Are vendors really pushing OpenOffice.org?

The Profoss event on OpenOffice.org is taking place on 10th june, and the final list of speakers and schedule are now available.

Until now, the interest for the event from potential visitors is comparable to other Profoss events organised. But what is different, is the lack of interest from commercial OpenOffice.org proponents to actively support and sponsor this event.

The format of this event is different (one afternoon rather than 2 days), but I don't think this is the explanation.

With Sun being the main OOo contributor and a Profoss partner, I expected interest and active support from them, but only David helped me.

Novell is also a big OOo developer, but I never ever got an answer from them, though the person I contacted was advised to me by Michael Meeks, an OOo developer.

IBM didn't show interest either. Their marketing department seem to be very picky, and more interested in marketing show than really informative events.

Even smaller companies labeled as OOo specialists didn't come back to me.

Luckily, registration numbers are currently similar to other events.

So, what I wonder is: despite all the noise around ODF and OOo, is there real interest from those companies and other FOSS companies to push OpenOffice.org to the enterprise market? Or do they think the majority of companies are not ready for the switch? Or, worse, do they think OOo is not ready for wide adoption in the enterprise?

Lots of questions, let me know if you have answers.....

Vim: Shortest match of your search pattern

I just discovered that if a "-" appears immediately after the "{", then a shortest match first algorithm is used. In particular, "\{-}" is the same as "*" but uses the shortest match first algorithm.

An example from http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~ssk/vim/pattern.html:

a[bc]\{-}[cd] matches "abc" in "abcd"
a[bc]*[cd] matches "abcd" in "abcd"

Note however that a match that starts earlier is preferred over a shorter match:

"a\{-}b" matches "aaab" in "xaaab".

Lemon POS solution in Profoss directory

I just added the Lemon Point of Sale solution in the Profoss Software Directory (in english, french and dutch). Still a young product, but quite interesting.

Bye bye EC2, Hello Gandi Hosting!

I have been using EC2 for some time now, for example hosting the Profoss news website, the Profoss newsletter, and other personal tools. But it was kind of expensive for what I used, so I was looking at alternatives, but as I had not time to tackle it, it was left as an idea.

But now my EC2 instance became unavailable. And for those who don't know, an EC2 instance has no persistent storage, meaning that a reboot leaves you with a blank instance. Which makes backup even more important.

As I needed to restore everything from my backups, I decided to go the Gandi Hosting service. They partition their servers in 64 shares, and (currently) you can decide to use between 1 and 32 of them. Ok, one share is not very powerful hardware: 256 MB of RAM (+512 MB of swap), 5 GB of RAID6 disk space reserved for your data (the system is on another disk). Network bandwidth stands at 5 Mbits guaranteed. But one share only costs.... 6€! And you can start small and add shares as you need them.

So I decided to take 1 share, and see how things go. If I need more power, I'll add a share, and I'll pay 12€ a month. But honestly, with the tools running on my share, it could be some time before I take that step.

Profoss speakers: interesting as usual

Profoss tries hard to get interesting speakers with real world experience at their events, and this is also true for the next event about OpenOffice.org.

Are currently confirmed:

• Eric Descamps, the manager at the Belgian Post for the OpenOffice.org project, which went through a Proof of Concept phase, and is getting at the deployment phase. Eric will share his experience and lessons learned in the project he leads.
  
• Machtelt Garrels, co-founder of the OpenDoc Society, will give a talk on how to best avoid usual annoyances met by people switching to OpenOffice.org.

Further speakers will be confirmed soon!

This event will take place at the International Press Center from 14:00 to 18:00, and registration is open for all interested parties!