How to Install LibreOffice in Ubuntu

In my last post I talked about LibreOffice. In case you wondering how to install LibreOffice on your ubuntu computer. Here are the instructions. Please note that doing this will replace your OpenOffice.org packages with LibreOffice.
Open a terminal and type the following commands to ad LibreOffice PPA to your software sources list.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install libreoffice

Please do give your feedback and bug reports to the LibreOffice team.

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

Its past midnight, I am lying in my bed and reading Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala . Outside the window, the Hanoi city is still awake preparing for the Tet new year. Few days ago I picked up this book from my friends Tu's bookshelf and fell in love after reading the first few pages. Andrew X. Pham prose is simply beautiful. Rediscovering my love for Vietnam reading through this book.

Yesterday at the Tet lunch at work, I mentioned this book to Marko and he suggested me to read Andrew X. Pham next book The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars as well.

About the book

Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Winner of the Whiting Writers' Award
A Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the Year

Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey—a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam—made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland.

Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as "boat people." Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds "nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness." In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ("Only Westerners can do it"); and in the United States he's considered anything but American. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.

Search Amazon.com for Andrew X. Pham

How do you create an organization chart with OpenOffice.org?

Few days ago one my colleague asked if I can help to make a organization chart with OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org does not come with sample organization chart template. The OpenOffice.org website says it is bundled with Professional Template pack but I didn't find it in there.

There is an organization chart Sample available if you have installed the Professional Template Pack from the OpenOffice Extensions website

Creating organization chart is easy with the OpenOffice shape drawing tools, but it is great to have a sample template. I found an old template here.
http://documentation.openoffice.org/Samples_Templates/User/template/org_chart.stw

PS:Perhaps I'll add a wishlist to the new libreoffice project for this.

HOW TO: Copy a CD-ROM in Ubuntu

Here is a quick tip on how to make a copy of CD/DVD when the standard CD/DVD burning software is not available. We can use the 'dd' command to copy the CD/DVD as an ISO image file on your harddrive.

 dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/tmp/cdimage.iso

1313832+0 records in
1313832+0 records out
672681984 bytes (673 MB) copied, 127.532 s, 5.3 MB/s

Full-body game control using FAAST and OpenNI

FAAST is middleware to facilitate integration of full-body control with games and VR applications. The toolkit relies upon software from OpenNI and PrimeSense to track the user’s motion using the PrimeSensor or the Microsoft Kinect sensors. FAAST includes a custom VRPN server to stream the user’s skeleton over a network, allowing VR applications to read the skeletal joints as trackers using any VRPN client. Additionally, the toolkit can also emulate keyboard input triggered by body posture and specific gestures. This allows the user add custom body-based control mechanisms to existing off-the-shelf games that do not provide official support for depth sensors.
http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/faast/

Chinese teacher helps blind find confidence in art

Inside a brightly-lit room in a lighting store, painting teacher Zeng Bailiang and his group of volunteers are patiently teaching a group of blind students the basics of Chinese painting.

The students in the classes in Nanning, the provincial capital of China's southern Guangxi province, spend hours practising brushstrokes on a special paper, feeling with their fingers the different wet and dry areas to guide them on their painting.

Eventually they get to the point where they can dip a brush, similar to the ones used for Chinese calligraphy, into black ink and draw things such as mountains or bamboo trees with long strokes. Short strokes can create flowers or birds.

Zeng, 55, is a self-taught artist who has been conducting classes for the blind for the past several decades. He says the classes fuel his passion for art with a sense of satisfaction that comes from helping the students - many of whom were orphans who came to him wanting something new and fun to do.
Read More

Snapstick, watch internet content on TV

Just stumbled across Snapstick on Mozilla-based applications page on Mozilla.org .

Snapstick combines the ease of discovering content on your laptop, tablet, or smartphone with the viewing pleasure of a big screen TV.

Now that sounds really cool. But it still doesn't explain what's the technology behind all this. Digging through the Snapstick.com site, I found the Engadget.com Snapstick review that explained the full details. Perhaps someone at Snapstick is listening, you need to put up relevant content where we geeks can find it easily.
BTW did I mention that this product is powered by Ubuntu. :)

Postfix Log Entry Summarizer

Everyday I manage a Postfix mail server that handles emails from 20 mailing-lists. On days like this when there lot of email traffic, I keep an eye on the activity using pflogsumm perl script.

pflogsumm -e --problems_first -d today /var/log/maillog | pager

pflogsumm.pl is designed to provide an overview of postfix activity, with just enough detail to give the administrator a "heads up" for potential trouble spots.
http://jimsun.linxnet.com/postfix_contrib.html

CES 2011 Tablet Roundup

DigitalTrends.com compared 25 tablet computers at International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011. It sure seems like 2011 is the Year of the Tablet. I feel that the small android devices from Asian manufacturers are going to eat up the market share of the big players if they get their act right.

1. Motorola Xoom
2. Blackberry PlayBook
3. Toshiba Android Tablet
4. Dell Streak 7 and 10
5. Dell Inspiron Duo
6. Samsung 7 Series Sliding Windows PC
7. Lenovo LePad
8. Lenovo IdeaPad Slate
9. Asus Eee Pads and Eee Slate EP121
10. Acer Iconia Tab A500
11. Sharp Galapagos Tablet

Small Form Factor Tablets

1. NEC LT-W Cloud Communicator
2. Motion CL900 Windows Tablet
3. iStation Zood 3D tablet
4. Coby Kyros Internet Tablets
5. Gadmei Android Tablets
6. Ace NomadPAD 10 series
7. Archos 10 Internet Tablet
8. Rockchip Tablet RK29XX
9. SBNTech All in One Embedded IP Multimedia Communicator
10. Jinys Tablets
11. The Others: the Aluratek Cinepad, AOC Breeze, Gentouch Latte (Latte Grande, Expresso), Notion Ink Adam, Azpen Windows 7/Android tablet, Vizio tablet, and the eFun Nextbook Next 4 and Next 6.

Dan Saffer 'Tap is the New Click'

Spent the first two weeks of January working on an interactive interface concept design for gesture and multi touch device. Can't ask for a better way to start the new year 2011!.
Don't miss Dan Saffer's 'Tap is the New Click' talk on designing for the new touchscreen and gestural devices for the public.

NYC IxDA - Tap is the New Click - Dan Saffer from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

"Tap is the New Click"

Even though the technology has been around for decades, only now are we starting to see mass production and adoption of c. Jeff Han's influential 2006 TED demonstration of his multitouch system, followed by the launches of Nintendo's Wii, Apple's iPhone, and Microsoft Surface, have announced a new era of interaction design, one where gestures in space and touches on a screen will be as prominent as pointing and clicking.

But how do you create products for this new paradigm? While most of us know how to design desktop and web applications, what do you need to know to design for interactive gestures?

This introduction to designing gestural interfaces will cover the basics: usability and ergonomics; a brief history of the technology; some elemental patterns of use; prototyping and documenting; and how to communicate that a gestural interface is present to users.


ABOUT DAN SAFFER
Dan Saffer runs www.kickerstudio.com. He is an international speaker and author, his writing on design has appeared in BusinessWeek and many online publications. His acclaimed book Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices has been called "a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs" and has been translated into several languages. His new book on interactive gestures will be published by O'Reilly in October 2008.

Dan is a member of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). He received his Master of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University.