Status-Q

Possibly the best aspect of OpenOffice is its open file format.. Here's a very crude quick and easy way on a Unix platform to get at something close to the raw text in an OO document:

   unzip -p mydocument.sxw  content.xml | sed 's/<[^>]*>/ /g'

This extracts the contents of the document as XML, then strips out most XML tags. Could be improved in many ways, but this is fine if you want to run the text through grep, wc etc or just want to get your paragraphs into a text editor. Is any normal user likely to do this? No, but it's important that it can be done, even on a machine which knows nothing about OpenOffice. (Here's why I think this sort of thing is important, by the way.)

[Original Link] From Robert Cringely's article:

Sun Microsystems recently sponsored a major seminar at George Washington University in the Washington area and the federal government's IT people attended. One source said that the present administration has so strangled the budgets of government agencies, especially research and education, that they're now considering dumping Microsoft's licensing schemes and transitioning to open-source Linux.

Thanks to Scott Weikart for the link.

Two related recent announcements are both welcome:

A US court decision that file-swapping is not illegal.

"The ruling means that the labels and studios cannot ban 21st century technology in defence of their inefficient and outmoded 20th century distribution model," said President of Grokster, Wayne Rosso.

And Apple's very cool new music store means that people who wish to purchase music legally in a 21st-century way can do so. As long as they have a credit card with a U.S. billing address.

[Original Link] (from MacCentral)

[Original Link] John helps get RSS into the public consciousness.

[Original Link] Tim O'Reilly on a favourite quote of his by Edwin Schlossberg:

"The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think".

And would it be too cynical to say that the skill of politics is to create a context in which they can't?

[Original Link] This came out a week ago but I've only just seen it. Office Depot (which, for UK readers, is the US equivalent of Office World or Staples) is apparently not going to carry hardware or software items unless they have the 'Designed for Windows XP' logo on them. So if you want to pop down to your local store for a copy of RedHat, you'll need to do so before May 30th.

Every mobile I've had (I think) allows me to set a personal text greeting so that when I turn it on it says 'Quentin's Phone' or something similar. But in every case, this appears after I've typed in the PIN number.

Now, will somebody tell me what this is for? If I've typed in the PIN, I know it's my phone and don't need to be told. If, on the other hand, I don't know the PIN, it's probably somebody else's phone and the only way I will get it back to them is by knowing their name, which I can't see...

Or is there some other intended use for this feature? Perhaps an inspiring message for the day? Or a joke to cheer you up when nobody's left you any voice mails?

But perhaps these days PINs don't make too much sense. Most operators will disable a mobile using the handset serial number once they know it's stolen, so there shouldn't be a great incentive for stealing them. And if you lose it, the more access any well-wishing finder has to your data, the more likely you are to get it back.