The good:

1. Open Office 3.0 feels snappier than 2.4. I don’t have hard statistics but it feels like it starts faster and various operations are faster.

2. Extensions designed for 2.4 work in 3.0 without modification.

3. A window bug in 2.4 which was triggered by compiz has been fixed in 3.0

4. In text documents, it is now possible to see the content of notes on the right side of the document. I would go as far as asserting that before 3.0, Open Office’s support for notes in text documents was so badly broken as to be unusable. In 3.0 it is possible to put notes to good use. And I would say that this feature alone is what made the move to 3.0 worthwhile for me.

However all of the positive above is undermined by long-standing problems in Open Office which still have not been fixed in 3.0:

1. Open Office’s support for notes is still deficient. It is not possible to associate a note with a span of text. I find this very annoying because I usually think of notes as comments on spans of text. It is currently not possible to select part of a paragraph for instance and add a note saying “this passage is incorrect” which would clearly be associated with the selected passage. If you select a passage and add a note, the note will be inserted at the start or end of the passage without any indication of what exactly it applies to. So you have to write in the note “The passage from A to B is incorrect.”

2. It is still not possible to get a split-screen view in Open Office. This may be due to just how abysmally ill-designed the underlying architecture of Open Office is. I often find myself wishing for such functionality. Sigh…

3. Open Office is just as likely to crash as before.

4. As I intimated above, the underlying architecture of Open Office is just as horrible as it ever was. If you have never tried to write extensions for Open Office you have no idea just how bad it is.

5. The documentation is just as inadequate as before. I’m talking not only about the documentation available to people writing extensions but also the documentation for end users.

Lately I’ve found asking myself why I’m putting up with Open Office and why I’m writing extensions for it. I keep having to remind myself that although Emacs would be more pleasant to work with, it is not a likely tool for most of my colleagues. Word would sit at the top of the list of most popular tool but due to ideological reasons (Word is not open source software) I’m not going to develop for Word. This leaves Open Office. I’ve checked again this morning what was available in the open source world and as bad as Open Office is, there is really no other contender. In my opinion, other office suites are either incomplete or not supported well enough on other platforms. I’m not fond of Windows but I’d rather develop extensions for an open source suite which is fully ported to Windows rather than an open source suite which is only half-ported or badly ported. Ditto for OS X.

I’ve upgraded from Hardy to Intrepid and found a slew of problems. First the problems which are not fixed:

1. Gnome does not want to start the gnome-terminal which is saved in the session configuration. After further investigation I found that session saving in gnome 2.24.1 does not work at all. This is a regression bug and a major one at that.

2. Update: I can’t sync to my cell phone using bluetooth. The bluetooth driver is there and working but to be able to sync there need to be some configuration performed. The configuration of the bluetooth tools has significantly changed since Hardy so this is not a trivial thing to fix. And the documentation seems nonexistent. One step forward, two steps back.

3. Evolution displays negative total number of emails.

Then the problems which I have been able to fix:

1. The guys working on compiz have decided to go from 0-based indexing of viewports to 1-based indexing. Of course, user settings are not automatically upgraded so I had to go into my configuration and fix that manually. I think the change is good because 0-based indexing makes sense only to programmers. However, not providing for an automatic upgrade of the configuration data is asinine.

2. scim initially refused to start. It turns out that skim was preventing it to run. Not skim directly but there was a session script which checked whether skim is present or not and if present would refuse to run scim.

3. Evolution at first did not want to connect to my mail server. I fixed this by switching from TLS to SSL for the connection protocol.

4. Update: Hardy and Intrepid run different versions of rsync. Unfortunately, the two versions do not speak the exact same protocol. There is some degree of compatibility so not all uses of rsync between an Intrepid and Hardy machine are doomed to fail. However, I use rsync in such a way that Intrepid’s rsync cannot talk to Hardy’s rsync. I’ve backported Intrepid’s rsync to Hardy to take care of that problem.

5. Update: Skype initially was not able to produce audio. Changing my sound out and ringing devices in the “Sound Device” tab of the “Options” dialog to the value “pulse” fixed the problem.

6. Update: Spamassassin’s cron job fails. A workaround exists.

7. Update: The Eclipse version bundled with Intrepid is both ancient and buggy. To be fair that is also a problem with Hardy. The problem has been reported and a newer version of Eclipse exists in one of the PPAs.

8. Update: Evolution displays a huge “Show:” button. I fixed this by going into the gconf registry and removing the key at /apps/evolution/mail/labels.

I will update this page as I find more.

I had to go to the hospital because I was running out of medicine. This was my second visit to the hospital. The first time I went with Hsiu-Lan. At that time, we decided to only get the medicine that was urgent to get at that time. The reasoning was that I could maybe get on the national insurance and save money. We later discovered that I have to have lived four months in Taiwan before I can benefit from that insurance. So last week I was running out of another medicine. I wanted initially to set up an appointment with the first doctor I saw but she was booked solid. So I went to see another doctor instead. Adeline helped me with making the appointment. It turned out to be easier than I thought. I was expecting to have to speak with a secretary over the phone but I found out I can register online. So by the time Adeline and I sat down together, it took about 2 minutes to seal the deal.

Then there was the small matter of having to go to the hospital and come back. Shu-Fun and Li-Ching helped secure me a ride to the hospital. A nice gentleman named Hsin-Hsing, a volunteer at Dharma Drum, was going back to his factory the same day I was going to the hospital. So, on the way, he dropped me off at the hospital. Hui-Hwa secured a ride back for me. After I was done, I called her and then called Mr. Lee and he came on a motorcycle (or was it a scooter, properly speaking) to pick me up.

So I went to the hospital. While I was there, I was able to communicate with the staff in Mandarin and with the doctor in Mandarin and English. It was not quick or perfect but it worked. After I was back at Dharma Drum, I was so happy that this was all taken care of and that nobody had to actually come with me into the doctor’s office. Then I realized they gave me the wrong dosage of Lipitor. I had benefited from so much help but I wasted it by not checking my medicine properly when I left the hospital! Mind you, this is the first time in my life I’m given the wrong medicine. A lesson learned, for sure.

So then the question became “how am I going to get this fixed?” Rushing down to the hospital right away might not be the best option. (Looking back, I think if I had rushed down to the hospital right away, it would have been very difficult to straighten everything out on the spot.) So I sought Hsiu-Lan because she’s been so helpful, has lived at Dharma Drum for a long long time and knows a lot. I quickly found out, however, that she had gone away on business. Venerable Chang Lang offered help. She called the hospital and then the doctor (who by that time was back in Taibei) and tried to get things sorted out for me. She found out that the dosage of Lipitor I need is just not available in Taiwan. (Hypercholesterolemia is probably not as big an issue in Taiwan as it is in the US.) She also found out that the hospital’s pharmacy does not carry Lipitor in a dosage more than 10mg. She offered to try to return the medicine and buy some 40mg ones but it is very expensive and I did not have money with me at that time. I said I would have to go with her but nuns are not allowed to travel alone with one or more men. So that idea was scratched. I’m making the story short but Venerable Chang Lang spent at least 2 hours helping me if not more.

After I left Venerable Chang Lang, I went to talk with Bill (more formally, Professor William Magee). I told him of my misfortune. Serendipity made it so that Ken Shu, a friend of Bill, called him just after I told Bill my situation. Bill asked Ken if he could take me to town to see whether I could get the right medicine and return the 10mg medicine to the hospital. Ken patiently drove me to several pharmacies. We had to check on at least 4 pharmacies before we found one which carried what I needed. Once I bought it, he then patiently drove me to the hospital to try to get a refund on the incorrect medicine but the cashier was closed so it was impossible. So we went back to Dharma Drum.

Venerable Chang Lang had told me she would tell Hsiu-Lan about my misfortune as soon as she had returned from her business away from the mountain. So the day after I went to the hospital, Hsiu-Lan called me with suggestions. I told her I still needed to return the incorrect medicine to the hospital for a refund. She inquired and found that Mr. Lin was available to drive me to the hospital. So we went to the hospital. The people there had been expecting me probably because of Venerable Chang Lang’s calls the day before. Getting a refund was very easy. Then Mr. Lin drove me to the pharmacy I had gone the day before to try to get more medicine but the pharmacist had not yet received more.

So now I have medicine for a few days and then I need to go back to the pharmacy to get more. Getting all of this straightened out has been quite an ordeal. In the US, it would be a simple matter of logging into my pharmacy’s web site, filling out a form and getting the medicine shipped to my door. I would not have to depend on anyone. But here, in Taiwan, it does not work that way and I have to depend on a lot of people to get the same result. I had to rely on the power of the network.

Here are phrases I practiced a lot during the past few days: “不好意思” and “我麻煩你”

As to why I sponsor one project rather than another. There are several principles guiding my choices:

1. The more I use a project, the more I’m likely to sponsor it.

2. I am more likely to sponsor small projects than big ones. For instance, although I use Linux a lot, it is unlikely that I will be sponsoring it. I think it is the responsibility of companies like Ubuntu and Red Hat or computer vendors like IBM to sponsor Linux. Another way to look at this is that Linux is already well taken care of. Smaller projects like Anki, for instance, are not so lucky.

3. I am more likely to sponsor projects which I feel are providing a service which is not provided (or provided well) by anyone else. There are multiple office suites out there so I’m not likely to sponsor office suites.

4. I have a limited amount of money. So it is likely that projects which ideally I should sponsor won’t get sponsored.

1. OOHanzi will work with Open Office 3 without modification.
2. There was a bug in Open Office 2.x which affected only people using compiz. If compiz was running, all dialog boxes which were created by the Java virtual machine running in Open Office would be displayed smaller than they should have been. This bug crippled OOHanzi pretty badly. After testing Open Office 3, I found the bug has been fixed.

Eventually, I should go through older digital albums and clean them up cause nobody wants to see the same temple under 10 different angles… unless perhaps they are into temple architecture. Another thing I should explore is subdividing albums into “highlights” and the rest. This way, if I want to show the album to someone I can just show the highlights while at the same time keeping the opportunity to go into more depth if I feel like it.

I have to say though that it is a little bit disturbing to select what is worth remembering.

After the awards, Master Sheng Yen reflected on the role of a founder and on the future of the educational facilities at Dharma Drum mountain. He was speaking Mandarin and his vocabulary was often way over my head but my roommate Weijen provided translation. I found particularly appropriate how he reminded the students that the money for their education comes from donations. He pointed out how they are part of a cycle of cause and effect. Donations allow them to study. If they study hard and then show the fruits of their efforts, donors are satisfied that their donations were not wasted. So donors donate again and the cycle continues.

As a visiting researcher at Dharma Drum Buddhist College, I am also part of this cycle. DDBC welcomed me to live in their facilities and perform research while at the same time the financial compensation they ask from me is quite minimal. So like the other students at DDBC I am benefiting from the donations. In any case, it would be out of character for me to squander the resources that are offered to me. Still, taking stock of the big picture helps to sharpen one’s focus.

1. Open the desired document in Explorer.
2. Click on the “Page” icon on the right hand side of the Explorer screen (it is at the same height as the tab titles.) Select the “Edit with Microsoft Word” option.
3. Once in Word, select “File->Save As” and select “Rich Text Format” in the “Save as type” combo box.
4. Start Jskad and select “Tools->Launch Converter”. You can use any of the “TWM to…” options. You can use “TWM to Unicode” for Unicode.

It is likely that there are other methods which can achieve the same results. Some of them may be a little more efficient. (For instance, I think there exist word macros to do conversion of Tibetan from this to that format, etc. I don’t use Word on a regular basis so that’s not an option I’m exploring.)

Now I’m going to explain the situation as I see it. I’m not an economist, mind you. So economists are likely to find this awkward.

According to the “free market” theory, markets are able to self-regulate. Business practice which produce no value cannot survive in a market because the market will not provide the means for those practices to perpetuate themselves. The current crisis can be taken as an example. The bankruptcies we are witnessing are precisely how the market is self-regulating itself. Financial institutions engaged in practices which did not produce value. It was not immediately apparent to the market that there was a problem but as soon as the problem became evident, the means of support for those practices evaporated and the market corrected itself. So far so good. The market does actually seem to regulate itself.

Yet, this does not mean that governmental regulation is not desirable. Here’s the problem. The swings of the market are affecting the lives of real people. The proponents of the free market view the processes which influence the market as if it were a pure cybernetic system. There are inputs, feedback loops and outputs and that’s all there is to it. The human factor is excluded entirely. Yes, the market will regulate itself but this regulating process is not without consequences. People lose their homes, their retirement funds, their jobs, etc. Financial rules could be established to help prevent business practices based on illusory value. They would dampen the swings so to speak.

Then there is the fact that the market as a whole is driven by decisions taken in micro-contexts. These decisions are rarely made to benefit the market as a whole. On the contrary, they are made to benefit whomever is the most powerful stakeholder in the micro-context in which the decision is made. A common example is the CEO who slashes a company’s R&D. This improves the balance sheet in the short run because a significant expense has been eliminated but it also cripples the company’s capability to compete in the future. I think the situation is similar in the case of the bad loans which were issued. Issuing those loans seemed like a good deal seen from the point of view of the micro-contexts in which those loans were issued. Nobody paid any attention to the fact that as a whole the lending practices were unsustainable.

To sum up, yes the market can regulate itself but the swings of the market are damaging to our society. It does not benefit society as a whole to let the market prop itself up by means of illusory value and then correct itself later.