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Fruits of the Season: Notes on my Berry Patch

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It was a good year for my berries. I have a 400 square-foot “berry patch”, half of it for the Fragaria genus (Strawberries, Alpine Strawberries, Musk Strawberries) and half for the Rubus genus (Raspberries, Blackberries, Thimbleberries and the various crosses such as the Tayberry and Loganberry).

The strawberry harvest in June went well in spite of the unusually persistent wet weather we had in May. I normally try to garden organically, but with that amount of moisture coming after bloom, the conditions for Botrytis (grey mold) were too good, so I had to spray a couple times with Captan. In the end we had far more berries than we could eat, so I was able to take 10 pounds of fresh berries and made a few gallons of wine. This is cellaring now, along with the raspberry mead I started last fall, and a gallon of an herbal wine (spearmint, pepermint and lemon balm in a 2:2:1 ratio). I’ve never made an herbal wine before and the ingredients were improvised based on what had a pleasing smell in the herb garden at the time. So there is a non-zero chance that I will end up with a gallon of homemade mint mouthwash.

I’ve been picking the raspberries for around a month now. I have the usual red varieties as well as some yellow and black. My wife refuses to sacrifice any of these to my wine making exploits this year. I will comply with her wishes, but I do hope to be rewarded with a pie in return for my benevolence.

Last year I started another bed, this dedicated to members of the Vaccinium genus (Highbush Blueberries, Wild Lowbush Blueberries, Bilberries, Cranberries, Lingonberries and Everygreen Huckleberries). These all share a common need for acidic soil, so it makes sense to group them together. Since this bed is only a year old, the fruiting was negligible.

I’d love also to plant some Ribes genus plants (Gooseberries, Currants) but these are illegal to grow in Massachusetts. This is an argicultural restriction put in place back in the 1920’s to prevent the spread of Pine Blister Rust, a serious and deadly disease of White Pines. The organism that causes Blister Rust does not spread directly from Pine tree to Pine tree but only via the intermediary of a Gooseberry or Currant plant where it completes part of its lifecycle. So when the government wanted to eliminate Blister Rust, they banned Ribes and so I have no Currants.

I also have various other berries and small fruit that don’t fall into the above categories, including:

  • A Medlar tree
  • A Pin Cherry tree (hope to make some wine from the fruit this year)
  • Grapes (American Vitis labrusca “Fox” grapes, like Concord, Mars and Remailly)
  • Serviceberry
  • Honeyberry (Lonicera Kamchatika — native to Siberia)
  • Elderberry

Some good sources of berry plants that I’ve used include Nourse Farms here in Massachusetts and Raintree Nursery in Washington state.

Good books for the home berry grower include:

For New England growers, a subscription to the UMass Berry Notes newsletter is a must. Although it is targetted to the commercial grower, most of the information is applicable to the home grower as well.

Lyon Summary

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I’m back from the OpenOffice.org conference in Lyon. Unfortunately, I was able to catch only the last 1.5 days of the conference, but from what I saw the sessions were informative, the hallway conversations illuminating, and the hospitality superb. I participated in a roundtable panel on “OpenDocument, Open Revolution” and gave a presentation later that day with the exciting title, “A Technical Comparison — ISO/IEC 26300 vs. Microsoft Office Open XML (Ecma International TC45 OOXML WD 1.3)”. The streaming media for these and other sessions are provided online by Kiberpipa.

I’d like to especially draw attention to John McCreesh’s “why.openoffice.org” talk. Usually my eyes glaze over at “marketing” talks. But even with jet lag and loss of a night’s sleep I found this to be an engaging and compelling statement of the OpenOffice.org value proposition.

A noteworthy item announced at the conference was the opening of an OpenDocument-focused web site at XML.org (http://opendocument.xml.org/). This is the “official community gathering place and information resource ” for the OASIS ODF TC and ODF Adoption TC, and is a great place to go with questions about ODF and browse the content there. I encourage you to make it a regulary visit in your browsing habit, or sign up for one of the feeds.

Next stop: OpenDocument Day at the KDE Akademy in Dublin next Tuesday. I’m going to give a lighting talk on “A Standard ODF Object Model”. I also plan to buttonhole everyone I see and try to convince them of the need for a unified effort to make an OpenDocument Developer Kit (ODDK).

Filed Under: ODF

The OOXML Compatibility Pack

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Just saw something worth noting. I was on a machine running Office XP and tried to open an Office Open XML (OOXML) formatted document. I don’t know why I tried that, but I did.

Word was smart enough to put up the following dialog:

Now, that is something I hadn’t seen before. I think we all knew that Microsoft was planning a compatibility pack for enabling OOXML on Office 2003 and Office XP. But my 2002 version of Windows XP knows about OOXML? I guess this wisdom must have come down in a previously downloaded Office patch.

In any case, if you click yes, you are directed to this page where you are offered a download of “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats (Beta 2)”. I had the pre-req’s, which included Windows XP SP2 and Office XP SP 3. So downloading a few file conversion filters should be simple and small, right?

Well, simple, but not so small. I was suprised to see that the convertors download was 43MB. That seems a bit large. In comparison, you can download a complete copy of OpenOffice.org, with included support for ODF documents and the Office binary formats, and the entire product is only a 93MB download. The 0.2 ODF Add-in for Word is only 1MB in size. So why does adding OOXML support to Office XP require a 43MB download?

In any case, once it is downloaded and installed, the integration with Office appears seemless. You can open OOXML files from the Windows Explorer by double-clicking on them, you can browse and load them as expected from the File Open dialog in Office, you can re-save files in OOXML format via the File Save, you can create a new document and save it as OOXML, you can even configure Word XP so the OOXML formats are the default format for all saved documents in Word. In fact, you can do all of those things that the Microsoft-supported ODF Add-in is not doing.

As reported earlier, the Microsoft support for ODF puts this ISO standard at a distinct disadvantage, providing no shell integration, removing it from its expected place in the File/Open and File/Save menus, and preventing users from making it the default format in Office.

So, let’s update the file format support matrix:

Criterion DOC Format in OpenOffice ODF Format in Word 2007 OOXML Format in Word XP
1. Format supported in default install Yes. No. Requires a download and install of separate, unsupported Add-in. No, but you are prompted to download a free converter pack the first time you attempt to open an OOXML file
2. File Open integration Yes. No. ODF is not listed in the default File Open dialog and doing a Control-O will not show ODF documents. However, ODF import is available in a separate menu item elsewhere in the menu system. Yes.
3. Save new document integration Yes. No. In fact no ODF save ability exists in the current version of the Add-in. There is a place holder for the ODF save operation, though it is on its own menu, and would not be shown when doing a simple Control-S to save a new document. Yes.
4. Can be made the default format Yes. No. Although other non-Microsoft formats, such as “Plain Text” can be made the default format, ODF cannot. Yes.
5. Simple round-tripping Yes. No. When an ODF document is loaded, its name is automatically changed and it is made read-only. So loading sampler.odt results in Word having a read-only version of sampler_tmp.docx. Attempting a simple Control-S to save will give an error. Yes.
6. Shell integration Yes. No. Yes.

I tip my hat to Microsoft for the way they have provided OOXML support in earlier versions of Office. Aside from the size of the download, the process was simple and the integration was seamless. That’s the way it should be. But what makes them think that customers using ODF format would want anything less than this? That fact that they’ve been able to integrate OOXML so well only increases the shame in having integrated ODF so poorly.

A quick look at the 0.2 ODF Add-in for Word

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An updated version of the Microsoft-sponsered ODF Add-in for Word has been posted. A few weeks ago I had tried out the earlier 0.1 version with results you can read here and here.

The Add-in’s Highlights page for the 0.2 version says that “This release is comprehensive with respect to Text, Formatting, Paragraphs, Images, Styles & document metadata scenarios”.

So, I gave it a try, installing it with Office 2007 beta 2 running on Windows XP. Here’s a summary of what I saw.

The UI integration I previously described and criticized remains unchanged. This will put ODF documents at a disadvantage not only compared to Word’s native format, but also compared to other export formats suported by Word such as RTF or even plain text. The only other format that will be ostracized from the File Open menu like this is PDF, and that seems to be because of legal squabbling with Adobe. But what did ODF users do to deserve this treatment?

I tested a conversion with my sampler.odt file. This is a one-page ODF document that uses a combination of essential word processor features. It is not intended to be an acid test. Unfortunately the 0.2 Add-in failed to load the document at all, hanging with the winword.exe process spinning at 100% CPU. So there appears to be some sort of infinite looping going on.

I tried a few variations of this sample.odt document, removing page elements until I could get it to load without hanging. It appears that the image with the caption may be the source of the problem. I’ve reported this defect to the project’s bug tracker and will try again when I hear that it is fixed.

Happy Labor Day

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Labor Day Stamp

Here you have Scott #1082, with a first day issue of exactly 50 years ago, September 3rd, 1956. The design is by Victor S. McCloskey, Jr. of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing based on a a small portion of a much larger mosaic, “Labor is Life” (also shown below) by the American artist Lumen Martin Winter. This mosaic was unveiled in 1956 by President Eisenhower at the the AFL/CIO Headquarters in Washington DC .

What a difference 50 years makes! One could write at length about how this stamp portrays a quintessentially 1950’s view of the family, the status of women, the industrial base of American labor combined with the influence of depression-era socialist realist art. But it is Labor Day, so I suggest you all get off the computer and start up the grill. That’s what I’m going to do.

Detail from "Labor is Life" mosaic