Dougma (dŭg·mə) n.

  1. An authoritative principle, belief, or statement of ideas or opinion, especially one considered to be absolutely true by Doug; who is often wrong.
  2. A specific tenet or dougtrine authoritatively laid down, as by Doug.
  3. A system of principles or tenets, for Doug.
July 4th, 2007

I have my subscription!

As announced on a number of other blogs, there is going to be a Python Magazine, and Steve Holden is going to have a regular column! Now I have something to hound my mailman over besides the last Harry Potter book! Subscribe now and get $10 off and a chance to win a MacBook! The subscription is both hard copy and digital. They are also looking for writers, no experience necessary. This is a magazing for Python enthusiests BY python enthusiests.

I already have plans to be supplying bound, professionally printed versions of the The Python Papers to the Cambridge Python Users Group. I will see what I can come up with for Python Magazine. As it is a subscription service, I will not be just printing out my PDF version.

July 4th, 2007

Mass Government can’t stop smoking Mocrosofts crack (updated 2x)

Or maybe it’s LSD, it was created here after all.

Want to make a major decision with little oversight and little notice? Just do it just before or on a holiday. Every time I take some time off with my family I get back to find out that some major change or event in the ongoing Mass ODF saga (or marriage, or the Big Dig, or Cape Wind) has occurred. Seriously, if it is something people actually care about, but is influenced by special interests with deep pockets, the decision is made when the majority of the state population is eating turkey, unwrapping presents, dressing their kids in costumes, watching people run across Boston, or in this case trying to celebrate the birth of a democracy; (no irony there). At least it is not a smear campaign again, it is just the Massachusetts Government rolling over. The good news is, we, the citizens of Mass have a chance to respond.

UPDATE: Seems I am not the only person having problems, so is the British National Archive. The solution seems to be the ones who created the problem, Microsoft and OOXML. Hope they actually read the 6000 page specification and know how to implement useWord97LineBreakRules.

UPDATE 2: Sun releases it’s OOXML/ODF converter for MS Office. And no it will not handle Visio OLE embedded objects, as that is impossible for a non MS developer. Only Microsoft can do that, and they wont. Also here is an unintended answer to the question ‘Isn’t choice always good for the customer?’ I have seen on every blog about ODF and OOXML. And in answer to Marry Jo, because it is impossible for me to implement the OOXML standard completely. Only Microsoft can do that, and thus is not actually a standard by any rational sense.

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