Petar Tahchiev's Blog

October 2007 Archives

OpenOffice vs. MS Word

Hi guys,

just a brief note on what happened with me yesterday. Me and a colleague of mine were having really great trouble with a Microsoft Word document - after opening the document (which, by the way, was about 500 pages and is confidential, so I cannot post it here), MS Word just hanged. We were trying to read it many times, but every time we tried the MS Word program hanged and eventually crashed. Hopefully we had a VMWare software with a Slackware linux installed, so after we opened the document with OpenOffice, not only it didn't crash, but also we were able to export it as a PDF and an HTML+CSS. Nothing more to say, but: Thank you guys - you rule! :-)

OOXML Objections And Sun's Position About It

I just found a really interesting discussion going on in Bulgarian open-source communities about the Microsoft's OOXML format and the fact that it was approved by some national committees.

So I would like to present here to you some thoughts on this "specification" and ask if someone heard what is the official Sun's position on this. So the history goes in very brief like this: on first of February OASIS published the 1.1 version of the ODF specifications and recognized it as a worldwide standard. Right now, what is currently happening is that Microsoft are trying to make another standard: Microsoft Open XML (OOXML), or ISO/IEC 29500. On one hand the ODF format was created with the idea of a complete independence of the application that uses it, the Microsoft format has some requirements that only the Microsoft Office applications can provide. Further enough there are some really strong arguments against the Microsoft standard, some of which are: no need of a second standard, OOXML is not even implemented already, the given specification is not complete, more than 10 percent of the examples given cannot be validated as a standard XML, the whole "specification proposal" is more than 6000 pages and misuses terms like "open" and "standard".... (and many others).

In spite of these objections many of the national committees, that have the right to vote for the proposal, voted "for" the proposal.

Now my question is: what is the official opinion of Sun about Microsoft's proposal? Also, if the new proposal is accepted as a specification will it be supported in the OpenOffice, and will we have an OOXML filter?

Some links that might be interesting to you:
http://www.noooxml.org/
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections
http://linux-bg.org/cgi-bin/y/index.pl?page=news&key=395779536(in Bulgarian)

Thoughts about BGJUG First Meeting

The first BGJUG meeting is over... :-)

And although it was a week ago, just today I find some time to blog about it. First of all: it was amazing!!! :-) And second of all: It was really amazing!!! :-) People started coming for the meeting half an hour earlier (well, I came an hour earlier, but who cares?). I had a room with 160 seats reserved, but as It turned out, it was rather small and we had 20-25 people standing up in the hall.

We started with me talking about the web-site, the group and how the idea initially started. Judging on their reactions people were really interested in that. After an hour we continued with Svetlin Nakov, who talked about the Google Web-Toolkit and how we can use it for making AJAX-driven applications. After the presentation we made it to the nearest pub where we continued chatting.

I really can't wait for our next meeting.

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