Planet OpenOffice.org

• Inordinately long lie-in until 11:15 - grief. The washing machine has packed in. Ignored the wife's advice that it wasn't turning at all, and set too cleaning out the shocking gunge that likes to build up in the pump / sump. After re-assembling, discovered that - in fact, the motor was not turning; removed the brushes - really pleased with the Hotpoint machine, they seem to care about the hapless service engineer - by smoothing, and folding the pressed steel so there are not sharp edges to practise self-laceration on everywhere. Easy to access, nicely enclosed brushes too - neat. Spares shop shut by the time all this was done: bother
• Fooled around with H. above her bedroom, affixing hardboard against the roof angle, to hold the insulation in place, reduce air-flow, and (with luck) further warm her room. Much interest from small people in crawling around inside. Appalled by the generally feminine and dainty hammering actions of all and sundry. Adjourned after dinner for some hammering practise outside with the eldest three - eventually got the idea that you really want to hit the thing impressed upon them - with some good results.
• Put everyone to bed, and out to the Newmarket Pregnancy Crisis Center fund-raising Quiz - had a great time, Laura & Creighton and Claire, too - fine puddings, good company, and interesting questions. Helped pack up, and back to bed late.

Table of contents viewer and generator for Writer (a basic macro).

Danish OpenOffice.org project members pointed out the Danish Parliament’s decision this week to require government data be stored in open formats. They developed a list which explicitly included ODF and excluded MSOOXML.

The original article can be found at: ODF Wins the Document Format War (via Google Translate).

It’s also covered in English at The Register (Danes Ditch Microsoft, Take ODF Road – At Last) and OSOR.EU (DK: Danish state administrations to use ODF).

The Register: “Parliamentary parties decided – after four years of deliberation – to use the Open Document Format in all Danish state office documents.”

OSOR.EU points out:

“The open standard ODF is recognised by many European member states. Next to Denmark it is also a national standard for public administrations in Belgium, Germany, France, Lithuania, Sweden and the Netherlands. ODF is recommended by Norway and it is one of the document standards at NATO.

“ODF is a document standard supported by many office applications, including most open source office software packages. The list of software companies supporting ODF include Sun Microsystems with its StarOffice, Google with Google Docs, IBM with Lotus Domino and Workplace. Microsoft supports ODF in the second edition of its 2007 version of its Office suite. Earlier versions require a plugin made by Sun Microsystems. ODF support is also included in the office suite Hangul, used by many of Korea’s public administrations and the office suite Itchitaro, which is popular in Japan. Open source applications that can handle ODF include OpenOffice, K-Office, Abiword, Gnumeric, Scribus and TextEdit.”

This extension for OO Writer lets the user to search the currently selected text in several online references. There is a set of references already defined for the user, and also the user can add references according to their taste.

Currently this version only supports Windows OS.

Nearly 1,000 New Developers Flock to Appcelerator After Company Announces Support for Apple’s iPad - Appcelerator, the platform for rapidly developing native mobile and desktop applications using web technologies, announced that Appcelerator Titanium would support Apple’s iPad starting in February.opentaps 1.4 Release Candidate Available For Download - The new release is now available, see also the new website.

Selenium 2.0 alpha 1 release - Selenium, a set of open source tools to automate web applications testing across many platforms, has just received a funding boost.