geekroom

OpenOffice.org recently released its 1.1 version. In the past, ooo has been funcitonal but clunky, so even though I’ve wanted to like it, I’ve usually ended up using Word on MS or Abiword on linux. The latest ooo release has won me over. The interface is slicker, the start time is drastically reduced, and it just feels a lot smoother. In short, it’s not clunky any more. The MS filters also seem to be much improved, and they were pretty good in the previous version. I feel very comfortable recommending that non-geek folks use this release as an MS Office replacement.

I’m even optimistic that the product will take significant market share away from MS, and if it doesn’t, it will be plain proof that MS’s dominance in the office apps world is a result of its monopoly. Free or $79 for the supported version vs. ~$500 for MS’s product is just too big of a difference to be justified by the very small difference in functionality.

Ooo also has a nifty export to pdf feature, which is quite handy for us, since we have had to buy acrobat for a lot of folks who like to create pdf versions of their word files. However, I’ve recently found another free (speech and beer) program called PDF Creator that provides the same print-to-pdf functionality that we’ve been buying Acrobat for. Even though it’s long been possible to create pdfs for free by printing to postscript and then using the free ghostscript tools to convert the postscript files to pdf, this process is way too burdensome to expect non-geek users to navigate it. PDF Creator uses ghostscript to provide the same ease of use of Acrobat without the difficult process.

Do this with vi.

Muahaha!

Of the past four or so machines on which I’ve installed Windows 2000, two have gotten infected by Welchia. My very first step after installing any Windows machine is obviously always to go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and install all the critical patches, as is Absolutely Necessary for anyone who installs a new Windows machine these days. But it takes a few minutes to download and install them, and in the meantime the machines get infected. That’s frustrating.

I just got us a new win2k install disk which has Service Pack 3, which should help considerably. When you’re installing win2k without any service packs, you have to jump all the way to SP4, which takes a considerable amount of time to install, especially on slower machines. And you need at least SP2 to be able to install the Blaster patch. But now I can install the SP3 version and go straight to windowsupdate for blaster and welchia patches before dealing with SP4 or IE or whatever.

Now I just need a good mnemonic for figuring out which patches are relevant from Windowsupdate, which is not exactly famous for providing detailed information on what the updates it suggests actually do. Typically it says something like “There is a security problem. People might be able to do stuff to your machine. This thing might possibly help. You might have to reboot after installing.” without ever mentioning any useful keywords like “Blaster” or “Welchia”. Arggh.

We had trouble getting a good audio feed for the webcast of the day 1 morning session of BloggerCon. I’m working on fixing the audio as well as it can be fixed, but some of it may be a loss. If anyone else recorded any of the day 1 morning sessions, please send in whatever audio you have. We might end up having to cobble together the best bits that various folks have collected.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to give a go at fixing the audio on the files we have, feel free:

• bloggercon_morning_1.rm
• bloggercon_morning_2.rm
• bloggercon_morning_3.rm

This morning I revisited the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) working group page, and found a request for comments on a standardized Digital Rights Expression Language:

“We invite you to submit comments and (especially) specific areas and scenarios that you feel a standardized DREL should support. Please submit your information in email form to juadams@scholastic.com or LTSC-DREL-COMMENTS@ieee.org“

To read more about the LTSC DREL working group follow this link.

Hey, check out our webcast!

 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggercon