LiberOffice

Back in October, a couple of developers, and community leaders in OpenOffice.org formed a new organization, and created LibreOffice.

They had a plan, but not a very well developed one. They had some ideas, but nothing laid out in concrete. The whole effort felt as if it had been drawn up on a Friday, implemented on a Saturday, and announced on Monday.

Two months later, and people are still wondering what it will offer. Or what it won't offer.

One of the issues raging on the LibreOffice mailing lists is whether or not LibO should be able to save, or export to OOXML, or, more precisely, the variant called DocX by Microsoft, and is allegedly the native file format of Microsoft Office.

The philosophically pure approach would be to neither read, nor write any file format implemented by Microsoft.

More statistical wierdness

I started a new blog in February.  I have not given the URL to anybody.  The only publicity I've done, is to casually mention that I would be blogging about that subject matter. 

Today I casually look at the stats for that site, and low and behold:

• The most hits are from Iran;
• The biggest traffic generator is a site in Singapore;

Whilst it is nice to know where the traffic comes from, the statistical data provides nothing that explains the source of the traffic.

Say what?

I was looking at the stats for this blog.

The most common keyword search for this site is:
shop to earn compensation plan.

That implies that my posts about Mary Kay, and Shop To Earn http://plainsofninsianna.blogspot.com/2008/07/shop-to-earn.html are what gets people here.

However, my post about Thunderbird is the one that has the most views.

This is not from "All Time", where older posts might reasonably be expected to have more views than newer posts.  This is from last month's stats. OTOH, I haven't been posting much to this blog recently.

A Media Centre

I setup a Linux Box to use as a media centre.
Then bought a big screen TV for it.

Problem: The TV does not have a VGA port for the computer.

Solution # 1: Buy an Android tablet with an HDMI out. Use VLC to stream content from the Linux Box media centre. Watch content on the big screen TV.

Solution # 2: Buy an Android tablet and NSA. Connect the two together. Watch content on the big screen TV.

The real irony is that Android Gingerbread is a better server than Microsoft's Home Media Server 2011 is. (Fewer bugs, and more out of the box functionality.)

Coming soon to a tablet near you: AAMP.

AAMP := Android + Apache + MySQL + Python/PERL/PHP.

Obama Care

I've been reading through the ObamaCare bill.

A couple of things to note:
* It makes homelessness a criminal offense;
* It reduces the amount of health care coverage offered by employers as a fringe benefit;
* It raises insurance premiums for everybody, whilst reducing the amount of coverage;

All that the kenyan citizen that occupies the white house is doing, is replaying the mau-mau revolution in the united states.

eSnips

Once upon a time, roughly five years ago, esnips was worth attempting to use.
But now, as this screenshot shows, it requires one to login, even when one is already logged in.



If you look at the top right hand part of the picture, the sign out link is clearly visible.
Next to it, is an equally clear "My Menu" link.

The login stuff is equally visible on the left hand side.

I call that a fail.

64 bit video

Flash is A11Y hostile, and as such, web designers who use it should be required to have both arms, both legs, both ears, and both eyes removed before being allowed to design another website.

But there is another problem with flash as well. It is not cross-platform. Flash is stuck in a 32 bit world. A world that died in the previous century. Technology that is more than a decade out of date. The only people that use 32 bit operating systems are people that run virii that masquarade as trojans that masquerade as operating systems.


The image below is of the page at http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_64bit.html.



Which is why FLOCK, a so-called social browser, fails to cut it as a social experience:



Whilst Minefield almost passes that test:



As does Namoroka:



Epiphany doesn't have any issues:



Galeon displays the same error message as firefox:



It is hardly surprising that Konqueror exhibits the same failure to display flash:



And for those of you who want to torture your ears, listening to what to has to have been one the worst songs to ever come out of Bulawayo, it can be found http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWDAPFU19GI .