Long ago I had a project where we needed to generate Word documents. We ended up using a fake X-Server running OpenOffice and some queuing mechanism to manage the fact that each OpenOffice instance could only handle one conversion job at a time. No fun, but it worked, does not scale amazingly obviously. Back then I of course also tried the KOffice converter which is easily run with little overhead via a CLI interface. Unfortunately it wasn't really up to the job in terms of Word compatibility.

I think I have mentioned Picok before on my blog. This is a system that lets users arrange and configure a number of portlets in order to be able to keep themselves up to date with what's going on in various web applications, similar to iGoogle and netvibes. The difference is of course that this system is entirely open source, so companies can install Picok in their intranet and give Picok direct access to all sorts of internal applications that they could not make available to iGoogle or netvibes. What makes this project all the more exciting is that this system was initially developed as a closed source application for the Raiffeisen bank in Switzerland. This was the first time for me, where I had the opportunity to be part of open sourcing such a large chunk of code.

A while back I blogged about helping out on the IT side of things or the un-informed.org project. A couple of people have replied and said they were interested in helping. In order to facilitate this, I have registered a project on google code and committed an initial version. Does not do much atm, but it features the current database schema concept and admin generator modules for the core entities. The step would be adding support for the various many to many relations. I hope I will have some time next week together with my co-worker Jordi to work on this. Check out the MySQL workbench schema file if you want to get a visual overview of the schema. That file should be fairly uptodate, though the definitive schema is defined the doctrine config file. Seems like there is even a MySQL workbench plugin to help in round-trip exporting/importing to this format. I have committed a little getting started file for anyone to wants to play with things, but for anyone experienced with Symfony, these should all be no brainers. I will be fairly liberal with giving people commit access. All that is required are a few sane patches or even just an email to the developers mailinglist with a detailed plan. There is also a #uninformed IRC channel on freenode now.

I am on the board for this years CH Open Source Awards. All the other guys on the board seem to be more into Java and other languages which so far have gotten way more submissions. So all you swiss open source developers (not only PHP developers), submit your work, get recognition, prizes and most importantly show off what kind of great open source applications are being created here in Switzerland. We are especially keen on seeing projects coming out of schools and universities. Should also help boost visibility for your project and its not all that much work to submit your project. We will look at all submissions in a fair bit of detail, so most of the work is on our side :)

I am still quite in shock over the recent news about the assassinations of family members of suspected terrorists executed by US military drones under the supervision of the CIA. What confuses me the most is the lack of a real public outcry. For some time now we seem to have accepted that the CIA uses these drones outside of warzones to kill people that are suspected terrorists in areas where at least officially the local governments oppose such actions. We have also accepted "human collateral damage" during these attacks. To me the recent attack however have a new level as now it is apparently also legit to kill the family members of suspected terrorists outside of warzones in countries that officially oppose such attacks. What level of wrong do we need to reached before we realize that we have nothing left to be proud of our western democracies and legal system?