Genii Weblog

Weblog search results for: odf OR "Open Document Format"

Happy New Year (and a tidbit from Mike)
Mon 1 Jan 2007, 11:06 PM
The blog's been a bit quiet lately (although traffic hasn't slowed much - as Bob Sutor says, "having a photo of an attractive young woman on a blog entry will help drive a lot of traffic"), as I have been caught up in end of year preparations, Christmas holidays and a trip to the Deep South to see my wife's sister and family.  I am trying to gather my thoughts, and have considered writing a "favorite columns" post, but decided against it for now.  I may still do a highlights post, but I think I'll wait a bit.
 
A more important thing to post about is: What next?  After almost four years writing this blog, with many hundreds of posts and even more hundreds of comments, what is it I want to do this year to keep things fresh?  What do you want to see me do?  More posts about rich text?  About coexistence?  About ODF?  Or even about dating advice?  More articles in the Rich Text 101 series?  More updates on products?  More insight into the world of software development?
 
Or should I just ask Mike Midas and Crystal Coex to post more?  It so happens that a few months back, Andrew Pollack noticed how quiet Rocky Oliver's blog had been for several weeks, and asked me to "guest blog".  Not thinking, and because I was way too busy (and lazy), I sent Mike and Crystal over to help out.  Did I mention that I wasn't thinking?  Anyway, the following was written back in September, but somehow Rocky managed to keep it off his blog, so I'll post it here just to show you what I have to deal with in my office.  People complain about bosses, but employees can be worse...
 
Inline JPEG image
Wage Slaves Unite!
by Mike Midas, Ace Developer (and virtual, remote guest blogger on LotusGeek.com)

It is said that house guests, like fish, start to smell after a few days.  Something certainly smells fishy over at LotusGeek.com, where the elusive Rocky Oliver hasn't been seen for weeks, so our boss sent me and Crystal over to be house guests, to freshen the place up a bit, if you catch my drift.
 
Driving to Georgia from Cleveland is like volunteering to give blood when your half blind Aunt Gertrude is the only dumb sucker they let draw blood at the annual Red Cross blood drive, and her sciatica is acting up.  You might as well just shut your fingers in the car door before taking off, but taking off we were, me with a hangover that a British King would have found sufficient reason for beheading whomever the current British Queen was, and Crystal with an attitude that filled the passenger seat like a hot blooded Latino princess being eaten slowly by a cold blooded South American reptile.  If looks could kill, the looks she was giving me could have been used by the U.S. Marines to clear out all the insurgents east of Euphrates.  Now don't get me wrong, Crystal and I work together just fine, but she doesn't like me, and the only thing I like about her she keeps covered up and out of reach of the likes of me.
 
But when the boss says jump, sometimes you have to put a lid on the snappy rejoinders, shut your eyes to the obvious headaches, smother your resistance like an unwanted pet ferret, and jump.  After all, Rocky has been a friend to the boss for a lot of years, and not just any friend either, but a short, gimpy, motorcycle driving  friend, and you don't find those on every street corner in town, except maybe you do in Georgia, which is why we were heading in that direction.  Ever since Rocky start working for the Man, his time hasn't been his own.  From free wheeling, hard drinking, bike riding independence, he has chucked it all over for the sake of the Suits, and the Suits have paid him back by piling on the work.  So, when a wage slave calls, us fellow wage slaves go forth in sympathy, because our lazy, self made entrepreneurial pain in the ass boss wants to sit back at the office and "manage the business", by which he means pull in the big bucks while he waits for us to get back and do the real work.  Not that I am complaining, mind you.
 
On a long car ride, because as you might have guessed, our boss is too cheap to spring for plane tickets when his yacht needs provisioning for the late season blowouts, a guy's mind tends to wander like the hands of a wayward Uncle when the attractive nieces are about.  With the lack of any good scenery other than the Ice Queen, my mind wandered toward the topic of what the heck we were supposed to do to help Rocky.  After all, Rocky's blog mirrors his skills, but his ego mirrors the Grand Canyon.  When he wrote a book, he called it "The Bible", and if that doesn't say something about a guy, I don't know what does.  So, I don't want to blog about "new @ functions", and I can't let Crystal blog about what she is thinking about in a public forum read by script kiddies, so what should we tell Rocky's readers to calm them down until he finds a free minute hiding out without his laptop in some corporate bathroom while the vampire Suits wander the halls thirsting for his blood, sweat and tears?  I'm guessing they don't want to hear about CoexLinks and Blackberries, although it makes a good story, and Ed Brill has the whole evil empire thing pretty well covered.  We could start some rumors about Hannover, like how it will include an Eclipse plug in for IPO (individual productivity orgasmatron), but they probably wouldn't believe it without some fuzzy screenshots by Maureen.
 
Then it hit me like a wet towel in a steamy locker room in 7th grade.  We are talking about a blog, not a newspaper.  It doesn't really matter what you say, what matters is what you link to.  So, in honor of Rocky and his blog and the whole LotusGeek ethos, I give you Bennie and the Jets by Elton John, but annotated for the blogosphere with lots of links to drive traffic to LotusGeek.com.  Maybe we can even get LotusGeek.com marked as a link farm and banned from the search engines, which would pay the boss back for sending us here.  (Just don't let Crystal see the last two links!) [Note 02/9/2022 - all links removed due to the passing of time and the taking down of blogs]
 
Bennie And The Jets

Music by Elton John
Lyrics by Bernie Taupin
Available on the album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
  
Hey kids, shake it loose together
The spotlight's hitting something
That's been known to change the weather
We'll kill the fatted calf tonight
So stick around
You're gonna hear electric music
Solid walls of sound
 
Say, Candy and Ronnie, have you seen them yet
But they're so spaced out, Bennie and the Jets
Oh but they're weird and they're wonderful
Oh Bennie she's really keen
She's got electric boots a mohair suit
You know I read it in a magazine
Bennie and the Jets
 
Hey kids, plug into the faithless
Maybe they're blinded
But Bennie makes them ageless
We shall survive, let us take ourselves along
Where we fight our parents out in the streets
To find who's right and who's wrong
 
© 1973 Dick James Music Limited 
 
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Kindle for business and pleasure
Thu 16 Sep 2010, 10:54 AM
As many of you know, I am not really a gadget person.  While others walk around with iPhones and Blackberries and other whizgizmos, I tend to stick to my laptop for work and to a paperback book for reading pleasure.  Thus, I had slightly mixed feelings about receiving a Kindle for Father's Day.  On the one hand, I had expressed an interest to my wife.  On the other hand, I wasn't sure how I would feel actually using it.

The model I got has the 3G network, and it is wonderful to be able to sit on the beach and order a book.  Realistically, most of us don't spend that much time on the beach, so I probably could have gotten away with the wireless model, since I am usually close to some wi-fi, either at my office or on the road.

As for actually using the Kindle for reading, I have been pleasantly surprised.  Gabriella Davis had warned me that it felt "un-book-like", but I have been very pleased with both the readability and with minor details like it keeping track of the page you are on.  The biggest surprise to me though was how much I use it for more than books that I have bought, and I have bought several.  I use it for PDFs for technical topics.  I use it to review stories and novels sent by friends.  I use it to review my own writing, both business and non-business writing.  To load all this onto the Kindle, I use the very handy and free Calibre software to synch and convert to Kindle format.

Now, I take my Kindle anywhere where I used to take books, but it has books, magazines, articles, work-in-progress, technical documentation (e.g., ODF manuals), and they all fit in the size of just one light book.

It doesn't overheat.  It is easy to read in bright sunlight while sitting outside.  The battery lasts for days and days, about a week to ten days if I turn off the wireless.  I could almost get to be a gadget person if gadgets all worked this well.  (Of course, one feature that some of you will hate is that it does not have a browser.  For someone who wants to get work done, this is a plus, but I also have my laptop for any real browsing.)

All this, and you can get it in the wireless, non-3G version for $139.  I recommend it, if only to save in chiropractic bills since you won't have to lug as much around.

Click to see Kindle 3G at $189

Click to see Kindle Wi-Fi at $139


 
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
My favorite spin of the day
Tue 4 Sep 2007, 09:07 PM
As many of you now probably know, Microsoft and Ecma failed to get the Open XML passed on a fast track ballot.  That doesn't mean it is dead, not at all, but it does mean they have to go back to the committee table and deal with some of the 10,000 comments (I mean that number seriously, although there are likely many duplicates).
 
So, of course, the spin meisters are out in force, trying to make it sound like a loss is a win.  There are a few notable exceptions, such as Jason Matusow, who lays out the facts without much spin, to his great credit.  But there are some very funny efforts as well.  My favorite is this chart from Stephen McGibbons (note DIS29500=OOXML and IS26300=ODF):
 
 
 
Above this, and this is the really funny part, is the caption:
And when both are combined it is very interesting to note that there is clearly more support for OpenXML already than there was for ODF.
So, Stephen manages to turn a unanimous vote for ODF into less support than a rejection for OOXML.  That is just priceless.  Please, visit Stephen's site (click on the image above) and enjoy the rest of the creative charts and feel free to share your thoughts, although Stephen has an unfortunate habit of holding off on publishing comments he doesn't like.
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
I joined the OASIS OpenDocument TC today
Wed 7 Mar 2007, 09:11 AM
I was invited to join the OASIS Technical Committee for OpenDocument Format a couple of days ago, and I wrestled a bit before deciding to join.  While I am very favorably inclined towards OpenDocument Format (ODF) over Office Open XML (OOXML), I don't like aligning myself too strongly on one side or the other, as it is quite likely that our OpenSesame products will support both.  There is also an uncomfortable level of antagonism between the camps, which seems unnecessary.  Religious wars may be entertaining, but they are seldom productive.
 
On the other hand, I am worried that the promise of ODF as an open standard will not be adequately realized if the development of the standard is too strongly influenced either by the free open source crowd or by the anti-Microsoft crowd.  I am not a free open source software zealot, as you may have noticed by the fact that Genii Software's offerings are neither free not open source.  I am not part of the anti-Microsoft crowd, as you might have noticed by the fact that many of our largest customers are "Microsoft shops" who use CoexLinks or CoexEdit to coexist with Domino servers in their own or other partner's and customer's companies.
 
So, I have joined the ODF T.C. in part to see if I can help improve interoperability with OOXML, and better round trip fidelity between ODF and other formats, including OOXML, Word binary formats, and last but certainly not least, Notes rich text formats.  I see a lot of potential in ODF, but I see a need to work to improve parts of it and to steer it a bit.  I hope I can help in that effort.
 
As for OOXML, I am also interested in joining Ecma so that I could help on that effort, possibly even help to rationalize OOXML with ODF in some way, although that may be impossible.  Unfortunately, Ecma is pretty expensive to join, and it is hard to justify if they do not really have a free hand in the development of OOXML.  I think Microsoft has made a huge strategic error in not embracing ODF earlier, and I am afraid they are likely to compound that error by continuing the fight for OOXML in its current state, no matter what happens with ISO.  I'd like to help them avoid that mistake, but Microsoft is a pretty big company to try to influence.
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
The very opposite of YAGNI - more like IYBITWCE
Wed 20 Aug 2014, 12:14 PM
There is a philosophy called YAGNI that many software developers and programmers will recognize. The acronym stands for You Aren't Gonna Need It, and it has been popularized along with the ideas of extreme programming and continuous refactoring (see YAGNI definition). The basic idea is that you shouldn't build anything until you actually need it. It probably even helps a lot of developers and teams, but at Genii Software, we go the opposite direction. A good part of what we build is not currently necessary, is purely speculative, or is sufficiently far ahead of what customers want that it could be considered a waste of time.

Yet we virtually always need it, and we seldom have to the time to create it at the time it becomes necessary. While this is mostly true of smaller parts of the code which nobody externally will see, it can also be seen in the larger, more visible efforts, such as:

CoexLinks Fidelity: Most of the functionality and development was done in 2009 as part of iFidelity, but the world wasn't ready. Now, after more enhancements protecting against data loss (see 4 minute demo) and the addition of the Message Store (see 3 minute demo), companies large and small are lining up to take advantage of the product whether because they are moving to Outlook or Gmail and need better rendering of application emails, or simply have the budget available now to enhance their outbound email without a huge commitment. If we were to recognize that need now and start development, a finished product would be two years away.

Exporting to EPUB - Building on even earlier work to manipulate and process XML and zip files for Open Document Format, we put a lot of time in 2011 to export rich content to EPUB format so that a customer could make an instant eBook. I posted the results of this a few times in 2011 in posts such as Viewing Notes/Domino fixes on a mobile device, though the functionality was not released until Midas LSX V5.00 in November 2013. We kept working on it, winding up with a fairly elegant and powerful solution (see 5 minute demo). At first, nobody paid attention. The video only has 65 views, yet we have had five companies buy Midas for the Export to EPUB feature in the past three months, and three more are evaluating it. The main reason seems to be that the mobile devices, especially iPhone/iPad, have added native support for EPUB files, so sending customized on-the-fly polished eBooks to customers is more and more appealing. Again, if we saw that need now, we'd be years away from a polished product.

So, YAGNI? Not so much. More of IYBITWCE (If You Build It, They Will Come... Eventually)

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
OpenSesame: Getting faster all the time
Thu 7 Jun 2007, 11:06 PM
OK, so I am a bit obsessed about performance and scalability, but sometimes there is a payoff.  Back on May 4th, I posted a question OpenSesame: How fast is fast enough? in which I reported that
Right now, I can export about twenty reasonably diverse documents a second to ODF files (albeit with weird memory leaks and all the other fun factors of early development).
I'm, happy to say that OpenSesame has been tuned and tightened a bit, and it currently clocks about 176 documents a second (same 19013 documents as before, but instead of taking over 15 minutes, it takes under two minutes.  Even better, the fidelity has improved in several key areas, and the memory leaks seem completely resolved.  I still don't know the answer to my question, but whatever it is, I seem to be getting closer.
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
ODF and bloat - When in doubt, jar it
Wed 12 Jul 2006, 06:37 PM
This post was inspired by a comment/question from Paul Ryan (#477.7) regarding an earlier post.  Paul says:
That said, honestly, I didn't find this topic particularly interesting, except to note that ODF consists entirely of XML, something that I hadn't quite registered before. Therefore, and as your example clearly demonstrates, ODF files are going to be very fat compared with proprietary formats like Notes rich-text or Microsoft formats.

Digressive musing...what XML really needs is a widely-used, maybe even compulsory, compression component to combat the bloat problem. Maybe there is something like that out there, and I'm just not aware of it.As a lawyer might say, Paul, asked and answered.  Yes, XML is fairly heavy, and the way ODF is implemented is even heavier than it would need to be, although still not as heavy as Office Open XML (OOXML) seems to be.

So, the obvious answer is to compress the whole thing, which is just what both ODF and Office Open XML do, and even in almost exactly the same way.  When you see an ODF file such as ThisDoc.odt, you are really seeing a zipped repositiory with several files inside it.  Technically, it is even more specific than a zip file, it is a "JAR file", which is to say exactly the same format as a Java Archive package.  There are usually several files and subdirecties in such a package, although the only required files are the META-INF\manifest.xml and the content.xml file which descrbe the contents of the JAR file and the content of the document, respectively.

But is it any good knowing this?  Sure, it makes clear why ODF files are not as humungous as they might otherwise be, since the zip compression is fairly good at compressing, but what else is it good for?

Well, for one thing, it is good for extracting images.  Unlike a Word .doc file or Notes rich text field, if you want all the images included in an ODF file, you can simply rename the .odt to .zip and unzip the graphics files.  You can also alter the content.xml file by hand or with some other utility and re-zip it, so long as there is not encryption set up on the JAR file.  This is like fiddling with DXL, except it is more reasonably structured.

So, for what it is worth, there you have it.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Briefly noted: Merged cells is one win for Open XML over ODF
Tue 19 Sep 2006, 11:33 PM
If there is one item where Office Open XML (OOXML) is clearly better than ODF, it is in the area of merged table cells.  Both Office Open XML and ODF support merged table cells, and they both handle merged columns (horizontal merging) in a somewhat similar manner which is also similar to HTML's COLSPAN attribute.  But merged rows (vertical merging) is an absolute disaster in ODF.  To quote a description from the on-line OASIS OpenDocument Essentials - Chapter 4:

Cells that span rows are an entirely different story. Rather than a simple table:number-rows-spanned attribute, OpenDocument represents the cells on either side of the large cell as sub-tables. Figure 4.6, “Cells Spanning Rows” shows a table with a cell that spans two rows. As far as OpenDocument is concerned, the table has only two rows. The second row consists of: 
  • A cell that contains a two-by-one subtable
  • An ordinary cell (labelled main 2,2)
  • A cell that spans two columns and contains a two-by-two subtable.
Figure 4.6. Cells Spanning Rows
Sample table with spanned rows
So, a table with four columns and three rows has two cells merged and becomes... a mess.  Ugh

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Interesting problem with OOXML and Google search results
Thu 16 Aug 2007, 08:12 AM
The following are three separate Google search results, the first showing an OOXML file with the extension .DOCX, the second an older binary format MS Word file with the extension .DOC and the third an ODF file with the extension .ODT.  If you have the appropriate application to read these files, each will open with the main link, but I am interested in the results of the View as HTML link for each, so I have shown a partial screen print for each below.  This happens in both IE and Firefox on Windows XP, but I don't know who is responsible for doing something about that.  It currently makes it impossible for me to read the .DOCX results without a compatible application installed.

1) OOXML .DOCX format
[DOC] [Content_Types].xml _rels/.rels word/diagrams/data1.xml word/_rels ...
File Format: Microsoft Word - View as HTML
[Content_Types].xml _rels/.rels word/diagrams/data1.xml word/_rels/document.xml.rels word/document.xml word/media/image1.gif word/diagrams/colors1.xml ...
usscouts.org/USSSPflyer.docx - Similar pages


2) MS WORD .DOC format
[DOC] The Arizona Technology Access Program
File Format: Microsoft Word - View as HTML
The Arizona Technology Access Program. A program of Northern Arizona University‘s Institute for Human Development. announces. ...
www.ataporg.org/Arizconf.doc - Similar pages


3) ODF .ODT format
[ODF] FairHead
File Format: OpenDocument - View as HTML
The "mailbox" symbols appearing after many route headings should be rendered as smileys by PDF Factory.
www.tongro.org/climbing/fairhead.odt - Similar pages


Results: (read on) to see results
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Hey, Genii beat Google at something
Wed 12 Jul 2006, 12:30 AM
Well, it is a small thing, but as I reported on July 5th, Genii Software joined the ODF Alliance.  According to Bob Sutor, Google has decided to follow our lead (OK, my conclusion, not Bob's).  See his post.  It makes sense, given Google's acquisition of Writely.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Keep it simple, stupid: Word and OpenOffice.org fail simplicity test, but Notes passes
Sun 5 Nov 2006, 08:43 AM
One of the real frustrations about working with Office suites these days is that too much is geared to the complex, but most users are stuck back at the basic.  I have commented before on merging table cells as a technique just beyond basic.  The contenders are Lotus Notes 6.5.3 (which is on this machine, although 7.0.2 doesn't have any real difference in this area, afaik), Microsoft Word 2007 (beta) and OpenOffice.org 2.0.2.  I would tell you what beta version of MS Word I am using, but like almost everything in MS Word 2007, the About document is almost impossible to find if you don't already know where it is.  I couldn't find it.

The test I designed was simply to create a simple table with three rows and four columns , then merge four cells and split them again... (read on)

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Google Docs (aka Writely) does not really support ODF, or at least not current ODF
Sun 5 Nov 2006, 11:32 PM
It is odd, but true.  In Google Docs, there is a menu item which says "Save as OpenOffice, and when you save a document, it has a .odt extension, which is indeed the extension OpenOffice.org Writer uses, but the contents are not really standard ODF... (read on)
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
The Export Shop Sketch (a parody)
Thu 29 Jun 2006, 12:08 PM
The Export Shop Sketch
(with thanks and apologies to Monty Python)

(a customer walks in the door.)

Customer: Good Morning.
Owner:    Good morning, Sir.  Welcome to the IBM Lotus Notes Export Facility!

(read on)
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
ODF vs. Notes rich text: Picture Borders
Sun 23 Jul 2006, 09:02 PM
This post shows another difference between Open Document Format (ODF) and Notes rich text, somewhat related to this last post.  Before I start, I must acknowledge that this could be considered a difference between OpenOffice.org's implementation of ODF and the Notes client's implementation of rich text, as both could handle things differently, but it would take a good deal of work in the ODF format to do what the Notes client does.

Difference in how an Image is treated when a border or drop shadow is added.
In both ODF and Notes rich text, you can import a JPEG, such as this one, and they look the same:


Figure 1: An image without borders or shadows in either Notes or OpenOffice.org Writer


Figure 2: Shadow and medium yellow border added  to the image in Notes client

In Notes, the shadow and border are added outside the image, which is left in its original size.  This is handled differently in ODF:

(read on)

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
ODF vs. Notes rich text: Drop shadows and such
Tue 11 Jul 2006, 11:38 PM
To follow up on my earlier post, here is yet another interesting difference between Open Document Format (ODF) and Notes rich text

Differences in Drop Shadow (and related items) for Tables
In both ODF and Notes rich text, you can specify a shadow for a table.  They even look pretty similar, but you don't have to go much further to see differences... (read on)

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
IBM Accessibility ODF Coding Challenge 2006
Thu 24 Aug 2006, 02:30 PM
IBM Accessibility ODF Coding Challenge 2006 logo
From Bob Sutor's blog...
Today we’re officially announcing the IBM Accessibility ODF Coding Challenge 2006, a contest for university students that combines open standards, open source, and accessibility. Our goal is to train hundreds if not thousands of college software engineering students to create great software that is accessible to all people, right from the start.
I find this very intriguing, and wonder whether college students will see it as an exciting chance to push their limits and show their stuff, with the attention of the world's largest software company, or whether they will see it as a gimmick.  It sounds like something I would have jumped on as a college student, but even having a college student myself these days, I can't begin to imagine how they think.

Any college students out there care to comment?  What do you think of such a contest/challenge?

(I also really like the </barriers> logo!)
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
OOXML files to exceed HTML files on web in 3+ years!
Wed 22 Aug 2007, 09:23 PM
A blog called InsideMicrosoft (which I am sure is completely unbiased), quotes my post Another update on ODF vs. OOXML file counts, or at least the Slashdot spin on my post.  The InsideMicrosoft post, ODF Outnumbers Open XML 162,700 To 1993 On The Internet, confirms my prediction that "a dedicated Microsoftie could spin this in a positive way", and in fact predicts that OOXML document growth will continue to "triple every three months", so, as they show:
August: 1993
November: 6000
February 2008: 18,000
May 2008: 54,000
August 2008: 162,000
November 2008: 486,000
February 2009: 1.5 million
May 2009: 4.5 million
August 2009: 13.5 million
November 2009: 40 million
February 2010: 120 million
May 2010: 360 million
August 2010: over 1 billion
But since InsideMicrosoft confidently expects this growth to continue, why stop there?  Extrapolating from their steady predicted growth rate, they implicitly predict:
November 2010: over 3 billion
February 2011: over 9 billionSince there are only a few more than 4 billion HTML documents on the web after 18 years, and since that count grew only a small percentage in the past three months (2.8% to be more precise), it is quite clear that InsideMicrosoft is predicting that OOXML documents will overtake HTML documents sometime in the next three and a half years.

Wow!  And you heard it here first.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
OpenXML4J Scenarios
Fri 1 Jun 2007, 06:01 PM
Brian Jones wrote today about the Office Open XML API for Java, or OpenXML4J, which he describes as an<blockquote>open source project to create a Java library for consuming and generating files in the Open XML formats</blockquote>The most interesting part of the site to me is the scenarios page, which has some potential scenarios for how you would use the toolkit, along with very spiffy graphics.  For example, the following two scenarios are included:

Confidential information removal
Remove comments, annotations, document properties, personal information, presentation notes, tracked changes, ... from outbound documents.
Scenario remove content outbound

Macros removal
For security purposes, remove macros, inappropriate language and content from inbound documents.
Scenario remove content inbound


The question in my mind is, are these scenarios generalizable to other office formats, e.g., ODF?  Mostly, they are.  So, what are various ways to address these same general scenarios with Notes 8 and ODF?  Are they applicable (not just these two, but all of them)?  If so, are they solvable with current toolkits, or toolkits currently planned, or would they require something more, whether open source or proprietary, such as OpenSesame?
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
OpenSesame: How fast is fast enough?
Fri 4 May 2007, 12:40 PM
In my quest to provide true integration between Notes and ODF (a.k.a. tilting at windmills), I have put together code that builds and modifies spreadsheets, presentations and word processing documents, but I have also put in a fair amount of time converting rich text to ODF and back.  While it is certainly not finished, I have enough done to test performance a bit.  As many regular readers here know, I am a bit of a fanatic about performance, believing that it is better to build scalability in from the beginning.

But what is the milestone or goal at which I should aim?  Right now, I can export about twenty reasonably diverse documents a second to ODF files (albeit with weird memory leaks and all the other fun factors of early development).  The fidelity is good, but is the speed reasonable?  If I convert rich text to HTML, I can do over 400 a second, but that is not saving anything to disk, and I haven't tested that way with ODF yet, since it is a less likely scenario.  Obviously, if this is a once at a time export to get into a productivity editor, the speed is fine.  But is there a scenario where companies will export hundreds of thousands of documents?  Or, is there a scenario where on-the-fly conversion will make sense, as in CoexEdit?

I don't know.  I don't even know how to know.  Sigh!  I guess I'll just keep making it faster until I run out of patience with that process.  Anybody have an opinion?

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Update on ODF vs OOXML file counts based on Google search
Thu 24 May 2007, 11:40 PM
It is two weeks since I posted the table of OOXML file types found by Google.  I was curious how the numbers have changed, so here is the updated file:


Format
Count (May 10, 2007)
Count (May 24, 2007)
ODT
85,200
89,000
ODS
20,700
20,600
ODP
43,400
44,800
Total ODF
149,300
154,400



DOCX
516 (12% on Microsoft.com)
659 (15% on Microsoft.com)
XLSX
68 (6% on Microsoft.com)
95 (4% on Microsoft.com)
PPTX
80 (13% on Microsoft.com)
349 (56% on Microsoft.com)
Total OOXML
664 (11% on Microsoft.com)
1103 (27% on Microsoft.com)

I'm note sure how to read these results, but they certainly don't make a compelling case for OOXML acceptance.  Yes, there has been a 27% increase in the DOCX format, but with millions of customers using Office, fewer than 1000 DOCX documents is not overwhelming.  The PPTX numbers look like they are growing by leaps and bounds, but with over 50% on Microsoft's site, and even then just 349 presentations total, the numbers are pretty minimal.  The spreads sheets are lightly represented in both formats, and even went down for ODS format.

So, a person who wanted to show that OOXML was gaining would point out that after about fifty weeks of approximately 28% growth for DOCX, versus only 4.5% growth for ODT, there would be more DOCX documents.  A person who wanted to show that ODF is doing better would point out that percentage growth is unimportant or unreliable against such small numbers, and would point to the 439 new OOXML documents versus 5100 new ODF documents.  A person who was trying to stay impartial might shrug and suggest we check back in a year.  What do you think?
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
One step at a time
Thu 31 Aug 2006, 12:28 PM
Sometimes the big news is the small steps which aren't even heavily announced, but which indicate some baseline of support... (read on)

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
OpenOffice.org Writer vs. Notes rich text editing: Property boxes
Tue 19 Sep 2006, 09:38 PM
This post is a bit different than my past few which showed differences between Open Document Format (ODF) and Notes rich text, as this shows differences between OpenOffice.org Writer and the Notes client rich text editor.  Let me start by saying I vastly prefer the Notes client approach.  The most obvious issue with the OOo Writer properties is that they are modal, meaning that you must act on the dialog box or cancel out of it before you can go to another element.  To see how incredibly annoying this is, simply try to find out the widths in a simple table, such as this... (read on)

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
OpenSesame: Nested tables in Lotus Documents editor
Wed 22 Aug 2007, 03:41 PM
Today's fun is looking at nested tables.  Some of you know that I think IBM has a weird resistance to nested table support, so I was hardly surprised when it turned out that the productivity editors don't support nested tables.  What I have a harder time understanding is that they DO support nested tables, sort of.  If you create a nested table in MS Word (in the .doc format) and then read it in the Lotus Documents editor, it renders the nested table quite well.  But if you try to create a nested table, the Create Table action is greyed out.  If you try to copy a table and paste it into a table cell, it fails miserably (and oddly).  But you can edit the existing nested table and save and re-edit and it works fine.

The mystery is solved partly due to a tip from Da Li Yin of the IBM Productivity Editors team (but in the managed beta forum, so I can't repeat it exactly), and partly by looking at the ODF code (one of the great parts of having an XML storage is it is easy to look at).  To get the nested table, you create a frame, using the intuitive Create - Frame action, and then put your cursor in that and create a table.  If you line everything up right (actually, I couldn't manage this manually, but fiddling with the XML worked), the nested table shows like a nested table should.

So, given that the editor CAN support nested tables, and given that it CAN interpret a nested table from an MS Word document 2003 document, it would stand to reason that the integration between Notes and the editor should be at least as good, right?

If you said "Yes!", you either haven't been paying attention or you are an incurable Lotus fanboy.  Let's take a simple example (I use only screenshots since the web rendering might change something.)

(read on) for images.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
ODF: After all this time, I'm still just getting it
Thu 6 Sep 2007, 05:06 PM
If you take a look at my post on OpenSesame yesterday, you may notice something about the scenario I posted.  Melissa and Tim and Mary all have Notes 8, but Gerald doesn't, and yet he can still edit the spreadsheet with OpenOffice and his revisions show up just like the others.  So far, so good.

But what if Mary isn't at home, and doesn't even have her laptop, so she has to go into an Internet cafe in Amsterdam to check her mail, which has all been forwarded to her GMail account so she can check it while she travels.  Mary usually uses Notes 8, but when she opens her mail, she realizes that Melissa, her boss, is not going to be too happy if Mary doesn't make her revisions.

So she does.  From Google Spreadsheets.  In a cafe in Amsterdam.  Without setting up any additional software.

And her revisions show up just like the others, and are accepted or rejected by Melissa, and are incorporated back into Notes.  And why does it all work so seamlessly?

ODF.  OpenDocument Format.  The power of standards.  Lotus Spreadsheets understands ODF.  OpenOffice understands ODF.  Google Spreadsheets understands ODF.  And now, OpenSesame understands ODF.  And that mutual understanding leads to a synergistic collaboration that feels amazing, but will eventually feel obvious.  And I am just starting to get it.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
What did you use for your last resumé?
Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:47 AM
In a post called Just the vector, Viktor...a whole lot of them, Rob Novak mentions that he and his crew need to create resumés for a client, and, as he says,
I last wrote a resume in 1993 using PFS: First Choice on the laptop provided for my first Masters' degree.
Daniel Lieber commented that his last resumé was written in Ami Pro 3.  This got me to thinking...

When did you least create or update your resumé?  (Hint: If it was last week and your current employer doesn't know, you might want to ignore that one)

What software or format did you use?

I'd be interested in hearing people's answers.  I created my last resumé in 1997, or possibly 1998, using DeScribe 5.0 under OS/2, and I am pretty sure I then printed it out.  I don't remember what the data format was.  The one before that I actually typed on a typewriter (cringe).

How about you? Anybody use ODF?  OOXML?


DeScribe word processor for OS/2

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
OpenSesame: David vs. Goliath
Mon 11 Jun 2007, 08:51 PM
Speed isn't everything, and I was worried a bit about how to test OpenSesame with large files.  The question is, what is large but not simply fabricated.  It is not too hard to create a large spreadsheet (see OpenSesame: Edit view in spreadsheet), but it is not terribly complex content.  Besides, I want to work with word processing documents.  I decided to work with the ODF 1.0 specification itself, which is about 691 pages long with different formatting, images, etc.  If I could get a copy of Microsoft's Office Open XML 1.0 specification, I'd try that, because at 6000+ pages, you don't get much bigger, but I don't have a copy in ODF format.

Anyway, the task OpenSesame has to accomplish is to unzip the various XML parts in the OpenDocument-v1.odt and load them into memory.  The main piece is the content.xml, which is 4,517,062 bytes, and it has to be parsed and loaded into a DOM tree.  OpenSesame performed beautifully, unzipping, parsing, loading, traversing the tree to retrieve a bit of text (just to be sure it was working properly), and removing the tree from memory, all in under a second and without any glitches.  I wondered how the NotesDOMParser would handle a similar task.  Since there is no class for unzipping, I just started with the content.xml and had the NotesDOMParser load, parse and unload.  It took 9 seconds.  OK, speed isn't everything, but it doesn't hurt.

So, now I need some good stress tests.  Should I do a ReplaceText and replace every letter 'a' with the word 'zoo' (since that would expand the text values, it would put more stress than replacing the letter 'a' with the letter 'z')?  Should I do a LinkMatching across the whole document and provide contextual links to website?  Should I create a really mungo Notes document by converting the ODF to rich text?  What would be good tests to run to see how well OpenSesame works under pressure?
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Odd finding with NotesDOMParser run repeated times
Tue 12 Jun 2007, 01:14 PM
In a follow up to my earlier post about OpenSesame and large word processing documents, I created an extra large document (in honor of the OOXML specs, it is 6404 pages long) by taking the ODF specs and copying about 100 pages and then pasting it over and over and over until I was over 6000.  The resulting OpenDocBIG.odt is 4,439,906 bytes long, and the unzipped content.xml is 42,789,688 bytes long.

So, I tried loading the OpenDocBIG.odt with OpenSesame (again, it has to unzip, save the various xml files to disk, then load, parse and delete them) and it took 12 seconds.  I tried the NotesDOMParser again, it took 105 seconds.  It still seems odd that the production parser in Notes takes almost ten times as long, but neither choked on the large file, and neither seemed to lose any memory.

But here is where it gets odd.  I ran both again, without restarting Notes, just to see if I would get similar results.  OpenSesame still took 12 seconds, but the NotesDOMParser now took 215 seconds, which is a huge jump.  I ran them both again, still without restarting Notes or doing anything else, and this time OpenSesame took 11 seconds and NotesDOMParser took 215 seconds again.  Still no indication that memory was running out or anything was going on.  I shut down Notes, restarted the PC, started Notes and did it all again, with exactly the same result.  See the image below.  What in the world would lead to that kind of slowdown, especially in a reproducible way?

Inline JPEG image

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
ODF vs. Notes rich text: Nested lists (was: Any interest in ODF vs. Notes rich text functional differences?)
Mon 10 Jul 2006, 10:19 AM
As I investigate Open Document Format (ODF) internals, and as we move closer to Hannover and the include ODF-compliant applets (for want of a better word), I am starting to compile a list of differences in inherent functionality between what you can and can't do with ODF and Notes rich text (and perhaps HTML/XHTML).  I was wondering if my readers were interested in this sort of thing.  I'll give an example:

(read on)

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Self deprecating standards
Fri 27 Oct 2006, 08:29 AM
Dictionary definition of deprecate

Computer definition of deprecate

I was reading through the Office Open XML draft yesterday, and came across a whole host of scary elements.  These are all from Part 4 of the draft specs, entitled Markup Language Reference, and, yes, those are the real page numbers.  It is not a short documemt, and this may partly explain why.  For example:

  • autoSpaceLikeWord95 (Emulate Word 95 Full Width Character Spacing) - pages 1378-1379
  • footnoteLayoutLikeWW8 (Emulate Word 6.x/95/97 Footnote Placement) - pages 1416-1417
  • lineWrapLikeWord6 (Emulate Word 6.0 Line Wrapping for East Asian Text) - pages 1426-1427
  • mwSmallCaps (Emulate Word 5.x for Macintosh Small Caps Formatting) - pages 1427-1429
  • shapeLayoutLikeWW8 (Emulate Word 97 Text Wrapping Around Floating Objects) - pages 1442-1443
  • suppressTopSpacingWP (Emulate WordPerfect 5.x Line Spacing) - pages 1462-1464
  • truncateFontHeightsLikeWP6 (Emulate WordPerfect 6.x Font Height Calculation) - pages 1467-1468
  • useWord2002TableStyleRules (Emulate Word 2002 Table Style Rules) - pages 1481-1482
  • useWord97LineBreakRules (Emulate Word 97 East Asian Line Breaking) - pages 1482-1483
  • wpJustification (Emulate WordPerfect 6.x Paragraph Justification) - pages 1483-1485

There are many more which relate to various parameters which are deprecated, but virtually all of these examples share a guidance paragraph which says:

Guidance wording for deprecated elements

Now, on the one hand, Microsoft is to be praised for its careful presevation of attributes, features and behaviors which exist not only in its own earlier versions but also in those of competitive products.  Good show!  On the other hand, these do not belong in an open standard!  This is a very clear case of vendor specific implementation leaking through into what Microsoft claims to be an open standard.  What should have been done is that the ability to extend the standard should have been well defined (one of the primary purposes of an XML standard, after all), and these should have been kept as a separate vendor specific implementation namespace.  Then, other products could have their own vendor specific implementation namespaces which repoduced what their customers needed.  In the meantime, the general standard would not be weighed own with numerous obsolete, deprecated elements before it is even formalized.

Pray for deliverance.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Another update on ODF vs. OOXML file counts
Mon 13 Aug 2007, 12:01 AM
It is now three months since I first posted the table of OOXML file types found by Google.  I was curious how the numbers have changed, so here is the updated file:


Format
Count (May 10, 2007)
Count (August 12, 2007)
ODT
85,200
90,400
ODS
20,700
21,600
ODP
43,400
50,700
Total ODF
149,300
162,700



DOCX
516 (12% on Microsoft.com)
1010 (16% on Microsoft.com)
XLSX
68 (6% on Microsoft.com)
216 (2% on Microsoft.com)
PPTX
80 (13% on Microsoft.com)
767 (47% on Microsoft.com)
Total OOXML
664 (11% on Microsoft.com)
1993 (26% on Microsoft.com)

I guess a dedicated Microsoftie could spin this in a positive way (rah! rah! 100% growth in DOCX format in three months), but it is getting harder.  In eight months since Office 2007 was released to th general public (10 months since release to enterprise customers), there are under 2000 of these office documents posted on the web.  In three months, 13,400 more ODF documents have been added to the web, with only 1,329 OOXML documents added.  It is hard to spin ten times as many ODF documents added as OOXML documents,  especially as 451 (34%) of those new documents were added on Microsoft.com.  That isn't what I would call good traction for the overwhelmingly dominant office suite.

And all of this before IBM rolls out Notes 8 with the ODF productivity editors included as part of tha package.  Since Notes/Domino is enterprise software, and enterprises move slowly, I don't predict an immediate surge, but I would expect a steady increase after six months or so.  By that time, if OOXML keeps up its torrid growth rate of 200% every three months, they should have an amazing 7,972 OOXML documents on the web, while ODF with its measly 9% growth rate should have about 193,215 ODF documents.  Eventually, of course, OOXML would likely catch up, except that the IT industry tends to reward winners, and the preponderance of ODF documents and ODF compatible office products is likely to start being noticed.  Also, that awkward percentage of the OOXML documents on Microsoft.com (especially going from 11% to 26%) is not going to fool anyone long.  When ODF documents are all over the place, and when Microsoft Office documents are still all really in the older binary format... I think people will get the message.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
OOXML's Formula for Failure
Mon 9 Jul 2007, 11:06 PM
Rob Weir has an excellent essay on The Formula for Failure, which takes a closer look at Microsoft's Office Open XML (aka OOXML or Ecma standard 376) and finds a number of deficiencies.  While a few of these may be nitpicky, others are quite clearly flawed in critical ways.  His essay clearly refutes the argument that OOXML has a fully defined formula specification while ODF does not.  ODF is quite clearly further behind in defining the formula specifications for its spreadsheets, but it seems likely given their process that they will wind up ahead, especially since Microsoft and Ecma have seemed so resistant to making even very obvious modifications such as removing bit flags from the spec and replacing them with individual flags.

I highly recommend that anybody interested in the file formats take a look at Rob's latest work.

Update: The Open Malaysia blog has an excellent follow up called Mathematically Incorrect showing a very specific example, and how the slap dash approach by Microsoft and the Ecma standards people has led to serious inadequacies in the OOXML specs.  I recommend reading it in its entirety.
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
VML vs. SVG - should Open XML revive a rejected standard?
Tue 25 Jul 2006, 02:10 PM
Rob Weir of IBM has an excellent blog (which I have mentioned before) called An Antic Disposition, which I enjoy for both the analysis and the clever use of language.  His latest post, Cum mortuis in lingua mortua discusses the obsolete VML (Vector Markup Language), which was rejected as a standard in 1998, and the current SVG, which was accepted as a standard in 2001, and which has gained fairly wide acceptance and maturity since then.  The relevance is that Microsoft has bundled the rejected VML proposal into their Office Open XML proposal.  As Rob says:
Now take a look at Chapter 23, VML, pages 3571-3795 (PDF pages 3669-3893). We see here 224 pages of "VML Reference Material", which appears to be a rehash of the 1999 VML Reference from MSDN, and in this form it hides itself in a 4,081-page OOXML specification, racing through Ecma and then straight into ISO. Is this right? Should a rejected standard from 1998, be fast-tracked to ISO over a successful, widely implemented alternative like SVG?
This is the kind of analysis which needs to be done on the Office Open XML format, and on the Open Document Format as well.  Just accepting either because of where it originated (Microsoft vs. OASIS) is not enough.  A standard should stand on its own, not be judged by its supporters alone (although obviously support for a standard is important as well).

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Microsoft channels Tom Lehrer in quest for OOXML passage
Wed 29 Aug 2007, 09:00 AM
It is hard not to wonder as we count down the last couple of days before the vote on ECMA's (and Microsoft's) quest to get OOXML officially made an ISO standard.  How did Microsoft, well known for its innovation over the years, and a strong supporter of developers and consumers alike, manage to come out with a document format that was so unfriendly to developers and consumers alike, and so innovation-free?  My theory, which is probably as good as any, is that Microsoft, with ECMA as its partner, is channeling Tom Lehrer.  Here are some examples:

Picture the joys of developers (such as myself) trying to implement a 6000+ standard filled to the brim with intricate and little explained dependancies, and you might just hear a soft refrain (to tango music):
I ache for the touch of your lips, dear,
But much more for the touch of your whips, dear.
You can raise welts
Like nobody else,
As we dance to the masochism tango.
 

Now, imagine delving further into those specifications, and coming upon the attributes of one of the many undocumented, deprecated, compatibility elements:
There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium,
<gasp>
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.


But what is Microsoft thinking?  What does Microsoft think its customers are thinking?  Here is one possibility of what Microsoft might hope its customers are thinking:
First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!


Of course, Microsoft customers may not feel quite like that.  Their actual reaction may sound a bit more like:
So say you love me here and now,
I'll make the most of that.
Say you love and trust me,
For I know you'll disgust me
When you're old and getting fat.


Let's go out to the Microsoft blogs, where we can hear a resounding tune as stories trickle in of dirty deeds done to push through a generally unpopular OOXML standard:
Stories of tortures
Used by debauchers,
Lurid, licentious, and vile,
Make me smile.


Boiling down the ECMA/Microsoft position on why OOXML should be made a standard, despite its many flaws, is this sophistic argument:
As the judge remarked the day that he
Acquitted my Aunt Hortense,
To be smut
It must be ut-
Terly without redeeming social importance.


And finally, for those loyal supporters who are reaching out a hand of encouragement to Microsoft in its ignoble quest, here is the tune you may soon hear if Microsoft and ECMA are successful:
I hold your hand in mine, dear,
I press it to my lips.
I take a healthy bite
From your dainty fingertips.

My joy would be complete, dear,
If you were only here,
But still I keep your hand
As a precious souvenir.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude...
Tue 12 Dec 2006, 08:28 AM
My second entry for African Proverb week.  As I described yesterday, my 16 year old was assigned an essay in which he was supposed to find an African Proverb and relate it to his life.  He claimed that it was impossible that an African Proverb could describe his life, but having read many in an entertaining quest to prove him wrong, I am inspired to use some of my favorites for posts this week.  This is the proverb my son chose, although I relate it to business today...

(read on)
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Investigating ODF (and/or Open XML) could be a full time job
Thu 20 Jul 2006, 10:18 AM
I have been fascinated by the "format war" going on between Open Document Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML, Microsoft's XML standard), and I thought it would be a good idea to read all I could on the subject.  Problem is, there are way too many sources of information.  Just in the blogosphere, there is a wide range, from Bob Sutor's (IBM) Striking the Right Chord, If You Can Find It with lots of links and some very good high level thinking to Brian Jones' (Microsoft) Open XML Formats compendium on Office Open XML topics to the more opinionated , but often extremely insightful blogs, such as Rob Weir's (IBM) An Antic Disposition and Andy Updegrove's (Gesmer/Updegrove LLP) ConsortiumInfo.org's Standards Blog, to the specialist blogs, such as Bruce D'Arcus' (Miami University of Ohio) darcusblog which touches many topics but focuses very closely on metadata, annotations and citations, etc. etc. etc.  If you also try to read the specifications and news articles and so on, not to mention dive in and see the actual implementations used by OpenOffice.org (ODF) or MS Office 2007 beta (MIcrosoft's Office Open XML), it might be more than a full time job.  I'm trying to prioritize, but it is pretty hard in this early information gathering phase, and it looks like there will be much more noise before there is quiet.  I am starting to understand why riding the wave is sometimes harder than following the wave, but also less fun.  Surf's up, folks!

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Does OOXML support legacy documents better than ODF? Let's find out
Mon 25 Jun 2007, 12:19 PM
Bob Sutor put a post on his blog called ODF is not open source which elicited a very interesting comment from a gentleman named John Scholes:
I got onto the UK committee slogging its way through the ecma standard on OpenXML by mistake, but I seem to be stuck with it. Echoing what you say above, the thing that irritates me most is that I cannot see any reason for a second ISO/IEC standard in this area. MS claims OpenXML is better for the billions of legacy documents out there in old MS file formats. That would seem to boil down to:
(1) all (or maybe almost all) legacy documents can be satisfactorily converted into OpenXML; and
(2) a substantial (or significant) proportion of legacy documents cannot be satisfactorily converted into ODF.
Both these propositions are essentially questions of fact. So the question is WHERE IS THE DATA? As a bare minimum, can we have a reasonable selection of legacy documents in support of (2) (so that they convert well into OpenXML, but not into ODF).
I recently asked this question on Brian Jones‘ blog and have not yet had any useful answers. Nor have the MS members of the committee come up with anything yet …
As Mr. Scholes points out, we should be able to demonstrate this, so I had an idea.  Let's find documents to prove/disprove whichever contention you want.  I am looking for .doc, .xls and .ppt documents that don't render, or don't render well, in OpenOffice.org or Notes 8 productivity apps or some other ODF editor, or such documents that don't render, or don't render well, in Microsoft Office 2007 or some other OOXML editor (if you can find one).  There have been reports of documents that don't open in Microsoft Office 2007, but I'm tired of reports.  Let's see some examples.  Similarly, there is much talk of the documents that are better supported by OOXML than in ODF, so lets see some.  Any takers?

If you would like, you can send these to  or just send  a link to a download page.  Supporters of either position are equally welcome, as I just want to see the truth in all of this.  If you like, I can then submit any of these examples to the people considering OOXML as a standard, so let me know if you want me to do so.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Getting customers to request Office 2007
Thu 19 Jul 2007, 07:01 AM
Martin Leyrer sent me this link to How to gain market share today from KLUGE.DE.  It is an illuminating demonstration of how giving away software can make money for Microsoft...
Customer: So can you also help us with infrastructure and hardware problems?
Me: Yes, of course!
Customer: We need help upgrading to Vista and Office 2007.
Me: Ooops...
Customer: Is there a problem?
Me: Well, you have now Windows XP and Office 2003 - and to be honest thats everything you need. In fact I would recommend taking a look at Open Office 2.2. So why do you want to upgrade?
Customer: Very simple: We want to read and edit Office 2007 DOCX files.
Me: But why? Nobody in the world uses that format except Microsoft itself?
Customer: We receive every day documents in that format from the European Commission in Brussels, we are part of many groups in Brussels, and they send out their stuff as DOCX.
Me: So tell them to convert it to DOC or even Open Document Format. There are probably hundreds of other interest group outside in Europe that receive these files and cant open it - and don't want to spent thousands of Euros to upgrade the systems.
Customer: No way. Everybody in Brussels uses now Office 2007, and they will not stop sending the documents out in DOCX. We tried and failed.
Me: But what is the reason for this bullshit?
Customer: Microsoft gave away Office 2007 licenses to the Commission's administrative staff - for free.
How many other companies receive documents from the European Commission and decide to get Office 2007?  Those "free" licenses are certainly paying off for Microsoft, although you would think the European Commission would be savvy enough to not play along.
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Anybody had a chance to try out wikiCalc?
Tue 30 Jan 2007, 05:40 PM
I was reading another one of Rob Weir's excellent posts from back in August, A Tale of Two Formats, and he mentioned wikiCalc® , which I was not familiar with before.  As far as I can tell on quick perusal, wikiCalc is an interesting blend of wiki, spreadsheet and WYSIWYG editor (although less of the latter).  I think the concept is very intriguing, but it also makes me think of a couple of different blends of applications that might also be interesting.  Hmm.

Anyway, more on that later.  Anybody try this out yet?  Any opinions?

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Now part of the ODF (OpenDocument Format) Alliance
Wed 5 Jul 2006, 05:17 PM
As part of Genii Software's move into support for OpenDocument Format, we have become members of the ODF Alliance.  Fairly symbolic at the moment, but expect to see much more from us in the next twelve months.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
In the future, Open Document Format > OpenOffice.org
Tue 29 Aug 2006, 10:20 PM
One of the major criticisms of Open Document Format was summed up by M. David Peterson in this post, when he said that the oft-repeated claim... (read on)

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Microsoft's FUD mantra du jour
Fri 31 Aug 2007, 12:11 PM
Microsoft is starting really irritate me.  I have no problem with their advocacy of OOXML, except when they get to the point of stacking committees and trying to buy votes, and I have no idea whether they are right that IBM engages in similar tactics, even if they haven't been caught (or been that successful at it, either).  But I really, really hate talking points ala Karl Rove and the "Swift Boat" travesty.

On various posts yesterday, I saw eerily similar snide comments being made about whether IBM would ever release the "Notes proprietary formats", with one poster on Brian Jone's blog saying, as an example:
When this whole to-do is over, IBM may just drop the OSSers like a bad date and proceed to take a bunch of government contracts with a Lotus suite that supports ODF in name only.  And when you ask Rob Weir to open source his stuff or reveal Lotus-specific format information, he'll probably repeat the line about how it contains "old legacy code which is covered by licenses and patents outside of IBM's ontrol." 
Besides the idiocy of acting as if Rob Weir would have any control over this, the subtle message being promoted is that IBM always hides its data formats and just wants to force Microsoft, as a competitor, to expose theirs.

What a pile of crap!

For those who don't know, and the Microsoft people really should, the IBM Lotus Notes data formats are all documented in a free, and generally available, download as part of the Notes C API toolkit.  Rich text, view formats, everything.  Data structures, how they go together, functions to access them as well as how to access them directly if you don't want to use the functions.  Sample code out the wazoo.  And all of it has been available for years, since 1994 at least, since that is when I used all of these documented formats to create my fisrt product.  Since then, all my products have depended on this open access top data formats.

So, is it possible that the Microsoft posters don't know this?  Certainly.  Is it likely?  Maybe the people repeating it don't, but this is the ultimate dirty tricks tactic, as it relies on people's ignorance of the facts, and leaves a sense that is hard to counter it.  So, while I can't do much to stop this, I will at least call it what it is, FUD, pure and simple.
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Are you ready for a Productivity Editors 101 series yet?
Fri 13 Apr 2007, 12:25 AM
My Rich Text 101 series has been very popular, and I have thought about starting a Productivity Editors 101 series to help people with similar topics inside the Notes/Domino 8 word processor, spreadsheet and presentation editor, but the product is still in beta.  Should I hold off until the release, or should I put out "beta 101" topics to start to introduce people to features and tricks that might not be obvious?  Any thoughts?

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Why not Open DXL?
Mon 25 Sep 2006, 10:37 PM
Spending all the time I do these days on Open Document Format and Office Open XML (OOXML, Microsoft's XML format), I am unsure why IBM doesn't jump on this bandwagon.  After all, they already have DXL as an intermediate format with classes to import, export and parse DXL for both data and design.

So why not a file format?  Like both Open Document Format And Open XML, IBM could package the files in ZIP format, could create a set of extensions such as DXT, DXF, DXV, DXD (text, form, view, database) and so on.  The basic content would be stored in one XML file, with the form either stored in a separate XML file in the same zip file, much as a stored form is stored, or simply referred to as it is now.

Why bother, you may ask?  Well, for one thing, it would offer an open format to allow others to both extract meta data and to allow more automated creation of data.  With just a few changes, it would be possible to store attachments and images as separate files, as in the other open formats, and that would greatly simplify extracting that sort of data.  A gradual adoption of more complex currently accepted standard, such as those in MathML or the Dublin Core, could facilitate use of Notes data in applications that use such standards, and would help rationalize meta data across data formats.

So, should we ask IBM to do this?  Of course, I guess we wouldn't have to wait.  If IBM didn't want to define such a standard, perhaps the community could.  The DXL part would remain IBM's, but the package format and such could be open.  That would be an odd marriage of proprietary and open, but odder things have happened.
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
You've just gotta love Open XML zealots (pass the popcorn)
Fri 19 Jan 2007, 08:21 PM
ODF zealots are a diverse bunch, but Office Open XML (OOXML) zealots are a much more homogenous breed.  They stick together, post on each other's blogs, and generally prop up each other's arguments.  It helps that they all seem to work for the same employer, even though they spend a whole lot of time arguing about the "Big Brother" attitude IBM has towards Open Document Format (ODF).  Here is a good example, which, like many, contains a kernel of truth and tries to pop it into a whole bucket of popcorn.

In his post, Diversity vs. Conformity (note: in Microsoft-speak, diversity means everybody in the whole world using Microsoft Office, whereas conformity means people using different tools), Doug Mahugh thinks he has scored a real gotcha.  He searched on IBM's website, and found no ODF documents!  How could this be?  Pop. Pop. Pop.  Bring out the butter somebody.

Now, he might have a point, but guess what?  The search he uses in Google (and, yes, he is very proud of his "diversity" for using Google) is:
odt filetype:odt site:ibm.com
Nothing wrong with that, but if it is such a big deal, you would certainly expect to see something different on Microsoft's site.  So what results do you see for this search?
docx filetype:docx site:microsoft.com
Amazingly enough, there are no Office Open XML documents on Microsoft's site.

Could it be, possibly, that neither IBM nor Microsoft is stupid enough to put content in a format that most of the world does not yet support, whether or not they support that format?  IBM certainly uses ODF.  For example, they sent my presentation template for Lotusphere in .odp format, but posting such content on a public website may be seen as fairly limiting at this time.

Darn, now I have all this butter, and nothing but a lousy little kernel.  Thanks a heap, Doug!

Minor update: There actually are .ods files on the IBM website, so there technically are ODF files on IBM's website, but just spreadsheets, not documents.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Interview with Ken Bisconti regarding Workplace and productivity editors
Tue 5 Sep 2006, 11:53 AM
Andy Updegrove had an interview with Ken Bisconti which focused on the ODF-compliant productivity editors which are already in the IBM Workplace Managed Client V2.6 and will soon be in Hannover (which Mr. Bisconti referred to as "Lotus Notes 8", confirming recent posts to that effect).  I was interested in the way Mr. Bisconti focused on the "on-demand" nature of the editors as a key differentiator.  I was also intrigued that the editors are not fully ODF compliant in the WMC 2.6, but are planned to be in Hannover in "Spring 2007".  I just hope that the "on-demand" nature is preserved in Hannover, as I am less sure how that will be achieved in the Notes model, and it seems fairly key to the value proposition.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Updated the blogroll
Mon 18 Sep 2006, 01:57 PM
For what it is worth, I have updated my blogroll to list more of the people I actually read, remove anybody I don't read anymore, etc.  If you are one of those people who pay attention to such details, you may notice more people in the ODF/Office Open XML world represented.  

I'd especially like to mention Rob Weir of IBM, who has an incredible way with words.  Just look at the titles of his posts and you will see what I mean.  I always appreciate good wordsmanship, and clever turns of phrase, and Rob's blog is worth reading just for that, even if you didn't care so much about the material, although that is very good too.  For a quick example, see his tagline:
Rob Weir, thinking the unthinkable, pondering the imponderable, effing the ineffable and scruting the inscrutable
Right on!
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
When accessibility doesn't refer to "someone else" - being an accessibilty consumer
Wed 30 Aug 2006, 03:34 PM
Accessibility in software and on the web has been an interest of mine for a number of years, from adding Section 508 and WAI (web accessibility initiative) support to our Midas Rich Text LSX HTML generation capability, to my more recent interest in Open Document Format and document formats.  Yet, in all that time, I have thought of myself as a provider of accessibility.  Even my focus on making our corporate webpage fairly accessible has been due to a sense that we should do this for "those who need it", or worse yet, so that others who did care about accessibility would not be able to point out how inaccessible our website is.  My mindset has still always been that of a provider.

So, I was on Bob Sutor's blog today, and he happened to mention that he was making his links more visible.  I responded, then sat and read my response a couple of times, and realized that I am an accessibilty consumer.  Perhaps we all are.  Here is what I said over there (although don't hesitate to visit his excellent blog):
I have to say, my eyes are not so great, and I am somewhat color blind, so I can never see the links in your text. I just mouse over where I think a link might be, and if it shows an underline, I know it is really a link. Some additional indication would be great, especially in light of your interest in accesibility.
Now, I am 43 years old, so I am not an old man, and my color blindness is only a partial red/green blindness that I read is quite common.  But my point is, I would never think to tell someone else that their website, blog or software was "inaccessible".  I would either use it as best I could, or not use it if it got too annoying.  Accessibility is something other people have to deal with, or so I tend to think.

But it isn't.  Accessibility is something people need, people like me and you.  Some need it more, some need it less, but it is a reasonable thing to expect.  It is not just a politically correct thing to do, or an expiditious way to gain business from government agencies who do have such requirements.  It is a way to treat your readers and users as people, worthy of respect, and worth keeping.  The flip side is, as a consumer, it is also my right, and responsibility, to let people know when their websites, blogs or software are not meeting my needs, even if I am not blind or uneducated or culturally different.  I will try to do so proudly.  How about you?
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
OpenSesame: First live demo at Collaboration University
Wed 5 Sep 2007, 05:04 PM
John Head is giving a developers session on the new productivity editors at Collaboration University, which will be held first in Kansas City September 10-12, and later in London on September 19-21.  John asked if he could introduce and demo OpenSesame.  It is a rare thing for me to let somebody else demo one of my products, and particularly the first live demo anyone has seen, but I thought the opportunity was too good to pass up.

So, what will John be showing?  I don't want to give it all away, so I will just describe the first scenario, and if you want to see more, you can just go watch John's demos yourself.  You know you want to go to Collaboration University anyway, and here is your excuse.

Scenario: Approval Cycle
As team leader at Pinnacle Products, Melissa is responsible for ensuring that the sales data in her regional sales database is accurate, but her team is spread out in various locations.  To give each team member a chance to review and edit the sales data, Melissa uses OpenSesame to take the data from her Lotus Notes database and send it out as a spreadsheet attachment to Tim.  Tim has Notes 8, so he simply edits the spreadsheet in the Lotus Spreadsheets productivity editor, makes a few changes, then sends the spreadsheet to Gerald, who does not have Notes on his laptop, but does have OpenOffice.  Gerald edits the spreadsheet with OpenOffice Calc, makes a few more changes, and sends the spreadsheet on to Mary.  Mary has Notes 8, so she makes her changes and sends the final edited spreadsheet back to Melissa.  Melissa opens the spreadsheet with Lotus Spreadsheets, and is able to review each change using the built in revision tracking, rejecting one or two edits, accepting others, and making an edit or two of her own.  Finally, she incorporates the changes back into Notes using OpenSesame again.

Intrigued?  I bet there is still room if you hurry.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
The amazingly little I know (or need to) about Chrome
Tue 2 Sep 2008, 08:13 AM
I really only know two things:

1) I actually learned about Chrome from the New York Times this morning, which either indicates they have kept a tight lid on it or they I have had better things to do than stay on top of every news story in the IT world.  I'd prefer to think the latter.

2) I have little interest in trying it.  

My second point may seem an odd response given my appalling ignorance of the browser and its capabilities as shown in my first point, but I think they are consistent.  I am not interested in moving into the camp of yet corporate behemoth that wants to control my experience.  Google has tried very hard to be cooler than Microsoft, but they are still a corporate behemoth that is seeking to control the web.  While I am a strong believer in the value of commercial software, the web and its access have become too vital to allow one company to control too much.  While Google says that Chrome is open source, it is still highly controlled by one company.  My experience with the open standards war that broke out last year over ODF and OOXML makes me very wary of succumbing to the enticement of the Googleplex.  Search is one thing, but Search/Mail/Office/Browser/etc./etc. is feeling dangerously close to monopoly, or an attempt at it. If Chrome is truly open source, and if it has features that appeal to people, Firefox can add those features, and I can use them that way.

Aren't we beyond flocking to the monolith, no matter how shiny and new it appears?

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
OpenSesame: Part of the "why?"
Thu 10 May 2007, 09:33 PM
A few people have questioned me over the past few months about my fixation on OpenDocument Format, and particularly my work on OpenSesame.  I'm clearly not some open source nut, so why not focus where the money is, or will be, and write tools for Open XML and Office 2007.

Well, they are right that I am not an open source nut.  I write proprietary software in order to make money off selling licenses, and I'm proud of it.  But Rob Weir of IBM had a post today which explains a little part of the "why?".  In his post, So where are all the OOXML documents?, Rob makes an interesting observation.  Despite the supposed 97% market share Microsoft enjoys, and despite the brisk sales of Office 2007 which Microsoft reports, and despite the fact that OOXML is the default format for Office 2007, the adoption of the OOXML formats seems a bit slow, at least out in the wild, wild web.

Google offers the ability to search by filetype, and Rob had the clever idea of simply using Google to see how many documents were out there of each type.  Now, ODF has been out there longer, and there is an inevitable "network effect" where nobody uses a format until everybody does, but this is still pretty astonishing.  I updated the numbers myself, and will note, as Rob did, that the larger numbers seem to be rounded.  I also added the percentage of the OOXML documents that are on the Microsoft website, as that seemed interesting.
FormatCount
ODT85,200
ODS20,700
ODP43,400
Total ODF149,300


DOCX516 (12% on Microsoft.com)
XLSX68 (6% on Microsoft.com)
PPTX80 (13% on Microsoft.com)
Total OOXML664 (11% on Microsoft.com)

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Sometimes, a sense of humor helps with technical documentation
Sun 27 Aug 2006, 11:29 PM
As we all know, reading technical documentation is not always entertaining.  Lots of lists of parameters and options, and your head can start spinning.  For example, I am reading through Chapter 3. Text Document Basics, which is part of the OASIS OpenDocument Essentials book (still a heck of a lot less painful than the official ODF specs), and there are lots of entries such as:

style:text-position
    This attribute is used to create superscripts and subscripts. It can have two values; the first value is either sub or super, or a number which is the percentage of the line height (positive for superscripts, negative for subscripts). An optional second value gives the text height as a percentage of the current font height. Examples: style:text-position="super" produces normal superscripts, and style:text-position="-30 50" produces a subscript at 30% of the font height below the baseline, with letters 50% of the current font height.
 
Erp!  But mixed in with the more dry entries, there are a few which show a healthy sense of humor peeking through, such as

style:text-underline, style:text-underline-color
    Oy, you wouldn’t believe how many underlining styles you have available to you! none, single, double, dotted, dash, long-dash, dot-dash, dot-dot-dash, wave, bold, bold-dotted, bold-dash, bold-long-dash, bold-dot-dash, bold-dot-dot-dash, bold-wave, double-wave, and small-wave. The style:text-underline-color is specified as in fo:color and has the additional value of font-color, which makes the underline color the same as the current text color.
 
or one of my favorites,

style:text-blinking
    Set to true if you want the readers of your document to hate you forever.
 
Now, that is truth in advertising!

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
OpenSesame: Cleverly (?) rendering Notes data to ODF
Wed 11 Jul 2007, 11:00 AM
One of the hardest things to decide when building a toolkit like OpenSesame is when to be clever, and when not to be too clever.  For example, there is functionality inside OpenSesame to render a view as a spreadsheet or a table, to render rich text in ODF format, to render an entire document as rich text and then render that in ODF, etc.

But what should the developer using this see?  Let's start with the following... (read on)

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
All in a name: What should we call a "Lotus Documents" document?
Wed 18 Apr 2007, 12:19 PM
As I work more and more extensively with the productivity editors in Notes/Domino 8 (mostly for our OpenSesame tools), a linguistic obstacle keeps hampering my documentation and internal discussions.  It appears that the productivity editors have been renamed as Lotus Documents, Lotus Presentations and Lotus Spreadsheets, although inside Notes 8, they will still just appear as Documents, Presentations and Spreadsheets.  But what should we call the Documents document to prevent confusion with a Notes document?  If you saw a method entitled CopyDocument, would you assume a Notes document or a Lotus Documents document?  What about an EmbedSpreadsheetInDocument?

It is possible we could refer to these as ODF Documents, but nowhere is ODF mentioned in the Notes 8 product, in the productivity editor Help or anywhere else I can find.  In fact, OpenDocument format is not mentioned either.  Of course, there are lots of hits for "Open Document", but they all point back to the discussion at hand, as they have nothing to do with Lotus Documents.

Perhaps we should refer to these as Office Documents, but that might confuse people who are used to Microsoft Office being referred to as just "Office".  (It is nice being the dominant leader, isn't it?)  Similarly, we could use "WP Document", but only if we use it in menus and such, as otherwise it will still sound like something external, maybe even a "WordPerfect Document" or "WordPro Document", either of which would cause more confusion.

We can hardly say a "Lotus Document", as that could be used interchangeably with "Notes document".  I guess we could say "Productivity Editor Document", or just "Productivity Document", but that sounds pretty awkward, and will certainly blow up those method names.  Imagine EmbedProductivitySpreadsheetInProductivityDocument.  Ick!

So, what should we call these?  If we come up with a good enough name, I can pound on Mary Beth Raven and others and see if we can get them to use it, but it has to be reasonably short and reasonably clear.  Any ideas?

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
In a hypothetical Midas for ODF...
Thu 4 Jan 2007, 11:37 PM
would a chunk defined (in a word processing context) as "Table 1; Row 3-7; Column 4-5" be equivalent (in a spreadsheet context) to "Sheet 1; Cell D3-E7"?  It makes you think.
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
An interesting question about ODF and Notes rich text
Thu 25 May 2006, 12:15 AM
A long time correspondent wrote asking me about Open Document Format (ODF) and the announcement that IBM will include an embedded ODF compatible OpenOffice editor instance inside Lotus Notes once Hannover comes along.  See this article for details.  This friend wrote:
I always think of you as the Rich Text expert - especially within Lotus Domino.
...
Will Notes / ODF have any effect on Notes Rich Text ?
An interesting question.  From what I can tell, the answer is "No!", because it seems very likely that IBM is simply going to extend their current ability to use MS Word as an editor in order to utilize the OpenOffice applications as editors.  This will not alter the use of rich text at all, but it does envisage a much stronger role for OpenOffice and ODF format.  One question that will likely arise is, how do you convert back and forth between ODF and rich text, if ODF is an important format?  At least, that is the question that intrigues me.

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Back from vacation
Sun 13 Aug 2006, 11:16 PM
You might have noticed it has been a bit quiet recently.  I have been on vacation, only blogging a bit to calm down a certain prince who managed to spill orange juice on a certain princess' laptop... just before she goes on her study abroad semester.  Much fun was had by all, but things are settled down now.  In any case, I feel rested and ready to get back to work.  I'm hoping to start a series of Questions and Answers on CoexLinks, which has proven to be even more versatile than I expected with some recent, creative customers.  I'll also be blogging more about Open Document Format (ODF), which I think has the potential to be a "big thing".  Things may be a bit quiet about CoexEdit for a few weeks, as we are preparing for new announcements, but more will be coming soon.

Good to be back, even though it was (I admit) good to be gone as well.
Read / Bookmark / E-mail
Beta in a beta for OpenSesame?
Tue 13 Mar 2007, 11:22 AM
I am considering whether to start a beta of some of our OpenSesame utilities for ODF that would coincide with the public beta for Notes 8.  This would allow people to try out tighter integration with the productivity editors (now renamed to Lotus Documents, Lotus Presentations and Lotus Spreadsheets, by the way) right from the start, but I don't know whether the mix of two betas would be annoying or helpful.  Obviously, it would be helpful to us, as it would allow release of at least some of the utilities along with Notes 8, but would it be helpful to developers/users who wanted to have a full picture of what they could accomplish with Notes 8?

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail
The question I keep expecting to hear... but don't
Fri 14 Jul 2006, 03:25 PM
The question I keep expecting to hear people ask IBM, but I have heard very little, is "What makes the IBM Productivity Editors different than eSuite and Lotus Components?"  Of course, I don't mean what makes them technically different.  I mean, what is going to make them successful where the other two efforts failed?  I certainly hope that IBM is asking itself that, even if the partners aren't (and maybe they are, but I haven't heard it much).

Tags:

Read / Bookmark / E-mail