Dissociated Press

Upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.5, test-driving the new hotness now. Please leave a comment if anything’s broken.

If the comments are broken, well… that’d be a problem, wouldn’t it?

Back home after trips to BrainShare (Salt Lake City) and SDForum/OSBC (San Francisco, CA).

Tons of fun were had, some really good food (and some exceptionally bad food, but let’s not focus on the dreck served by the airlines…), interesting company, and the opportunity to meet and talk to a lot of people about openSUSE.

Good stuff, but glad to be “home” for a few days. Next trip: Austin, TX for Linux Foundation thingy, and then LugRadio Live in San Francisco for a couple of days. (Note to organizers of shows — San Francisco is so overdone. Seriously — great city, but once or twice a year is enough. Seattle, Orlando, and Boston are nice too, you know….)

Getting set today to jet off to SLC for the big Novell conference of the year — BrainShare. It’s a biggie — five days, thousands of Novell employees, partners, customers, all jammed into the Salt Palace Convention Center. (I’ve been there before… not sure “palace” is quite fitting, but it is ginormous…)

I’ve covered BrainShare once as a journalist, so it will be interesting indeed to attend it as a Novell employee. I recall that Novell pulls out all the stops for BrainShare, and I think it’s going to be a fun (if exhausting) week. I have two talks on KDE4 during the week, and a spot in the Friday keynote — which will be all sorts of fun and excitement.

I think they’ll have videos online once the whole shebang is over — so if you can’t make it to SLC and BrainShare next week, you’ll be able to bask in some of the keynotey goodness anyway. In a little window on your desktop. But you’ll have your choice of comfy chair, so there’s that.

See you in SLC!

The other day I used Google Docs with a colleague to hash out a project, and I was really digging Google Docs at the time — thinking “man, this totally blows fat client software away,” because we could both update the document, and chat in the sidebar about changes… it was really useful.

Today, I’m trying to create a spreadsheet with Google Docs and keep getting an “Oops, a server error occurred” when trying to save a spreadsheet and just thinking, “man, this totally blows.” I just spent 10 minutes creating a template that I can’t save in Google Docs. Luckily, I was able to copy and paste the content into an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet with no problem.

I know that OpenOffice.org is not completely bug-free, but I’ve never had it refuse to save a document before… every time I start to think that I’d like to switch to Web-based software completely, I run into a problem like this and think “nope, Web-based software still isn’t production-ready.”