We Moved

Hi everyone,

some of you may know that I moved; we really needed more space, so we rented a nice flat only a few hundred meters from our old location. So, yesterday, we returned our keys to the owner of the old flat ... now it's time to decorate the new one and to start to feel at home.

Is this a true story? Yes, it is. We really moved ... and this was a real challenge, since it was the hot phase of the preparation of The Document Foundation you all are aware of. By the way, my deepest deepest thanks to all my friends who supported me to make my life a bit easier during that time ... they helped by e.g. painting our old flat. You are amazing, really!

Okay, back to amazing #2 and The Document Foundation. It seems that the dust settled a bit, and now it seems that our move to towards a more libre project is a bit similar. We already started to plan the interior, put some furniture in and started the decoration process ... to make our guests feel comfortable :-) So who are our guests? At the moment, there are a lot of people who seem to like the idea. It's incredible ... I really hope that Oracle sees the potential, too, and accepts our invitation to support the foundation and to finally get a better product.

Who is Oracle? In fact, it is the people ... I - being a volunteer - had always a more than great relationship with the guys being paid for the work on OpenOffice.org. In fact, I consider some of them to be my close friends ... and I really (really) respect their work and their great engagement for the community project. So I'm looking forward that LibreOffice - as referred to in the FAQ - is a temporary name, but the foundation will become the new home of a more open development for all contributors. Either companies or individuals ... let's hope for the best!

Cheers,
Christoph

Back me up, Scotty! Aehm, BackupPC.

What a week. After the Community Council Meeting...

• I visited my family (for e.g. 70th birthday party),
• came home (and fought against my Inbox *g*),
• went to a two days business trip (exhausting and the current train situation a bit annoying...),
• spent a nice evening with my colleagues (oops, I totally forgot about our Indian style dinner),
• in the same night, I helped my neighbor since her husband had a hypoglycemia and required emergency medical services,
• then overslept the day after,
• tried to support some colleagues with their pilot study (some computer in the network did say goodbye), ...

... and finally I got called by my girlfriend who told me that her computer had been stolen. Oh dear, what's next?



Unfortunately, she requires the notebook computer for her day job, so there wasn't that much time find a suitable replacement. Now, about 24 hours later, we already bought another one, set it up with Ubuntu Linux, and restored most of the data.

Why is that so important that I wanted to tell you in a blog post? The reason is to say "Thank you!" to the people in other open-source projects who do a great job to make others' lifes easier. For example BackupPC - the system that saved (most of) my weekend :-)

BackupPC resides on a little server and scans the computers in the local network. If it detects a known one, it connects via a SSH tunnel and syncs the files to RAID disks. The file history can then be accessed via a web interface which also provides to (usually) easily restore them including access rights. The goood thing is, no one has to worry about doing the backups manually.

So please guys, keep an eye on your data. Usually, one realizes how important it is once it is lost... :-)

Bye,
Christoph