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, […]
Archives for May 2008
Spreadsheet file format performance
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 […]
Berry Good, Berry Bad
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 […]
Achieving the impossible
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 […]
Standards Words
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 […]