Open Office 1.0 released today - [Commercial]

[Michael James]

>OpenOffice 1.0 has been released today.
>
>OpenOffice.org 1.0 provides a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft
>Office.

On Buttons pushed, commence a rant...

<rant appology="sorry, but misguided efforts like this are what keep me chained to an ageing Mac desktop">

No offence to the skill of the open source wizards who made this,
 BUT Microsoft's talent for bad code is only exceded
 by the horribleness of their human interface.

Yes, the ability to read and print (all of the)
 word document formats IS (unfortunately) a nessessary feature.
Emulating the screen clutter, or following Word's
 "inhuman interface guidelines", yuk!

In the same way that "computing expertise" is perverted into
 "being able to kludge some sort of usefulness out of windows"
 "Word processing skills" usually is code for,
 "being able to trick Word into appropriate formatting"

</rant> pant pant..


What I want is something completely different.

I want my Information Processor to be able to "apprehend" a datastream,
 (ie: follow and structure the information from)
 whether it come in XML, from executing "ifconfig -a"
 or from my fingers typing a letter to Auntie.
Having structured it, (probably into XML)
 apply a stylesheet and display it accordingly.

I want "Perl Inside". (and Python, Ruby and Lisp)

Bundled, I want interactive tools
 to construct the "apprehension keys"
 and then view what they are doing to a given datastream.

In a recent job the datastream was a CDs-worth of compressed ascii data
 describing the power output by all the big power stations in Australia.
(and Perl's while (<IN>) ate them without a hiccup, took all night but)

Years ago I wrote the internal Phonebook for Canberra Uni through Nisus.
A perlscript wrote an ascii file with a tab structure.
Nisus took this with Macros that assigned
 <H1> status to lines with no leading whitespace.
 <H2> to lines with 1 leading tab etc.
Well it was more complicated than that but that's the idea.

These days it would be better to go to XML
 then use an XML - HTML stylesheet.

michaelj

<flameguard>...
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a privilege not exercised is illegal.

Michael James			michael at james.st
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