Moved my blog

Recently I decided to update my blog to something that will be less awkward than NanoBlogger I have been using until now. I mean, writing the entries in vim is great, running the nb script is easy, but the turnover to preview it, fix, run the script again etc. is just annoying.

Now I moved my old blog to holesovsky.blogspot.com, which will be much easier for me to handle. With some Perl scripting, I even converted all the old entries here, so that the old blog can really RIP.

Small note to the conversion

When you are using the blogger.com's Import XML feature, and it looks like the import is taking too long (minutes or so), the answer is simple: Your XML was not accepted by blogger.com. I have seen reports of people waiting several hours to import the blog.

Don't wait in such cases - it was just that an error occurred, and the UI has not reported that. Just try to find out what is in the XML that could have caused the import to get stuck - usual suspects are &'s instead of " or OTOH things like &Acaron;, or other less common escapes.

Recent documents in LibreOffice

This is again one of those little improvements that make LibreOffice much more usable, and that I so much love hacking on. I implemented a dropdown for the Open toolbar button that brings an easy access to the Recent Documents, and sent that the UX mailing list for feedback. I got some really useful hints. Even better - I gave Samuel code pointers to play with this a bit, and he came up with a beautiful patch that implements his ideas. And here is the result:

Samuel - thank you for this! :-) For anybody who would like to bring this functionality to the Start Center too (the screen you see when you start LibreOffice), here is an Easy Hack that will result in reusing the code for the Start Center too; and also will delete lots of duplicate code.

LibreOffice 4.0: Use Firefox Personas in your favorite office suite

At the very last minute, my patches to support Firefox Personas in LibreOffice were accepted as a late feature for 4.0, hooray! :-) What does it mean?

Personas are easy-to-use themes that let you personalize the look of your Firefox says the Personas page. In fact, it is a great collection of many nice pictures you can apply in your Firefox with one click.

Olivier had the great idea to reuse them in LibreOffice too. I provided him with few code pointers to implement the feature, but then I decided this is actually so fun project that I wanted to do it myself (sorry, Olivier!) - and started that at the Munich HackFest. Long story short, here is the result:

Unfortunately we cannot choose Personas in LibreOffice with just one click as in Firefox, but it is as easy as it can be - just download LibreOffice 4.0 RC1 (or later) when available, choose Tools -> Options... -> Personalization -> Select Persona, and the rest is trivial, the dialog will lead you through the necessary steps. Enjoy!