Somewhere out there!

I’m not sure why there is the constant it’s already a standard, so “let’s make it official” party line for OOXML.

In fact currently there are more ODF documents than OOXML.

The current discussion is about what is coming next and not about what we have at the moment. Certainly older Microsoft formats are pretty much a mob enforced standard, but were does that get us? A future likelihood of a community generating the situation where we are forced to buy Office 2007 just so we can send OOXML documents for a government tender, business contracts, legal letters, etc, etc, etc. Badly directed standards have a way of doing this.

Why should a new standard justify a commercial status-quo or monopoly?

I think it is also disingenuous to claim there is a business cost in failing to standardise OOXML. If a worldwide ISO standard existed (oh right it does) then Microsoft like everyone else has the choice to implement a migration path. If this standard was built into Office Now+1, then the business cost of OOXML and ODF would be the same.

After all we are not talking about the past, but looking to the future.

Migrating an accounting system from an old Xen 2.0 domain to XenEnterprise means it is also time to upgrade from sarge. Due to changes in available libraries, this required recompiling fbsql.so. Leading to issues dealing with a new gcc 4.1 feature:

In the OSS document management (DMS) space there are two primary choices: Alfresco and KnowledgeTree (KT). Other systems that do content management, like Plone or Drupal, are often suggested as DMSs, but in my opinion while they maybe great for managing websites they aren’t really designed for a business DMS.

Another useful PDF tool is pdfsam. This will rip apart and glue back together your PDFs in a simple basic interface.

I’ve used Guaranteed PDF Decrypter a few times to remove passwords restrictions from PDFs. It is a clean, simple and easy to use product. I can even crack some PDFs, but only passwords with 40 bit, which basically isn’t much.