Somewhere out there!

Detailed look at OpenOffice vs MS Office on a Terminal Server by Bernhard Tritsch:

The results show that roughly 30 to 40% more users can sign on to the platform with Microsoft Office 2003 than with OpenOffice.org 2.1 with identical hardware and an identical configuration of the terminal server on Windows Server 2003 SP1. Even for terminal servers with Microsoft Office 2007, one can expect that the system resources can be used roughly 20% more efficiently than is possible on a system with OpenOffice.org. This applies both for the 32-bit and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 when used as the primary platform.

Memory requirements of all three Office Suites on 64-bit Windows Server 2003 are increased by the factor 1.1 to 1.5 if compared to the 32-bit platform.

If you like Halo you should watch this video. Halo 3 promises to be an amazing looking game. I’m out of the country when it releases, but knowing my friends they’ll be ready for several coop replays by the time I get home again.

From digg.

I’m sure this is a bit monotone to a few readers, but these two commentaries speak much better to the issues than I can. The 2nd particularly points to a fundamental issue: the independent process of standardisation is being pushed aside by the politics of business.

I checked out OrangeHRM from the Sourceforge top ten list over the weekend and it looks quite useful.

Here is a quick review. Some of the functionality looks very useful.

The third major facility of OrangeHRM is a comprehensive leave management module. This provides entire workflow for an employee to request leave, with any number of approvers being able to review the request. Approved leave is recorded in a company calendar. At each stage, the appropriate people are notified of the status of the request and any actions he or she must take. This alone is of great benefit to many companies whether small or large saving both paper and time, as well as showing at a glance who will be away on any given day or week.

I use ipayroll to deal with most of the hassle of accounting for paye and doing payment batches, but the other side of organising when leave can be allocated over a couple branches can be a pita. Self-service might make this much easier.

It is painful reading the comments at Rod Drury > Open XML Crunch Time.

Robert O’Callahan has a useful comparison to the HTML standard.

Ignore the usually stupid naming call on both sides. Over and over, we have the same:

1. Business case – Many billion documents in the old format.
2. Business case – Cost to move away from Office
3. Technical case – What happens to innovation?

vs

1. Business case – The future is not dependent on the past in this situation.
2. Business case – Why should a ISO standard justify _your_ potential OOXML business model?
3. Techical case – What happened to making it work?

Some of it seems to be what hear about at global whaling conference.

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:

Useful list of CA software.

Standards New Zealand to run workshop on Office Open XML:

Standards New Zealand will facilitate a two day industry meeting to assess stakeholder views on the suitability of a document on Office Open XML for publication as an International Standard.

…

Standards New Zealand, as New Zealand’s national Standards body holds the responsibility to cast this vote on behalf of New Zealand.

‘The aim of the meeting is to assess and understand New Zealand stakeholder views to allow Standards New Zealand to make an informed vote on behalf of New Zealand. This meeting will be independently chaired by Ms Alison Holt, the New Zealand delegate to the international committee JTC1 SC7 Software Engineering’ said Grant Thomas, Chief Operating Officer, Standards New Zealand.
…

The meeting will be held over the 23 and 24 August 2007 in Wellington.

I will have to find out how to make a postal or email submission. We have maybe 10,000+ Openoffice documents. I’ve fixed OO documents with zip and emacs. Two official ISO office document standards, is asking for pain. Especially when it flavors one company, no matter how important they are. That HTML as an example, probably would have been no Web 2.0 if Microsoft had managed to fork HTML.

I’ve been working on getting Tribox with Asterisk and Freebpx working over the last couple weeks as well.

While reading SIP debug logs today I discovered that with Freebpx and maybe Asterisk in general the outbound context is important as well.