Nethazard.net

Finally I’m on my way to CONSOL. I missed the first day, but I hope I didn’t miss much. I’m a bit nervous because I don’t know my way around on south Mexico city, but I’ve been on worse situations.

The main thing that worries me is that I didn’t bring any laptop with me and I’ll need to review my slides.

Its the first time I attend this event, so I don’t know what to expect. All I can say is that I hope it will be at least as good as EnLi 2007 was.

Writing on the nokia n800 is still cumbersome. Hope I get used to it soon. Well, at least I’m still using Linux and free software…to a degree.

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I’ve been fighting a battle (one of many) about the use of free format files on private/public organizations. And I think I finally won this one.

The Casino Tampiqueño is a social club in my hometown Tampico. So they organize balls and carnivals and multiple events. Recently, they “discovered” email. So they started sending “spam” to all their members about their notices and future events.

The bad thing was not the “spam”. It was that they decided to attach all event or notice details on a file. And guess what file was that? OOXML .docx format. Not only I couldn’t open the file, but also every other Microsoft Office user that hasn’t updated (legally or not) to the most recent version. And for what I’ve seen, there’s a lot of people that haven’t.

So with every email I got, I sent two emails explaining that the file they sent couldn’t be opened by everyone and suggested the use of PDF or JPEG files (yes, I know jpegs of documents are not nice, but its a file extension everyone knows….and mp3s are not suitable).

Then I finally saw the problem affect a non free software or Linux user: my mom. She got one of those emails and tried to open it. Since she couldn’t see it she called me up to fix the problem. Then I explained what the issue was about using proprietary formats on files (without detailing the OOXML vs ODF politics) just the essential stuff, and then told her to write back to the club explaining what I just told her. So she did.

And I haven’t confirmed if our emails did any change. But this past two weeks I’ve been getting new “spam” from the club with PDF and JPEG file attachments. Yay!

Well…its still spam, but now its spam I can view or throw away, without swearing and shouting about proprietary file formats.

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today, after a long period of hassling with my semi broken laptop I finally sent it to warranty service. I struggled for almost a year with my 5mins lasting battery and as if that was not annoying enough, the ac adaptor had a false contact. So basically charging the thing was a pain.

Today, after much thought and a trip to Texas, I finally left it for repairs. I just hope that the bestbuy geeksquad do a better job than last time, where I left it for a broken hard drive and ended up with an almost dead battery.

There’s been huge things going on lately, but I can’t type as fast as I’d like on the nokia n800 yet. Maybe this will be my computer for the next month or so until I get my laptop back.

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