March 2009

Project BudBurst

March 29, 2009

The crocuses have bloomed here in Westford, one of first four flowers of my spring garden, the others being Galanthus nivalis (Snowdrops), Iris reticulata (dwarf Iris) and Eranthis hyemalis (Winter Aconite). But the crocuses are the most noticeable, since I have naturalized them in small drifts over the lawn. For a few years I’ve been [...]

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Taking Control of Your Documents

March 24, 2009

How to free yourself from Microsoft Office dependency in three easy steps The Objective When you save a document in your word processor, your work is encoded in a particular file format. You often have a choice of formats that you can use, with names like DOC, DOCX, RTF, WPD or ODT. Your choice of [...]

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Introducing Planet ODF

March 23, 2009

I have an early Document Freedom Day present for you. Planet ODF is a feed aggregator based on Sam Ruby’s Planet Venus, which itself is a refactoring of Planet 2.0. Planet ODF aggregates several blogs, news sources, discussion forums and other online services related to ODF. I’ve tried to be semi-intelligent so you don’t get [...]

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From the Statute of Frauds to WYSIWYS: Document Format Implications

March 4, 2009

I’d like explore the topic of electronic documents, digital signatures, and what properties are required of them them to be considered accurate and reliable written records. Since this is as much a social question as it is a technical one, we’ll start with some history. “An Act for prevention of Frauds and Perjuryes” 29 Carol. [...]

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Low-Fat ODF

March 3, 2009

Jack Sprat could eat no fat.His wife could eat no lean.And so betwixt them both, you see,They licked the platter clean! Is dietary fat good? Or is it bad? Without getting into a discussion of saturated versus unsaturated fats, or the virtues of omega-3 oils, let me make a few basic, reasonable observations: Individuals differ [...]

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ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability: Theory and Practice

March 1, 2009

This is a follow up to some work we did at the ODF Interoperability Workshop in Beijing last November. We had good participation there: IBM, Sun, Google, Novell and Redflag from the big vendor side, as well as a good number of users. It was a full-day workshop and we covered a number of topics. [...]

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