Category Archives: OOo

A simple thought on the management of software

I just wrote a column for Charles Arthur about how I had celebrated Firefox day by switching back to Opera and this thought didn’t quite make it in. The organisational division between the users and producers of software should follow … Continue reading

Posted in nördig, OOo, Software | 6 Comments

Instant bibliographies

I hate bibliographies, and I suspect that any tool I bought to handle them would consume immense quantities of otherwise productive slightly less unproductive time. On the other hand, I need to have reliable references and footnotes from time to … Continue reading Continue reading

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Making OpenOffice tolerable

One of the incidental irritations of using OpenOffice is that it uses its own, eccentric python installation. OOo is almost completely scriptable in Python, but the mechanism was put together many years ago by one programmer in his spare time, … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in OOo | 1 Comment

More evidence of Sun’s inefficiency

John Naughton writes, apropos the latest version of Adobe Acrobat, which makes commenting easier, that “Those of us who work in the Open Source world know that one of the factors which makes companies wary of moving to Open Office … Continue reading Continue reading

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Browser truce

I have been using Opera for nearly ten years now, and for most of that time it has been the quickest and best-thought out browser on any platform. It had tabbed browsing, keyboard control, bespoke ad blocking, and full indexed … Continue reading Continue reading

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Slo-ooo-w progress

The rate of progress on OOo is glacial; every fortnight or so I get an update on issue 6193, about the utter uselessness of notes in Writer compared to MS Word, and that was opened in June 2002, since when … Continue reading Continue reading

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I wish I spoke Finnish

At least sometimes I do. I found from the referrer logs a page full of people arguing in Finnish about my rant against OOo. I doubt I am missing much. The arguments are almost certainly the same in any language, … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in OOo | 5 Comments

With enough eyeballs, all bugs are invisible

An interesting test case for open source boosterism is provided by the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 this week. I have been using this product since long before it was usable, out of a mixture of perversity, stinginess, and vague anti-Microsoft … Continue reading Continue reading

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Posting from Ooobasic

Well, I will be if this has actually worked … Which will enable all sorts of strange goodies, if it works. The really important thing is that it is extremely easy to draw dialog boxes in OOo basic; whereas in … Continue reading Continue reading

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OOo down the drain?

In the Australian Computerworld article about there being not enough developers of OOo/Star Office, Ken Foskey is quoted as saying there are now 50 people working on the program for Sun in Germany, ten for Novell, and only four independent … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in OOo | 3 Comments