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Archives for 2010

U.S. Postage Stamps of 1960

2010/12/23 By Rob 5 Comments

It is that time of the year again when I look back at the commemorative postage stamps of 50-years ago.  This year we look at the stamps of 1960, a new decade.  Stamps issued then celebrated current events as well as 50th and 100th anniversaries.

I also have a similar review of stamps from 1959, 1958 and 1957.

First up is the “American Credo” series, each featuring a historical quote as selected 100 “distinguished Americans”.  Some of these quotes are just as radical now as they were then.  In fact, I think if you wore some of these on a T-shirt to the airport you would be detailed for questioning.

  • “Observe food faith and justice toward all nations”, George Washington in his Farewell Address.
  • “Fear to do ill, and you need fear nought else”, Ben Franklin in “Poor Richard’s Almanac”
  • “I have sworn… hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”, Thomas Jefferson in letter to Benjamin Rush.
  • “And this be our motto, in God is our trust”, Francis Scott Key, from the poem “Defense of Fort McHenry” (later to be the National Anthem)
  • “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves”, Abraham Lincoln in letter to H.L. Pearce.
  • “Give me liberty or give me death”, Speech given in Richmond on March 23, 1775

Observe good faith... (1960)

Fear to do ill... (1960)

I have sworn... (1960)

And this be our Motto (1960)

Those who Deny... (1960)

Give me Liberty... (1960)

Lord Baden-Powell founded the scouting movement in 1908, in England.  The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) was incorporated in 1910.  The 50th anniversary jubilee stamp was designed by the famous illustrator Norman Rockwell.  Rockwell had a long association with BSA, having started, at age 19,  painting covers for their magazine “Boy’s Life.  The USPS released a 100th anniversary stamp this in 2010, with a design by Craig Frazier.

50th Anniversary of Boy Scouts of America (1960)

The 1960 Winter Olympic Games were held in Squaw Valley, California, considered an unlikely host at the time the games were awarded to them.  These were the first Olympic games to have electronic data processing facilities, in this case provided by an IBM 305 RAMAC.

Commemoration of 1960 Winter Olympics

1959/1960 was the first UN-designated “International Year”, in that case dedicated by the General Assembly as “World Refugee Year” with the aim, “to focus interest on the refugee problem and encourage additional financial contributions from Governments, voluntary agencies and the general public for its solution”.

The design here was by Ervine Metzl.

The UN has dedicated 2011 to several causes, including “International Year of Forests”, “International Year of Chemistry”, “International Year for People of African Descent” and “World Veterinary Year”.

World Refugee Year (1960)

The Water Conservation stamp was part of a series that included Soil Conservation in 1959 and Range Conservation in 1961.

Water Conservation (1960)

The South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was formed in 1954, as a collective defense against communism in South-East Asia.  It never really had any power, managed to stay out of the Vietnam War, and was disbanded in 1977.

SEATO (1960)

The “American Woman” stamp does not appear to mark any specific event, contemporary or historical.  Typically the date of the first issue and the post office honored to have the first day of issue postmark bears some significance.  But this issue was first released June 2nd, 1960 in Washington, DC, a date and place (as far as I can determine) of no particular significance.  Remember, this was an active period of the Woman’s Rights movement in the U.S.  In 1958 Eisenhower asked Congress to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.  Eleanor Roosevelt opposed ERA and backed Adlai Stevenson against Kennedy in 1960.  In 1960 the FDA first approved the use of birth control bills.  So I take this stamp is serving a contemporary political, even propagandistic purpose, similar to Kennedy’s compromise “Commission on the Status of Women”, with Eleanor Roosevelt as Chairman.  We should consider also the Cold War and how women were portrayed in contemporary Soviet propaganda.

The American Woman (1960)

Hawaii became the 50th State on August 21st, 1959.  This obviously required an update to the Flag.  According to USC Title 4, Chapter 1, §2, “On the admission of a new State into the Union one star shall be added to the union of the flag; and such addition shall take effect on the fourth day of July then next succeeding such admission.”  Thousands of designs were submitted for the new flag. The winner was 17-year old Bob Heft, whose design was originally done for school project where it receive only a B- grade.

So the new Flag was made official July 4th, 1960, along with a commemorative stamp.

(I wonder if there were any First Day Covers of this issue, considering that post offices are not open on Federal holidays?)

50-Star US Flag (1960)

The Pony Express was a mail service from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California, around 1,900 miles.  For all its fame, even today, it was a relatively short-lived service, from April 3, 1860 to October 1861, interrupted by the Civil War and then made obsolete by the telegraph.  The centennial issue was designed by noted illustrator Harold von Schmidt.

Pony Express Centennial (1960)

The “Employ the Handicapped” issue commemorated the meeting of the 8th World Congress of the “International Society for the Welfare of Cripples” in New York City.  Over 3,000 delegates attended.   This society was later renamed the “International Society for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled” and more recently to “Rehabilitation International”.

Employ the Handicapped (1960)

The Fifth World Forestry Congress was held in Seattle, Washington in 1960, with the theme of “Multiple Use of Forest and Associated Lands”.  You can see that in reflected in the stamp design, showing the five major uses: wood, water, forage, recreation, and wildlife.

5th World Forestry Congress (1960)

This was a join-issue, designed by Charles R. Chickering and Leon Helguera, with the same design used for a simultaneous Mexican issue.

150 Years Mexican Independence (1960)

In 1860 the Japanese sent their first diplomatic mission to the United States, leading to the ratification of the “Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation”.    I wonder how this commemoration was viewed in 1960, with the pain of WWII so much closer in the minds of contemporaries?

100 Years US-Japan Treaty (1960)

“Wheels of Freedom”, in conjunction with the 1960 National Automobile Show in Detroit.

Wheels of Freedom (1960)

We know this better today as the “Boys & Girls Clubs of America”.  The first Boys Club was formed in Hartford, Connecticut in 1860.

100 Years Boys' Clubs of America (1960)

This one was slightly controversial at the time.  The Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee which reviews and recommends proposals for stamp subjects initially rejected the proposal to issue a stamp to mark the new automatic mail sorting facility in Providence, calling it “self-serving”.  But the Postmaster General overruled their recommendation.  A few years, and one congressional hearing later, the prototype facility, called “Project Turnkey”, was declared a failure.  Of course,  look 50 years later, as we’ve honed delivery, both public mail service as well as private couriers, to a fine edge.  It just took some time.

First Automated Post Office (1960)

The Camp Fire Girls was founded in 1910 , the same year as Boy Scouts of America.  The Girl Scouts of America came about two years later, in 1912.  Even 100 years later, the rivalry continues unabated.

50 Years Camp Fire Girls (1960)

“Communications for Peace”.  Echo I was a passive communications satellite, meaning it merely acted as a reflector (a 100-foot Mylar balloon), bouncing signals back to earth.

Echo I, Communications for Peace (1960)

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Filed Under: Philately

Microsoft Office and ODF: Best Practices

2010/12/20 By Rob 13 Comments

I’ve received a few questions about how to read/write ODF documents from Microsoft Office.  I looked around and did not find a comprehensive Microsoft web page on this topic, so I’m putting together this page as a reference for best practices on how to use ODF with Office.

I intend to update this post as I find more information, so feel free to add a comment if you have a link to some additional material.

Depending on what version of Microsoft Office you are running you may have up to three different ways of working with ODF documents, either through native support in Office or through a third-party extension.  Your options are listed in the following table:

[table id=7 /]

A few notes on each option:

  • Native support for ODF 1.1 is available in Office 2010, and in Office 2007 once you install Service Pack 2 (SP2).   Using the Office Customization Tool, administrators can configure Office to default to ODF format for new documents.  Office will give you an warning message whenever you try to save a document in ODF format, but this can be disabled according to these instructions.  Some ODF features are either not available, or are implemented in a way that is not interoperable with other ODF editors like OpenOffice.org.  Examples include spreadsheet formulas and change tracking.  Microsoft has written up in detail what features are and are not supported when saving Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in ODF format.
  • Oracle’s ODF Plugin is available commercially, with support.  It is the only current option for those who require ODF 1.2 support.  It is also the only option that supports Office 2000.  An earlier version of this plugin, originally made available by Sun at no cost for individual use, is still available for download at Softpedia.
  • The ODF Add-in for Microsoft Office is an open source developed under Microsoft sponsorship by several smaller companies.

Unanswered questions:

  • Are there any head-to-head reviews of these three options, preferably one that looks at standards conformance and interop?
  • Are there any ODF options for Office 2008 or Office 2011 (Mac Office)?
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Filed Under: ODF

What is the Earliest (First) Christmas Carol?

2010/12/13 By Rob 17 Comments


(You should click the above time line to get a larger, more readable version).

Before we can answer the question of the first or earliest Christmas carol, we need to deal with some preliminary questions.  What is a carol?  What is a Christmas carol? And how does one determine a date for  Christmas carol?  None of these questions are trivial.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “carol” as “a ring-dance with accompaniment of song” or “a song; originally, that to which they danced” or “a song or hymn of religious joy”.  The later definition hits the mark most closely. However, we also have a large number of non-religious seasonal songs of similar joyous character, and I will include them as well.  But even then there are some little controversies to note:

  • Is “Jingle Bells” really a Christmas carol?  The best evidence is that the song was composed for Thanksgiving, not Christmas.
  • And what about “Do you hear what I hear?”  This was written in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.   If you read the lyrics with any care it becomes obvious that the imagery is about missiles not Christmas: “A star, a star, dancing in the night \ With a tail as big as a kite.”

However, both songs appear to have become seasonal standards, regardless of their original meaning, so who am I to argue to otherwise?

Dating carols is also tricky, especially since the tune and the lyrics often date from different times.  A great example is “What Child is This?” where the lyrics date to 1865, but the tune (Greensleeves) dates to the 16th Century.  Where such dates differ I take the later date, the date when the text and the tune were wedded.  In some cases the text might have been set to music multiple times, with different tunes in use in different countries.  “While Shepherds Watched their Flocks at Night” is a great example, set to numerous tunes from 1700 to 1903.  In such cases I have taken the date of the version most-familiar in the United States.

[amazon_link asins=’B000005IVR,B003DZPRNO,B00B48D892′ template=’ProductGrid’ store=’ananticdispos-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’048e3f30-0c57-11e9-930a-6bb2ccf60deb’]

The above time line shows the Christmas carols that I knew in my childhood.  Your core group of carols may differ from this, based on your age, country, language, ethnicity, religion, etc.  Although my horizons would widen as I grew older and went to school, so I can now recognize a broader set of international and ancient carols, from “In Dulci Jubilo” to “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen” to “Riu Riu Chiu,” the above set represents my “native” carols, the ones I knew as a child.  Everything beyond that I consider to be an import.

[amazon_link asins=’B00122FUTQ,B002WP3SGE’ template=’ProductGrid’ store=’ananticdispos-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’3ef78e92-0c57-11e9-980e-5d3e70aceb53′]

The oldest carol on this time line is, not surprisingly, “Adeste Fideles”, published in 1751, with a history that goes back even further.  I remember it being sung in church in my youth, with the words slightly modified, coming out with a loud, clear-throated “Adeste Fideles!” followed by a muted, “mumble, mumble mumble” until a fortissimo “in Bethlehem.”  Maybe it was different when Latin was still taught in schools.

[amazon_link asins=’B00123CXGS,B005CJTX6G’ template=’ProductGrid’ store=’ananticdispos-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’9713b514-0c57-11e9-a653-a580711a1f53′]

It is also notable, looking at the time line, that there was a “golden age” of carol writing, say 1840-1860.  We have hardly seen a prominent traditional church carol since then.  However, the 20th century has given us a large number of new secular standards and commercial holiday songs.

I’d be interested in hearing from other traditions and cultures:  What is the earliest holiday song that you commonly hear this time of year?  Something a mother might sing to a child, or a family or church sing together?

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Filed Under: Music

ODF TC Creates Advanced Document Collaboration Subcommittee

2010/12/05 By Rob 14 Comments

The OASIS ODF Technical Committee voted a couple of weeks ago to create a new subcommittee, on “Advanced Document Collaboration”.  Robin LaFontaine, from DeltaXML will chair the subcommittee.

Since the entire ODF TC is quite large now (almost 20 active members attend each meeting) it is impossible to do a technical “deep dive” on every topic in our meetings.  So when a particular specification domain requires sustained attention for a period of time, we can create a subcommittee, to allow interested TC members to study and draft specification enhancements.   We’ve done this several times before.  For example,  the Accessibility SC  developed the accessibility enhancements for ODF 1.1.  And the Formula and Metadata subcommittees drafted those key parts of ODF 1.2.  I hope that this new SC will be equally successful in their work.

So what is “Advanced Document Collaboration”?  A key part of this will be enhancing change tracking in ODF.  I’ve been looking at how existing applications implement change tracking and I’m not 100% satisfied.   And I don’t mean only ODF editors.  Even Microsoft Office using OOXML lacks full and complete change tracking support.  For example. Microsoft Word does not track changes that occur in an OLE object. And change tracking in PowerPoint is entirely absent.  And starting in ODF 1.2 we  have an additional RDF metadata layer in documents and we need to consider how change tracking deals with this.   So there is a good opportunity here for us to advance the state of the art.

We are fortunate that earlier this year the OpenDoc Society, with sponsorship from NLnet Foundation. commissioned a proposal of a feature-complete change tracking specification from DeltaXML.  This draft has also been contributed to the ODF TC and has attracted some implementor interest, with prototyping work occurring both in KOffice and AbiWord.

While studying change tracking, I’m hoping the SC will be able to give some thought to how we might canonically represent an “editing change” artifact.  By this I mean a high level change which in the general case might be a correlated set of content, style and metadata changes which appears atomic the user, but which at the implementation level might touch several XML files in the ODF document.  This editing change artifact, aside from being necessary to represent change tracking, could also be quite useful in other problems, such as a runtime clipboard format, as a quantum of change in a real-time collaborative editor, or to represent the persistent form of a document selection, which itself is useful in contexts such as fine-grained digital signatures.  Not all of this happens overnight of course  But I’m hoping that the initial work on feature-complete change-tracking will give other benefits down the road.

The charter for the new Subcommittee follows.  If you are interested in these topics but are not already a member of OASIS, then I’d encourage you to join now, so you can “get in on the ground floor” with these exciting new discussions.

Statement of Purpose

Many ODF documents do not involve collaboration. They are created by a single user, edited by a single user, and then perhaps presented or shared with multiple users, or maybe even just converted to PDF for distribution.

However, collaboration-based document scenarios are also common, including review and comment, change tracking as well as emerging work in real-time collaborative editing, in-context document collaboration, persistence of structured document fragments, and so on.

In order to bring together technical experts in these areas, and for them to evaluate trends, investigate opportunities and draft enhancements to ODF in these areas, we are proposing a dedicated subcommittee for this topic.

The initial and highest priority for the Subcommittee will be change tracking. Reliable and user-friendly revision management is critical for professional document workflows in corporate and public sector environments, and as such an important feature of Open Document Format.

The SC is asked to prepare a draft specification of a markup vocabulary that can accurately describe any incremental change to the content and structure of documents – typically made in multiple editing sessions by different authors.

Deliverables

  1. A draft specification for change tracking, including Relax NG schema
  2. A description on how to apply change tracking markup to the various
    versions of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as a host format.
  3. A set of test documents that will allow implementers to validate their
    change tracking implementations.
  4. A document that describes in detail how the existing change tracking
    mechanism in ODF can be converted to the new markup.
  5. Other proposals, draft specifications and in-scope work related to the subcommittee’s Purpose.
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Filed Under: ODF

Invitation: Join the “openstandards” sub-reddit

2010/11/10 By Rob 4 Comments

For a couple of years I’ve been trying to find a good way to share and discuss news, articles, blog posts, etc., about open standards. I’m not very pleased with the results.

I’ve tried putting out weekly links of relevant articles on my blog.  Although this is semi-automated, it is severely limited, since only has links that I know about.  But I know that my readers, collectively, know far more.

I’ve tried a “planet” aggregator of stories related to ODF, from blogs, new articles and Twitter.  However, the signal/noise ratio for Planet ODF is rather low.  There are limits to what can be easily collected by regular expression searches, and “ODF” is a particular hard one, since along with meaning Open Document Format, it also means Organ Donation Foundation, Oregon Department of Forestry, Open Defecation Free, and Ordem da Fénix (the name of a Harry Potter novel, in Portuguese).  I’ve supplemented the logic with custom rules to, for example, reject content that mentioned both ODF and “brush fires”, but that is a fragile approach.  Short of applying Bayesian learning techniques or NLP, I don’t think this dog will hunt.

Now, I suppose I could just give up and go over to TalkStandards.com and be instructed on open standards by the European counsel for the Business Software Alliance and read commentary by other members of the Microsoft claque.  But if you know me, you know that won’t happen.

So, I’m trying something new, a “sub-reddit” dedicated to sharing and discussing links related to open standards.  This includes areas touching on open standards from the policy, adoption, economic and legal angles, as well as news reports, technical discussions, etc.

http://www.reddit.com/r/openstandards/

I assume most of you are familiar with reddit.  It is a social-bookmarking service where you share links and can have a threaded discussion for each link as well as vote each link up or down.  Anyone can post links.  Anyone can vote links up or down.  Anyone can comment on links.  With sufficient participation the most interesting links and discussions rise to the top.  However, if you are new to reddit, I’d recommend that you:

  1. Go to the reddit page and register for a free account.
  2. Go to the openstandards sub-reddit and click the “+frontpage” link to add this sub-reddit to your reddit front page.
  3. Install a bookmarklet to make it easier to submit new links.

So please take a look and share a few of your favorite links.  They could be new stories or old favorites that you think are worth another look.  These could be your own original content or links to good content from elsewhere.  I’ve seeded it with a few articles that have caught my eye in recent days.  I’m hoping this approach will give us something with a higher signal/noise ratio that is also more timely, open and interactive.  Enjoy!

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Filed Under: Standards

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