office

I’m home in the UK temporarily and I am having to deal with the painful realities of home computing.

I have myself (partly) to blame. I’ve bought some crap hardware, but haven’t we all?

Though I don’t know what possessed me to purchase a CIT200 Linksys Skype phone for my parents. Well I know why. So my parents could communicate cheaply. Unfortunately the USB device is dependent on Win32 drivers. So moving them over to Ubuntu dapper, not possible. Also Skype is proprietary FOOL. Argh…

One step at a time you might say. They’re not quite used to OpenOffice yet. They’ve been using the pre-bundled Microsoft Works 7 (.wps files), which aren’t compatible with OpenOffice. Oh no. In fact wps files aren’t compatible with new versions of Microsoft Office.

Oh, WTF?

Thanks to a online resource I installed a plugin for Works7 to export wps files into Word compatible RTF files. Those files I can import into OpenOffice.

That’s painful. My mother has made quite a few documents that each have to be manually updated to doc and then opendocument text (odt). That’s painful.

A simple letterhead of my parent’s business shows the import is leaky. God knows how to extend that border line to the right. Or correct the font. I frustratingly tried to edit and format the letterhead and it couldn’t get it to align nicely to right. What a pain.

Our good neighbour Morley has been more keen to use Linux. He is a complete novice and I helped order the parts from dabs.com with him two years ago. He never got it working and since recently returning to Praze Farm I had a look at his machine.

A local computer store said his Radeon 7000 works. It doesn’t. He did manage to procure an old Matrox PCI MGA which does work. He got as so far as to install Fedora, but never managed to get the dialup modem working. I noticed he was trying to get a Winmodem working. sigh

He says he is familiar with Fedora since he had some Linux Format magazine guide. Of course I want him to use Debian, or Debian based like Ubuntu Dapper. Now I have to convince to, re-install. Pain. I am also trying to convince him to get broadband now.

Years ago I bought my parents a mini-itx (when they were all the rage) based machine from scam, sorry scan.co.uk who built a very noisy machine. Recently I just turned off the fan and took the side case panels off. Seems to be OK. I want to “upgrade” the machine as the USB ports are dodgy, the network card hates DHCP and the sound card doesn’t work. I did hunt around for a machine, but the Mac mini might be again too painful for my parents and it doesn’t have a mic jack for Skype. WTF.

I looked around dabs and I can’t believe they sell machines with 256mbs of RAM. Also they don’t reveal how loud they are which is super important to me. And they’re not cheap. I am missing Korean prices. And does the hardware work with Dapper? Hmph. Lets face it, hardware support pages don’t help. You’d be hard pressed to source the tested machines. I ran a great Ubuntu desktop machine on a high end Thinkcentre in Korea. I want that back. It was also quiet. I also loathe, hate and break out into angry fits about having to buy Microsoft Windows whilst buying a computer.

I am thinking back to my adventures with computing at home. It really just hasn’t worked out for poor Linux. The biggest breakthrough is having broadband with a Linksys WAG354G-UK. I am greatly indebted to a local LUGer Neil Stone for helping my parents set this up. They would not have managed the broadband setup without him. We have a peculiar problem with our phone line and if some phones are plugged in the modem could never reliably maintain a connection. We’ve unplugged all our phones and broaband does work, except we have terrible landline quality issues. Argh, another reason why my parents like Skype a lot.

So I can share the Internet reasonably from my lovely Thinkpad X40 wireless. Though only in one room. The walls are so thick in praze farm, the signal doesn’t go into my bedroom or the kitchen. I noticed the WAG354G has an aerial port, but I couldn’t find an aerial that claims to support it. I contacted Linksys and they said the product isn’t on the market and suggest purchasing instead the WRE54G v2. I can’t find that device on dabs. Anyway we have several rooms in this house. I am not going to buy a wireless repeater for each room! So wireless and big old thick walled houses is pain.

Hopefully in the future I’ll get my WRT54G that I send via sea from Korea and install that upstairs where the walls are thankfully just partitions and see how that goes.

Another important problem I have been keeping myself busy with are backups or “digital preservation”. My strategy is to copy everything precious and organise them on an external 80G USB hard drive which already has fallen off the desk a couple of times. I’ve ripped down DVDs of home videos to VOB, but since neither of our machines at home are particularly powerful, I can’t convert them to theora!

I have many digital images that I need to track in some database. I need to write a program to do that. I’ve been too lazy to do so. We keep a lot of printed photographs in our cupboards. It’s remarkable how they’ve preserved, although my mother chucked out all the negatives as she claimed they were all “stuck together” and useless. Damn, I don’t think I will digitising photographs anytime soon.

There are two main problems I think with my parents and computing. Hardware and know how. My mother claims she would attend computer courses, but there aren’t any ones with Ubuntu and say OpenOffice and Firefox (Gmail)!

The most pressing problem is that it is hard to buy compatible hardware without falling for some Microsoft trap. At least I have my parent’s using Gmail and now we have broadband so I can access . They seem happy with that, though I’m not. There really needs to be Free software comparable to Gmail.

We’re at least no closer any to “free computing” after all these years.

Sometime ago I came up with the idea of automated comparison of how different Office applications render Microsoft documents. Here is some output and thoughts.

# Export test file to PDF from application
# `convert` (imagemagick) PDF to TIFF
# findimagedupes $MICROSOFT_TIFF $COMPETITOR_TIFF

office2007beta2/4-1-1-23.tiff abiword/4-1-1-23.tiff:  89.45% similar.
office2007beta2/2-19-1-1.tiff freepdfconvert/2-19-1-1.tiff:  98.44% similar.
office2007beta2/2-19-14-7.tiff freepdfconvert/2-19-14-7.tiff:  99.61% similar.
office2007beta2/4-1-1-23.tiff freepdfconvert/4-1-1-23.tiff:  96.48% similar.
office2007beta2/2-19-1-1.tiff neevia/2-19-1-1.tiff:  98.44% similar.
office2007beta2/2-19-14-7.tiff neevia/2-19-14-7.tiff:  99.61% similar.
office2007beta2/4-1-1-23.tiff neevia/4-1-1-23.tiff:  94.92% similar.
office2007beta2/2-19-1-1.tiff OO/2-19-1-1.tiff:  91.80% similar.
office2007beta2/2-19-14-7.tiff OO/2-19-14-7.tiff:  99.22% similar.
office2007beta2/4-1-1-23.tiff OO/4-1-1-23.tiff:  88.28% similar.

# Abiword 2.4.4 failed to generate PDFs that imagemagick’s convert could work on, except in one case. Btw the rendering in that case is completely wrong. Notice though how it scored a 89.45% similarity.
# Chart PDF test files that MSOffice2007beta2 outputted would make imagemagick’s convert choke ! Hence, I had to compare them by hand.
# Neevia and freepdfconvert do very high quality PDF conversion compared to MS Office 2007.
# Converting test files to PDF in each application is extremely laborious
# OpenOffice 2.0.3 does well, except minor details in the rendering such as font size and alignment
# I did try other “online” PDF convertors. Neevia and freepdfconvert were the only two to pass my basic CJK test.
# Reference PDF conversion with OO can be automated
# Of course I assume that the PDF export is the same as the on screen rendering. This isn’t strictly true. For example Word documents with a coloured background won’t come out in a PDF.
# Imagemagick’s compare and pdiff can help
# I tried Softmaker’s Textmaker 2002 linux edition. Couldn’t render any of my doc tests. The new 2006 Textmaker version for Windows renders my tests well, though it seems unable to export to PDF. Doh!
# Microsoft are doing away with PDF export
# The similarity index can only be used as a rough guide to flag possible problems. OO renderings are often below 90%, but the information is there.

If there is a way to hack Microsoft Office 2007beta2 to create (correct) PDFs from them command (cmd) line, then this technique has a hope. I can’t be bothered to go through hundreds of test cases. Since Neevia and “freepdfconvert” are so close to Microsoft Office2007 renderings in my tests, perhaps they could be used as a base reference.

Document compatibility between Microsoft and opensource formats is probably going to get worse before it gets better.

Right now we have quite decent compatibility between Openoffice and MS Word with the 97–2003 .doc format. Not perfect by a long shot. Especially for CJK documents in my tests, but usable.

So here is why it’s going to get worse. Microsoft is pushing its new .docx XML standard which of course isn’t compatible or rather importable with OpenOffice (or anything else for that matter).

In my tests if you open .docx as “Word XML” in OpenOffice, expect a crash. Oh, but the new .docx XML standard is actually a standard proposed to ECMA one might exclaim. Now one can look up the spec, instead of reverse engineering the proprietary Word 97–2003 .doc format. Er, no.

The Microsoft proprietary specification, expertly called “Office Open XML” to confuse everyone is a 4081 page Word centric document from hell. Still I’ll be surprised if this red hot spec is complete and stable by the time Office 2007 actually ships. Still Microsoft have the money and contacts to push this standard as if it was actually a reasonable implementable specification reference. Ouch.

Microsoft’s “Office Open XML” spec was also of course designed to completely derail the true “opensource” format standard proposal called ODF. ODF or otherwise known as the OpenDocument Format is currently implemented in OpenOffice as “Opendocument Text” .odt. I don’t have much experience with ODT or ODF except that in seems to incorporate every XML technology under the sun. So expect your Office application to be like a Web browser, except more complex. How on earth it maps onto A4 postscript or PDF is anyone’s guess.

ODF is now implemented by a couple of programs. “Office Open XML” is only implemented in the repeatedly delayed Office 2007 installment. Here is a comparison article on Wikipedia.

Anyway, if you are wondering what a “Hello World” in each “Office” format looks like, then I have a treat for you:

# Hello World ODT file
# ODT converted from Hello World Word doc
# Extracted ODT
# MS Word 97–2003 Hello World
# Microsoft’s Office Open .docx
# Extracted DOCX
# Hello World PDF converted from docx from Office2007beta2
# Hello World PDF from Openoffice2
# Microsoft’s XML Paper Specification(XPS) Hello World
# Extracted XPS
# Print to file TIFF by Office2007

Scary things to think of:
# The sheer complexity of these new XML formats
# What about the millions of existing Word 97–2003 documents out there and their 3rd party tools?
# Might implementors create XML filters for existing Word doc tools?
# Will “commercial” implementers write their own Opendocument engine from scratch?
# How many people will convert (upgrade) their Word documents to .docx?
# Will there be a plugin for Office 2007 to publish to odt?
# Will OpenOffice implement import from .docx? Should they?
# Will Microsoft be forced to implement odt?
# What happens if the industry is bribed towards .docx ?
# Longterm: What will the fall out be? Two “new” standards vying here. Will either complex standard work out?
# What about Excel? Excel is actually supposingly mapped out a little on Microsoft’s “Office Open” spec, whilst there is nothing for spreadsheets on ODF.
# Will Office formats map or become part of the HTML Web?

Personally, I think the new Office format should be reStructuredText.

So I need to write a report.

I can’t write it in HTML because it will print badly from a browser. And editing HTML can be a pain. There is princexml but that costs a couple of hundred dollars.

I don’t want to edit in ODF because then I would have to use a hunk-of-crap WYSIWYG editor like Openoffice. Hell no. Also I have no experience of how ODF maps to the Web. Pretty badly I’ll assume.

There is stuff like textile, markdown and reStructuredText, but what’s the point? They only seem to generate good HTML. So we are still left with the printing beautifully to A4 problem.

Ok there is good old “tex”. But really I don’t want to go back there! Do I really have to use latex? It’s just so heavy and you can’t publish to HTML easily. Argh!

Docbook. Hell no. It’s a dark art to control how the formats finally look. Trust me, I have experience.

I had this thought that there must be some good mediawiki/wikipedia article printer tool. Maybe I can write this in mediawiki with the help of mozex and vim. Oh no. The Debian package is still b0rked on 1.4. Argh…

I just wish there was a better mapping between the web and office formats like odf.

One of the reasons I left Melbourne is that a job offer with SGI fell through. I knew the company was in dire straights, but this story on slashdot confirms it.

They wanted me to work on the interface (a Web application) for their NFS NetAppliance products.

Another small issue with my employment is that I had to be sponsored again, which can be a lengthy and expensive process for me to switch companies. Previously I had a working holiday visa that allowed me to work anywhere basically for up to 3 months. An evil recruitment agency Greythorn offered to sponsor me early in my stay in Australia and I accepted, without realising I would be invalidating my Working Holiday visa. I think I would have chosen to switch to another IT contract, rather than be sponsored if I knew the consequences.

So switching companies (to SGI or whatever) had to begin with a tiresome (for me and my future employer) sponsorship process. Big evil Greythorn actually went through a 3rd party to do this. I can’t recall the name of the 3rd party company. I had to pay for a chest X-ray and get a certificate of private medical insurance. Even though I do have a reciprocal medicare card because I am a British citizen. Sigh.

Sponsorship with one of these specialised 3rd party companies who knows what they are doing takes about 2–3 weeks at a minimum. Though as mentioned you have to find time for the X-ray and filling in some forms.

I was sick of being tied to my first sponsorship for two years and as it was so difficult to switch companies, I thought “bugger it” and hence I left Australia and I am now in Korea.

I stayed in Australia for about 9 months and if I did stay an additional 15 months I would have been able to apply for residency in Australia and been able to pick and choose my job. Sponsorships are often abusive as my employer knew once they sponsored me that they had me by the balls. There is no incentive for them to give me a raise or improve conditions as they know I can’t switch jobs easily.

I started a thread about syncing time between machines in an office over at the Red Hat nahant list. Feck I hate mailman. The thread continues in the next month, detailing NTP syncing best practices.

A summary:

• Don’t use CRON fools!
• Use Red Hat’s tool X-version of system-config-date and use it to set up ntp (GOSH, that sucks!)
• ntpdate for laptops and workstations that reboot often, because you should only use ntpdate on boot as big time shifts during a running system can cause havoc
• Otherwise run ntpd for machines that stay on. Caveat: If time is out by more than 1000 seconds, it won’t update. First ntpdate then restart ntpd. Urgh.
• DST is a pain.
• Win32 time sync net time /setsntp:yourlocalRHserver (on the Domain Controller)