In light of a recent post by Rob Weir on the woeful inadequacies of Microsoft Excel 2007's financial functions I thought this might make interesting reading...

Microsoft have formally announced that Office 2007 SP2 will be updated to support ODF 1.1, and NOT OOXML! Office will also be updated to include support for PDF 1.5, PDF/A and Microsoft's own XML Paper Standard (XPS) which is currently being prepared to be presented to the standardisation boards.

This move has been treated with trepidation by some ODF advocates and we do need to wait until early 2009 to see what Microsoft will actually do, but I firmly believe it's a step in the right direction for Microsoft. Hopefully this will mean that they have recognised the multitude of mistakes they made with OOXML and that ODF is a much more suitable format, and with their joining the standards boards and a continued promise of interoperability we can only hope this is the first step of many!

Watch this space I guess!

Some of you may be aware that Microsoft are proposing their Open OfficeXML (OOXML) as an ISO standard. Now, I'm involved in producing an international standard (see my blog about it over at http://www.diggsml.com) and I know what's involved.

This standardisation process MUST NOT be done by one company, simply releasing what they have and calling it a standard does not make it the correct answer, there needs to be much wider industry comment and review.

This is before you see that:

1. There is already an ISO standard for documents, ISO26300 called Open Document Format (ODF)
2. There is no provable implementation of OOXML! Even Microsoft's own Office 2007 does not properly implement it!
3. The specification is incomplete, there is a lot missing from it.
4. 10% of the "examples" proposed do not even validate as XML!
5. There is no guarantee that anyone can ever implement OOXML without being liable for (or breaking the rules on) patent fees on patents owned by Microsoft!
6. This standard proposal conflicts with other ISO standards, such as ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times), ISO 639 (Codes for the Representation of Names and Languages) or ISO/IEC 10118-3 (cryptographic hash), this is proof of how ill-thought out OOXML is.
7. There is a bug in OOXML that forbids any date prior to 1900
8. Most importantly this standard proposal has NOT been created by bringing together the experience and expertise of all interested parties (such as the producers, sellers, buyers, users and regulators), but by Microsoft alone.

Please, please, support this petition opposing the introduction of Open OfficeXML as an ISO standard, it only takes a minute of your time.

http://www.noooxml.org/petition/

I thinks this is one of the greatest mashups I've seen for a long time, I think it really makes RSS a worthwhile technology!

Everyone is talking about it and I've been laughing at it for a while now!

Take My Twitter as seen over there --> and add LOL Cats and you get:

LOL Twitter

I've just tried to setup VMWare Server on the new works laptop I'm gonna be using on an impending trip to the USA. Everything seemed to go well in the installation process but every time I tried to connect using the VMWare Console I got an error message stating "Error writing to vmware-authd socket. error 10013" or occasionally "Failed to do SSL handshake"

Not helpful I'm sure you'll agree!

Well, after a bit of googling and a lot of swearing I came across the following two forum posts (One post on the VMWare forum, and one on the McAfee forum) from people trying to use VMWare server in conjunction with McAfee SecurityCenter.

It turns out that this spangly new Dell Inspiron laptop came pre installed with McAfee SecurityCenter, which has a child "McAfee Redirector" process, that does some stuff with ports on your computer, even after you've disabled the firewall!

Cheers guys...

Anyways, you apply this at your own risk, don't bame me if your computer catches fire or evil crackers take control of your computer after you implement this but here's a fix that worked for me.

If you create a .reg file with the following contents (or download it from here), merge it into the registry and restart, you're sorted. This IS disabling part of McAfee SecurityCenter so if you don't know what this is talking about with ports and the like this may not be for you...

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\McAfee\Redirector\Ports]

"902"="Ignore"
"8222"="Ignore"
"8333"="Ignore"
"912"="Ignore" 

Let me know if it works/doesn't work for you :)

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