After being told by European Union in 2004 to standardise and open their Office format or else face the risk of being kicked in the butt, Micro$oft decided and went ahead with a new standard which is supposed to be one for its upcoming Office releases. But instead of following the already approved ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications), Micro$oft decided to create one more standard called Office OpenXML and by questionable tactics got it to the approving body and got it nearly approved till India, Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela protested. It still pending review and there is a fear that it might approved. The reasons why it should not be approved are

1. There is already a standard ISO26300 named Open Document Format (ODF): a dual standard adds costs, uncertainty and confusion to industry, government and citizens;
2. There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;
3. There is information missing from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;
4. More than 10% of the examples mentioned in the proposed standard do not validate as XML;
5. There is no guarantee that anybody can write software that fully or partially implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent lawsuits or patent license fees by Microsoft;
6. This format conflicts with existing ISO standards, such as ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times), ISO 639 (Codes for the Representation of Names and Languages) or ISO/IEC 10118-3 (cryptographic hash);
7. There is a bug in the spreadsheet file format which forbids any date before the year 1900: such bugs affect the OOXML specification as well as software applications like Microsoft Excel 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007.
8. This standard proposal was not created by bringing together the experience and expertise of all interested parties (such as the producers, sellers, buyers, users and regulators), but by Microsoft alone.

Because of the reasons stated above, there has been a heavy opposition to this format and a online petition to prevent this standard getting approved is available online.  So please visit it and make your voice heard.

Also check out the technical comparison available at ODF Fellowship.

Source : [No OOXML, D Wheeler]

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With the everybody getting ready for Firefox 3 release tomorrow, Google silently seems to have updated their Toolbar extension to accommodate the latest version. Even though according to the version info in the official site is still carrying the old version number of 3.0.20070525, the version that is being offered for download is 3.1.20080605W

There has been no significant changes in the layout or any new features in this release but still for those who jumped the wagon with Firefox release candidates and had been handicapped without this, it would be a relief.

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Finally the word is out… The Download day or the day IE get its a$$ kicked is 17th June 2008. It is celebration time at Mozilla Community as the market share is steadily growing for Firefox and every other news service is covering this huge event. My Google News alerts for Firefox is flooding with the release news. Also another reason for the Mozilla Foundation to open the cork would be the 10th anniversary of its launch. On March 31st 1998, the first Mozilla Code became publicly available under the Open Source License and Mozilla Foundation took shape.

So for the people who are joining this party late… Please download your copy of Firefox on June 17th from here

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Semiconductor’s Magnetic Movie (2007) by Douglas Kahn

In 1744 a simple experiment was conducted in Sweden to reproduce the underlying cause of the Aurora Borealis in a laboratory, what we would now think of as a room. A small hole in a shade “the size of a large pea” let through a ray of sunlight that then was refracted through a prism. The small patch of light broken into a spectrum of colours then traveled through a medium of turbulent air directly above a warmed glass of aquavit. The resulting image landed on a screen a few short feet away and looked like what was seen dancing in the sky on many long Swedish nights, nature’s sublime entertainment in the real pre-history of cinema.

The experiment concluded that the aurora was caused by a refraction of light through volatile vapors. Straining a rainbow through drunken air may have not proved to be most scientifically accurate recreation of the Aurora Borealis, but it was the “very most beautiful thing that can be arranged in a dark room…flashing beams shoot suddenly up and then transform into colored veils, endlessly changing position between themselves, the one against the other.” The shift in magnitude from the scale of the earth to a miniature in the laboratory was no doubt greased by the remaining aquavit left undedicated to the pursuit of science.

In Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have taken the magnificent scientific visualisations of the sun and solar winds conducted at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Semiconducted them. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor were artists-in-residence at SSL. Combining their in-house lab culture experience with formidable artistic instincts in sound, animation and programming, they have created a magnetic magnum opus in nuce, a tour de force of a massive invisible force brought down to human scale, and a “very most beautiful thing.”

Just as the finicky sun in Sweden was let through a small hole in the shade in 1744, scientists at the SSL at University of California in Berkeley theoretically model, conduct experiments, and develop instruments to study the magnetic fields of the sun. They study them deep inside the sun’s core, in the looping of the corona flaring above its surface (the photosphere, that lights our days), and the solar winds of charged particles that interact with the earth’s own magnetic field, creating the auroral displays at the poles. Magnetic Movie is the aquavit: not scientific but still granting us an uncanny experience of geophysical and cosmological forces.

With Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have tapped into a new and ancient aesthetic of turbulence. We can hear it in the sounds of natural radio—naturally- occurring electromagnetic signals from the earth’s ionosphere and magnetosphere—that course through Magnetic Movie, at times animating the animation, a quick nervous response condensed into static. The sound itself is the product of the combined turbulences of the earth’s molten core, weather systems and electrical storms, ephemeral ionization in the upper atmosphere, and the solar winds. What we hear is underscored with complex and supple orders, in fact, too complex and supple to be ordered. We already have experience of them in the tangible turbulence of water and the crazy convection of combining fluids, tongues of fire and the thermal afterthought of smoke, the ribbons of clouds stiffly blown twisted up a hill. The flux championed by Hericlitus that has awed audiences since antiquity, found in magnificent new form in Magnetic Movie.

Source : [Douglas Kahn, Animate Projects, YouTube]

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With the entire netizen community going ga-ga over announcements of Firefox 3 release and checking out the release candidates, everybody seemed to have missed out the news from Micro$oft last week about their next disaster in the line. It seems Ballmer and his gang will burden us with next beta release of Internet Explorer 8 this August. For now IE 8 looks very much similar to IE 7 and the major changes or additions would be that Micro$oft would be trying to adhere to standards more than what it has been doing all this time. This would also make IE 8 incompatible with the pages which were specifically coded for non-standard versions of previous IE. IE 8 also would introduce us to Web Slices which is somewhat similar to Active Desktop. We can also expect Micro$oft to plug many vulnerabilities and introduce many in this upcoming release.

I am certainly not very anxious for this release. For now Firefox seems to take care of my browsing requirements.

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One of the features that got attention was the bookmarks management in Firefox 3. Lately I have had the need to bookmark many of the links in my bookmarks toolbar. With the favicon displayed next to the side, it was pleasing and eye-catching. But the space was restricted and the links started to overflow the given width. So little googling to increase the height of my bookmarks toolbar brought me to MozillaZine (which I should have done before going to Google). This is how you go about it….

1. Go to Firefox’s Profile directory ( Press [Win]+[R], and type “%APPDATA%” to go to your apps directory and you will find a directory called Mozilla and then navigate to your profile directory inside)
2. In chrome folder, there might be a file called “userChrome.css“. If not you might have a example file and even if that is not there then create one using notepad.
3. Inside type the following based on which version of Firefox you are running.  Please change the height variable according to your needs. 54px worked out for me. Then save the file and restart Firefox to have as much bookmarks as you want in your toolbar.

For Firefox 2

/* Multi-row bookmarks toolbar */
#bookmarks-ptf {display:block !important;}
#bookmarks-ptf toolbarseparator {display:inline !important;}

and sometimes you might need to add this also

/* Sometimes you may need this */
#PersonalToolbar {max-height: none !important;}

For Firefox 3 (this worked out for me)

/* Multi-row bookmarks toolbar for Fx3b5pre*/
#bookmarksBarContent
{display:block !important;}
.places-toolbar-items
{display:block !important;
height: 54px !important;
overflow-y:auto !important;}
#bookmarksBarContent toolbarseparator
{display:inline !important;}
#bookmarksBarContent .bookmark-item
{visibility: visible !important;}
.chevron {height: 0px !important;}

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Sometimes device driver maintenance can be a pain in the wrong place, esp in Windows. XP is good with USB devices with automatic detection and configuration, but it’s not so good with removing them. The device drivers are not removed automatically and they create a havoc in your system on a longer run. My office laptop came with pre-installed XP and it’s been running for past 3 years and it has seen it fair share of new hardware. For a automation engineer it’s a nightmare to add devices knowing that somewhere something is going to wrong because of your unused drivers. Also every time your OS boots up, it loads your unused drivers too until you physically uninstall them. Below is a procedure to remove your unused device drivers from Windows XP.

1. Go to System properties dialog box from your control panel or press [Win] + [Break]
2. Select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button which is quite below.
3. Click “New” button below the System Variables panel.
4. In the dialog box, type “devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices” in the Varibale Name field and “1 ” in the Variable Value field.
5. Click OK to exit.
6. Right Click “My Computer” in the desktop and click “Manage” to take you to Computer Management.
7. Select Device Manager in the left menu, and then go to View menu in the top and select “Show Hidden Devices”
8. In the devices tree shown below, expand the various branches in the device tree and look for unused devices or hidden devices which will be indicated by grayed-out or washed out icons.
9. Right-Click the devices and select Uninstall to remove the device driver.
10. Continue this procedure for the entire list of unused drivers.

Source : [Tech-Republic]

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