There is an important vote coming up in the International Organization for Standardization on whether or not to promote Microsoft’s in-house developed Office Open XML (OOXML) to the status of being an accepted international standard. Should Microsoft’s format receive this blessing, it will be free and clear to lean heavily on its corporate girth in the direction of government and other agencies that require the formats that they are saving data in to be fully documented and open.

I’m not whole-heartedly opposing this standpoint as an anti-Microsoft or pro-underdog statement, but rather because this move puts a terrible risk on the long-term viability of very important data. I am an amateur genealogist. Preserving my research is extremely important to me. I need to know that in thirty years or if I migrate to another platform I will be able to open the word processing documents containing my research. For government agencies, the issue is clear. The government already has hundreds of thousands of records dating to the 1970′s that are inaccessible due to obsolete data storage formats on tape. There simply no longer exists a device that will read them. It is inexcusable for this to happen again.

Microsoft claims that its own format is an open spec, meeting the needs of government agencies. However, the same company has demonstrated behaviors that are monopolistic, often resulting in vendor lock-in. It also retains the only chair on the technical committee overseeing the development of OOXML, and has reserved the right to make its own custom version of the specification (should it not agree with the recommendations of the technical committee). This has already happened with Microsoft Office 2007, which uses a variation of the OOXML spec that is already obsoleted by the changes Microsoft has had to make to the format since it failed the fast-track vote last year after being considered dangerously flawed. The clearest reasoning that the body developing the OOXML spec cannot and should not be trusted is the clearly cited evidence that Microsoft tried to buy votes for OOXML in Sweden and exhibited strong-arm pressure amongst other voting bodies.

In order for a specification to be considered “open,” in my opinion it must be vendor neutral, easy to understand, and openly implemented or implementable on a variety of platforms. To date, the Microsoft specification consists of over 6,000 pages, some of which is incomplete and encompasses older, binary specs from Microsoft’s former Office suite formats. It pushes techniques using the .NET framework and VisualBasic, neither of which are open or implemented on other platforms.

This next point should be separate from this post, because this post is primarily about the format. There is a separation between the format (OOXML) and the application implementing the format (Microsoft Office). Let’s divulge and use the application as a case in point. Microsoft says that the complexity of and inclusion of binary blobs in OOXML are primarily to facilitate backwards compatibility. In theory this is a good thing. This whole post is about being able to open documents saved thirty years in the past. In reality, though, Microsoft has demonstrated the exact opposite of this behavior by disabling the ability to open no less than twenty four older file formats in Microsoft Office 2007, calling them inferior. This included Microsoft’s own default format of the then-current Microsoft Office for Mac release. It later apologized and said that what it really meant was it’s way of opening the files was inferior, but the spin couldn’t deny the fact that Microsoft had willfully removed a function from a program that allowed it to work with competing formats and even some of its own. It has already been demonstrated that most of the functionality can be converted without the tie-down to proprietary technology. Virtually all functionality could be converted were Microsoft to open up the specification to their binary formats, as has been requested.

There are alternatives already in place and here today. The current format war puts Microsoft’s OOXML in competition with OpenDocument format, or ODF. ODF is a vendor-neutral specification based on an easily readable syntax that has already gone through the standards process. It was approved as an international standard two years ago, in fact. It is developed and maintained by OASIS, an organization composed of 600 member organizations, the largest of which are IBM, Sun, Novell, and Google. Until recently, Microsoft was also a member of the organization.

There are tools to read and write ODF already implemented in multi-platform solutions, primarily in OpenOffice.org but the specification is evolving independently. A rapidly growing list of other applications are implementing the specification (including Microsoft Office) in large part due to the clarity and elegance of the specification. What OOXML accomplishes in 6,000+ pages, ODF accomplishes and exceeds in 2,500+. OpenDocument includes clear specifications for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and formulas. What’s more, it’s rapidly becoming a specification to build other specifications on. There is currently an effort to develop an OpenDocument-compatible raster graphics storage format called OpenRaster.

In closing, I would urge readers to not subscribe to the FUD that Microsoft is spreading and not follow blindly along a path just because it’s easy to say, “Well, Microsoft and Office are big enough that there will always be a way to open the files.” Think about where we were just ten years ago, about how much has changed. Look at the diminishing market share of Microsoft to rivals such as Apple and Firefox. Think about how important the long term viability of your information is. And think about data portability. Support open formats with open and clear direction.

A report was recently published by the Burton Group that collects nearly all of the misconceptions about ODF that Microsoft is spreading, a report that was completely debunked by the OpenDocument Alliance. It’s worth reading simply to know the facts.

So, Steve Jobs just concluded his Macworld keynote speech. Biggest news: the iPhone is now official. All I can say is: dang. That thing is going to be awesome. It’s the combination of three devices: a widescreen video iPod (not so exciting), a cellular phone (moderately exciting), and a productivity suite running a full OS (very exciting).

Obviously, what I’m most interested in is the fact that this thing runs Mac OS X. Yes, it RUNS Mac OS X. It’s got mobile versions of Mail.app and Safari, and Jobs claims you can run desktop-class applications on it. Sweet. Sadly, I’m sure that internet access will require the $40/month Internet fee (something I doubt I’d use enough to justify the cost), but there’s good news: it does Wi-fi and Bluetooth. So, given that the places that I would use it also have WiFi access, I’d be set. It’s supposed to make it really easy to navigate and dial people, but I didn’t quite visualize there have only been text descriptions of it. I’m sure the video will be available this evening or tomorrow. It has integration with Google Maps and GPS functions, so it’s aware of where you are. It doesn’t use a stylus, but rather the finger as a pointing device. In fact, it has multitouch, so you can use more than one finger to do gestures and navigate. All that said, the iPhone sounds close to the perfect organizational device I’ve wanted for some time now. Sadly, it’s not cheap at $499 (4GB) and $599 (8GB). But it’s not going to be released until June, so I’ve got time to save back my money if I decide I want it.
Apple also debuted their iTV device, now called appletv. Seems nice enough, HD video playback, a 40GB drive, and wireless 802.11n access to a Mac/PC that otherwise serves as a storage device for larger videos. Compared to Tivo’s Series3, which is like $800, it seems a value at $299. That said, I don’t think it’s really worth the money. If it recorded television shows also, maybe.
I was shocked at the lack of a few things though. First and foremost, where is Leopard? I mean, let’s see some new secret features, demos, or at least a release date announced for the thing! There was no iWork or iLife announcements, even though Amazon accidentally linked them on their site. On the iPhone, how automatic is the synchronization with the Mac?  Will they sync if they realize each other’s presence via bluetooth?  Will it sync over the Internet without requiring a .Mac subscription?  Will it sync with multiple Macs easily?  How easy is note taking on the Mac?  Can I take a note and turn it into a To Do or add it to my Calendar, akin to what was demoed for Leopard?  Another biggie is, what about iTunes? They’ve announced that the appletv plays HD video, which implies that HD video would be available on iTunes. Where’s the beef?  A number of questions remain.

Two days ago I had an epiphany: I hate Quicken for Mac. Actually, that’s something I’ve known for a while now, but I’ve continued in hopes that perhaps some day Intuit would release a truly cross platform solution with feature parity with Windows. Reality sets in when you realize that they’re still using OS9-era code, have become pretty much the only company not to release a major software as Universal Binary, and the Intuit CEO is even saying that Quicken Mac’s future is in question. They probably get more money for Quicken by bundling it with new Macs than they do upgraders, there’s just no compelling reason for anyone to use it. But my issues with Quicken for Mac are for another post.

Friday I set in to convert my data to an alternative: MoneyDance from Reilly Technologies. MoneyDance is probably the highest rated Quicken alternative for Mac. Let me throw this out first: it also has one of the ugliest interfaces of all of the alternatives. I was put off several times by it, but then decided to jump right in. So far, I’m very pleased with it. It takes a simpler approach to finance management than any of the programs I’ve used, and still manages to pack in features that other alternatives miss, especially online banking.

My own pros and cons list:

Pros:

• It’s built in Java, and is completely cross platform! Not only does this program run on Windows and Mac, but Linux to boot! While it’s not open source, it is open standards-based. That counts for a lot in my book (especially having gone through the rigors of trying to migrate my data from Money to Quicken for Mac).
• It can handle most accounts that you can throw at it: banking, credit card, loan, investments… you name it.
• It’s got a simple, double entry accounting model that simply works, contrasting with other programs that have way too much focus on making displaying your transactions seem like some kind of arcane, black magic, and usually fouling up in the process.
• Reports are not the best, but are nice. I feel much more in control of my financial picture than trying to use Quicken for Mac’s.
• Tagging for transactions. I’ve not used it yet, but in my book tagging is the best thing since sliced bread!
• Online banking. This is the main feature that made me consider this over iBank.
• More of a minor thing, but this is the only financial management program that can correctly determine my payment amount for my home mortgage and other loans. Even MS Money got that one wrong.

Cons:

• For me, the butt-ugly interface. I have to commend them for producing a product that works natively so well across so many platforms, but in this day and age of information presented with smooth colors and in useful ways, there’s no excuse for the first thing you see being a calendar with Java-shade-of-grey colors.
• Reports are lacking somewhat in what they can produce. I’d kill to see the equivalent of MS Money’s “Monthly Report”. Heck, if I could just run reports on specific Payees (or even see a list of Payees) I’d be happy.
• Online Banking, I believe, is new to this release of MoneyDance. As such, it still feels “tacked on”. I’ve not found a way to enter an online transaction from the account register itself. Instead, it has to be done via an online dialog box that asks for your password every time. I haven’t used it yet, but I suspect that this will cause some confusion when I go to pay an online payment that I have a reminder set up for–I’ll probably wind up with two entries in my register. I’d love to be able to send an online payment from the account register, or at least have my financial data automatically, periodically downloaded without having to ask for my password every time!
• Help documentation is sparse and largley incomplete. When it’s important to find out if I’m doing things the way MoneyDance thinks I should be doing them, I often have to go to the help forums.
• Paycheck Manger to track my pre-tax deductions, salary, bonus, etc. More cool points if they could make it to where I could easily run reports on my Paycheck vs. my wife’s Paycheck to compare notes for W2 forms.
• 401k Manager is desperately needed. Although it’s flexible enough to work very capably with Investment Accounts, I’m far from a financial wiz and don’t understand the inner workings of Investment or 401k accounts. Those things truly are arcane, black magic! Give me a wizard!

All in all, I like MoneyDance and feel more in control and informed of my finances than over the past year using Quicken for Mac. Slack must be cut for MoneyDance’s faults; compared to Quicken it’s still a fledgling lil’ fella. I’m hopeful that they’ll continue to make improvements in the program’s usability and help documentation, and continue to become a solid performer across all platforms, especially Linux.

Apple has a tendency of doing things that just constitute icing on the cake. Like, recently I discovered that when I started a video chat, it conveniently paused my iTunes track that was playing so that I could hear the other person talk, and resumed it again when I stopped chatting.

One of Apple’s most recent icing on the cake features is Gapless Playback in iTunes and iPod. That is to say, Apple has finally removed the nasty little half second gap between songs that plagues most computer-based music, and iPod fans in particular.  Having applied the iPod updates, I’m pleased to discover that the fruits of Apple’s big iPod/iTunes announcements this week have trickled down to us older users.

However, while music aficionados are praising Apple for Gapless playback in opera, classical, and live music, my ultimate playback challenge is of course Pink Floyd.  Pink Floyd music has that timeless appeal of the concept album, and more often than not songs fluidly flow from one into the other in an atmospheric treat for the ears.  I was thrilled to discover that Dark Side of the Moon played perfectly in iTunes 7, and more thrilled to discover that it played flawlessly on the iPod as well.  Glad I didn’t have to upgrade to get this feature!  Thank you Apple!

I’m back! I realized that my blog has been sitting idle for some months, primarily because I moved to a new server that supports Ruby on Rails, and I’ve been too lazy to migrate my blog with the site.

But, it was this morning while migrating my blog postings for the past year+ that I realized how valuable this blog is. It really doesn’t matter to me that no one reads my blog (assuming the scant reader sees this, my apologies for calling you no one!), what matters is that I’ve captured some stuff that I personally find interesting, such as my thoughts on the media during the Katrina crisis. Then looking at the dates and times that these entries were posted, it really adds an interesting perspective to things. I mean, here I am less than a year since my “Considering a Mac” post, and now I have not just an iMac, but a MacBook and an iPod as well.

With all that said, with the transfer I thought I’d try something a bit different: moving to WordPress. WordPress is one of the de facto standard open-source blogging softwares, and it has some features that my former blog, Nucleus CMS, didn’t have. If nothing else, I’d like to make sure that the MySQL that my entries are in are supported enough to be flexibly moved.

I’ve got quite some catching up to do, as many of the last things I’ve mentioned have changed (PULSE is FINALLY released, but founding member Syd Barret has sadly since passed away, Star Trek XI is confirmed to be un-stalled–with teaser poster no less, Dreamworks have released a teaser trailer for the upcoming live-action Transformers movie, Airbus has fallen into a bit of a crisis and are now playing up the A350XWB, Fox News and Newt Gingrich have declared World War III, and so on). Additionally, I’ll need to migrate the look and feel of this blog back to being similar to my main website at www.kenpardue.com. Shouldn’t be too hard, but I’ll have to put my CSS hat on again.

This article talks about an upcoming Windows Live service called Live Drive. While I’m dubuious about the claim of “store everything”, it does sound promising that they reference high def movies and other very large(tm) files on there. Google is fantastic, if for nothing else to inspire other companies to share the wealth in this age of bandwidth-o-plenty.

Upgrading from my antiquated and ailing Garmin iQue 3600 to a Pocket PC-based Dell Axim X5.  I’m completely sick of my battery failing on me on the iQue, which is particularly important during meeting when taking notes. And I don’t want to take the risk that the thing is going to glitch on me while driving in some unfamiliar area with the GPS.  A friend of mine hooked me up with a great deal that I couldn’t pass up, so here I am.

So far, I like Windows Mobile a LOT better than Palm OS.  Obviously, as a fairly recent Mac convert, I don’t care for MS as much as the next guy.  What really matters in the end is the quality of the product, and PocketPC seems like the best mobile OS at the time.  Apple may come out with some nifty gadget next year, but for now this Axim is great.

I’ve finally gotten around to removing the generic links on the right side of my blog, replacing them instead with a list of my currently playing and recent tracks.

Ever heard much about Ruby on Rails? Of course, you can’t be a web developer and not hear the buzz around Web 2.0… hype or no hype, one of the things I’m seeing more and more these days is the Ruby on Rails framework. Ruby is, unlike PHP, a fully-realized Object Oriented language, and the Rails framework focused around consistency and development best practices that allows the rapid creation of very powerful web applications and services that actually run faster than Java web apps, with significantly less code.

It also seems to be an able answer from the open source community to .NET web applications style of rapid development, and there are people switching from .NET to RoR. On top of all that, unless I’m understanding incorrectly, Ruby apps can be compiled and distributed cross platform without needing a framework to be installed on the client machine. The interpreter is shipped with the binary. How cool is that?

Couple that with (consider my interest in both Ruby and XPlatform development here) RubyCocoa, a bridge between Objective C/Cocoa and Ruby, and I may just have a new way to start playing with actual application development. To top it all off, an article on the Mac Dev center talking Cross Platform development and that Perl, Python, and Ruby have all become very powerful application development platforms in their own right.

Traditionally, I’ve used PHP. That’s what I know well and can knowledgeably navigate through. But one of the things that I’ve searched for years with PHP is a best practices methodology that applies across the board. I’ve been unable to find that since it’s such an open way of doing things. I’ve developed a set of techniques that work for myself, but those techniques are reimplemented and readdressed every time I do a site. In another sense, I’ve developed and redeveloped in PHP because it made me feel better about myself for being able to do it, not to mention keep my skills sharp. In the last month, however, I’ve seen our devleopment style undercut twice by template-style websites that deliver a whole lot more for a much more reasonable price. Since I have an aversion to Nuking things, perhaps migrating to a development framework such as RoR would be a way to still feel good about the development I’m doing, but also allow us to get very capable applications to market more quickly.

I’m coming to realize that the framework is just what is missing from PHP, and that’s just what has grown to be remarkably robust around Ruby. There’ s a nice set of articles comparing PHP to Ruby and discussing the two.

Unfortunately, Ruby on Rails needs to, of course, be deployed on the hosting server. That isn’t good news for shared hosting because Rails is fairly new on the scene and most shared hosts do things very conservatively. My current host, HostGator, doesn’t offer support for it (yet). I’ve been looking at TextDrive… which is billed pretty darn close to being the “Official Shared Hosting Solution of RoR”. I’ve been looking at their services and they seem really nice, actually. I’m impressed simply with the fact that they fully support WebDav and allow you to mount iDisk-like folders on your desktop and share iCal files (can we say .Mac alternative with more options?). They also support, of course, both Ruby and the Ruby on Rails frameworks, PHP 4 AND 5 (HostGator supports only 4), and version control on your files through subversion and a few other options. Although I haven’t used subversion, I’m interested in it.

Will I move? Well, I’m seriously considering it. Even if I don’t use Ruby on Rails, there are several techniques I want to try in PHP 5 that I just can’t do right now with version 4.

Any thoughts?

I think I’ve finally got things set up and organized in my computer room with the new iMac.  I moved my computer desk into a different location, making the room flow better (which was a pain considering I now have a 10 gallon aquarium on it — poor fish are probably traumatized).  I’ve also adopted the Mac attitude of clutter-free with everything hidden away, and for the first time I’ve organized and neatly routed all of the cables underneath and behind the computer.  It’s amazing to look down and not see a spider’s web of cords and cables at my feet.

The last of the hardware to be migrated to the iMac was my old Creative Inspire 5.1 Speakers.  The iMac has kind of a weird headphone/optical digital combo audio output jack, so to use my surround sound I had to get Griffin Technology’s XPress Cable.  Everything plugged right in, and I don’t think my speakers have ever sounded so good.  Plus, the red fiber optic light is nifty!

So far, I’ve had very few problems out of Rosetta/non-Intel software.  I had some trouble with the label maker software that ships with my printer, and some trouble with the Tri-Select Backup software for my external drive which, as I found out later, isn’t even compatible with 10.4 (Tiger). Flip4Mac (WMV playback through Quicktime) also doesn’t install, but there’s a patch promised soon™. There are a few game issues, particularly X-Plane.  Turn the graphics settings down and it flies well enough until a Universal Binary is available.  In fact, all of these vendors are planning Universal Binaries of their software.  As with all things Mac, it’s just a waiting game.

All in all, I’m very comfortable with the Mac as my personal productivity and development station.