The OpenDocument Fellowship has put out a tender valued at $11,500 USD to develop an open source toolkit to convert HTML+CSS documents into OpenDocument Text. Details here.
August 2006 Archives
Want to know how much Vista will cost when it’s released? Microsoft isn’t talking, but if you check out the Amazon pages for Vista, you’ll find the pricing revealed, in black and white.
The OASIS Office Formula Subcommittee recently published an excellent page about OpenFormula. The page is very understandable by non-technical people. as well as including enough technical information to satisfy those who want that, and has a nice set of links at the end.
The OpenDocument Fellowship has released a white paper titled “OASIS/ISO OpenDocument Format: Using open standards to promote competition and close the Digital Divide”, available in OpenDocument (ODT) and PDF formats, from http://opendocumentfellowship.org/government/proposal.
This white paper explains why governments should support OpenDocument. It makes two proposals:
* Government agencies should publish public documents in ODF
* Government agencies should accept documents stored in ODF
The white paper quotes relevant international agreements and policies and explains the situation clearly in a way that will be accessible to most government officials.
The OpenDocument Fellowship has attracted nearly $40,000 (USD) in donations to help fund development projects under the Fellowship’s Targeted Donations Programme .
One donation will be used to reward volunteers from the OASIS ODF Formula subcommittee for their continuing work on the formula specification. The other donations are targeted at development projects. The Fellowship is producing an “ODF toolkit” for developers, and a light-weight ODF viewer.
More information about the funded projects, and other projects seeking funding, can be found on the Fellowship’s website, http://opendocumentfellowship.org/development/projects
Spokesman Daniel Carrera said, “These projects are all very strategic. They provide a huge benefit to OpenDocument for only a modest amount of effort.”
“The Fellowship hopes to build on this early success by attracting further donations to extend the support for the format and to make it easier for open source developers to contribute to the ISO 26300 standard. This is important work in ensuring standards remain open. Any individual or company that is interested in making a donation should contact us.” Email: daniel.carrera@opendocumentfellowship.org
Looks like I need to poke my head around Sun’s Blogosphere a bit more, as what I have found thus far this morning has me second guessing whether Silicon Valley’s finest is a lot finer than I have been giving credit.
I think I’d like a second cup, please!
Just noticed this post in the Classpath project archives and felt it was worth making note of, as well as to extend a BIG PHAT THANK YOU to those of you who have helped bring both the Classpath project as well as IKVM.NET into existence. The software development world is a MUCH BETTER PLACE because of your efforts.
Thank you!
Admit it, so do you!
NOTE: Please tell me I’m not the only one on the planet who thinks that,
a) Jordon is funny.
b) Jordon is HILARIOUS!
c) Jordon is *HOT*, *HOT*, *HOT* (probably married), but she’s still *HOT*!
EXTENDED NOTE: Just in case, the above is not a multiple choice question. ;)
Okay, back to the grind stone… Just needed to get that out of my system.
I feel better now, don’t you? :D
EXTENSION-TO-EXTENDED NOTE: Just in case you’re not already subscribed, as per her note in the above linked bio,
If you’d like to sign up for my newsletter click here and check the box beside “Code Project Insider”.
I promise… regardless of whether you share my crush, her daily tech briefs are something you will look forward to none-the-less.
Imagine BumpTop used as a way of organizing tracks for a sequencer, or of storing and retrieving video clips. We would have entirely new ways of working with this kind of data. I invite you to apply your imaginations to this now, because there is serious interest in developing BumpTop as a real product.
I can hardly wait.
Good news for Firefox fans: Microsoft has invited Firefox developers to attend the Windows Vista Readiness ISV Lab in December, to help make sure that Firefox and the Thunderbird email clients work properly under Vista.
Hello IronPython Community,
We have just released IronPython 1.0 RC2. This build includes fixes for all known blocking issues against RC1, and we’re anticipating that this build will be the same as 1.0 final unless we hear otherwise. We’re looking for any feedback, but in particular we’d like to know of any blocking issues discovered against this build or fundamental language incompatibilities. Please try out the latest build over the next 2 weeks and let us know if you encounter any issues as soon as possible.
We’d like to thank everyone in the community for your bug reports and suggestions that helped make this a better release: Kevin Bjorke, Kevin Chu, Mark Rees, Stanislas Pinte, and Timothy Fitz.
Thanks and keep in touch,
The IronPython Team
More complete list of changes and bug fixes:
============================================
BitTorrent has moved the state of the art forward in terms of scaling to large audiences. In this work we (Ashwin Bharambe, Venkat Padmanabhan and I) took a hard look at the mechanisms to see why it works so well, and if/when it doesn’t. The secret of it’s success seems to be the Tit-for-tat data exchange between peers, and a local-rarest-first request order for data, which prevents the infamous “last block problem.” We discovered the BitTorrent has slightly more difficulty scaling down than up: it can have difficulty when the seed bandwidth is low. We propose a smartseed strategy, a variant on the TFT scheme and a bandwidth estimation that improves the performance. The simulator code is available. Joint work with Ashwin Bharambe and Venkat Padmanabhan.
I can’t really say why I find this surprising, but for some reason I’ve held on to the notion that MS and the BitTorrent protocol would never be something you would find grouped together in regards to any sort of product and/or research.
Obviously this was just one of those silly assumptions that was grounded upon non-sense.
Cool! I’m always glad to discover things such as this, as it helps reinforce the notion that MS is *TRULY* interested in advancing the Art of Computer Science in *ALL* conceivable areas. Its simply impossible to provide support for every new idea that is ever developed, no matter how clever and/or disruptive it might be.
Haven’t had a chance to play with the above link, but when I do, I will report back what, if anything, I discover.
Enjoy!
According to the IEMobile Team blog, the next version of Internet Explorer Mobile for Windows Mobile will have a different user-agent string. Read their blog entry for details.
Detecting Internet Explorer Mobile’s User-Agent on the server
IKVM.NET Weblog - Thursday, August 10, 2006
Here’s the release candidate. Updated japi results are available here.
Changes since previous snapshot:
* Integrated GNU Classpath 0.92.
* Fixed ikvmc to handle constructorless classes correctly.
* Fixed a couple of FileChannelImpl bugs.Files are available here: ikvm-0.30.0.0.zip (sources binaries), ikvmbin-0.30.0.0.zip (binaries), ikvmbin-generics-0.30.0.0.zip (binaries built from generics branch)
Please access the above linked post for links to each of the mentioned items.
As per Jeroen’s recent comments to the IKVM.NET list,
I’ve created 0.30 rc1, please test it and let me know if it works or
not.
Please use the form on the above linked list to join the conversation.
As always, Thanks Jeroen!
NOTE: From what I understand Mark Wielaard and the Classpath hackers are moving forward fairly aggressively with pulling together the remaining differences between Classpath and JDK 1.5. I think the following collage of screen shots of IKVM 0.30 vs. JDK 1.5 should help provide a quick understanding of the progress they have made.)
Bad news for those concerned about Windows security: At the Black Hat security conference last week, hacker managed to crack into the system — and this before it’s even released.
and apparently thats the exact situation I’m faced with,
BetaNews | Microsoft Kills Virtual PC for Mac
What has been a foregone conclusion for many Mac users has finally been confirmed: Microsoft’s Virtual PC is dead. In a statement provided to BetaNews Monday, the company said its Macintosh Business Unit has decided not to go forward with a version of the software native to the Intel platform.
Well, wasn’t the first time I was wrong, and it most certainly won’t be the last. Of course, there are *MUCH* worse things in life than being wrong about something.
For example, not being right (or making things right, as is the case with this.)
SourceForge.net CVS Repository - [lsharp] View of /HISTORY
Version 1.3 5 August 2006
Some features now require CLR 2
Added (spawn expression) to allow experimental multi threaded evaluation.
Added (handle-event target eventName handler) to allow .NET event handlers to be written in LSharp (and thus allow Windows Forms apps to be written in LSharp!).
Added defevent
Added symbol-name
Added gensym
Added member
Inspector shows non public fields
Bug fix - load fails when last line in file is a comment
The Console Main is no longer marked [STAThread]. This allows Windows Forms apps to be developed, run on a secondary thread using (spawn ‘(run application f)) and be dynamically and incremntally refined using the toploop on the first thread.
Cons now implements ICollection
Bug Fix - constructors can now pass null as an argument
&optional and &key parameters
Bug fix - map on empty list
Added Web Application development features and examples
Fixed bug in when return value
Fixed append bug
What is LSharp? Rob Blackwell, LSharp .NET project developer** explains,
L Sharp .NET is a powerful Lisp-like scripting language for .NET. It uses a Lisp dialect similar to Arc but tightly integrates with the .NET Framework which provides a rich set of libraries.
L Sharp is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. You can download the latest release from Sourceforge. You may also want to read Rob Blackwell’s Web Log.
Can’t wait to play with the latest updates, and most definitely am looking forward to the next official release.
Thanks Rob!
–
** As per the notes on the Introduction page of the language tutorial,
Wiki Link: [release:159]
Release 1.0 2nd Release Candidate
Aug-03-20060 Files
Description
Release Change Log
There are currently no change log entries for this release.
Seems the answer to the titled question is obvious, but as of yet no downloads, and no announcements on the list or via the web feed.
None-the-less, this is something you may want to prepare for if, in fact, this will either directly effect a current or planned/unplanned future testing environment.
I’ll update accordingly.
A J2EE Moment of Zen - Miguel de Icaza
Avalon marks the end of the American Dream.
Which dream would that be? Or better said, which “American Dream” are you refering to?
See, the way I see it is this: The “American Dream” is itself paying for its sins. But not because the “American” dream is a bad thing in and of itself, and instead because ‘Dreams’ and ‘Reality’ — Well they’re just not always the same thing, now are they.
Miguel, you know better than I do that the “American” heritage began *CENTURIES* before the United States came into existence. As such, it is my belief that the *REAL* “American Dream” is not represented by that in which the average citizen of the USA believes it should be, and instead by the foundation of *FREEDOM* in which the “American Heritage” has been built upon since the day the *HUMAN SPIRIT* entered the *AMERICAS* and called this same claimed land — *HOME*.
So I’ll ask again….
The “American Dream”?
Which dream would that be?
Steve Ballmer recently issued a mea culpa when he admitted that Microsoft bit off more than it could chew when it embarked on its Vista upgrade that was to change virutally everything about Windows. Unfortunately, though, he went on to say that Microsoft will succeed by going in many directions, and being a “multicore” company. He’s got that exactly wrong.
Is this a radical idea?
I’m about to publish an article advocating that ASP.NET programmers should be able to use Atlas controls to obtain Ajax client-side capabilities with zero Javascript programming. Is this really a radical idea?
