Saw the news on a couple of different sites, on Groklaw, on Slashdot, for example, that the OASIS Open Document Format has been accepted as an "Industry Standard" by the ISO. ODF is now ISO/IEC 26300. Although not "official", the remainder of the process is a formality as far as I can tell.

The OASIS Open Document Format is the document format developed for Open Office, but is already supported by Koffice and Abiword (I think). It goes without saying that Sun's Star Office supports it as well. OASIS, Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, is an international, non-profit organization whos mission is to develop ebusiness standards. From their "About" section:

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. The consortium produces more Web services standards than any other organization along with standards for security, e-business, and standardization efforts in the public sector and for application-specific markets. Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries.

Sponsors include IBM, Sun, Intel, U.S. Department of Defense, Boeing, and visa. Hell, its an impressive list. Interestingly enough, although the OASIS Open Document Format is used primari.y open source office suites, Microsoft is a member of the consortium.

Speaking of Microsoft, they must be a little displeased right now. Not only did ODF become a standard, according to Slashdot John Dvorak has an article entitled "Microsoft Malaise" and a subtitle of "Eight signs that the software giant is dead in the water". According to Groklaw, the State of Mass. asked "Can Anybody Out There Make MS Office Interoperate with ODF?" and got an answer. According to some reviews or comments I have seen on the net, the next version of MS office is going to require substantial retraining since the UI has drastically changed - although I must admit I have no idea if that is true.

Man it would be nice if Open Office and Open Document Format can gain increased (and substantial) mindshare in the market.

Mozilla has released a security update for both Firefox and Thunderbird. This release fixes several bugs that are considered "critical". If you are a firefox or thunderbird, make sure that your software is updated. In my case, I have to wait for Kubuntu to update the package.

Note, I found this on all sorts of sites like Slashdot, Planet Mozilla, etc.

Plone 2.1.3 has been released. It appears that it is mostly a maintenance release and some fixes to Kupu have been implemented. It'll be interesting to see since my wife uses kupu to post to her blog. It also appears that some other small changes have been made that may require re-customization of some of the "portlets". We'll see.

You may experience some downtime of neohawk as I upgrade. Then again, since nobody actually reads the site I am not overly concerned! ^_^;

Late last year I transitioned from Gentoo Linux to Kubuntu on my laptops(yes, I still prefer Gentoo on my servers). However, at least on one my my laptops, I have been very disappointed in the latest release of Kubuntu. It hangs...Can you believe it, it actually hangs the computer! It requires a hard reboot! Even on the Live CD!

To be fair, however, it works like an absolute charm on my IBM (Lenovo?)Thinkpad. In that sense, I am very pleased with it so far.

It is hard for me to believe that nobody else has experienced this on an Averatec PC. Okay, so its a couple of years old, and has some perhaps funky hardware, but still. The laptop is the one used by my wife and kids, and is an Averatec 3200 series. 3210 I believe(the sticker has worn off so I can read it...).

I upgraded to "dapper" yesterday on the Averatec, and it started to hang. I tried to do some things and was unsuccessful. So I downloaded the Live CD and this morning popped in to see how it would work. And the Live CD actually hung! I cannot believe it. Sigh. I am almost tempted to go back to Gentoo....

Okay, off to Kubuntu.org and other places to see if there is any info on it......so much for upgrading plone today....

UPDATE: I kinda figured out what the problem is. The linux kernel that comes with Dapper doesn't like the networking hardware on the Averatec. By booting with an older kernel, zero problems whatsoever. Need to try and identify this problem so I can report it....At least my wife will be able to use her pc....

The other day, George Nemeth posted over at BFD about an email he received about an individual that setup a NEO blog aggregator site. It is not a bad site, and although the individual in question says that he is doing it pro-bono, he does work for a web design company which suggests ulterior motives to me, regardless of whether the that site per se is pro-bono. Not that that is a bad thing.

I actually remember IM'ing with George while I was still in Okinawa about a similar idea. I even set up site that basically did the same thing. This was almost a year ago. I took a little time the other day to reset it up, under the new neohawk domain: http://planet-neo.neohawk.org. It was, and is, really just a test and does not have the full NEO blogroll. Just a few of the one's I have in my rss reader.

I never really spent much time customizing it or building it up more, largely because I have a RSS reader and BFD does a great job of directing me to interesting posts and allowing commenting. And BFD is already established as sort of, if not the, at least one of the premier blog sites for NEO. What I like about BFD is the introductions that George and others give, and the commenting. What I had set up was really just a aggregator, on the web instead of on my PC.

I used a python based software called PlanetPlanet (Open Source of course). It takes about 15 minutes to set up, apart from listing all of the sites to be parsed. Even now, the planet-neo site is really just out of the box, default layout etc. And it'll probably stay that way. Interestingly enough, I re-set this up the day that George posted, but I noticed that Jeremy Smith over at Case has set up a PlanetPlanet test for Case's blog: http://planet.case.edu/beta/. The real "planet" for Case is at: http://planet.case.edu/. I am curious as to what the "real planet" for Case is using....

FWIW, I have no problems with what the guy in Pittsburgh is doing. More power to him. Reality is though, I won't be registering, nor using it. Just a personal preference, but I would rather see George or MeetTheBloggers do it. Regardless, I have my own planet...

Early this month I posted Disappointing Dapper and the problems I had upgrading my wife's PC to the dapper release of Kubuntu. I had a update comment on it that the problems was with the kernel.

Not surprisingly, a couple of days ago, the kernel included with Dapper was upgraded, and now there are zero problems. The usb printer works, the camera works, sound works, and I am on the latest version of KDE. Ah, happiness.

Kubuntu, just in case you're interested, is a version of Ubuntu but tweaked to provide KDE as opposed to Ubuntu's GNOME. Of course, KDE or GNOME is a personal preference for the desktop environment, and with linux their are a multitude of other choices. I just happen to prefer KDE, though I have many friends and acquaintances that prefer GNOME. REALNeo used Ubuntu on the PCs provided to East Cleveland.

Okay I have sat on this for a day or two, but SCO just had 182 of their claims dismissed by the Magistrate Judge in their $5 billion lawsuit against IBM. PJ transcribed the pdf into text here. And then:

I slept and slept and slept. And now, hopping back on my horsie, here are the media reactions to the news that the court just stuffed a sock in SCO's mouth. Mostly they quote at length from the very quotable judge's order.

But check it out for yourselves.

The long an short of it is that two-thirds of SCO's case against IBM just got tossed. Not based on merits, but rather on the fact that SCO was unable to specify what was *exactly* the problem. They failed to do that even under court order. Read the judges order, it is fairly harsh. Much harsher than anything PJ has ever written. The main quote making its round the 'net is:

Given the amount of code that SCO has received in discovery the court finds it inexcusable that SCO is in essence still not placing all the details on the table.¹²³ Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that “you know what you stole I’m not telling.” Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus’ entire inventory and say “its in there somewhere, you figure it out.”

One of the things to note, is the attention to detail that PJ has on prior declaration of so called "analysts". You will also notice that PJ, citizen journalist, is oft quoted in the "MSM". So much for bloggin/citizen journalism not offering quality and fact checking. ( Which reminds me, I still need to finish this...even if Jill took my punch line.)

Those of that have been watching this case since 2003 know where its going. But there are still claims on the table the judge has not dismissed. And it'll still be a while until it is finally finished.

Ain't Over 'Til lthe Fat Lady Sings.

A little late on the uptake, but Open Document Format and Microsoft have been in the news lately. Back in late June, it was reported that Belgium had made the decision to switch all government documents to the Open Document Format. Open Document Format, or ODF, is the new ISO standard for document file formats. In ISO lingo, it is now known as ISO/IEC 26300. ODF is the file format used in open source office software such as OpenOffice.org, KWord, and Abiword. I posted about this back in May

Meanwhile the State of Massachusetts decision to use open document format for its government documents, in addition to plain text and the portable document format(PDF), continues to create controversy. Earlier this week, via ZDNET Government, this:

"State Sen. Marc R. Pacheco issued a committee report that found officials" did not pursue this policy in an open, collaborative, or lawful manner."

But in a interview in with C|NET, that the State of Mass intends to stay the course.

"Our next action is to do what we are doing right now, which is working toward the goal. We believe in the utility of open standards," Gutierrez said Friday.

Note that the current CIO was not the CIO when Mass announced its open standard decision back in September of 2005. Microsoft and its supporters have fought this move by Mass. in various ways. In fact, Microsoft originally refused to support the open document format, and have stressed that they are working to get their Office OpenXML certified as a standard by next year.

But Microsoft seems to have had a change of heart, as reluctant that change may have been.

Brian Jones of Microsoft announced, also earlier this week, that Microsoft was funding a project hosted on sourceforge that will translate between Microsoft office and open document format. In fact, you can already download a odf file format converter for Word 2007. And interestingly enough, it is not only hosted on sourceforge, but it is released under a BSD License.

Great news, eh? Check out PJ's take on it.