout support mentored by Michael Meeks. It was such a joy to talk with him on various topics. His demo on VCL dialog resizing was mind-blowing!

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Mac port team (led by Eric Bachard et. al.) using the src-to-xml converter that I wrote during Novell’s Hack Week (which they referred to as the “Novell parser” during their talk). Glad to know it’s being useful to you all.

Of course, it’s always great to see my fellow Novell hackers, whom I don’t see on a daily basis because of our geographical constraint. The trip to the beach in Saturday afternoon, with Florian, Noel and Hubert was particularly fun. Water in the Mediterranean Sea was very cold, and the wines were fantastic. BTW, I’m always amazed by Fridrich’s language skill: you speak how many languages in total!? So far I’ve seen him speak in Czech, German, Catalan, French, and English.

Aside from meeting with various people, I was also able to hack during my stay in Barcelona on one data pilot feature I’d been working on. The hack continued from my flight to Barcelona, back from Barcelona, and I was finally able to make my cut while being stranded at the Philadelphia airport because of my flight delay. Isn’t modern technology great? You can be stranded at an airport and still being able to hack. :-)

Some pictures from the conference:

Mingling at breakfast on 1st day
Mingling at breakfast on 1st day

(from left) Back of Tor, Fong Lin, Michael, and Hubert (front)
(from left) Back of Tor, Fong Lin, Michael, and Hubert (front)

(from left) Michael, Noel, and Tor
(from left) Michael, Noel, and Tor

Eric Bachard giving talk on native Mac OS X port
Eric Bachard giving talk on native Mac OS X port

Petr Mladek talking about splitting OO.o source code into pieces
Petr talking about splitting OO.o source code into pieces

Kendy (Jan Holesovsky) on git
Kendy (Jan Holesovsky) on git (there is Jon’s follow-up to this talk).

Fong Lin and Tor posing for photo
Fong Lin and Tor posing for photo

I’ve uploaded all of my photos here.

Trip to Prague

I just came back from a week-long trip to the City of Prague – the capital and largest city of the Chech Republic – to participate in Novell developer’s team summit. Just saying that I had such a good time is an understatement. It was a blast! The weird thing is that this was the first time I ever met with anybody who is involved in the OO.o project face-to-face, and instead of text-only communication that we normally conduct, talking with actual voice and seeing their physical face brings such a warm, pleasant feeling to the conversation.

Aside from the meetings we had in the office, we spent the evenings and the Saturday exploring the city. The most memorable moment of course is the “blackout” incident on Thursday.

Here is the story. We went by train to a small town outside of Prague on Thursday evening. The plan was to find a restaurant in that town to sit down, relax, eat and chat (the usual stuff). We got off the train, and headed for the first restaurant closest from the train station, but unfortunately it was closed. But hey, accidents happen all the time, so we immediately regrouped and headed for the second restaurant in town, thinking that the odds of two restaurants being closed were very low.

And guess what, the second restaurant was also closed! Jan, our trusted local guide, sensed that something was wrong, so he found someone local and asked him what was going on. We then found out that there was a power outage in that town, and as a result of that all their local restaurants were forced to close for the evening.

At that point, our only choices were either to wait one hour for the next train, or walk 6 kilometers to the next town and hope that the power outage didn’t reach there. We chose the latter.

Long story short, we ended up walking that long 6-kilometer trail through the woods to the next town, to finally find a restaurant! In retrospect, though, it was probably the best team-building exercise anyone could have come up with (plus a good exercise physically). :-) But I’d rather not go through that again. ;-)

This trip was actually my first visit to Europe, and I’m sure I’ll be back again. It’s sad that we don’t know when we will meet each other again the next time, but hopefully not too distant future.