DIS 29500 / Office Open XML vs Standards Australia

Read this fact sheet, and this technical case against ooxml, then read this guy, affiliated with microsoft, and this piece on groklaw.

Then, if you've still not had enough, read about Sweden.

What a shambles.

As someone who implements OpenOffice in our document generation and workflow of a largish application, it's been a joy to work with ODF. It's simple enough to understand, and the spec is clearly laid out. I haven't read the whole thing, but I don't need to: I can easily find the information I want with only a little bit of googling.

As someone who is fighting with half of his office using Office 2007, and sending incompatible documents all over the place, I now believe that September 2 is doomsday.

How exactly am I meant to deal with 6000 pages of information hiding possibly contradictory information, if I want to implement something based on ooxml?
If Microsoft themselves can't even implement it in Office 2007 (I believe its a subset of the spec they use), what chance do I have?


Worse; I can't believe the shills who call this "Open XML" - it's Office Open XML, and deliberately named in such a way to create confusion.

CoScripter, Selenium, Repetitive Testing and IBM

CoScripter (formerly Koala) is an automated testing tool for web applications.

Don't waste time reading further, just watch this awesome demo.

This neatly fits into the testing tools we've got at work: a continuous integration box, phpunit constantly running, phpcodesniffer watching for dangerous code, zend code analyzer doing the same, and our planned implementation of Selenium+PHPUnit.

Now we'll be able to tag team with Selenium and this tool.

Thank you, Mike & IBM, life just got easier.

Hunting for Hezbollah

So tonight, I was channel surfing. I caught a mix of NCIS, an SBS show about the iraq war (and the US long term plans); and topped it all off with the first story on Foreign Correspondent.

It was a piece from BBC2, called "Hunting for Hezbollah". All in all, it was a little bit of your standard fare for a bit there: Hezbollah, bombed buildings, pissed off people, religious fervor, and so and so forth.

However, what did catch my attention was the fact Hezbollah have a number of underground bunker complexes. We aren't talking primitive either - these things, built in secrecy, with running water, electricity, showers; and half a mountain to protect the occupants from bombing & shelling.

I've included here a number of snippets - I only started watching about where part 2 kicks in.

The other thing which kind of did shock me also was when the local guide pulled out an M4/M203 - here's a snippet from the Foreign Correspondent page on this.
That's a pretty pricey piece of high tech weaponry, which has been taken from a dead US solider in Iraq. Supposedly, some of the groups over in Iraq are simply killing because the value of the equipment the US soliders have makes the risk worthwhile - there is no other underpinning for their actions, of a religious nature or otherwise.

Here's the picture of the weapon and the guide (Dawoud):


To give you a clearer idea of what it looks like, take a look at wikipedia's article on the M4 Carbine:



Have a watch:

Synopsis

Hezbollah, the powerful political, military and welfare organisation of Shia Muslims in Lebanon, has been linked to a string of bombings, attacks and kidnappings, mainly against Israel and the western world, for over 20 years.

Originally conceived by a group of clerics after the 1982 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon – Hezbollah, or Party of God, was formed primarily to resist the occupation.


BBC reporter Darius Bazargan went to Beirut to investigate claims that Hezbollah is again gearing up for battle.

But to get to know Hezbollah you need a way in to their secret world. He found it in former Shia militiaman, Dawoud, who agreed to act as guide.

Dawoud is a staunch Hezbollah supporter – although not an official member of the party – with all the right connections to the city’s dark underbelly. He describes how ordinary people worried about security, are buying guns and preparing for war.

The guide takes Bazargan to an arms dealer where for a price, high-powered weapons are readily available; they travel to areas where Hezbollah is gaining support by rebuilding private houses destroyed in the conflict; and in the Shia heartlands they talk to the mother of a martyred soldier, proud and victorious that her son died fighting for his country.

In southern Lebanon the guide discovers the entrance to a secret military bunker, and closer inspection reveals an elaborate network of tunnels complete with running water and electricity.

But further into Hezbollah territory the atmosphere becomes tense as they drive through restricted countryside past warning signs prohibiting entry, and come across a Hezbollah military base.

Turning back, they are too late to avoid being detained and interrogated by a Hezbollah patrol.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

I can see the light...

Go and read this article on controlling individual neurons with light pulses.

I won't rehash the article, except to say; wow.

Since you are now able to stimulate very, very, very specific parts of the brain, imagine how much easier it would be to tell specific parts to take a lunch break.

That's the kind of research that I've heard of being done in (loose) connection with Stephen Wiltshire: The Human Camera.

I don't have a fucking clue on where to find the paper(s) for it, but it basically boiled down to researchers using magnetic fields to temporarily suspend some parts of your mind's regular functioning... and when they did it, many of the subjects got a lot better at problem solving / pattern finding / etc; somewhat like an autistic savant.

It cropped up on 60 minutes the other night too.

Stephen was used as an example of just what could be possible.

Pidgin, Songbird, and a Shirt

Alright, let's cut to the chase. I desperately want a ninja filled tshirt.


With the current state of the US dollar, it's probably a good time to prise $25 USD from my ever so tight pockets; but the penny pinching old grandfather in me just won't let me.

So, I have a plan:

1. Wait for either Gutsy Gibbon to land, or a decent feisty backport of pidgin


2. Learn just what exactly this dbus thing is


3. Use a mixture of kung fu and whinging to have Songbird inform Pidgin of what I'm playing, just like I've always wanted.

If I can get at least half way into doing that, then I can most probably convince myself:

• dbus is cool, and you are making something shiny enough that you deserve a t-shirt


• this is way too hard, you need a pity t-shirt

Either option is great for me.

Extract Meaning from Text, as a Webservice!

Hublog has some has some sweet APIs under its hat.

The one of most interest is the Clearforest web service. If you want to be able to extract people, places, organizations, cities, and a whole lot more from a bunch of text, this is worth it to you.

I spent a bit of the evening playing with text extracts from Wikipedia, local government, and all sorts.

It's quite nifty; but doesn't quite pick up everything I'd like - ie, I tried it with a fragment on Stamps from wikipedia.

Postage stamps of Ireland are the postage stamps issued by the postal authority of the independent Irish state. Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland when the world's first postage stamps were issued in 1840. These stamps, and all subsequent British issues, were used in Ireland until the new Irish Government assumed power in 1922.

It picked out everything about the countries, governments, etc, but couldn't tell me about Stamps, or about years.

Give it a shot and see what you can do!

pySerial and Roomba

So when I'm not looking for the ghost in the machine, I seem to be spending a fair amount of my time pining for a Roomba.

It isn't even because I have a low-mess problem that obviously needs robotification (I mean, who doesn't have one of those), but because the damned thing comes with an open interface.

With a little bit of expense, I could remote control my Roomba with nothing more than a laptop, really long serial cable, and a whole bunch of Python.

From there, it's only a hop, skip and a jump to a day of internet fame with a wiimote roomba, and then it's on to rule the world program away my household hygiene issues.

The biggest obstacles I seem to have is only the worst website in the world and simply not having much of a decent idea for exactly what I would use my roomba for...

So lets hear it: 3 best applications for a robot slave you can come up with.

Where's my Airship!?

Where's my airship flights?

A few quotes to get you salivating:

EG: In as brief a list as possible, what kind of advantages does airship travel hold over traditional air travel?

RH: The best word picture I can give you is to refer back to where we left off, with the Hindenburg. It could carry a whopping 100 tons of payload and people at a top speed of 83 mph (cruise was closer to 65 mph). Yet it was powered by only four diesel engines each with a maximum of about 1,200 hp. so for less than the horsepower of one engine on a four engine C-130 turboprop cargo plane (that only carries 20 tons) the Hindenburg could fly from Southern Germany all the way to the US in about 72 hours.

and

The airship industry has no shortage of enthusiasts, visionaries, and passionate dreamers, but it’s almost barren of the steely eyed business people who have the professionalism and expertise to first build the solid enterprise that can build the airships. I guess it’s just easier for these people to get an MBA and go manage an IT start-up or a Fortune 500 company.

When you have industry folk saying where's my manager, then you know there's a market there ripe for the taking.

Can you imagine it? You book in a flight, which might take a day or so, but you get to spend many hours in an inflight casino... or a bar. Or even better, you are hooked up to the internet, so there's very little discernible difference in your day to day life (at least if you develop software for a living).

Tell me that's not better than flights for $1 to batshit nowhere.

My 44th Birthday, Torino Scales, and Apophis

On my 44th birthday; April 13th 2029, the first ever object to get a 4 on the torino scale, Apophis will swing by for a day.

The picture to the right shows just how close it will come.

It'll be visible to the naked eye in rural areas of Africa, West Asia, and Europe. I think that's worth planning a holiday for.

So what did god give you for your birthday?

All Text Must Be Selectable

While reading a bit about pidgin UI design, it was pointed out there is some text which isn't selectable (copy and paste) in the conversation window.

I don't know how it's 2007, and half our lives are on the internet; but application designers are still missing this very easy and very useful feature on the odd occasion.

Everything should be selectable!

My best friend, the ghost in the machine.

Is it a ghost in the machine or my best friend, Dave?

The Washington post has a good piece up about the human connection with military robots - worth the read if you design anything.

This has to be my favourite part:

When Greg Harbin was piloting one of the first Predators over Bosnia from his desk in Hungary, he wasn't actively trying to become the first UAV operator in history to be awarded a medal. He was trying to avoid becoming the first UAV pilot to incinerate a schoolyard full of children.

The then-32-year-old Air Force captain's bot was "dead square right over the city" of Mostar, looking for snipers, when its engine conked out. As it spiraled down, still carrying 2,000 gallons of fuel, Harbin could see on his screen, through the cross hairs of the nose camera, that "it was dead-centered on that school. If I'd allowed that thing to hit into that school, could you imagine?" he recalls. "I would be the first guy in the history of the world to kill somebody with an unmanned aircraft."

Using the kind of fancy flying he'd learned as a fighter pilot, and only the 15 minutes' worth of battery power he had left, he miraculously pulled the bot out of its spiral and found an airstrip run by the French. To make sure the barely-under-control bot didn't hit all their transport planes, he intentionally crash-landed it on their runway. "The French were pretty funny on the radio. They didn't know what it was. They videotaped the whole thing."

But that's not the significant part.

As he was struggling to bring the bot down without an engine, he could see "the ground coming real fast." He dropped the landing gear, flared the wings, pushed the stick forward and then started fumbling around at the bottom of his desk chair.

He had bonded so tightly with the machine hundreds of miles away that he was searching for the lever that would allow him to eject.

It reminds me very much of a story by Colin Kapp: Gottlos. Worth the read if you can find it...

Google Maps to have microformats

Microformats in Google Maps.

Pretty neat. If you don't know what this means, I'll tell you.

You would:

• Search for pizza in collinswood
• Find your favourite pizza place
• Click a button
• Add it magically to your address book

Want to see how? Go and install Operator, and then do the above steps.