Saturday, September 24, 2005

NFL Week #3 -- 7:39 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

There's a lot of bad teams and a lot of tough matchups this week. It's a dangerous time to be picking. At least I know that the Lions won't lose this weekend. At any rate, here we go: Falcons, Bears, Bucs, Colts, Rams, Panthers, Vikings, Jaguars, Eagles, Cowboys, Seahawks, Steelers, Giants, Chiefs.

The Master comments: Brace yourselves kids; 5 differences: Bucs, Colts, Rams, Panthers, Vikings, Eagles, Cowboys, Seahawks, Steelers, Bills, Bengals, Jets, Chargers, Broncos.

Slashdot Goes HTML 4.01 and CSS -- 4:28 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

At long last the folks at Slashdot had bitten the bullet and redesigned the site using HTML 4.01 and CSS. The guys who talk the most about open standards finally use them! There's a couple of caveats due to ad code, etc., but but they even went so far as to convert all the comments! Good stuff. Congratulations! I know from first hand experience that such a conversion is not easy. The benefits make it all worthwhile, though.

As noted below, The Haus is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS.

Massachusetts Goes OpenDocument -- 10:07 am CST, Update by The Master

The question we like to ask here on The Haus is: if you use proprietary software, who OWNS your data? Well, in the case of Massachusetts: Massachusetts does. That's because they have decided to move all of their documents away from Microsoft Office and it's proprietary, patent-laden formats into the freely avaiable OpenDocument specification. Good news for Massachusetts. Now we get to see how Microsoft responds. I wonder if Ballmer will be throwing some more chairs?

J.t.Qbe comments: Maybe he'll try luring them back with his monkey boy dance.

A.T. Hun comments: DEVELOPERS!!1!1

In all seriousness, this is a major issue. I've got old papers from college that I can't open in anything anymore. At least with those I can usually strip out the text if need be. The WordPerfect and MS Word formats have so much extra crap in them that stripping out the text is an exercise in futility. I moved to OpenOffice.org mainly so that I can be guaranteed that my data will still be mine and accessible to me in the future. The OpenDocument format will help guarantee compatibility, no matter what program I choose to use in the future. No wonder MS is in a tizzy about this. The DOC format, not Windows, is really their big cash cow. DOC guarantees that people will be locked into MS Word forever.

J.t.Qbe comments: Hey A.T., want a copy of my handy-dandy Wordplus-to-text converter? You might need to update the late-80s era C to get it to compile, but it shouldn't be bad.

Friday, September 23, 2005

Modern Pinball Firefox Theme -- 10:24 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I just discovered an new theme for Firefox that I really like: Modern Pinball. It is based on the Pinball theme that I've known and loved until recently. Later versions of Pinball had major problems with Firefox in Linux. Modern Pinball solves all of those problems and even includes proper icons for the Preferences/Options menu. Check it out. The author is working on a version of the theme for Thunderbird, which would be very cool.

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