...actual distinct voices speaking in my mind? Or is it just the weblog of James Lindenschmidt? Here you can see me wrestle with this and other questions, while spewing forth my writings, opinions, and hallucinations.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

 

Writers, get OpenOffice now

If you are a writer of any sort, whether you are working on a novel or writing a 3-page paper for a class or something, you should go get OpenOffice immediately. It's a really good tool for writing, better than Word. I even like it better than LyX, which is saying a lot. The cool thing about LyX is that it is a document processor, not a word processor, which means the writer doesn't have to think about formatting the document. S/he just writes. LyX takes care of formatting automatically. Though you do sacrifice some flexibility, you more than make up for it in workflow. When I'm writing, I write faster in LyX, because formatting isn't an issue. And if you are really determined, and if you really, really hate the default formats, you can learn to hack the underlying LaTeX code to modify the document. But this is (for the average user) heady, geeky stuff.

OpenOffice has taken a page from LyX (or more specifically, from LaTeX, which is the markup language underlying LyX). It has a stylist, which allows you to do the same thing as LyX. You type, and tell the program what each part of the text is. For the title, you select the title and select "title" in the stylist. For a section heading, select "heading". Etc. Once you do this, OpenOffice takes care of formatting for you. The coolest part is that this automatic formatting is MUCH easier to modify than in LyX.

For shorter documents, this isn't such a big deal, but once your document is longer than a few pages, a stylist is indispensable. The best part is, once you have a template you like, you gain the ease-of-use and quickness offered by LyX, while retaining the layout flexibility of a wordprocessor.

In addition to the above, OpenOffice can publish to HTML. Unlike MS Word, the HTML it generates is actually pretty clean, and surprisingly representative of your formatting. In other words, the generated webpage looks surprisingly like the original document, even in terms of details such as line spacing.

Anyway, I'm really impressed with OpenOffice 1.1. There is absolutely no reason for a writer to use anything else. The best feature of OpenOffice is that it is free, and that the data it generates is stored in a free data format (.sxw files are basically zipped XML files). That way, you don't have the most profitable corporation in history standing between you and your data.

^ posted at 2:07 AM

 

Look! The Emperor Has No Clothes!

This is a follow-up to the post from the other day. Apparently, Dan Geer, who was one of the authors of a report criticizing the dangers of a computer monoculture in the form of Microsoft dominance, was fired from his job at @Stake.

I guess intelligent, undocumented criticism of Microsoft is no longer a part of the corporate reality.

^ posted at 11:12 AM

 

New version of OpenOffice

There is a new version of OpenOffice.org available, version 1.1RC5 (release candidate 5). I just downloaded it and installed. It's light years beyond the previous version (1.0.2) I had installed. The coolest new feature is that there is a button right next to the print icon to export your file to pdf. And it's all Free, in the best senses of that word.

It's available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

^ posted at 3:51 PM

 

Implications of Cancun

There is an article on ZNet called Implications of Cancun that I want to read, so I'm bookmarking it here.

I haven't really studied what happened in Cancun yet. I'm sure there are more articles about it.

^ posted at 10:57 AM

 

Microsoft Reliance Threatens National Security

This story, to me, states the obvious. But it's only obvious because I've been thinking about the dangers of proprietary software for several years now. Go read it.

UPDATE: I just found another study (pdf file), called CyberInsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly. I haven't read it yet, but it looks interesting. I'll report back when I've had a chance to read it.

^ posted at 12:21 PM

 

Caffentzis and The Commoner

I was talking to my friend and teacher George Caffentzis the other day, and he recommended The Commoner: a web journal for other values. It's a nice site with some really good articles on it. In particular, I'd like to link to two of George's articles that are very very good. They do a good job of analysis of the political situation in Iraq:

• No Blood For Oil: The Political Economy of the War on Iraq
• From Stealing to Robbing: A Post-Script to "No Blood For Oil"
• In The US, Dreaming of Iraq

There are many other articles there, too. But start with the Caffentzis pieces listed above.

^ posted at 12:19 AM

 

The War On Terror: a British Perspective

I want to put this into my blog, essentially to bookmark it so I can read it later. At first glance, t r u t h o u t - British MP: Attacks U.S. on 9/11 and War looks like a very enlightening article. And now Bush wants something like $87 Billion to continue his crusade. Sigh.

^ posted at 9:25 AM