Adobe’s FXG seems to be to PSD what OOXML is to .DOC: a re-factoring of a middle-aged binary format in XML with a focus on fidelity rather than elegance. My working model is that we need to think of the de-proprietarization of market-dominating technologies in the intensely pragmatic model of a sequence of bigger fish swallowing smaller fish: a sequence of consolidation of dialects, modularization of parts, then adoption into pluralistic frameworks and Adaptability Standards, allowing user selection of winning mini-technologies. Each stage of which will take at least a major software release cycle

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The big fish swallow the little fish: Adobe’s FXG and MicroSoft’s OOXML

Rob Weir posted on his blog a couple of days ago an Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability .  I think it’s great that he has brought up spreadsheet interoperability, and specifically the issue of formulas, which seems to be the main thrust of his post.  I mentioned on the day of our SP2 release last week that “I’ll be doing some blog posts that get down into more of the technical details, to help explain some of the engineering decisions that we made in our implementation,” and Rob’s post is a good starting point for that conversation.

See the article here:
ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability

PHPPowerPoint 0.1.0 was released last week, as an open-source PHP API for generating PPTX files, much like the PHPExcel API for XLSX files.  Maarten Balliauw has a blog post with more information, download links, and sample code. A new post at OpenXMLDeveloper.org covers the Simple OOXML Library , a set of classes that sit on top of the Open XML SDK to help developers create word-processing documents and spreadsheets quickly with minimal programming required.  The abstractions of this library make it possible to be immediately productive with Open XML even if you haven’t studied the details of the spec yet

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Links for 05/04/2009

But it does go back to a point I have made several times on this blog over the last few years: the more that our laws require the use of open standards, the more that we will need to make sure that the kind of “openness” involved or created by those standards actually allow grass-roots market-enhancing (which may in some cases be a euphemism for ‘disruptive’) implementation. So I am favouring the term Open Technologies rather than Open Standards: meaning technologies and their enabling standards which don’t exclude implementation for reason of size and complexity, just as much as for reasons of openness or language or timezone or IP or corporate affiliation or technological tradition. In fact, I would go as far as proposing the following rule of thumb: no open standard should make a technology that would take an experienced and expert developer more than one month (full-time) to develop.

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How big should an open standard be? A real issue for Open Standards and FOSS

Consider that there may be one hundred million word processing documents printed every day (anyone know the real number?) That could mean a million extra pages per day generated because of page-profligate settings or algorithms. Now, paper is usually made from estate timber, so there probably is no SAVE THE TREES deforestation angle. But paper production takes energy, toxic bleaches are used, power is used to make it, fuel is used to transport it, if it is disposed by burning the carbon gets released, and more toner cartridges are used

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Greener typesetting

Hello All, Just released xprocxq, which is an experimental bootstrap implementation of W3C XProc Draft Specification, written in xquery of all things. xprocxq project information and download http://code.google.com/p/xprocxq/ xprocxq runs within eXist XML Database but the original prototype was developed using SAXON -SA. I am planning to support more XQuery processors in the future but will focus on making xprocxq as compliant as possible for eXist XML Database.

View post:
[ANN] xprocxq v0.6.74 BETA an XProc processor written
in XQuery

Whew, it has been a while since I wrote my last blog.  New initiatives for the new year have been keeping me fully consumed.  However, one of these new initiatives has reached a point where it was time to get it written up on my blog. The cost of Medicaid and Medicare has been written about often as government budgets are re-evaluated and the new administration takes root.  With econonmic times being what they are the number of beneficiaries are increasing in an already overburdened system of service to US state and local communities.

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Applying SOA to improve US Medicaid and Medicare

I’m happy to announce the 10.1.3.4.1 release of BI Publisher. This release rolls up bug fixes and enhancements since 10.1.3.4.0 to include the following: Support for Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3 Extended Support for Single Sign-On Providers Automatic Refresh of LDAP Cache Support for Siebel CRM Security Support for Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) for Burst Reports Data Model Enhancements Web Service Data Set Type Enhancement: Specify Path to Data in SOAP Response SQL Query Data Set New Property: Use Default Schema Only Support for JNDI for Scheduler Connections Support for Expressions to Calculate Date Parameters RTF Template Enhancements Get List of BI Publisher Configuration Settings Enable Debug Mode for an RTF Template Number to Word Conversion in Report Output Remove Logos and Links from the BI Publisher Header Disable Access to Guest Page Updates to the BI Publisher Web Services For more details on this release please see: BI Publisher New Features Guide Release Notes Certification Information Note: something is wrong with the doc pages at the time of posting.

Originally posted here:
BI Publisher 10.1.3.4.1 Enhancements

I just updated Papervision3D to allow the CameraObject3D#unproject method to work when CameraObject3D#useProjectionMatrix = true. Papervision3D has two methods of ‘projecting’ vectors onto the screen: useProjectionMatrix = false, this is the default ‘fast’ method useProjectionMatrix = true, this is the method where projection is done by a matrix Note that Papervision3D switches to method #2 in ‘ortho mode’. So what is the difference exactly between these two kinds of projection?

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Unproject with useProjectionMatrix = true

Catching up on links to blog posts I’ve found interesting this month … I was on vacation the first week of April, and missed out on the announcement of the release of the Open XML SDK Version 2 April CTP.  Zeyad Rajabi has details of the SDK version 2 over on Brian Jones’s blog, including a great example of the validation technology that is being built into the SDK.  Zeyad also has a new post this week on how to remove comments from Excel and PowerPoint files . Stephen Peront , who will be in London at the DII workshop on May 18, has posted an example of how to use the new External File Converter API in Office 2007 SP2 .  This API gives developers the ability to add their own custom formats to Office’s list of supported formats – the list that appears in the dropdowns on the File/Open and Save/As dialogs.

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Miscellaneous Links, 04/22/2009