• Expensive LibreOffice Extensions And Templates Website?

  I read a time ago about the myth of an expensive LibreOffice extensions and templates website. I investigated about this and had a look at the real numbers (they are public available on the wiki page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers). I found some expenses only in two fiscal period: 2017 and 2018. TDF spent in 2017 6399.44 Euro and in 2018 642.60 Euro. The money was predominantly spent for content migration and an improved server environment. It included also an individual training for the TDF infrastructure team.

• Announcing the dates of LibOCon Almeria

  LibreOffice Conference 2019 will be hosted by the Spanish city of Almeria during the month of September, from September 11 (Wednesday) to September 13 (Friday).

  On Tuesday, September 10, there will be the usual meetings of the community, to discuss topics of general interest for native language projects, such as localization, documentation, quality assurance, design and marketing.

  Collateral events such as the social dinner and the hackfest, which are a tradition of the LibreOffice Schedule, have not yet been scheduled.

Tomorrow LibreOffice 6.2 will be released. Time to give you some information what will come in LibreOffice 6.3.

• Forget snowmageddon, it's dropageddon in Azure SQL world: Microsoft accidentally deletes customer DBs

  The Azure outage of January 29 claimed some unexpected victims in the form of surprise database deletions for unlucky customers.

  The issue afflicted a number of Azure SQL databases that utilize custom KeyVault keys for Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), according to a message sent to users seen by The Register. Some internal code accidentally dropped these databases during Azure's portal wobble yesterday, forcing Microsoft to restore customer data from a five-minute-ago snapshot.

  That means transactions, product orders, and other updates to the data stores during that five-minute window were lost. That may warm you up with red-hot anger if you're in the middle of a particularly nasty cold snap.

  The note explained that the cockup happened automatically during what Redmond delicately called an network infrastructure event: a CenturyLink DNS snafu that locked essentially half of Microsoft 365 customers out of their cloud accounts, a breakdown that began at 1045 UTC.

• Microsoft deprecates MSI

  Well – obviously. At least, their current actions tell that: they deprecated CRT MSMs (which is reiterated in VS 2019 RC2 release notes), a technology designed to allow MSI-based installers to install the CRT libraries in a centrally-managed manner; and the only recommended way now is using vcredist executable, which is not MSI-compatible.

  What else, if not deprecation, might it mean, when an installer technology made unable to deploy applications created using vendor’s own flagship development tool?

  Well – I thought: maybe that was an oversight? Why not inform them about the problem that MSI-only installers would be left without any viable option?

• Improving SmartArt import in Impress FOSDEM talk

  The next step in the recent SmartArt story is my Improving SmartArt import in Impress talk at FOSDEM 2019, in the Open Document Editors devroom. The room was a bit far away from the popular places, but the livestream worked out nicely.

As you might have seen, we have now run four C++ sessions to get started with C++ and LibreOffice development. The origin of this actually happened already at the last LibreOffice Hackfest in Munich where Izabela, Mike, Anxhelo and me conspired on the idea. We also started to recruit LibreOffice developers as mentors right there and Xisco joined us soon.

As the lectures discuss the basics of data structures and C++ I started to create some patches against LibreOffice to show how to start with simple things in the LibreOffice build based on the examples from the lecture, but in the environment of LibreOffice and with some of its framework and conventions...

Also: LibreOffice monthly recap: January 2019