There is a petition against OOXML becoming an ISO standard here. Besides the fact that there already is an ISO document standard, ODF, a real standard is easy to implement and naturally has a variety of implementations. But there is no working implementation of OOXML and unlikely to be any produced by anyone other than […]
Subversion is a great command line utility waiting for decent GUI. While the GUI’s supplanting the command line represents the triumph of the Image over the Word, the GUI has its place—even in text editing. With respect to subversion, there’s cognitive utility in being able to visualize the structure of your repository or working copy. […]
Based on GNU Emacs 22.1, Aquamacs has just released version 1.0 after two years of development. Intrigued by Emacs but want a text editor that intetegrates well with Mac OS X GUI, Aquamacs may be for you.
BadBunny is a multi-platform worm affecting Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X spread by an OpenOffice Draw document, “badbunny.odg”. When opened, it displays an image of a man in a bunny suit having sex and launches mIRC on Windows or XChat on Linux or OS X to forward itself to IRC users.
This highlights the security […]
Nature has announced that it cannot accept OOXML documents:
We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature’s own editing and typesetting programs.
And so has Science:
Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent […]
Upgrading WordPress awhile back required me to restructure my directory. Most of the links were fixed, but Juan kindly observed that the link to the Soylent Green Theme was broken. For some reason, the original theme is lost (if only I had moved ~/Libray/Application Support/TextMate into subversion earlier). But an updated version can be downloaded […]
Not Weapons of Mass Destruction, nor even Word and the North Korean Missile Crisis, but Wysiwym MarkDown editor.
As discussed in a previous post Mardown is an edge case of markup. A marked-up document contains:
text information about that text
A markup language determines:
what markup is allowed what markup is required how the markup is explicitly distinguished from the text what the […]
OpenOffice.org has just released an Aqua version of OpenOffice. It is Alpha software with the following grim warning:
WARNING: THIS SOFTWARE MAY CRASH AND MAY DESTROY YOUR DATA DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE FOR REAL WORK IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT
Download it here…if you dare. Or if you need a more reliable port, try NeoOffice. […]
In looking for an emacs logo for the previous post (which I didn’t use since all of them suck) I ran accross the following from Does Not Compute. I hate this fucking meme, but I almost pissed myself laughing when I saw this.
Emacs, Richard Stallman’s venerable text editor, has just been updated for the first time in six years! For those unfamiliar with emacs, here is Neil Stephenson from In the Beginning was the Command Line:
I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough […]
The Blogosphere reacts to Linus Torvald’s talk on git, notably here, here, and here.
Two features of the distributed model appeal to me:
The ability to make offline commits Better control over merges
BTW branching and merging is not just for source code. Consider the following case. You have a draft and you want to experiment with a different […]
Hal Licino has put a Mac Plus and and AMD DualCore in a head to head speed test of common tasks using office applications. The results were dramatic:
Due to bloated code that has to incorporate hundreds of functions that average users don’t even know exist, let alone ever utilize, the software companies have […]
In an ealier post I wrote about the power of plain text…and its perils. One of the perils of plain text, at least for a writer, is that it is unformatted. Formatting, however, is not merely aesthetic; it carries semantic significance—which can be crucial, especially with complex documents. The way to avoid this particular peril […]
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