Thursday, June 11, 2015

Badly targetted advertising

The web today is essentially one big advertising stream. Everywhere you go you're bombarded by adverts.

OK, I get that it's necessary. Sites do cost money to run, people who work on them have to get paid. It might be evil, but (in the absence of an alternative funding model) it's a necessary evil.

There's a range of implementations. Some subtle, others less so. Personally, I take note of the unsubtle and brash ones, the sort that actively interfere with what I'm trying to achieve, and mark them as companies I'm less likely to do business with. The more subtle ones I tolerate as the price for using the modern web.

What is abundantly clear, though, is how much tracking of your activities goes on. For example, I needed to do some research on email suppliers yesterday - and am being bombarded with adverts for email services today. If I go away, I get bombarded with adverts for hotels at my destination. Near Christmas I get all sorts of advertising popping up based on the presents I've just purchased.

The thing is, though, that most of these adverts are wrong and pointless. The idea that because I searched for something, or visited a website on a certain subject, might indicate that I would be interested in the same things in future, is simply plain wrong.

Essentially, if I'm doing something on the web, then I have either (a) succeeded in the task at hand (bought an item, booked a hotel), or (b) failed completely. In either case, basing subsequent advertising on past activities is counterproductive.

If I've booked a hotel, then the last thing I'm going to do next is book another hotel for the same dates at the same location. More sensible behaviour for advertisers would be to prime the system to stop advertising hotels, and then advertise activities and events (for which they even know the dates) at my destination. It's likely to be more useful for me, and more likely to get a successful response for the advertiser. Likewise, once I've bought an item, stop advertising that and instead move on to advertising accessories.

And if I've failed in my objectives, ramming more of the same down my throat is going to frustrate me and remind me of the failure.

In fact, I wonder if a better targeting strategy would be to turn things around completely, and advertise random items excluding the currently targeted items. That opens up the possibility of serendipity - triggering a response that I wasn't even aware of, rather than trying to persuade me to do something I already actively wanted to do.

Sunday, June 07, 2015

Building LibreOffice on Tribblix

Having decent tools is necessary for an operating system to be useful, and one of the basics for desktop use is an office suite - LibreOffice being the primary candidate.

Unfortunately, there aren't prebuilt binaries for any of the Solaris or illumos distros. So I've been trying to build LibreOffice from source for a while. Finally, I have a working build on Tribblix.

This is what I did. Hopefully it will be useful to other distros. This is just a straight dump of my notes.

First, you'll need java (the jdk), and the perl Archive::Zip module. You'll need boost, and harfbuzz with the icu extensions. Plus curl, hunspell, cairo, poppler, neon.

Then you'll need to build (look on this page for links to some of this stuff):

  • cppunit-1.13.2
  • librevenge-0.0.2
  • libwpd-0.10.0
  • libwpg-0.3.0
  • libmspub-0.1.2
  • libwps-0.3.1
  • mdds_0.11.2
  • libixion-0.7.0
  • liborcus-0.7.0
  • libvisio-0.1.1

If you don't tell it otherwise, LibreOffice will download these and try to build them itself. And generally these have problems building cleanly, which it's fairly easy to fix while building them in isolation, but would be well nigh impossible when they're buried deep inside the LibreOffice build system

For librevenge, pass --disable-werror to configure.

For libmspub, replace the call to pow() in src/lib/MSPUBMetaData.cpp with std::pow().

For libmspub, remove zlib from the installed pc file (Tribblix, and some of the other illumos other distros, don't supply a pkgconfig file for zlib).

For liborcus, run the following against all the Makefiles that the configure step generates:

gsed -i 's:-DMDDS_HASH_CONTAINER_BOOST:-pthreads -DMDDS_HASH_CONTAINER_BOOST:'

For mdds, make sure you have a PATH that has the gnu install ahead of the system install program when running make install.
For ixion, it's a bit more involved. You need some way of getting -pthreads past configure *and* make. For configure, I used:

env boost_cv_pthread_flag=-pthreads CFLAGS="-O -pthreads" CPPFLAGS="-pthreads" CXXFLAGS="-pthreads" configure ...

and for make:

gmake MDDS_CFLAGS=-pthreads

For orcus, it looks to pkgconfig to find zlib, so you'll need to prevent that:

 env ZLIB_CFLAGS="-I/usr/include" ZLIB_LIBS="-lz" configure ...

For libvisio, replace the call to pow() in src/lib/VSDMetaData.cpp with std::pow().

For libvisio, remove zlib and libxml-2.0 from the installed pc file.

If you want to run a parallel make, don't use gmake 3.81. Version 4.1 is fine.

With all those installed you can move on to LibreOffice.

Unpack the main tarball.

chmod a+x bin/unpack-sources
mkdir -p external/tarballs


and then symlink or copy the other tarballs (help, translations, dictionaries) into external/tarballs (otherwise, it'll try downloading them again).

Download and run this script to patch the builtin version of glew.

Edit the following files:

  • svx/Executable_gengal.mk
  • sw/Executable_tiledrendering.mk
  • vcl/Executable_ui-previewer.mk
  • desktop/Library_sofficeapp.mk
  • vcl/Library_vcl.mk

And replace "LINUX" with "SOLARIS". That part of the makefiles is needed on all unix-like systems, not just Linux.

In the file

sc/source/core/tool/interpr1.cxx

replace the call to pow() on line 3160 with std::pow()

In the file

sal/qa/inc/valueequal.hxx

replace the call to pow() on line 87 with std::pow()

In the file

include/vcl/window.hxx

You'll need to #undef TRANSPARENT before it's used (otherwise, it picks up a rogue definition from the system).

And you'll need to create a compilation symlink:

mkdir -p  instdir/program
ln -s libGLEW.so.1.10 instdir/program/libGLEW.so

This is the configure command I used:

env PATH=/usr/gnu/bin:$PATH \
./configure --prefix=/usr/versions/libreoffice-44 \
--with-system-hunspell \
--with-system-curl \
--with-system-libpng \
--with-system-clucene=no \
--with-system-libxml \
--with-system-jpeg=no \
--with-system-cairo \
--with-system-harfbuzz \
--with-gnu-cp=/usr/gnu/bin/cp \
--with-gnu-patch=/usr/gnu/bin/patch \
--disable-gconf \
--without-doxygen \
--with-system-openssl \
--with-system-nss \
--disable-python \
--with-system-expat \
--with-system-zlib \
--with-system-poppler \
--disable-postgresql-sdbc \
--with-system-icu \
--with-system-neon \
--disable-odk \
--disable-firebird-sdbc \
--without-junit \
--disable-gio \
--with-jdk-home=/usr/jdk/latest \
--disable-gltf \
--with-system-libwps \
--with-system-libwpg \
--with-system-libwpd \
--with-system-libmspub \
--with-system-librevenge \
--with-system-orcus \
--with-system-mdds \
--with-system-libvisio \
--with-help \
--with-vendor="Tribblix" \
--enable-release-build=yes \
--with-parallelism=8

and then to make:

env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/mps:`pwd`/instdir/ure/lib:`pwd`/instdir/sdk/lib:`pwd`/instdir/program \
PATH=/usr/gnu/bin:$PATH \
/usr/gnu/bin/make -k build

(Using 'make build' is supposed to avoid the checks, many of which fail. You'll definitely need to run 'make -k' with a parallel build, because otherwise some of the test failures will stop the build before all the other parallel parts of the build have finished.)

Then create symlinks for all the .so files in /usr/lib/mps in instdir/program, and instdir/program/soffice should start.