Sunday, March 23, 2014

How to build only vcl modules from scratch in LibreOffice

After reviewing the component diagram on the LibreOffice wiki, the following will make the VCL module in LibreOffice:

make sal salhelper store cppuhelper cppu xmlreader registry unoidl dtrans \
     binaryurp dtrans animations jvmfwk jvmaccess javaunohelper stoc i18nlangtag \
     ucbhelper comphelper basegfx tools unotools i18nutil i18npool sot svl vcl

Update: this doesn't always work. Turns out that there is some sort of circular dependency between i18npool and another module, which make sorts out itself. 

I'm now trying:

make CppunitTest_i18npool_test_breakiterator ucb configmgr vcl

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Google+ names policy discriminates against Native Americans

I find it absurd that Google+ doesn't recognize certain names. The latest outrage was when they rejected Elaine Yellow Horse. It was only after BuzzFeed contacted Google that they decided that, gee whiz, that is a real name! Who would have thought it.

So I thought I might let Google know a few things about Anthroponymy. Given Google has a whole division who work out if you've given a real name or not, you would hope they would be well-versed on what can constitute a name. It appears not, even in their own country they don't recognize the name of the original native people who inhabited the land.

 Here are a few things that Google+ administrators might like to brush up on when it comes to names of people around the world:

  • You don't have to have two names. You can be named with just one name - a mononym. This is quite common all over the world.
  • There are those who prefer to be named after their children - this is called teknonymy. As an example, I knew a Lebanese man whose first son was named George. We knew him as Abu George, literally "father of George".
  • People can have names that are... unusual. Let's give you a few:

    Jellyfish McSaveloy
    Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily Hutchence
    Apple Blythe Alison Martin
    Baby Hospital
    Yahoo Serious
    Goveg.com


  • There are a number of people whose names may be mistaken for rudeness:

    Argelico Fucks
    Dick Assman
    Lucious Pusey (changed to Lucious Seymour)
    Rusty Kuntz

    So let's see - Google will be banning all the Fucks, Assman, Pusey and Kuntz of the world, even though these are their legal names.
Google, pick up your act. It's getting really old. Frankly, the fact that Elaine Yellow Horse appealed your policy three times and it was only once the media got involved that you did the right thing shows that your staff are either incompetent, or racist. I hope for incompetence. Either is bad, but racism is much worse than incompetence.