It is the type of response that was crafted to end all debate and justify all sins: “Backward compatibility with billions of documents produced over decades”. Variations of this occur everywhere. Rather than cite them all, a simple Google query will … [Continue reading] about A Game of Zendo
Lost in Translation
In the last installment I looked at the way the ODF Add-in for Word 2007 integrates into the Word UI. Now let's drill down into an actual conversion and see what fidelity we get. I downloaded the code from SourceForce and installed on a machine … [Continue reading] about Lost in Translation
Traduttore, Traditore
Brian Jones in his blog entry of 11 July 2006, comments on their recently announced ODF Translator: It's directly exposed in the UI. We're even going to make it really easy to initially discover the download. We already need to do this for XPS and … [Continue reading] about Traduttore, Traditore
50 years ago
I find it interesting to take a look back at the commemorative stamps issued in 1956. What do we choose to remember, and how do we remember it?For example, 1956 was the 100th anniversary of the the birth of Booker T. Washington, a great leader in … [Continue reading] about 50 years ago
Epithets
A few thoughts on the Epitheton Ornans, or ornamental epithet. This is more than a nickname, but a formalized word or phrase associated with a person. Classical epic poetry makes heavy use of this rhetorical device. For example, in Homer Achilles … [Continue reading] about Epithets