Popular Posts

The Recipe for Open Standards (and Why ISO Can’t Cook)

September 9, 2010

Recipe First some definitions.  Let’s define an “open standard” as one that is:  1) freely available, 2) developed in an open process and 3) freely implementable, e.g., is royalty free.  Clearly there are interests out there that attempt to soften these criteria, but that only demonstrates the competitive power presented by truly open standards.  We [...]

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How to Crush Dissent

August 15, 2010

While in Berlin for the LinuxTag 2010 conference a couple of months ago, I took the opportunity for a 8-mile long meandering walk across the city, from Warschauer Strasse and the East Side Gallery to Wittenbergplatz and KaDeWe, taking in the various historical sites along the way.  It was a great refresher course in 20th [...]

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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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Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability

May 3, 2009

[2009/05/07 -- I've posted a follow up article on this topic which you may want to read] A couple of months ago I did some experiments on the interoperability of ODF spreadsheets, the theory and practice. In that earlier post I looked at the then current ODF implementations, including: OpenOffice.org 2.4 Google Spreadsheets KOffice KSpread [...]

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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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The Disharmony of OOXML

March 14, 2008

I sometimes hear it said that formats like OOXML, or ODF for that matter, are simply XML serializations of a particular application’s native data representation. This is said, seemingly, in an attempt to justify quirky or outright infelicitous representations. “We had no choice. Office 95 represents line widths in units of 1/5th of a barleycorn, [...]

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The Right and Lawful Rood

December 13, 2007

So what do we have here? Sixteen men, lined up. They seem to be having a good time. Some are older, some younger. A historian of fashion might be able to tell us their relative social status, and perhaps their trade, by looking at their clothing. In the background, three men are observing and comparing [...]

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Cracks in the Foundation

October 7, 2007

You must admire their tenacity. Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser, and Paul E. Merrell (aka “Marbux”) . The mythology of Silicon Valley is filled with stories of three guys and a garage founding great enterprises. And here we have three guys, and through blogs, interviews, and constant attendance at conferences, they have become some of the [...]

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The Formula for Failure

July 9, 2007

It has been a boast for around around 6 months now. Microsoft’s OOXML fully defines spreadsheet formulas, and ODF doesn’t. The Microsoft boosters have been parroting the party line for quite some time. Miguel de Icaza gleefully noted back in January: OOXML devotes 324 pages of the standard to document the formulas and functions. The [...]

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An ODF/OOXML File Format Timeline

June 24, 2007

I suppose the downside of a blog post containing only a picture is that there is nothing for anyone to quote. So here are a few themes that struck me while putting this chart together: Microsoft once made file format information on the binary formats readily available, in fact encouraged programmers to use the binary [...]

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