29 June 2004

Open Document Formats - XML to you and me This is one of the areas I am going to be looking at so its good news that there has been a recent flurry of activity around it.  here are some of the more important links.  The debate was started by the EC report into this topic which is summarised here the full report can be found here.   One of the nice things about this report is that its been reviewed by Microsoft and Sun, and their comments on it, (at least those they made public), are also published.  Tim Bray, a man with some credibility in this area, (now working for Sun), describes his meeting with the EC team here.  John Udell writes up his views on the EC report here.  Dare Obasanjo responds to Tim Bray here.   Then the thread starts to drift a bit, but Tim Bray also talks about his views on how the OpenOffice team have used XML, he is impressed!  And a snippet on how Microsoft have used XML in Office 2003, he is less than impressed!  Tim also talks about the use of custom schema’s and concludes they are not a good idea, (Microsoft implement them in Office 2003, OpenOffice don’t).  Jean, (a MS employee), gives his point of view, Jean like Tim is also a member of the team that created XML. 10:49:58 PM    trackback []  comment [] Graham builds on his Ownership thread Graham is continuing his posts on the concept of "ownership" in IT with comments on an article in Computer World on Why Business Leaders Ignore You, like most IT people I am sure you have had that experience.  I wrote extensively on a simillar issue a while back when I described the disconnect in perceptions between IT Managers and IT users over how important there personal productivity is, and I built on that yesterday in my post on Work Space design. 2:53:28 PM    trackback []  comment [] Update on X1 As I have mentioned before I use X1 for all of my local system searching, a friend of mine asked how I was getting on with it, he is using Blinkx.  So here is an update. I am running X1 on Windows 2003 Server, its not supported but it seems to run just fine.  I have moved the indexes out of my local profile and onto my data disk, but thats the only change to the standard configuration. I don't have it configured to autostart when I login because I often have multiple sessions running, one console and the others using Windows Terminal Services, I only have it running in my console session. I have it indexing 27,000 files out of a total of 130,000 on the machine. I have had the odd machine slow down when its doing some heavy indexing, like my database of RSS feeds, but since thats 44,000 items I don't hold that against it as its only when I rebuild the index, (for reasons of my own making) Some people don't like the fact that it has tabs for email, attachments, file and contacts but I think its great because I generally want to search within these scopes not across them I find the type down searching just perfect, on my machine its effectively instant and the great thing about it is after entering just a few clues you often only have one or two matches and its easy to just look at the document previews to find the correct one.  Without type down you end up building really complex searches that are a waste of time The document preview is still the killer feature for me, I almost always use it rather than opening the actual file.  For RSS feeds there is never a need to open Outlook. Lotus Notes indexing is not there yet, nor is support for phrases.  Although a new version is due version is due very soon and promises these.  Lotus Notes is important to me,  I generally manage just fine now without phrases however. I picked up my copy cheap because I had already purchased Newsgator, (there was a discount if you purchased both together), which I thought was a fine deal, discount after the fact.  I think this is the first time I have ever seen such an offer before. 2:10:05 PM    trackback []  comment []

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