Archive for August, 2008

wtf department

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

I was using MS Word on my work laptop (MS Windows XP) this afternoon when I was presented with the following error message (you’ll need to click on it to appreciate it fully):

I used to think some of the ‘green screen’ IBM 3270 error messages were classics: Enter required field (do you think I’m some [...]

Simply ripping

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

I’ve got some travelling coming up, and I thought it would be nice to pass the time by playing a DVD or two on my Eee PC. My USB DVD writer is larger and heavier than the Eee, and requires mains power so this would mean copying the DVDs onto a 2Gb USB [...]

They shall have prizes

Monday, August 25th, 2008

Back home for a long weekend (today is a UK bank holiday) after spending most of last week in London on business. I managed to fit in an IRC chat one evening with some of my fellow judges of the OpenOffice.org Community Innovation Programme (CIP). Sun Microsystems offered multi-million dollar prize money earlier in the [...]

The Government replies…

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Readers with long memories may remember that I managed to lodge an e-Petition with the UK Prime Minister’s Office urging the UK Government to sign up to the Hague Declaration of the Digital Standards Organisation. The original posting is here.
The petition clocked up 212 votes, and today I received the following email as the official [...]

Building Communities

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

One of the pleasures of attending the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference is catching up with old friends. I always make a point of having a chat with Zaheda, one of the founders of the OpenOffice.org community, now with Google, but still keeping a keen interest in OpenOffice.org.
Zaheda is doing a Conference session The OOo Global Community [...]

Beijing updates

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

As you may be aware, an event eagerly anticipated around the world is taking place in Beijing this year. I mean of course the OpenOffice.org Annual International Conference, which will take place between 5th-7th November this year. We are now in a period of frantic activity for the Conference organisers. As usual, the bulk of [...]