Pages

2008-01-17

Quick Pay Calculator

"This Quick Pay calculator runs on an HM Revenue & Customs accredited Internet Payroll engine. It is fast and accurate. You are welcome to use it at anytime for your routine payroll calculations. It is a free service."

https://gs.payroo.com/payroo/qpc/QuickPayRunList.do?exec=start&displayName=Payroo&apc=

8 Tools to Help You Travel Forever and Live Rent Free

"How then, do you travel long term and not run out of money? Hotels (and even hostels) are expensive over time, and finding rental accommodation in every city you visit is impractical."

http://www.vagabondish.com/8-tools-travel-long-term-live-rent-free/

SQL Designer

http://ondras.zarovi.cz/sql/

The Miniature Earth

http://216.70.117.172/me_english.htm

Edirol R-09: WAVE/MP3 Recorder

"the R-09. Building on the success of the R-1, the R-09 takes many of the most desired features — 24-bit uncompressed recording and a built-in stereo mic — and shrinks it all down into a more streamlined, stylish, and affordable package."

http://www.rolandus.com/products/productdetails.aspx?ObjectId=757&ParentId=114

ODF vs. OOXML on the Eve of the BRM

"History teaches that monopolies in the marketplace, like empires in the broader world, are rarely sustainable over long periods of time, and ultimately fall victim to both external attack and internal weaknesses. The degree to which Microsoft's competitors have embraced, and many Microsoft customers and national governments alike have resonated, with ODF are strong indications that the foundations upon which Microsoft's historical dominance has been based may at last be weakening."

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080117130300657

JISC infoNet - System Selection infoKit

"System change is often prompted by seemingly insoluble problems with existing hardware and software and is often unwelcome both to those who have to cope with it and those who have to fund it. One of the themes running through many of the JISC infoNet infoKits is the opportunity afforded by system change to add value to the business of teaching, learning and research. This depends, of course, on selecting the right system in the first place."

http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/InfoKits/system-selection/index_html

Navigating Oracle's public online documentation

"Here's a quick guide to navigating Oracle's public online documentation library, which contains hundreds of books. Bob Watkins also offers a rundown of his favorite offerings in the collection."

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-9592_11-6105712.html

Documentation index page

http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/index.html

Scheduling a meeting in Lotus Notes








http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/dw/lotus/learn/viewlets/notesdomino/notes8/schedulemeetfinal_viewlet_swf.html

And other tutorials here:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/demos/viewlets.html

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

"... the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It's quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points."

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html

Wink - Screencast, Presentation & Tutorial

"Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users."

http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

Team Aquaduct wins Innovate or Die competition



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U-mvfjyiao

"Team Aquaduct was declared the winner out of 102 entries by building a unique and functional solution to provide rural communities with access to clean water."

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/team-aquaduct-wins-innovate-or-die.html

OpenDocument supporters respond to Burton Report

"There have been a few good responses to the Burton Report (you must register to download), the document that debates the relative merits of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Ecma 376 Office Open XML (OOXML). While this document is supposedly “unbiased,” a few writers found reason to contradict that stance."

http://www.fanaticattack.com/2008/opendocument-format-response-to-the-burton-report.html

For example

"1. Page 5 says “…[L]ibraries and large businesses, faced with storing and using years of Microsoft Office legacy documents, will prefer OOXML, as OOXML can more faithfully recreate the look and metadata (such as spreadsheet formulas) stored in Microsoft’s binary file formats.”

This statement confuses file formats and applications. Surely, OOXML cannot faithfully recreate the look of anything. It is a file format, not an application.

Microsoft Office is the application that interprets OOXML, and it can also render legacy binary file formats, except when Microsoft decides to remove support for them, as Microsoft recently did with Office 2003 SP32. There can be further problems when Microsoft decides not to support legacy features, such as when they removed support for Visual Basic scripting in Office 2008 for the Macintosh3.

The authors fail to note that no other application supporting OOXML has been able to faithfully or fully recreate the look of Microsoft’s legacy binary documents. So the statement that OOXML – a file format – is the solution for rendering legacy documents is simply false." "

ODF& OOXML - What has happened so far?

"OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the current ISO standard (IS 26300:2006) for XML-based word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents. By using an open standard format like ODF, consumers avoid vendor lock-in and are able to have a choice of suppliers. ODF is widely supported by vendors, in both commercially-available and open-source software, and is seeing strong adoption world wide.

In early 2007 the European Computer Manufacturer's Association (Ecma), after a superficial review clothed in secrecy, submitted the Microsoft-authored document format specification, Office Open XML (OOXML), to ISO/IEC JTC1 for approval as an International Standard. This provocative submission occurred only three months after JTC1 published OpenDocument Format (ODF) as a unanimously approved International Standard.

OOXML has been widely criticized as flawed standard, having been designed with only a single vendor's objectives in mind and designed to work fully only with that vendor's products. Also, in its rush to catch up with ODF, OOXML was submitted to JTC1 in an immature state, hastily written and insufficiently reviewed. At the time it was approved by Ecma, there were zero commercially available implementations of OOXML. The only support was in the beta version of Office 2007."

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/01/you-are-here.html

Britain Advises Against Vista, Office 2007 for Schools

"The British government's educational IT authority has issued a report advising schools in the country not to upgrade their classroom or office systems to Windows Vista or Office 2007. According to this InformationWeek story, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency says costs for Vista and Office 2007 'are significant and the benefits remain unclear.' Instead, Becta is advising British schools to take a long look at Linux and open source suites like OpenOffice.org."

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/11/2242208

"To ensure widest compatibility of files between different applications, users of Office 2007 should not save in Microsoft's new Office format (OOXML)."

http://news.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=35287