Some Random Dude

New Years Resolution Update : Open Office

A couple of months back I decided I was going to give Open Office another try. As I mentioned, I’d done this a couple of times before but never lasted longer than a week or so, mostly due to issues with Impress understanding Powerpoint files.
Well, I can report that Impress is dramatically better at this than last time I tried. In fact, it hasn’t burped for me once. I’ve opened uncounted presentations in the last two months, complete with animations, etc, without a single hitch. I’ve also created a number of presentations, shared them with the rest of the Powerpoint-using company, and not heard back a whisper of an issue. Top marks for this one Open Office!

To be honest, probably the only real issue is with Calc, the Open Office spreadsheet. In particular, around its Pivot Table equivalent (sorry, not sure what Open Office calls it). When I first opened an Excel sheet containing a Pivot Table, I was horrified. All my beautiful Pivots no longer worked. After my momentary panic, I discovered that Calc does indeed have a similar facility, it’s just seems to not be compatible with Excels. This is a bit of an issue, not just because I have lots of sheets with Pivots created in Excel (OK, I can recreate them) but because I need occasionally to share the pivots I create, and it seems to be broken going from Calc back to Excel as well. Not a show stopper, but one that hopefully will be addressed.

The other issue with Pivots is there seems to be no Pivot Chart equivalent. So, I’ve had to set my pivot up to what I think I want to look at, chart it, then if I change my mind and mess with the pivot, I have to redo the chart. Clumsy.

Still, not enough to make me uninstall Open Office, so my experiment goes on. Two months of using this in an organisation full of Office users with no major compatibility issues is not too bad in my opinion.

Note, I still haven’t sorted out what to do about Outlook. I need a replacement that deals with Exchange, including calendars. I sync my phone directly with the Exchange Server, so no need for ActiveSync support. Thunderbird + Lightning looks like it won’t be a solution until sometime after Lightning 1.0. Any suggestions?

A380 Seats driven by Linux

I flew from Sydney to Singapore on the new Airbus A380 a few weeks ago (on Singapore Airlines). I boarded expecting the hype to be exactly that, but was pleasantly surprised. It was significantly quieter than the normal 747’s I travel in, the seats where gigantic (even for my wide arse), lots of big pillows, noise canceling headphones as standard and Singapore Airlines great on-demand video system. All good.

However, what was interesting was some of the tech built into the seats. Finally, standard power outlets in the seat for your laptop, rather than having to buy some expensive adapter, but more than that, USB outlets so I could charge my iPod as well. There also seems to be an ethernet port, but I didn’t have a cable handy to plugin and see what happened, so not sure what that is for (there was no in-flight internet access on this flight. I’d been part of the trial for that on Singapore 12 months ago, but according to the flight steward, the trial had too many issues so they weren’t sure when it would be offered again)

Interestingly, via the screen in the seat, you not only have access to movies, etc, but also the full OpenOffice suite as well as some generic file management and media player apps, running on Linux. If you plug a USB key into one of the USB outlets, you can access your documents on the key and work on them (albeit using the pretty hokey keyboard below) as well as play your mp3’s and movies via the in seat screen and sound system.

What I didn’t have the chance to check was whether you would be able to execute apps or scripts located on your drive. If you are connected to the the rest of the seats in the flights, how long until someone uses this to snoop onto other people’s USB keys plugged into their seats?

Needless to say, getting off the A380 and onto a 747 for my flight from Singapore to Beijing was a big letdown. Maybe some of the hype was justified after all?

BTW, apparently this was the first commercial flight of the A380. Singapore Air had done a flight where tickets were auctioned for charity, but this was the first of the regular Sydney->Singapore legs, and this is the first leg to use the A380 anywhere in the world. Doesn’t take much to make me feel special 🙂

OpenOffice Conversion, Take 3

At this time of year for the last two years, I’ve tried converting away from MS Office to OpenOffice for work. Start of quarter is usually a good time to try these things, and start of year more so.

The last two years, I had to give up, primarily because of poor compatibility between Impress and Powerpoint. However, I’ve had so many compatibility issues between Powerpoint and Powerpoint recently, that I’ve decided to give it another shot.

So starting now (or whenever the download finishes), I’m going to try and kick MS Office again. Almost cold turkey, not sure yet how to deal with Outlook and Exchange, but for the rest I’ll be using OpenOffice as long as I can. I’ll report back here as I go, but any pointers will be most welcome.