August 2006

A Tale of Two Formats

August 22, 2006

As he stood staring at them, they asked him no questions, for his face told them everything. ‘I cannot find it,’ said he, ‘and I must have it. Where is it?’ His head and throat were bare, and, as he spoke with a helpless look straying all around, he took his coat off, and let [...]

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The 96.97 percent problem

August 21, 2006

The press release puts out numbers of awesome import. We finally have the answers we seek, the science of web analytics and super-duper tools has laid all doubts to rest: Amsterdam – August 14 2006 – OneStat.com, the number one provider of real-time intelligence web analytics, today reported that Microsoft’s Windows dominates the operating system [...]

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Four Shorts

August 21, 2006

I. OpenOffice.org Conference (OOOoCon 2006) in comming up, September 11-13th in Lyon, France. The last day starts with a panel discussion of ODF topics, and follows with a track dedicated to ODF. I’m on at 14:00 with a presentation with the exciting title, “A Technical Comparison: ISO/IEC 26300 vs Microsoft Office Open XML (Ecma International [...]

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A Demo: Mathematica, MathML and ODF

August 20, 2006

Here’s a short tutorial on exchanging MathML between Mathematica and OpenOffice, showing what is possible today, and offering some suggestions for closer integration. First, start with a new ODF document in OpenOffice. It is often easier to modify an existing document, inheriting its structure and default styles, than to create a new document from scratch. [...]

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Math You Can’t Use

August 6, 2006

Summary: In this post I will look at MathML, a web standard for displaying mathematical equations. I will show how well established it is on the web, how it is integrated into ODF, and how Microsoft has decided to go off in another direction with OMML, another “stealth” standard hidden in their 4,000 page Office [...]

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Follow the Leader

August 3, 2006

David Wheeler, the chair of the OASIS ODF Formula Subcommittee has a good status update on our work defining the details of the expression language and supporting functions used in spreadsheet formulas. I’d also like to point out some cool work by Daniel Carrera, who put together some code that post-processes the OpenFormula specification (in [...]

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