Lotus Symphony 3.0 Fixpack 2

The second service release to the Lotus Symphony 3.0 Office Suite was released pretty quietly last month. FP2 contains a small collection of security patches for the underlying OpenOffice.org code as well as some compatibility fixes when interacting with other office suites.

Download Lotus Symphony 3.0 Fixpack 2 here (For Windows) (or here for Official download source)

This release is Officially compatible with:

• Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP2, Windows 7
  
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11, RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 Update 4, Ubuntu 8.04
  
• Macintosh OS X 10.5, Macintosh OS X 10.6.2, Intel only

Fixes from the FP2 Release Notes:

• CVE-2010-4643: A security vulnerability in OpenOffice.org which is related to TGA file processing might lead to arbitrary code execution.
• CVE-2010-3689: The OpenOffice.org start script and other shell scripts expand the LD_LIBRARY_PATH in an insecure way.
• CVE-2010-2935 / CVE-2010-2936: A security vulnerability in OpenOffice.org which is related to PowerPoint document processing might lead to arbitrary code execution.
• CVE-2010-4253: A security vulnerability in OpenOffice.org which is related to PNG file processing might lead to arbitrary code execution.
• CVE-2010-3453 / CVE-2010-3454: A security vulnerability in OpenOffice.org which is related to Word document processing might lead to arbitrary code execution.
• CVE-2010-3451 / CVE-2010-3452: A security vulnerability in OpenOffice.org which is related to RTF document processing might lead to arbitrary code execution.
• CVE-2010-4008 / CVE-2010-4494: Possible Security Vulnerability in OpenOffice.org resulting from 3rd party library LIBXML2.
• CVE-2010-3450: A directory traversal vulnerability in OpenOffice.org which is related to zip/jar package extraction might lead to overwriting files and even to arbitrary code execution.
• SPR #JCHC89R945: Include mandatory Eclipse help patches, SPR #MSTO89WRX8: Enhanced selective access control support.
• PPT files with grouped objects will be corrupted if save them in Symphony and open them again in MS Office which contains a security patch claimed in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-087. For detailed patch information, please refer to http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-087.mspx.
• Optimize preload notification behavior by removing the notification bubble.
• Password protected MS Excel with edit password cannot be edited.
• The cell border orientation will be lost when opening a MS Excel file in Lotus Symphony.
• The result is wrong when copying a table which contains hidden columns from Lotus Symphony spreadsheet to Lotus Notes.
• The behavior of Subtotal in DataPilot is wrong when there are more than one items in Data area.
• 'divide by 1000' format is not supported in Lotus Symphony 3 Spreadsheet.

Nokia 6301 and Linux Part 2

I noticed that I have a couple of dozen visitors hit my earlier posting on synchronizing linux systems with a nokia 6301, and given that I am on a bit of high after just posting my previous note about connecting to the net through the the GPRS and bluetooth functions on the nokia 6301 I figure I will follow with my latest discoveries fiddling fun.

I must be turning into a google zealot because everytime I turn around there is another google service available which I want to twiddle. Let me explain.

Currently Evolution does not support synchronizing itself in any sane fashion against a syncml device like the nokia 6301. So all my contacts living inside my client have become increasingly disconnected with the contacts listed with gmail and the contacts that I have on my cell phone.

Obviously the context between these three application is somewhat different in each case. Like I often want to be able to grab a map of my next intended target from the evolution address book, but rarely want to do this inside of gmail itself, and I usually cannot be bothered with any of that rigamarole on the cell phone. Nevertheless, it would still be nice if they were synchronized.

So here steps in google to the rescue with its online syncml service, along with instructions on how to configure the sister device of the 6301 (6300 in this case) to use its service. Note that the Nokia 6301 and 6300 are S40 series Symbian OS devices.

I won't go into the details of the configuration since they are adequately specified elsewhere, but figure I will get to the point, thanks google for providing a working sync service.

Next I want to point out that gmail is available as a binary application on most recent nokia phones including the slightly older models such as the 6301. As a side note, this works with Google Apps as well.

Check out http://m.google.com for all the goodies, including google maps.

Sigh, I can feel the tendrils of zealotness swirling around me... Somebody kick me if I go too far.

Anyways, while this isn't exactly a Nokia 6301 and Linux article, the same results can be achieved, so I figure it is a good enough equivalent.

Linux, bluetooth, and GRPS internet

Currently I am sitting in Austin's Neighborhood Pub across the street from my little condominium here in Calgary, Alberta. Although I can see a number of wireless networks in the area, none of them are unsecured and for their own reasons, the pub itself is not particularly interested in providing wireless connectivity to its patrons.

So this leaves me with the need to be creative in how I connect to the internet. What's more, in a couple weeks I am leaving for my second major cross country bicycle tour of Canada, and will likely be more or less completely away from the gentle caress of the net for most of that time.

Anyways, as I mentioned, I need to be creative with this whole connectivity thing, and my solution is via bluetooth, to route packets through my cell phone and connect to the net via the phones GPRS (and EGPRS in some areas) data connection.

The thing that impressed me is that this technology is alreadly quite nicely supported in linux, albeit with a bit of work on the commandline (not much, just check out pand, bnep, and of course ifconfig and dhclient). If you want some fairly superb documentation on this check out the bluetooth article gentoo wiki.

I imagine that other operating systems like the BSD's would support this as well, but I haven't confirmed it.

Congrats to the bluez folks for delivering a working network bluetooth stack for linux.

As a side note from what I read on Dan Williams' Blog, this functionality will eventually make its way into network manager itself sometime around the release of 0.8.

This makes me want to move to a phone that actually supports 3g data connections to make this all a bit faster than dialup... However, at this time there is nothing available on the market which will do everything I want from a phone (3G. UMA, Bluetooth and supports a native binary gmail application). My current Nokia 6301 does all of this except the 3G thing, so I am going to stick with it for the time being.

Take Care, and hopefully I will post back here before I leave for my tour, but then again, even if I don't then so be it, I will be able to post from the road.

Please enjoy responsibly

Master of Orion 2 and Dosbox party

My friend Tristan and I have been fans of Master of Orion 2 for well over a decade at this point. Personally, the game is within my top three all time favorite games (also including Crusaders of the Dark Savant and Close Combat 2).

Anyways, a long time ago, we discovered that network multiplayer of MOO2 was deeply slow and sucky (like impossible to play for a protracted period of time). The games we have played against one another have either been hotseat or deeply time consuming and resulting in no real conclusion.

Well, no more. I finally got off my butt in regards to this issue this week and managed to get MOO2 running quite nicely in Dosbox. This resulted in us spending about 19 hours over the course of the last weekend playing the game the way it was meant to be played (to the bitter end of course, and several times over to boot)!

Anywho, this worked so well, that I am currently writing an NSIS installer which will pull all the necessary components off of the install CD, as well as properly configure DOSBOX such that nobody else needs to go through the decade long pain in the ass that we went through ever again.

Basically, what I have so far asks for the path to the install CD, copies the DOS only files to the HD, patches the game and sets up a local copy of dosbox to run it.

Later I will write a launcher which will get the dosbox environment running in some sort of sanitized location and execute various cli switches to configure the gameplay itself.

Weee!

-Ted

Contract to develop firefox extension

I have wanted to be part of an open source software development business for a long time. Ha. I'm quite giddy right now, because I just happen to own one.

I have a number of little development contracts out right now to develop a variety of tools, website extensions and generally muck about with technology. What's really cool is that I am using exclusively open source tools and environments to do the work in.

Ha, this great.

So long, and later.

Pulseaudio Stereo Server

Ever since the speakers on my laptop decided to die, I have been looking for ways to get audio out of the machine.

There are a couple options:

• Don't have sound
• Use headphones, or a speaker connected to the headphone port
• Use a network sound server

Given that I love the concept of tinkering around with weird technical thingamajigs, I decided to give the latter a try.

So here is what I want to do.

My mythtv frontend in the living room is connected to a very decent speaker system, also, there are other "always on" machines around the house which are hooked up to speakers.

I want my laptop to auto-detect the existence of the sound systems on these machines and connect to them at a push of a button, then route all of my computers audio through those speakers.

Anyways, I have not been able to get my laptops pulseaudio client to connect to a system wide instance running on the media server. If anyone has gotten a similar system running, I would love to hear about it.

Let me know.

-Ted

A spin with gnome-blog

I was poking around the software repository for opensuse 11.1, and came across a tool called gnome-blog. This is a panel applet which is supposed to allow me to post to my blog directly from the desktop rather than the supposedly tedious process of opening the blog website and posting from there.

Anyways, the tool is supposed to allow me to drag and drop images inline with the text, so I figure I will give it a whirl.

This version of gnome-blog is from 2006, and appears to be the most recent, so I suppose that development has stalled. Google has failed to deliver anything of interest more recent than that.

Update: I am not impressed. So long gnome-blog.

-Ted

Linux Kernel Space Media Transfer Protocol

So after a couple years of pondering I have finally begun work on implementing a kernel space driver for the media transfer protocol.

Yes, yes, this is my first foray since university into kernel space, but I have had enough of the user-space solutions to implementing the media transfer protocol. Hundreds of devices have now implemented the darn thing (including my iriver clix if you recall), and what's more the USB.org folks have finally published the 1.0 version of the standard.

First here is a bit of the technical reasoning.

1. Already two distinct user-space implementations which both share similar drawbacks. libmtp, and libgphoto


2. Dependant on libusb which has stalled in development


3. Race condition in device connection, first application to detect and connect blocks any other software from using the device until connection is dropped

Etc, the current implementation suffers from all the problems that user space drivers suffer from in the monolithic world (even the microsoft implementation has this going on). Also, it's about time I get my hands dirty in the kernel for pete's sake.

So how is this thing going to work you might ask?

Well, here is how I see it right now, and others are welcome to chime in on this.

The protocol is implemented partly in kernel space, and partly in user-space depending on necessity and appropriateness.

Kernel Space Driver (mtp):
Connects and manages all operations:
Exposes file hierarchies as a mountable file system
Implements protocol for transferring straight files.
Issues device handles to userspace which can be used asynchronously (no more device pointers!)
Automatic device connection

User Space Library (libmtp-media)
Implements protocol for managing media (including meta-data) (music, pictures, video, etc)

User Space Library (libmtp-cal)
Implements protocol for managing contact and calendar (vcard, ical, etc)

Essentially the protocol implementation will be separated across a variety of locations.

Anywho, after an hour or so of fiddling, here is the latest line from dmesg:

usb 4-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
usb 4-5: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
mtp: USB Skeleton device now attached to USBSkel-192
usb 4-5: New USB device found, idVendor=4102, idProduct=112a
usb 4-5: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 4-5: Product: iriver clix
usb 4-5: Manufacturer: iriver Limited
usb 4-5: SerialNumber: 41dff81c000000f33230303530313031
usb 4-5: USB disconnect, address 9
mtp: USB Skeleton #192 now disconnected

Not much, but hey it's the beginning of the road here.

Lastly, if anyone wants to employ me to design this, I am certainly on the market.

-Ted Bullock

How to synchronize a Nokia 6301 in Linux - Investigation

This afternoon I received my brand new Nokia 6301 cell phone. In many respects, I really do like the thing.

This nokia smartphone has a wifi antenna which allows it to be used as a VOIP handset if you are in range of an appropriate network and also supports all the normal functionality of your typical cell phone. It also supports Bluetooth and has a mini-usb adapter.

When physically connected to a modern linux machine (in my case openSUSE 11.0), it initially identifies itself as a USB Mass Storage device and the desktop responds appropriately by mounting it like any other USB drive. However, the phone specifies a couple of other connectivity options, including "Data Storage" (USB Mass Storage), "Media & Printing" (MTP) and "PC Suite".

When you choose "Media & Printing", the device switches to MTP mode (Woohoo, go libmtp!) which libmtp supports very nicely, although after perusing the datastructure, I am not clear which folders are the "correct" folders for which type of file. I guess this would just require some testing inside of Windows to see where the nokia tools put things. That said, this also means that f-spot should work pretty much out of the box.

Anyways, the third option "PC Suite" puts the device into a state which the nokia PC Suite application can use to synchronize the phone with Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes. This third area is the most interesting for me at the moment. I want my Evolution Contact List and Calendar to synchronize with with the phone so that I don't need to pull out my laptop just to check if my flight to New York leaves at 10:45 or 11:45.

There do seem to be a number of tools for solving this problem, however they are not particularly explanatory, nor have I actually been able to sync my calendar, todo list or contact list to the phone in yet in Linux.

So, that pretty much summarizes my experience to date with the Nokia 6301 in Linux.

I definitely would appreciate someone pointing me to documentation on how to get my calendar out of the PC and onto the phone.

Lotus Symphony 1 Experience

The glitzy look of the recent IBM Lotus Symphony release got my attention pretty quickly. While trying it out on a couple of tasks I rather rapidly started hitting various bugs. That said, I think the OpenOffice folks could take some hints in usability from this project.

The biggest issue that I ran into was with Bold, or Heading text not showing up on a page. Technically the the word processor thinks that the text is there because I can move my cursor through it, however it just shows up as white. Closing and re-opening the document will show the text for a few moments, but it will disappear again pretty quickly.

This is a deal breaker for me. So I won't be recommending it to anyone for the time being. Too bad really.

My initial experience with pfSense

As good as OpenBSD has been as my gateway router OS, I am pretty sure that I am going to move away from it to one of the pre-packaged routing systems.

Specifically, I am talking about pfSense. pfSense is a distribution of FreeBSD that uses the pf packet filter technology originally from OpenBSD, and actually had its origins as a fork of the m0n0wall project which uses ipfilter. Both systems are extremely powerful, and importantly, easy for me to use, and because I want to stick with pf as my underlying packet filter, I have chosen pfSense.

Installation onto my compact flash driven Compaq Evo D300 Small Form Factor, was very straightforward with the assistance of my card reader, dd, and a null-modem serial cable (after I figured out that installation is done via a serial terminal rather than the screen). Certainly, anyone ready to do an embedded installation of pfsense just with parts lying around their house deserves major geek cred points.

Right now, only 64Mb of the 2Gb flash card is partitioned for use (from the default image), which actually is not really a big deal since its a router. I'm not exactly going to mess with it very often. Maybe. I am forever tinkering with this stuff. But I think that I will leave it until the next distribution update.

3d Graphics Drivers and Open Source

I am constantly frustrated with the lack of open source drivers for my 3d graphics cards. My main workstation includes a GeForce 7800 GS which can be leveraged properly with only the proprietary nvidia driver. I am frustrated about this because of the implicit maintenance chores associated with this type of driver.

I am definitely not an open source zealot who will not use software just because it is proprietary (RMS for instance).

To really understand my grievance here, I'll relate a small tale of woe.

Like many other technical people, it is my ordained duty to help maintain the computers of my friends and family. For a variety of reasons and almost without exception, Windows XP is the operating system of choice. Almost without fail however, I am called in every 8 to twelve months to resolve the latest in a string of maintenance problems that my friends and family are experiencing. Typically, they will have downloaded some malevolent piece of software that is running amok on their computer. The only solution that I truly trust in this situation is to wipe the system drive and start over again.

Naturally, I have introduced my family and friends to Linux (openSUSE in my case) as a viable migration option for improved flexibility and security (I know this is debatable, but at least it's a smaller target).

Generally, their experiences with the GNOME user interface are not painful. Also, with Helix Banshee, they are able to enjoy their MP3 music collection out of the box.

For out of the box desktop usabilty, openSUSE is an exceptional migration candidate with only one glaring dilemma. Graphics drivers.

Unless an Intel Graphics adapter is being used, it is necessary to install those darned proprietary drivers to enable 3d support. The process and rationale behind this is mysteriously magical for my parents and friends. The necessity to reinstall the driver upon every single kernel security update is ridiculous, irritating, and impossible for these people to do on their own. I can't be making house calls every month to half a dozen people just to re-install the driver for them.

Nevertheless, there are a couple bright lights on the horizon.

The Intel adapters (with open source 3d drivers) have experienced dramatic performance improvements in the past several years, and can now be considered a completely viable option for a SOHO Linux workstation. Moreover, the rumors and rumblings about a discrete Intel Graphics solution are very promosing.

The Open Graphics Project also provides a light in the dark. The open specifications, drivers and hardware (Verilog) designs, should provide a very solid foundation for open 3d support in the operating system of your choice. Even OpenBSD may finally be able to introduce 3d.

Until the future is now, keep on swimming.

-Ted