Tiritiri Matangi is an island sanctuary located some 4km west of the tip of the Whangaparaoa peninsula. As an open sanctuary, it’s easily accessible to the public either by private boat or ferry. Apart from being a beautiful island in itself with stunning scenery, it is also home to a variety of re-introduced native birds, a few of which are endangered (some can’t be seen on the mainland any more). The island was a farm for most of the 20th century but in the last 30 years it has been largely restored to its former natural glory through massive replanting efforts that have seen most of the island reforested, with some grassland being left for species like the Takahe. Guided walks are offered by the volunteers working on the island and while this means that the walk proceeds at a slower pace, the commentary they offer is really interesting; by the end of the walk you’ll be quite knowledgeable in the island and its bird life.

Fortunately, it was a beautiful day, and while I’ll leave the bird photography to the experts, the island itself offered plenty of sights worthy of capturing.

There are many walking tracks on the island and many of them offer wonderful views of the coast.

I was amazed how clear (and calm) the water was

The central meeting point of the island is the lighthouse which is surrounded by the volunteers’ lodgings, a gift shop and a few grazing Takahe.

And finally, a view of the island from the ferry just before departure. There is a railway on the wharf with a cart onto which all the gear from the ferry is placed – I thought that was pretty cool.

All in all, it was a great day – highly recommended. The panoramas were created using Hugin, an open source image stitcher (also highly recommended )

TVNZ has obviously invested a lot of money in the miniseries The Pacific because its advertising has permeated through a range of its other programming across channels. The respectable TVNZ 7 channel is playing real documentaries about the war in the Pacific to promote this miniseries – the ads say so themselves. One News also cashed in on the action, reaffirming it as a top quality source of tabloid-grade drivel. Also this week, Breakfast went to the set of Grey’s Anatomy… followed up by a Close Up feature on the same thing. TVNZ is becoming quite the oxymoron.

OpenOffice.org ships with 6 different icon sets. In terms of graphic design, some of them are very outdated and I’d be surprised if more than a handful of people were still using them. Does OpenOffice.org really need to include so many icon sets? This is an excellent area to examine for space reductions because the vast majority of space savings will be carried over to the installer. Depending on the action taken, we could shave off anything from a couple of megabytes up to ~10% from the installer. Even the most conservative actions outlined here would help save bandwidth costs. So, which ones should we get rid of? And can we make the remaining icon sets take up even less space? The quick answer to these questions is yes, but a discussion is needed because there are many options available depending on how badly we want to save every byte

First, let’s have a look at all the icon sets that OpenOffice.org ships with. To change the icon set in OpenOffice.org, click clicking Tools -> Options -> View -> Icon Size and Style. When OOo is installed, you can find these icons in /Basis/share/config/ – each theme is stored in its own zip file.

Galaxy (Default)

High Contrast

Tango

Crystal

Industrial

Classic

Now let’s take a look at the footprint of these icon sets. Between OOo 3.2 and 3.2.1 the size has been reduced; I am using the values from the OOo 3.2.1 Dev build – m14. The sizes below are of the zip files themselves.

As far as my explorations have led me, there are 4 main optimizations that can be made, each of which is a discussion in itself.

1. Getting rid of unnecessary icon sets

Two candidates for instant removal would be Classic and Industrial. Tango and Crystal are used for GNOME and KDE environments respectively. Do we still need to keep these? If we get rid of Classic and Industrial, we’ve already saved a little over 7MB. If we get rid of all 4, we save over 16 MB.

The matter is a bit more complex than simply deleting the zip files: the icon sets’ names are hard coded into OpenOffice.org in the source file /vcl/source/app/settings.cxx We could just ask for the unnecessary icon sets to be removed from the list, but it would be nice if this list could be dynamic rather than static. One additional option might be to have icon themes as extensions. Maybe in the future…

2. Optimizing images with PNGOUT

The vast majority of icons in each set are PNG files. We can optimize them with PNGOUT, which gets rid of unnecessary data contained inside each PNG file. The savings across thousands of files are quite impressive, even with no compression on the entire folder (Store). More on compression in the fourth point. For now, suffice to say, even if we delete no icon sets, PNGOUT will enable us to save a couple of megabytes. At the very, very least, we can do this, and we can do it quickly.

Data is based on compression using 7-Zip 9.10 Beta.

3. Remove Duplicates Within Icon Sets

One of the most obvious instances of duplication is the high contrast icons: they are represented in their own icon set, but they are also located in the Galaxy icon set. Savings could be made if we got rid of the High Contrast icons in the Galaxy icon set (which appear to be exactly the same as those in the High Contrast icon set).

A more tricky instance of duplication involves the duplication of icons using different file names. The same image may appear multiple times in a single icon set. For example: sx03125.png sx03137.png sx03140.png sx03152.png sx03153.png sx03154.png sx03155.png sx03158.png sx03219.png are all copies of the same icon. Admittedly, that’s a bit of an extreme example, but there are plenty of other icons that are duplicated 2-3 times. Changes here would need to be reflected in code that references these icons, which is where the trickiness comes in.

There is also an inconsistency in the naming of icon files: some make little sense (like the above), while others have better naming (e.g., image.png). The gains might not be worth the amout of time needed to make this work though.

4. Improve Compression

Each icon set consists of several thousand files which are stored in a single .zip file. This is done for a very good reason: if all these files were extracted, there would be a huge overhead from the way the file system stores files, especially in these cases where we have thousands of tiny files.

The Galaxy Icon set uncompressed - 4.3 MB in size, 29.2 MB on disk!

We can increase the compression of the icon sets without adversely affecting memory usage. According to 7-Zip, the difference between decompressing ‘Store’ and ‘Ultra’ compression settings is 1MB of memory. I have tested both settings and OpenOffice.org opens them fine. This can save an extra 100-200 KB per icon set. The question is, is it worth it? We might even decide to lower the compression if it reduces the memory footprint and helps OOo load 5 milliseconds faster .