Nick Richards — Nick Richards

Moving back in has been hard. Not for all the usual hate your family reasons that everyone else seems to use but simply because I’ve run out of space for my books. Great stacks of them roam the floor of my room causing consternation for the kittens and forcing me to step delicately unless the vibrations cause them to topple in a scale model of downtown earthquake disaster. You see I’m now trapped in the bibliophile version of High Fidelity, organising my library by genre and then alphebatised within that genre. »

CM4 is totally, totally addictive and the makers know it. In the saved game properties there’s a little addictiveness rating for how long you’ve spent on the game, so far they advise me to look at changing my underwear on this one. There was a study showing that computer games playing boosts concentration and I have to agree, days fly past… I get lots of work done too, in the time that CM4 is doing its number crunching to simulate pretty much the entire footballing world in my computer I’ve been reading, writing and learning. »

I’ve been reading Neal Stephensons the Diamond Age, its a rather good book. In it a smart nanotechnology interactive book named The Young Ladies Illustrated Primer is an important part of the story. This book helps people grow. It’s sort of like an RPG but with explicit life lesson style. We don’t have nanotech yet and so we can’t make the primer but we do have a bulkier version, if you put a little imagination into it. »

As people are becoming increasingly fond of mentioning I’ve not got long left as a student. In May I’ll be taking my exams, a very, very scary prospect. Posts may be a bit thin on the ground for a while whilst I get my revision head on. Alternatively you may see a few History posts. Who knows. Oh and I refreshed my about page slightly, my new picture is an absolutely rocking screencap from Cristian Driga’s OOoCon filming. »

Newly discovered OpenOffice.org feature of the day returns! At OOoCon I had the opportunity to talk with the guys who really know the code inside out and backwards, the release engineers. I learnt a fair amount about the huge number of Easter eggs that were in the code before the release of the code to the open source community and some of the l33t formatting options that are available. For example wrapping words in stars like *so* indicates that you want them turned bold, _underline_ also works. »

“When working with drivers which not fully support the access to the privileges of the database or returning just incorect information, OpenOffice.org only allows the operations which the driver returns. E.g. when the driver doesn’t return the right to insert values into a table even when the database allows it, OpenOffice.org also shows the table in read only mode.” it’s all in the HOWTO. You might notice that we’re going big on database access recently. »

Another fine NTK spinoff, snackspot was launched this week. It’s now my new favourite website. Check out this entry for my American drink of choice Vanilla Coke for an idea of the flavour of the site. Very yay. »

We are glad to announce that the next OpenOffice.org version (OpenOffice.org 1.1) has reached an important milestone and is now available for download as OpenOffice.org 1.1 Beta. It represents a significant advance in the application and incorporates the features and changes introduced in the developer builds over the past year. The release includes a massive amount of new and exciting functionality, features and bugfixes, the highlights are: Many new import/export formats like PDF, Macromedia Flash, DocBook, several PDA Office file formats, flat XML and XHTML Support for Complex Text Layout (CTL) and vertical writing languages, such as Thai, Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew Enhanced integration with Java, with up to 10 times better performance Support for Accessibility throughout the entire suite Support for add-on components Initial support for recovering damaged OOo files Support for a new data source type - MySQL Improved online help (F1) A more complete list of features is available. »

My blog posts are trending towards the size of my NetNewsWire entry box. Either this shows the extent to which context dictates production or its one of the finest pieces of usability engineering I’ve ever seen. Either way it demonstrates the heavy burden placed on UI engineers to get it right. This is something we’re working quite hard on at OOo, our 1.1 release will demonstrate a refinement of the current interface before we go back to basics and rethink the whole thing for 2. »

It is indisputably true that chicks dig scars. Well, they do if you got them in a sexycool way, otherwise they’ll just laugh. These are ways not to get a scar. One of them has happened to me. Running to class and tripping over. Walking into a glass door. Papercut. Lighting a match too close to your fingers Dropped shoe on foot. These are not fight club scars, these are not heroic wounds. »