May 2008

Fractured YEARFRAC and Discounted DISC

May 19, 2008

There are a few things that a spreadsheet can get wrong. You can be hard to use. You can be ugly. You can be slow. You can even crash occasionally. These are all annoyances. With a monopoly, annoyances are a way of life. However, there is one place where a spreadsheet can never be wrong, [...]

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Spreadsheet file format performance

May 13, 2008

I’ve been doing some performance timings of file format support, comparing MS Office and OpenOffice. Most of the results are as expected, but some are surprising, and one in particular is quite disappointing. But first, a little details of my setup. All timings, done by stopwatch, were from Office 2003 and OpenOffice 2.4.0 running on [...]

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Berry Good, Berry Bad

May 8, 2008

It has been an interesting Spring here in Westford, weather-wise. April dipped below freezing on the 3rd, 8th, 9th, 15th and 16th. Then we got a warm spell, a week of days that reached 75 °F (23 °C) and even one day that reached 87.4 °F (30.8 °C) (April 23rd). Then it struck, on May [...]

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Achieving the impossible

May 7, 2008

Unadulterated copy of James Clark’s Relax NG validator jing. Unadulterated copy of Kohsuke Kawaguchi’s Sun Multi-Schema Validator msv. Unadulterated copy of the ODF 1.0 Relax NG schema. Unadulterated copy of the ODF 1.0 Standard, in ODF format. No errors from either validator. msv is so good as to tell us “the document is valid”. But [...]

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Standards Words

May 6, 2008

Introduction There are several words, more widely used than understood, that recur frequently when discussing standards. Specification and standardization requires us precisely to describe technology in such a way that practitioners in that field can achieve the goals set out in the standard. But this precision is only perfectly intelligible to those who share the [...]

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The Challenge

May 5, 2008

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <office:document-content xmlns:office=”urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:office:1.0″ xmlns:text=”urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:text:1.0″ office:version=”1.0″> <office:body> <office:text> <text:p>Dear Alex Brown. Please prove that I am invalid ODF 1.0 (ISO 26300:2006). I do not think that I am. In fact I think that your statement that there are no valid ISO ODF documents in the world, and that there cannot be, is a brash, [...]

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Release the OOXML final DIS text now !

May 4, 2008

The JTC1 Directives [pdf] are quite clear on this point. After a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM), if the text is approved, the edited, final version of the text is to be distributed to NB’s within 1 month. This requirement is in the Fast Track part of JTC1 Directives, specifically in 13.12: 13.12 The time period [...]

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ODF Validation for Dummies

May 2, 2008

[Updated 4 May 2008, with additional rebuttal at the end] Alex Brown has a problem. He can’t figure out how to validate ODF documents. Unfortunately, when he couldn’t figure it out, he didn’t ask the OASIS ODF TC for help, which would have been the normal thing to do. Indeed, the ODF TC passed a [...]

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