RasterWeb!I tell ya, that Diver Mark cracks me up, what with his Hot RSS and what not:
I would like to applaud CNET for their courageous invention of a completely new and incompatible version of RSS. They call it
dlhottitles, but I think it deserves to be named something sexy, like "Hot RSS".
(I don’t want to mention what I first read when I saw the element dlhottitles…)
When we last mentioned Word, we spoke of alternatives to Word. what we’ve come to realize at the time is that almost any of the alternatives listed are better than using Microsoft Word under Classic on Mac OS X. sure, I’ve still got Microsoft Office 98, which worked fine in Mac OS 9, and it still sometimes works… But more and more I’m finding that it tells me it can’t open certain Word files. After it tells me it can’t open certain Word files, I use one of the alternatives – most often using Antiword to first take a quick peek in the terminal, and if I have to, actually create a PostScript, then use ps2pdf to create a PDF file.
Damn you incompatible (with yourself) binary formats that just aren’t very open!
Since we’re on a roll talking about Microsoft, I should mention this: IKEA founder ‘richer than Gates’.
The interesting things to me is that this news came out the day after I went to IKEA. I like to think I had something to do with it… I like to think that because it amuses me.
The other interesting part is that I noticed IKEA uses neoware machines running Windows NT 4. Yes, NT4! Now, I could say that IKEA’s founder would not be richer than Gates if they had upgraded all of those machines to Windows 2000, because that would be funny… or I could say that IKEA’s founder would be even more richer than Gates (more richer?) if IKEA had been using Linux all along, because that would be political…
We all know you can’t be funny and political at the same time…
Besides, we also know that Windows is cheaper that Linux anyway… We know this because Microsoft tells us so.
I said recently that Windows Hates Me, and it must be true. I think Windows hates me because it knows I usually prefer non-Microsoft technologies. See, even when I use Windows, I end up using something like Perl. So when I said that Microsoft SQL doesn’t like to store a lot of text
, what I should have said is that the non-Microsoft tools I used didn’t like to work with SQL to store/retrieve a lot of text. So I’ll give Microsoft SQL a point there. It stores lots of text, I just can’t easily do it with the tools I’m using. That damn Win32::ODBC module is partly to blame, as it has it’s limitations…
Of course if I was using some other RDBMS like MySQL and Perl’s DBI module, I’d have no problems. Microsoft SQL hates me too you see…. and if I was using MySQL and Perl, I’d try my hardest not to do it on Windows…
I won’t even get into the scheduler and how I need to bug an admin go in via VNC to add a scheduled job instead of just using crontab…
Windows, Microsoft SQL… Why do you hate me so?
The options for not using Word on Mac OS X continue…
The AbiWord folks have a development release of AbiWord v2.1.1 (MacOSX, Jaguar/Panther), which I have yet to try out. I’ve pretty much quit using OpenOffice.org for now and tend to use NeoOffice/J for editing Word files, and for the simple conversions I use Antiword along with ps2pdf to turn Word documents into PDF files…
It’s still a pain to receive Word documents, but some people just refuse to send you anything else…