A decision to dismiss appeals against the controversial fast-track approval of a Microsoft document format has provoked six members of global standards-setting body ISO to question ISO’s relevance. Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela had appealed against ISO’s stamp of approval for Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML), an endorsement likely to help the software giant win more public-sector contracts.

A significant minority of national standards bodies had voted against approving the Microsoft format, which is an alternative to the open-source Open Document Format that has been a published ISO standard since 2006. But ISO, together with the International Electrotechnical Commission, decided earlier this month that those appeals were not worth pursuing, meaning OOXML will soon become an ISO standard, provided no new appeals are lodged.

This weekend, the state IT organizations of Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay published a declaration saying they were no longer confident that ISO would be a vendor-neutral organization.

“Whereas in the past it has been assumed that an ISO/IEC standard should automatically be considered for use within government, clearly this position no longer stands,” they wrote on the South African representative’s site (www.raffee.co.za).

“The bending of the rules to facilitate the fast-track processing… remains a significant concern to us,” they said, referring to a process many parties had complained was too fast and not transparent enough for such a complex format.

Microsoft lost a first vote on OOXML, which is opposed by advocates of open-source software that can be freely shared and modified, but won a second vote after a week-long ballot resolution meeting to discuss the 6,000-page specifications.

ISO is a non-governmental organization made up of the national standards of 157 countries. It sprang up in the 1940s in response to demand for standard specifications for materials needed to rebuild the infrastructure of war-shattered countries.

You can help the effort to oppose this unfair practise by signing an online petition here

Related articles

• Nations question ISO’s merit following dropped Open XML appeals
• ISO, IEC reject appeals, approve OOXML spec
• UK Unix group vows to appeal OOXML ruling
• Venezuela joins line appealing OOXML standard approval
• Brazil and India Challenge Microsoft Office Document Standard
• OOXML ratification faces delay after objection

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

There was no “Download Day”, no server downtime, no record to set… It all happened without much fanfare. Just a small statement in the most visited page in internet. “New! Download Chrome (BETA) - the new browser from Google”

Google calls it Chrome, People call it “Google OS”, Open Source Community will have its “Chromium”, IE would call it “Nightmare come true”, Opera would cry “copy cat”, Apple would say “Just another Safari“, Privacy Advocates will cry “Foul”, Some call it start of “Web 3.0″ or “Web 3.0 beta”, FireFox is just recovering from the “shock” and I just call it “cool“…

Imagine the simplicity and minimalistic colours of Google in a browser and you got “Chrome”. The way you had imagined and used tabs are going to change. The tabs are going to the top floor instead of being below the address bar. You can still switch tabs! You can kill the tab from the tab strip or from the process manager. When you kill the tab, you see a “sad tab.” If you reload the page, Google Chrome will even remember the scroll position.

New tab page shows most frequently visited page, most frequent searches, bookmarks, and recently closed tabs. You can choose whether a bookmark strip follows you as you surf (in case you want to save screen space).

Geeks, use the Task Manager to get details about a specific process running in Google Chrome, or to force a misbehaving tab or application to close. You can use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Esc to quickly open the Task Manager. For each active item in Google Chrome, you can monitor the amount of memory taken up, the amount of CPU used, and the network activity (bytes sent and received). To force a misbehaving webpage or application to close in Google Chrome, select the web page, then click the End process button. For those who need to go the extra mile, you have “Stats for Nerds”

More news for the techies, Google Chrome uses WebKit, not a new rendering engine to the web. It renders just like Safari. It multi processes all its tabs with separate threads making it more stable and resource efficient in long run. Chrome uses V8 virtual machine to execute javascript. According to one source, “V8 executes JavaScript much much faster than current technologies.” Chrome is open under a BSD License. The name of the project to open-source Google Chrome is Chromium.

The official Google blog announced the Chrome project being available to general public from today. For now only Windows users. Mac and Linux users watch out for updates. You can also check out the comic book explaining Google Chrome from Google.

Related articles

• The Chrome is out of the bag: Google’s browser arrives Tuesday
• Google launches Chrome web browser
• Google Chrome
• Google’s Browser Is A Warning Shot At Windows, Not At Internet Explorer
• Two Years After Denying its Existence, Google Launching “Chrome” Web Browser
• Google creating its own browser based on WebKit
• Google launches beta version of its open source browser
• A fresh take on the browser
• Google debuts its own browser

Yesterday, Matt officially announced the release of WordPress 2.6 codenamed “Tyner” to the blogging community. WordPress release codename’s are named after jazz musicians and continuing with the tradition, 2.6 has been named after McCoy Tyner. It contains many new features that makes WordPress a more powerful  CMS (Content Management System).

One of the most important features of this release is Version Control System which enables Wiki-like tracking of edits similar to Wikipedia. This would be a very handy feature which enables the users to just undo and go back to a previous version of the post.

Another major feature introduced in this version is display of captions alongside the images. The example can be seen in the WordPress logo displayed in top of this post.  [Looks like alignment of captions has an issue. I am not just able to get it aligned]

Theme previews would be loved by any serious WordPress user. It was a long awaited feature. It enables to preview the theme, tweak and correct your mistakes before the whole world sees it.

WordPress uses Gears (previously known as Google Gears), an open source browser extension project started by Google. It is primarily for developers to manage offline storage thus enabling you to get a little extra juice. It maintains a cache or keeps a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds (they just pop right up!). You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending. WP 2.6 only uses the cache concept and the future versions are promised with more features in collaboration with Gears.

Other notable features in this release of WordPress are

• Word Count are displayed in the side bar when writing or editing the posts.
• You can reorder the gallery just by drag and drop.
• Bulk management of plugins. Just enable or disable all plugins in a single click.
• “Press This” bookmarklet which enables you to blog from anywhere just by clicking a boomarklet in your browser.
• More advanced image control enabling easy insertion, resizing.  Also shifting from Flash uploader to the classic uploader is easy.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions. Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

With all these new features, I decided to jump the bandwagon without having to wait for my Hosting company to update the Fantastico which will help me automatically upgrade my WordPress installation. Now bit Feed is powered by WordPress 2.6

Related articles

• Wordpress 2.6 is out. Should you upgrade. Yes!
• Wordpress 2.6 adds revisions, Gears and Tumblr style blogging
• ‘Press It’ Bookmarklet in WordPress 2.6 Makes Tumblelogging Easy
• WordPress 2.6 Released Early
• Happy birthday, Google Gears!

For those who blog with WordPress.com or have their self hosted WordPress and think that CSS stands for Canadian Secret Service, they might have been frustrated when they attempt to customise their WP theme to their liking. Even though there are loads of themes available in the World Wide Web, its a pain finding them and they testing each and every one of them to find that some element in the entire theme is not great. You would have wished that if only there was a tool that just gives you the output what you wished. Thanks to Jaroslaw Dobrzanski, we have a Online WordPress Theme Generator. People who love a simple, minimalistic WP theme would fall in love this generator.

You can customise the look of your blog, without having to know what is CSS or PHP… You can change the colours, fonts, layout, header and all other settings. The best part of all is that you can see the output right away when in the preview pane. So if you don’t like the way how it turned out, then just redo it till you get it right. Once you are done perfecting the theme, just download the zip, and unzip and load it right away into your dashboard.

Related articles

• 20+ Must-Have WordPress 2.5 Compatible Plugins
• WordPress for iPhone App Due Soon
• Your Wordpress Blog Can be a Forum?
• Build A Website With Wordpress, Part 4

The exit of Bill Gates from Micro$oft might be old news for most since the media was quite devoted in covering it. But many would have not read the Free Software Foundation guru, Richard Stallman’s article in BBC on his retirement.

In his article, he deplores the much attention given to his retirement and his success. The whole point of a unjust social system with proprietary software is missed. To quote in the guru’s words

The most important thing that Microsoft has done is to promote this unjust social system.Gates is personally identified with it, due to his infamous open letter which rebuked microcomputer users for sharing copies of his software.

Gates may be gone, but the walls and bars of proprietary software he helped create remain, for now.

You can check the whole article here at BBC

Related articles

• ‘Bars, not Gates’
• Bill Gates: PC Genius, Internet Fool

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]

Related articles

• Google takes a swipe at OOXML
• ODF editor: ODF loses if OOXML does
• GNOME Foundation defends OOXML involvement
• ISO approves PDF as an international standard

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

Related articles

• Mozilla opens the doors on Messaging subsidiary
• Google’s Shadow Over Firefox
• Mozilla officially scores a world record