An Antic Disposition

I'm back from Barcelona despite Delta's best efforts to trap me at JFK airport. No rain, no snow, no sleet, no security alert, no strike. Nothing. But somehow Delta managed to turn a scheduled 40 minute flight to Boston into a 3 hour delay to board plus another 2.5 hours sitting on the runway waiting to take off. So instead of arriving at 18:00, we didn't arrive in Boston until 23:30.

It is interesting to look at FlightStats.com to see how they rate this particular flight. It says that DL 480 has an on-time percentage of 30%, and is excessively late 52% of the time. The average delay for this flight is 79 minutes.

I just don't get it. It is one thing to be slow. But why can't you be slow and still be accurate in your estimates? If you are going to be 79 minutes late on average, then why don't you adjust your schedules accordingly?

In any case, the conference in Barcelona was great! This was my 2nd year attending OOoCon. Last year, in Lyon, I attended OOoCon as an outsider. I remember then being asked by several attendees why IBM was not contributing code to the community and thinking to myself how much it sucked that we were not doing so. What a difference a year makes! Now the discussion is not if IBM will contribute, but the logistics of exactly when and how we will make our contributions. I was proud to attend the Barcelona conference as a real OpenOffice.org member, and I can tell you that the beer tastes better when you are a member of the community.

I gave a presentation called "ODF Interoperability: The Price of Success" on Wednesday. The slides should be posted up here within a few days. A video of the presentation is here. Your best bet is to wait for the slides and follow along with my audio.

On Thursday I lead a full-day workshop on ODF interoperability on behalf of the OASIS ODF Adoption TC. We had participants from a number of ODF vendors/projects: IBM, Sun, Google, Novell, SEPT-Solutions, Haansoft, OpenOffice.org and KOffice. We worked through a few exercises where we tested the exchange of documents that reflected a number of typical real-world business cases. Although they did not attend, we also did some tests with the Clever Age Word Add-in. This event was the first of hopefully several workshops where we will attempt to bring the vendors together in a focused effort to improve ODF interoperability.

There were many good conference sessions that I wanted to attend but missed. That is the downside of having a full day workshop. Of the sessions I did see, the highlights were:

• Louis Suarez-Potts's opening keynote "OpenOffice.org 3.0 and Beyond"
• Hu Cai Yong's impassioned "Beyond Technology, the Chinese Roadmap" on the subtext of Western cultural imperialism embedded in some "one size fits all" commercial software application suites.
• Barbara Held's talk "Toward openness and accessibility" (video available here)

For the ones I missed, I need to go back and watch the taped sessions and read the presentations.

Overall, it was great to see old friends, and meet so many more for the first time, including some with whom I have corresponded with at length, but never before had met in person.

I didn't have much time to play a tourist, so I'll give you only two pictures. The first I've taken from the Ars Aperta website, a picture of Charles Schulz and I exchanging funny stories at the Mac Porting party:



And in the "Maybe My Youth Was Not Misspent" Department comes this picture of a decorative "column" outside the building where I gave my presentation on Wednesday. The building hosts the University of Barcelona's philology department. I immediately recognized the text as Homer and snapped this photo. The next day I was passing when two students were trying to read it. I stopped, and stood, with arms dramatically outstretched, and in my best Greek dactylic hexameter, recited from memory the Invocation to the Muse that begins the Iliad. So, thank you Professor Higbie, wherever you are, for making us memorize Homer. It actually came in use!

Labels: ODF, OpenOffice

Via CrunchGear, MacWorld UK, and APC Magazine -- Mac Office users seem to have no way of reading the new OOXML files which Office 2007 for Windows writes by default. APC quotes a Microsoft Mac Business Unit spokeperson as saying, "Unfortunately it is still to early for us to say when the converters will be available".

Whoops.

As a public service I note two alternatives: the Mac port in OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice.

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9 December 2006 Update: Interesting analysis from from Andrew Shebanow over at Shebanation: How adding OOXML support to the Mac is likely 150 person-year effort. And Mary Jo Foley's Unblinking Eye points out that the problem is not just with the Mac support. Windows Mobile 5.0 will lack OOXML support until mid-2007.

Is it just me, or does this seem like something less than a coordinated roll-out? The clean, hassle-free way of doing this, with the least suffering for users and admins, would have been like this: Ship Office 2007 with OOXML support, but not as the default. Then over the next year get the rest of the Office ecosystem working with OOXML: the Mac, Mobile, Sharepoint, Excel Live, etc. Get all of the support out there, but don't force it on people yet as a default. When all the pieces are ready then, via a service pack or version upgrade, change the defaults. Everything goes smoothly from there.

The fact that they didn't follow this roll-out model suggests that someone at Microsoft really, really, really wanted to get OOXML out fast, even if it wasn't pretty.

Luckily admins do have the ability to perform a more orderly roll-out in their organizations if they wish. The default format for Office applications can be changed via a registry entry. For example, for Excel the registry entry is:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Options\DefaultFormat

By default it isn't there, but you can create an entry of type REG_DWORD and assign it the value of 56 (38 hexadecimal). Once you've made that change, Excel documents will be saved in the legacy binary formats by default. Similar registry settings for Word and PowerPoint are:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options\DefaultFormat

create REG_SZ with value of "Doc"

and

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\PowerPoint\Options\DefaultFormat

create REG_DWORD with value of 0

It should be trivial for someone with a Windows compiler to create a simple application to accomplish this same task. Ideally it would also allow the default to be changed to any other format of the admin's choice, including turning it back to OOXML if/when admins desire to deploy that way, or changing it to ODF when a good Plugin is available.

10 December 2006 Update: My attention has been drawn to an earlier post from a lead in Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, where the removal of support for Visual Basic macros is discussed. Damn, that's cold. Ever get the feeling you've been marked for extermination?

17 May 2007 Update: From News.com "Microsoft delays Office convertors for Mac" and some great follow-up analysis by Andrew Shebanow over at Shebanation.

30 May 2007 Update: More analysis and commentary on this ongoing issue from Joe Wilcox over at Microsoft Watch:

Meanwhile, Microsoft makes big noise about interoperability. What kind of example does Microsoft set when the formats for its Mac and Windows Office suites aren't interoperable? Irreconcilable is the position of increased Microsoft-and-other platform interoperability and the decreased interoperability between Office file formats across two platforms.

Labels: Mac, OOXML, OpenOffice

I've updated the blog to use Google's new “beta” Blogger software. I haven't noticed any glitches, but please let me know if anything seems broken. They've updated their feed to support Atom 1.0 which is great. Previously they served up Atom 0.3 which I then updated to 1.0 via this mechanism.

Also, the new Blogger has added item tagging support via the Rel-Tag microformat. (Blogger calls them “Labels”). I had been using Technorati tags for this purpose, but the integrated UI in the new Blogger is worth the work of switching over, so you may notice a little churn in old entries as I convert.

As you probably have heard, OpenDocument Format (ODF) has been official published by ISO as ISO/IEC 26300:2006, as you can see here. This is the culmination of almost four years of effort by the OASIS TC. Also note that ISO/IEC JTC/SC34 had a ballot last July to request that JTC1 make the final ISO version of ODF freely available for download at no charge. Until that happens, you can purchase an ISO version from the ISO web site, or download an OASIS version at the OASIS ODF TC's web site. The content should be identical. Eventually the ISO version should be downloadable for free as well.

Another member of the ODF community has started up a blog. Florian Reuter, an ODF TC member who recently joined Novell, discusses some suggested enhancements for ODF 1.2.

Finally, OpenOffice.org has announced the winners of their Template/Clipart Contest. The templates of course are in ODF format, so this is a good illustration of the richness and capabilities of the format. Linux.com has the details.

Labels: Blogging, ISO, ODF, OpenOffice

I have a backlog of shorter items that I've accumulated in recent weeks that I'd like to share with you. I hope you find something here interesting.

First, congratulations to OpenOffice.org and KOffice, who both recently announced new releases. In my mind the notable features include an improved extensions framework in OpenOffice 2.04 and leading MathML conformance scores and command-line (UI-less) scripting for KOffice 1.6. Combined with the recent release of Firefox 2.0, it feels like Christmas has come early this year!

I get the feeling that there are more good things to come. Eike Rathke blogs about order of magnitude performance improvements in load time for large spreadsheets, a fix targeted for OpenOffice.org 2.1.

Some emerging technology at Adobe, a project codenamed “Mars”, which appears to be a reformulation of PDF, based on open standards such as SVG, PNG, JPG, JPG2000, OpenType, XPath and XML, all sitting in a Zip container file. There is a voice in my head saying, “This is important”. For example, could we have a single container file that included both ODF editable content as well as Mars/PDF for high-fidelity presentation? That way you can hand a document to someone and they can either view/edit it in a full heavy-weight editor, or get a fast high-fidelity read-only rendering. Both modes of use from the same file. To make this, and other cool things happen, Mars and ODF will want to synch-up on things like packaging, manifests and metadata. Adobe, call me ;-)

Two new ODF whitepapers to note. J. David Eisenberg looks at ODF and XForms and how they work together in OpenOffice.org, using a wrestling club application form as an example. Of course, source code is included. “Opportunities for innovation with OpenDocument Format XML” is the title of a new IBM whitepaper also just posted.

A couple weeks ago I participated in a roundtable discussion on ODF at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, held by the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue forum. You've probably already read Jame's Love's post on it on The Huffington Post. If not, take a look. Since I tend to spend my days with two kinds of people, the technical and the very technical, it was good to get out and hear a different perspective on the issues.

A familiar face at the Berkman Center was Sam Hiser, who has a new post, at once both visceral and witty, called “Pretending Interoperability”.

Finally, in order to increase the signal-to-noise ratio in this blog, I've instituted a new comment policy. Those comments which are outside of the prescribed bounds will not be published.

Labels: KOffice, ODF, OpenOffice