May 2007

The Legend of the Rat Farmer

May 31, 2007

The Tale A long time ago in a land far away there once was a prosperous town called Hamelin. Everything was perfect in Hamelin until the year the rats came. The rats ate up the grain, bit the townsfolk in the toes and scared the young children. Something had to be done! So the Bürgermeister [...]

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Interoperability by Design

May 22, 2007

We’ve all heard the interoperability hype. Let’s see what is actually there. First, we start by looking at the many ways in which documents are integrated into the Windows/Office platform. Any fluent user of this platform will use many of these capabilities on daily basis. These are basic features which have been around, in some [...]

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The Funnel and the Wedge

May 18, 2007

The idea was prompted by a comment a reader submitted to a recent post, where he talked about one of the challenges of trying to bridge two different formats (in this case ODF and OOXML) via translation: Both formats must evolve their new versions simultaneously in locksteps… This one is the killer. Trying to have [...]

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So where are all the OOXML documents?

May 10, 2007

Google has a nice feature that allows you to search for documents that match a given file type. This is done by adding “filetype:NNN” to your query, where NNN corresponds to the file type. This feature has supported the ODF and OOXML document formats for at least two months, when I first noticed it. I’ve [...]

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