Category: Random Thoughts

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OOXML vs. OpenDocument

One of the latest most talked about “wars” in the software world is the office document formats war. Both formats are XML based, and both are used to describe the miscellaneous office documents like Word and Excel documents. The OpenDocument format was developed by a committee and is already an ISO standard. OOXML, on the other hand, was developed by Microsoft and isn’t yet an ISO standard. Microsoft has been pushing and lobbying OOXML (Open Office XML) very hard to become an ISO standard.

However, from a technical point of view, OOXML is barely manageable. The format contains in it the legacy of all Microsoft Office’s previous versions and is impossible to edit correctly by external tools despite the fact that it is so-called “open”. Stéphane Rodriguez wrote 10 technical points why OOXML is defective by design. In one of the points, Rodriguez quotes one of Bill Gates’ memos that was exposed because of a legal case:

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Saturday, December 5 1998
To: Bob Muglia, Jon DeVann, Steven Sinofsky

Subject : Office rendering

One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of
the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.

I would be glad to explain at a greater length.

Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well.

While making Office documents work only in Internet Explorer is a legal move by Microsoft (and I’m not even sure about that), obviously it’s an anti-consumer move that locks non-IE users out of the ability to view some documents online. Therefore there’s no surprise that Microsoft tries to appear to have an open document standard while in practice creating another proprietary format that can only be correctly used in Microsoft Office.

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Ideas That Made Money Although They Shouldn’t Have

Every once in a while someone comes to me asking if I want to participate on a new idea. I guess everyone wants their “million dollar exit”. Naturally, so do I. Unfortunately I haven’t made any progress lately with ideas, but I’m not pushing it – when the right idea comes, I’ll have all the time I need to implement it.

MadConomist.com came up with a list of ten ideas that shouldn’t have been profitable, but were very much so. Some items there are really surprising. (via Digg)

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When I See Toilet Seats Twice A Day, I Must Report It

The old toilet seat “fight between the sexes” will probably always be a mystery to me. While I always return the seat to its previous position when I’m in someone else’s place, I wouldn’t mind lifting it and lowering it back as much as needed in my own home.

Having said that, it turns out that the issue is subject to actual research. Not much research, but who would have thought? And for those of you who really have a hard time doing the seat up-seat down thing, here’s the PeaceMaker Toilet Seat Lifter.

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Some Soft Drinks May Seriously Harm Your Health

I previously linked to an article about what happens to your body if you drink a coke. Now there’s a new study that “suggests a common preservative found in drinks such as Fanta and Pepsi Max has the ability to switch off vital parts of DNA”. Reading this was the last straw for me. Up until now I drank quite a lot of Diet Coke in an attempt to avoid the calories, but this is simply too much. A co-worker of mine classifies all these drinks as “poison”. I can see why now.

While I drink a lot of water during and after my workouts and during lunches, I still want something else sometimes. Since the health issue is more important than the calories issue, I (almost completely) switched to 100% pure orange juice. Hopefully this won’t come with a weight gain.

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How To Sleep More Effectively

Since I started working out, I had to regulate my sleep more. I do my workouts in the morning, and workouts are extremely exhausting if I don’t get a good night sleep. I currently sleep 7 to 8 hours every night. During weekdays I get up at 5:15am, so this means I’m usually asleep by 10pm. I believe working out and sleeping right are two main reasons why I haven’t been sick for a long time. This includes times when a lot of people around me were getting sick.

Reading this article about how to sleep more effectively made me realize I was at least doing one thing right.

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A Crappy Search Engine – Is It A Bad Thing?

If you’re looking for a crappy search engine, there’s one right at acrappysearchengine.com (go ahead… click it… it’s not a joke). This search engine gives you results mildly related to, but not exactly, what you were looking for. The inventors’ reasoning is:

How can you really claim to explore the web when your search engine only returns the results you are looking for?

I think they’re somewhat right. For example, I was interested in finding GDB front-ends so I went to Google and looked for some. The 9th result I got (note: you might get a different result) was the UPS debugger, which declares itself as “not a GDB front-end”. I clicked the link and found a very interesting project I never heard of before.

Getting an opposite result to “GDB front-end”, namely “NOT a GDB front-end”, turned out pretty good for me. Now I know that if I run into trouble with GDB, I can also try UPS.

So maybe it’s not such a bad idea to have a crappy search engine.

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Sony – Evil Company #2 To Feature On This Blog

I previously mentioned Sony’s not-so-customer-friendly past behavior (previous post link). In short, Sony always wanted to create their own, non-compatible standards, so they could comfortably lock-in consumers to their products. The range of products this applies to is extremely big, which is to me a proof that this is a company strategy.

Here’s why I decided to add Sony to the evil companies featured on this blog (along with HP, the first evil company I wrote about): If you need a replacement screw for your Sony speaker, it will cost you 82$ US. And as you can see from the picture – this is a special screw. It’s a screw-the-customer screw, I’d say. (via Digg)

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Google Maps Offers You To Swim The Ocean. I Think It’s A Nice Touch

Lately, it was published that if you ask Google Maps to show you instructions on how to get from one place to another, which is across the ocean, Google Maps will offer you to swim. For example, here’s Google Maps’ instructions on how to get from Mountain View to Zurich. Note that instruction 36 says:

Swim across the Atlantic Ocean, 3,462 mi

Google Maps is offering you to swim 3,462 miles (5,571.54893 kilometers, I used Google Calculator for this) across the Atlantic Ocean in order to get to Zurich.

While this is funny, I also think it’s a very nice touch by Google. Obviously, the swimming part can be replaced by:

  • detailed flight information, or
  • an error saying the route cannot be computed.

While the error option would have been much easier for Google, they chose to put a placeholder until (I’m sure) they’ll have integrated flight information for their directions part of Google Maps. So why, really, emit an error when you can be funny?