Hentzenwerke Publishing ships Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org. This sounds like a great little book. Looking forward to checking it out. I’ve been using OpenOffice.org for a couple of years now, on Windows, Linux and OS X, and I’m really pleased with it. I just installed the NeoOffice/J version, a native UI version for the Mac, and I’m enjoying it a lot more than the X11 version I had been using.
Via the RSS feed at Hentzenwerke Moving From Windows to Linux
Andrew MacNeill points out that the VFP 9 EULA is posted in its entirety to the FoxForum Wiki at http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~VFP9EuLA~VFP.
It’s great to see the brain-dead requirement of having to uninstall previous versions has been removed. However, there are some really bizarre new phrases added. Rush Strong points out the weirdest: “You may not.. work around technical limitations in the software,” Excuse me? That’s how I have made my living for the past fifteen years. VFP doesn’t include your inventory system, but that’s a technical limitation I can help you work around. Yes, it’s true that DROP TAG ALL will remove all relations, but I know of a product that works around that technical limitation… VFP crashes when used with some HP drivers, but there’s a technical work-around on the Microsoft KnowledgeBase that lets me work around this technical limitation.
I find it hard to believe that such a silly requirement could be enforced in court. On the one hand, OJ was found innocent and Sacco and Vanzetti executed. On the other, Microsoft was found guilty, guilty, guilty. I have neither the money nor the interest in finding out what is and isn’t enforceable in the EULA! But I think a lawyer at Microsoft needs to be flogged for writing such nonsense.
Laura and I enjoy listening to WERS, the user-supported radio station of Emerson College, on Saturdays: 10 AM – 2 PM Standing Room Only plays Broadway tunes, and 2 PM to 5 PM All A Cappella. Since we live just outside their broadcast area, we listen to the streaming audio. Thanks to Live365.com, we can listen to the streaming music either on the iMac via iTunes or through the ThinkPads and WinAmp or Live365’s player. However, that means that we are stuck in the computer room with the good computer speakers or listening over the weak laptop speakers, right? Nah.
Downstairs, we moved my ThinkPad into the living room, and use the living room stereo via iRock. Okay, follow this: WERS broadcasts their radio signal, and also routes the audio somehow to Live365.com, who turn it into TCP/IP packets. The internet packets route their way through the Internet, and end up on my Comcast cable, decoded by my local cable modem. Routed from there to my LinkSys WRT-54G. Wrapping around the room, an ethernet cable goes to a LinkSys 5-port switch, and back out again to a LinkSys WAP-11 802-11b transmitter. Back into radio waves, the transmission somehow finds its way to the living room, where the ThinkPad A31p‘s built-in wireless adapters turns it back into TCP/IP packets, again, and then into an MP3 stream, which WinAMP turns into audio output, again. Wait, we’re almost there! The iRock then turns the audio stream back into FM radio waves, which are picked up by tuning the living room stereo to the same frequency. Once again, back to audio, the sound, finally, comes out the speakers.
What’s remarkable is how good this sounds. And that it works at all.
How hard could it be?
If this works out, we may consider using an Airport Express, and cut out a lot of the complexity.