February 2010

Doing the Microsoft Shuffle: Algorithm Fail in Browser Ballot

February 27, 2010

March 6th Update:  Microsoft appears to have updated the www.browserchoice.eu website and corrected the error I describe in this post.  More details on the fix can be found in The New & Improved Microsoft Shuffle.  However, I think you will still find the following analysis interesting. -Rob Introduction The story first hit in last week [...]

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How to photograph an asteroid

February 22, 2010

Over the years, I’ve seen Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with my naked eyes.  And I’ve seen Uranus and Neptune through a telescope.  But I’ve never seen an asteroid until last night, when I photographed the 2nd largest minor planet, Vesta. Vesta is currently near opposition, meaning as seen from the Earth, Vesta and [...]

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Weekly Links #3

February 20, 2010

Danish Open Source Vendors declares victory in open standards war “The mood at this year’s general meeting was joyous. In late January 2010, OSL could declare victory in maybe the most important and hard fought battle that OSL has been part of since its formation. On 29 January 2010 the Danish Parliament (Folketinget) decided unanimously [...]

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Microsoft Office document corruption: Testing the OOXML claims

February 15, 2010

Summary In this post I take a look at Microsoft’s claims for robust data recovery with their Office Open XML (OOXML) file format.  I show the results of an experiment, where I introduce random errors into documents and observe whether word processors can recover from these errors.  Based on these result, I estimate data recovery [...]

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Weekly Links #2

February 13, 2010

Q&A: IBM’s Alistair Rennie on the big picture for Lotus | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com “Ultimately, new types of documents are possible. I don’t see my kids creating content 5 to 10 years from now going into a dumb text editor and doing a presentation. I see them using rich media and aggregating small [...]

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Weekly Links #1

February 6, 2010

Advogato: Proprietary File Formats conflict with Equal Opportunities tags:  standards Bob Sutor: What would ODF support for WordPress look like? tags: ODF Lotus Solutions Development Lab: Lab 04: ODFDOM: Generating ODF Documents from a Notes Agent tags: ODF, Notes Gwennel – A WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM editor “Gwennel is a free WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM editor for [...]

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