Plan-B for Software Documentation

Most user of Plan-B for OpenOffice.org don’t notice, but we do deploy Google Analytics to track visitors and a myriad of other data.

However, I’m a bit disappointed about Google Analytics last update. While the added features are much appreciated, I have to notice that a lot of buttons and links getting to this functionality are broken. I can’t set my own date range for the analysis anymore and I can’t click on the link for the new (re-appearing) hourly view.

I guess I’m getting what I’m paying for. After all this service is free.

While Dell has listened to its customers’ proposals on IdeaStorm and now offers some PCs with Linux (to be precise, Ubuntu), it has not yet replied to the request to offer OpenOffice.org preinstalled.

But why buy a Dell computer, if you can have your Windows XP virtually online from Nivio? And Nivio offers OpenOffice.org as its default office suite.

But wait a moment, how do I access an online virtual Windows XP desktop? Right I still need a computer with some sort of OS and that can then run OpenOffice.org natively and Windows XP as well. Not sure why I really need this Nivio.

If you are a Writer, using OpenOffice.org as you main tool, Dimitri Popov’s “Writer for Writers and Advanced Users” might be the book for you to read. And Dimitri does know his OpenOffice, as he also publishes the “WriterTools” extension. WriterTools in version 0.7.1 includes features such as:

• Lookup Tool - select text and lookup it up in several online references, including Cambridge Dictionaries, WordNet, and Google Define.
• Google Translate - select text and translate it to different languages using the Google Translate service.
• Email Backup - Backup your currently open document per E-Mail.
• Multi-format Backup macro - saves the currently open text document Writer) as Word, RTF, and TXT formats in one command.
• Open FTP Document - open a document stored on an FTP server and work on it locally.
• Convert to DokuWiki converts the current document into DokuWiki format.
• Start/Stop Timer - keep track how long you work on which document and save the data in the accompanying WriterDB database. Use it as you please, such as for billing etc.

This set of tools utilizes the new OpenOffice.org extension infrastructure. Which seems to gain momentum in general.

I find the DokuWiki macro real nifty. I bet, if it would be MediaWiki as output, a lot of Wikipedia authors would become OOo converts.

While other states’ attempts to safeguard their documents by using open standards seem to have stalled for now, New York is the next one to try. Assembly woman RoAnn M. Destito (Democrat), proposes the state study how government documents are created, shared, and archived and how these documents can be used in a way that “encourages appropriate government control, access, choice, interoperability, and vendor neutrality,” in Bill A08961.

This means more consideration of open standards like ODF and ISO 26300, to avoid perfectly preserved digital garbage that can’t be read because the format is not documented and the sole keeper of the application creating it went out of business.

Computerworld writes abut the defeat of bills pro ODF in six states. The proposed legislation would have in one way or another mandated that state agencies in California, Florida, Texas,
Oregon, Connecticut, and Minnesota, need to use open standards for office documents. The only currently accepted open standard that is implemented by more than one vendor is ODF/ISO 26300.

However, lobbying by Microsoft kept legislators from demanding that electronic office documents are stored in non proprietary formats, so they can be accessed in many years to come. Interestingly, most legislative comments do not doubt that this is a worthy goal. However they do feel used by either side of the debate and their lobbying interests. So they squashed most bills without a vote. I guess the companies gathered in the ODF Alliance lost a battle, but they don’t declare the war over.

As an increasing number of companies and institutions migrate to Linux and OpenOffice.org, interoperability becomes more and more important. The world is still geared towards Microsoft’s document formats and that poses barriers to migration, one of which is fonts and their influence on how documents print and break into pages.

The leading Linux distributions in the enterprise space, Red Hat and SuSE delivered some new fonts that are metrically identical to the widely used Microsoft fonts. What does this mean for you? You can receive an MS Office document and use the equivalent font and print it w/o fear of it breaking into a different number of pages. It also means you do not need to update the table of content because of re-pagination. Off course the same is true in the opposite direction ODF –> MS Office document.

Use Plan-B for OpenOffice.org to learn more about how to configure Writer for optimal MS document compatibility.

I can’t believe what I just found on the Yahoo!Search Blog about removing pages from a website. The author says “The best way to remove dead URLs from the Yahoo! Search index is to return an HTTP Error 404 when our crawler requests the page.”

Are they serious, really serious?

The HTTP spec clearly says return code 404 is “Not Found” temporarily and 410 is “Gone” permanently. They even say in th explanation for code 404 “The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.”

Yahoo slurp is free to treat a 404 page as if removed although I don’t think it serves the searching public well. However, I can’t understand why the Yahoo!Search blog teaches webmasters to send a 404 if a 410 return code is appropriate.

Just needed to rant about this, because this blog has for sure a wide readership.

Apparently, interest to use OpenOffice.org as a tool to other means is growing. I just discovered that OpenMRS, an open source Medical Record System framework, plans to use OpenOffice.org as an alternative Data Entry mechanism.

More precisely, Matthew Harrison proposed this project for the Google summer of Code challenge, and apparently got accepted. Michael started blogging about his project. Currently he is reading up on OpenOffice.org macros programming and XForms, which he intends to use for formalized data entry.

Google’s summer of code pays student interns for the summer to create open source code for many open source projects. It has been quite popular with students from around the world. While the stipend of $4,500, is nice compensation for something a student might do anyhow, it is a lot of money to many students in other countries. In any case it does help many open source projects to get some additional resources which they mentor and help to achieve the project’s goal.

OpenMRS is an initiative to build a much needed medical record system framework, that is affordable for developing countries to manage their are number of patients or such diseases like AID/HIV. Impressively, the project is only one year old, but has implementations in seven countries and collected millions of patient observations.

Yoon Kit blogs over at Open Malaysia about the physical size of the Microsoft OOXML spec presented to the International and national standardization boards.

You got to see the pictures of the 6039 pages in context. They are really eye popping.

Yoon also argues that this is probably by far the largest spec reviews in such short time. He puts his weight behind the request of various national organization bodies at the International Standardization Organization (ISO) to not fast track this mammoth of a standard specification. But these requests were ignored. This post is a must read!

On Sunday, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general council, gave an interview to Fortune magazine, where he alleged that OpenOffice.org violates 45 Microsoft patents. The article is about the general assertion that various open source project violate 235 patents where Microsoft claims to be the inventor. However, Microsoft chooses not to name which are the patents or the alleged infringements.

The article shines a broader light on the issues with software patents and gives an informative summary about the Novell/Microsoft deal from late last year. It also exposes some of the conditions that Richard Stallmann, the most ardent defender of open source, puts on journalists in order to grant an interview.

In short Microsoft scares people about alleged patents it holds that are violated by open source projects. It even claims that it made already secret deals with some fortune 500 companies to license these patents. This tactic reminds me of the SCO claim that Linux infringes on its Unix patent portfolio. Under scrutiny of the courts and especially IBM’s ability to deal with patent claims it evaporated into nothing. We will have to see if Microsoft has more legs to stand on. In the mean time one should not be scared, such risks are everywhere.