What Microsoft’s track record tells us about OOXML’s future

"If the discussion on OOXML was purely technical I don’t think there would be much debate. Apart from Microsoft employees and a few lost souls, for whom we can only wonder about their real motivations, I have yet to meet any technical person arguing that OOXML is a good specification."

[...]

http://lehors.wordpress.com/2008/03/25/what-microsofts-track-record-tells-us-about-ooxmls-future/

SQLManager Brings ODF Import/Export To Leading Databases

" If you have been looking for a way to utilize your ODF documents as input to your DBMS server, or a way to use the output from the DBMS with your other ODF-capable software, take a look at SQLManager."

http://lnxwalt.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/sqlmanager-brings-odf-importexport-to-leading-databases/

UK: Major cost reduction result of Bristol's switch to Open Standards

"Bristol City Council's switch to StarOffice in 2005 has led to a major reduction of IT costs, says Gavin Beckett, the council's ICT Strategy manager.

StarOffice is Sun Microsystems' proprietary suite of office applications, which is based on the Open Source OpenOffice. In 2006 Bristol took the further step of adopting the ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF).

Speaking at a conference on ODF in the Netherlands last month, Beckett said that implementing StarOffice for 5,500 desktops in Bristol saved 1.1 million GBP (1.4 million euro) in comparison to the total cost of implementing Microsoft Office. "The licences for StarOffice cost us 186,000 GBP (243,000 euro), in comparison to 1.4 million GBP (1.8 million euro) for MS Office.""

http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7409

http://boycottnovell.com/2008/03/15/bristol-adopts-odf-ec-eu-ann/

OOXML ISO-Vote

"This site is a service for those wanting to try various voting scenarios on the proposed ISO standard OOXML (aka DIS 29500, aka ECMA-376)."

http://iso-vote.com/

Examples of ImageMagick Usage

" This web pages presents a set of examples using ImageMagick from the command line. However they are also examples of what can be done using the ImageMagick Application Programming Interface (API). As such these pages should be the first stop for IM users after reading the terse user manuals."

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/

The Ultimate Linux Reference Guide for Newbies

http://blog.lxpages.com/ultimate_linux.html

Perl - Create RSS channels from HTML news sites

"RSS is an XML-based format, where the the site's information is described in a format that simplifies the news down to a few key elements. In the example we're going to run through, we'll concentrate particularly on the title and link tags. If you're interested in specifics of RSS, you can read more about it and see the full specification at netscape.com; for the purposes of this tutorial, though, I'm going to concentrate on how we can manipulate RSS with Perl and leave RSS internals alone."

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/11/15/creatingrss.html

PCL Command Sequences

"All PCL Command Sequences begin with the escape character (an ASCII control code with a hex value of 1Bh, 27 decimal) and end with the first upper case letter (or "=" note: "@" is considered an uppercase letter). In between there is either nothing (the PCL command is just the escape and a single upper case letter) or a set of one or two characters and often a numerical value. The single character commands are listed at the end of the "Decoded PCL Commands" table below. The first non-uppercase character after the escape will be a symbol between "!" and "\" (most commonly one of %,&,( or *) which is called the "parameter." After the parameter there is normally a lower case letter called the "group." After this there may be a numeric value. If no value is present, the value is assumed to be zero. Finally the ending uppercase letter is called the "command.""

http://www.sxlist.com/techref/language/pcl/index.htm

CSS Cheat Sheet

http://lesliefranke.com/files/reference/csscheatsheet.html

Perl - HTML Processing with Tokens

"Regular expressions are powerful, but they're a painfully low-level way of dealing with HTML. You're forced to worry about spaces and newlines, single and double quotes, HTML comments, and a lot more. The next step up from a regular expression is an HTML tokenizer. In this chapter, we'll use HTML::TokeParser to extract information from HTML files. Using these techniques, you can extract information from any HTML file, and never again have to worry about character-level trivia of HTML markup."

http://lwp.interglacial.com/ch07_01.htm

Norway mandates government use of ODF

"NORWAY'S GOVERNMENT has mandated that its websites must use Open Document Format (ODF) for files published for use by the Norwegian public."

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/20/norway-mandates-government-odf

Sputtr - Multi-search engine

"Welcome to Sputtr. A refreshingly clean way to search the things that matter the most. With Sputtr you can save valuable time by having all the right searches on just one page!"

http://www.sputtr.com/

Lynx Viewer

" This service allows web authors to see what their pages will look like (sort of) when viewed with Lynx, a text-mode web browser."

http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

Fireftp

"FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers."

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/684

Gspace

"This extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (4.1 GB and growing) for file storage. It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them from every Internet capable system. The interface will make your Gmail account look like a FTP host."

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1593

LinkChecker

"Check the validity of links on any webpage."

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/532

ColorZilla

"With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily."

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/271