OpenDocument News

I've posted a longer article of recent OpenDocument news on my O'Reilly weblog. The list of applications supporting the OpenDocument Format is growing so rapidly that the team at the OpenDocument Fellowship is having trouble keeping their Applications List up to date, and it's a daunting task to review all the additions. I hope to do some work updating the list this weekend. Daniel Carrera briefly reviews one of the new additions, Peepel, a web-based office suite that competes with Google Docs and similar services. Politics continue in the ODF-vs-Microsoft/Ecma OOXML arena, with Microsoft apparently urging California voters to lobby against a pro-ODF bill and Microsoft UK setting up a web-based petition to lobby the British Standards Institute to vote in favour of Ecma Open XML as an ISO international Standard. This petition follows an older one (begun by John Imrie) to the Prime Minister in support of ODF in the UK.

The Graphing Calculator story

This isn't new (copyright 2004 Ron Avitzur), but I just discovered it. http://www.pacifict.com/Story/ I found the story quite inspiring, as well as amusing in some places. Warning: it's long. Here's how it starts:

I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day... In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.

Installing Ubuntu Linux

Today I successfully installed Ubuntu Linux on my new laptop. It was so easy! The only complication I ran into was understanding the choices on the partitioning menu. I had two partitions pre-done on the new laptop, and was intending to use the larger one for Linux. I'm sure I would have been better off with only one partition and letting Ubuntu take care of everything. Anyway... the choices were in geek-speak, and even with my Unix buddy Eric helping, we weren't sure which choice was the appropriate one. So we tried several; fortunately the wrong choices returned error messages (instead of doing something awful to the existing paritions) and by matter of elimination I eventually stumbled on the correct choice. After that, I had no problems at all. The laptop was connected to our ethernet network, so Ubuntu helpfully offered to download updates and install them, which it did without a hitch. It also detected the modem, the wireless card, and the wireless network, though it refused to connect to either of them. I suspect I need to do something else to enable that... a question for another day. The rest of the day went quickly as I explored things and installed programs. I enjoyed the beautiful brown Ubuntu interface -- as well as the really cool screen savers!