Category: Computing

Had to do some work with Word 2003’s XML format, WordML. It is definitely a good step that Microsoft allows us to read XML out of Word, but the format itself is borderline silly. Case in point – bulleted and numbered lists.

Word does not group together the bullets. Each bullet appears inside of a paragraph and the only thing that it does do is mark the physical offset the tab should appear from the edge of the page. As such, you cannot know where bullets begin or end and if you try to leverage or tweak the XSL stylesheet Microsoft provides to transform the XML file into HTML, it is impossible to convert this bullet-per-paragraph scheme to a normal ul/li scheme. Instead the XSL stylesheet uses convoluted spans with style attributes that use margins to push the bullets into their position.
One other thing is that since the WordML does not use ul/li elements for bullets, it needs to output some sort of character to denote the bullet. WordML, being focused on visual representation in the actual application, uses a dingbat character, which it outputs all the way to the HTML produced from the transform. Dingbats are not really available on the web and as a result you get weird bullets, like the character ‘n’.

In short, I just hope really hard that Word 2007 is much better in XML output, especially since is Office Open XML is now an ECMA standard. I wonder whether OpenOffice is much better…

Our office printer is a Canon ir5000-6000 netwroked copier/printer. A workable duplexing black and white printer. To set it up with Ubuntu you need to follow these steps:

1. Download the Canon drivers from the Canon Europe (Linux does not exist in America, really).
2. Expand the zip file and from it expand the file sq92LNX2.2E.tgz
3. From the System menu, open the Administration menu and select Printing.
4. Enter the su password.
5. Double-click the ‘New Printer’ icon and a dialog box will open.
6. Select the ‘Network Printer’ option and then ‘HP JetDirect’ from the drop-down menu next to it.
7. Enter the IP address of the printer and click ‘Forward’.
8. Now, click the ‘Install Driver’ button and in the file selection window, go to the folder in which you extracted the drivers in step 2, open the ‘ppd’ folder, and then select the file cnir50e1.ppd.
9. The printer selection window will switch to list Canon printer. Scroll down and select the Canon ir5000-6000 printer.
10. Optionally give the printer a name and description and click ‘Apply’.

You should now be good to go.

Note: Make sure that you switch the printer’s paper selection, if you are in the US, to use ‘Letter’ paper size instead of the European ‘A4’ paper size.

Being involved in the far periphery of development for mobile devices, as well as a keen supporter of Yahoo!, I rushed and downloaded their Go mobile application for my work-assigned Blackberry 8700g.

Go is a Java-based application that installs smoothly and offers you, through a rather interesting scrolling menu, a view on supposedly everything that you set up in your Yahoo! universe. As a user of MyYahoo! and Yahoo!’s calendar, address book and other features, I was eager to have all that functionality with me and the potential is indeed great. Can you imagine sending and fetching Yahoo! mail from wherever you are? who need Blackberry and Microsoft Exchange then, really?

There is one problem. Go just does not work well and being termed a beta is an egregious rush to release, probably for the announcement on CES. Even on a relatively robust device as the Blackberry is, the application is slow and on T-Mobile’s not so hot Edge network, downloads are pretty snail-paced as well.

The idea behind go is that mobile web stinks thanks to the awful browsers that are out there. That’s a valid point. So you write a Java application that installs on the mobile device and communicates with servers directly, circumventing the web part of things, as web services can dish out the data and the application can read it full well. Yahoo! does it and Google did it extremely well in their mobile Google maps application.
So, what’s up with Go?

Search: if you really need to search the web or local data while out and about Go can do that.

Headlines: Go can deliver you headlines and stock quotes in its special ticker.

Mail: You can even read and send mail, although setting them up is buried in a bunch of settings menus – not smart for such a powerful application.
This is where the good stuff ends and the caveats and asterisks start appearing.

Headlines: If you like me have a MyYahoo! portal page set up, you’d expect your headlines to be waiting there for you. Why, you’d be disappointed, like me. Go expect you to punch in the URLs of the *RSS* feeds you would like to consume. Excuse me? I am sure there is a news distribution rights situation happening here, but telling me I need to enter entire URLs into a mobile device? From where exactly. Even when you select from their list of sources, you indeed get the headlines, yet when you click the headline to view the story takes you to a plain-web page, not one pre-digested for mobile device consumption, heavy with images and navigation and pretty useless. So not great. This situation is repeated for sports headlines, business headlines, etc. Is this not why Go was created in the first place?!
Calendar and Contacts: According to the Yahoo! Go website help, calendar and contact information are to be seamlessly integrated into the existing calendar and contact databases on the device. That would be a bit messy (no separation between work and life) but I can take that with a smile. Guess what – nothing, repeat nothing – happens. Sweet. Better than breaking things, but something like 30% of the utility of the application for me, goes out the window. How difficult would it have been to put the calendar and contacts *inside* the Go application? A workflow would have been

• Open address book
• Click contact
• Email contact
• Send

Too much for the people at Sunnyvale.

Local Information: Although Yahoo! knows I live in Wayland, MA, Go for some odd reason decides that the center of my life and the universe for that matter is Sunnyvale, CA, home of Yahoo!’s HQ. I agree it is a central location but getting traffic for the 101 is not really useful, is it?

In short, thank you Yahoo! for putting the effort and giving this application an interesting look and taking the right approach – a mobile application. Thank you for giving it away, too. Even as a beta, Go needs to grow, a lot.