Nethazard.net

Just finished publishing ACM Crossroads issue 14.4 online.

This speed of publishing is thanks to Emacs. I use tramp mode to edit and fix files remotely on the ACM servers via ssh. Tidy with html-mode to validate and fix all markup so that the files are XHTML 1.1 Strict. Dired mode to rename, move, copy files, and image mode to check if images are correct.

I wonder if I can edit images (like crop, resize, convert to jpeg, compress) in Emacs. I know you can edit videos, so images can’t be more difficult.

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Finally I’ve got myself around my online editor tasks and published issues 14.2 and 14.3 online of the ACM Crossroads magazine.

Also there’s a new digital version of issue 14.3.

Also published the latest twexter code at http://test.twext.com. Its now a very usable prototype. Soon automatic translations will be available. THEN it will get very interesting.

Its been a very busy sunday.

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Its been a long day but it has finally come to and end. It all started with a lot of javascript hacking for HoraDeComer.com. It was getting tough but I finally beat it.

But the javascript adventure wasn’t over yet. Duke Crawford came to visit for a couple of days, so we started hacking on the twexter interface. Nice to say we managed to rewrite the whole interface to take a simpler approach. Its a pity we can’t continue with the interface we had before, thanx to some browser bugs, but since we need some more things going, we cant hold out for perfectionism. This way, we’ll soon be happy to announce a version 0.4

I’ve been using twitter lately and still don’t find its awesomeness. Although its entertaining to post my twitts every now and then. Feels reflexive and relaxing some how.

FLISOL is only a week away and I hope I can make it there. Also, Ubuntu Hardy is coming out soon.

A lot is going on and I’m about to go to sleep. Yes, a long day indeed, but a nice day after all.

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I tried to resist the twitter thing, but I just kept hearing about it and my curiosity won. I’m now on twitter: http://twitter.com/gabrielsaldana.

I don’t know much about how it works or why it’s cool, so any tips are appreciated.

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Contrary to what Miguel de Icaza believes about the ISO approval of OOXML as an office document format standard, this is nothing but a big loss for the free software and open source communities.

Yes, the whole OOXML approval process broguth Microsoft to a somewhat “open” direction. But the truth is that there’s nothing open about it. If it was, the development and changes of the new OOXML specifications should’ve been a public process. But no one really knew how the new OOXML proposal would be until its final publication.

But first of all, why do we need another office file format when ODF is already an ISO standard? If Microsoft is in fact moving to an open direction, why doesn’t it adopt ODF and contribute to it, instead of developing a rival or competing “open” standard? There’s already a lot of ODF implementations, and none OOXML implementations other than Microsoft’s own MS Office. So supporting ODF sounds to me like a be a better open direction, and no, a translator between these formats is not contributing to an open standard.

Microsoft pledged that it would modify future versions of Office to conform to the ISO standard. But what will happen with the current existing Office format? Ohh, that won’t be supported? Microsoft is well known for not keeping their promises and tweak the facts on their favor.

All I see from Miguel is a lot of praising about OOXML as a “superb” format, but I don’t see any code. Gnumeric still doesn’t have full support of OOXML. And if its so easy to read the whole 6,000 pages of the whole specification, plus the the specifications to the old binary formats to clarify the binary blob implementations and actually do the implementation code, then why is it not there already? I guess reading the 600 page specification for ODF is far more complicated.

What OOXML will bring as an ISO standard is confusion, market fragmentation and more life to the monopoly of Microsoft over corporate/office computing.

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