“The rumors of a fourth OOXML complaint turned out to be true. Denmark has become the fourth nation to protest the ISO’s acceptance of OOXML, and Groklaw has a translation of their complaint. They now join India, Brazil, and South Africa. There are going to be plenty of questions about deadlines, because people have been given two different deadlines for appeals, and the final DIS of OOXML was late in being distributed and not widely available. In fact, that seems to be one of Denmark’s complaints, along with missing XML schemas, contradictory wording, lack of interoperability, and troubles with the maintenance of DIS29500. In other words, we should expect a lot of wrangling over untested rules from here on out, and Microsoft knows how to deal with that.”

The Association for Open Source Vendors [OSL] hereby lodges a formal complaint to ISO over the certification process after the meetings in Dansk Standard‘s committee S-445 (former S-142/U34) as well as the decision to change the Danish vote to a yes in connection with the processing of DIS 29500. Thus I write to you in your capacity as vice president for ISO and as your capacity as executive director in Dansk Standard. I will send this complaint in English before the end of the month.

On the 22nd of May, the Association for Open Source Vendors made Dansk Standard aware that the Danish requirements for DIS29500 had not been fulfilled. We summarized our views in the following 5 main points (see attached letter)

1. Microsoft Office formats stand in the way of interoperability
2. XML schemas are missing
3. The finished specification is not available
4. Contradictory wording
5. The maintenance of DIS29500 has not been decided

• Slashdot | Denmark Becomes Fourth Nation To Protest OOXML

The OpenDocument standard has been developed by a variety of organizations and is publicly accessible. This means it can be implemented into any system, be it free software/open source or a closed proprietary product, without royalties.

• Slashdot | OpenDocument Now Published ISO Standard

Excerpt from the Article: … It is a concept that is now a reality, but the next house we saw was a mock up of what things could be like.

In South Korea’s vision of the home of the future we will all wear mini-PCs on our wrists, which turns things on or off, opens doors, and tracks the wearer’s position in the house at all times.

Smart wardrobe
Style advice is offered by a mirror on the wardrobe

Here, everything is voice activated, and the fridge can provide you with recipes which use the ingredients inside, and let you know if your food is out of date.

It relies on the food packaging containing radio tags, or RFID labels, which can be read by the fridge each time it passes through the door.

But will the food industry or consumers be prepared to pay more for this? And what about food that does not come in lots of packaging? …

• BBC NEWS | Click | Smart homes a reality in South Korea

“IT services provider Atos Origin has predicted a forthcoming change in the software landscape based on the results of a survey it has carried out in conjunction with the UK’s National Computing Centre. The survey, which was compiled through over 140 web-based questionnaires completed by senior UK IT professionals in May and June, indicated that over 60% believe open source will either increase its presence in certain business areas
or be a fundamental component in core IT systems, while
73% expect open source to develop within their organizations’ IT strategy over the next five years.”

Slashdot | Atos Origin Predicts Open Source Landscape

At OSCON 2005 there was a lot of interest in Ruby. Ruby is the hot new? language popularised by Rails. Rails is derived from/inspired by Basecamp.

What was more surpising to me, as a Java developer, was the way Java has come in from the cold. There were lots and lots of Java sessions. The daily keynotes discussed Java. Last year there was little Java and the year before that none. Two open source Java stacks, gcj/classpath and Apache Harmony had sessions and generated a lot of excitement. The Apache Geronimo guys announced Geronimo M4 which passes the J2EE 1.4 TCK, and is open source. Java seems to be front and centre. In many other sessions constant comparisons were made with Java. Java is the reference language…

Read Greg’s complete report:
Greg Luck’s WebLog: OSCON2005: Ruby is hot, Java is cool, C# is neither

p.s.: I will sadly not attend, since I have postponed hollidays for the not-so-near future.

COPYFIGHT

IBM XML Enhancements for Java, part of their Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK), has released a tool for providing language extensions to J2EE 1.4 to support XML, XML Schema, and XPath in Java.

This is unique because it uses a Java language-based approach to developing XML applications. Through integration of Java and XML, the extensions simplify the development of XML-based applications and enable developers to reuse existing Java libraries when developing XML code.

Integration with XML at the language level is a feature supported by Groovy, and currently being debated by Java heavyweigts for inclusion in Dolphin. (JSE 7)

XML Enhancements for Java 1.1 released

“Addressing a crowd of developers in Sydney today, Google Maps creator Lars Rasmussen encouraged them to embrace bleeding edge technology in browser software. He cited the example of how Google Maps can command Internet Explorer to use VML (Vector Markup Language by Microsoft) to display a blue line between geographical points, but use a PNG graphic format and a linear description for the Firefox browser.”

From the article: “Firstly, the Web allows rapid deployment and there is no software for users to install. It’s also much easier to make sure code runs on multiple browsers compared with multiple operating systems like Mac OS X and Windows. The downside is that browsers don’t give programmers full access to a computer’s resources such as memory, process power and hard disk space. This is a bottleneck the engineer sees being removed in future, although he thinks the simplicity of the current Web browsing experience needs to be maintained.”

Take browsers to the limit: Google

Slashdot | Google Maps Creator Takes Browsers To The Limit

* Talkr – Letting blogs speak for themselves

Originally the blog was intended to be non-personal, because I wanted to get co-writers to join in. But I decided to keep it personal with the option of spawning new blogs in the future with other people.

I wanted to share the great stuff I find on the net, and after years of hesitating I finally created this blog as a platform for that goal, and as such I have succeded very nice indeed, I love this platform so much that I have almost dropped making my own blogging system, as was the original intention – WordPress basically works like a dream (can be a bitch to setup, when you go to the more advanced areas) and I am generally amazed and crazed about the technologies that the blogging communities has created or actively promoted (Technorati, Flickr, BlogLines, GeoURL, Podcasting (Audio Blogs), FeedBurner, Creative Commons, XML / RDF / RSS, and tons of other stuff!).

In total there are currently 444 posts by me, and 20 comments posted by readers, including my responses (not mentioning the hundreds of comment-spams I recieved while franticly trying to create and configure solid filters), so I’m guessing people aren’t too chatty and debateful while reading this blog, either that or nobody is reading it!! haha
Well, the actual fact is that I mostly post other folks posts, mainly from slashdot.org and other sources I visit for news and info about stuff that matters in any way or form. I will try to write more myself, but sometimes I sacrifice it in order to deliver more important news, since as I said before, my goal is to inform about stuff that happens out there, it has never been my goal to be a reporter, I see it more like a messenger of coolness, or info-filter of boredom and info-overload.

I have learned much in the past year, and I feel prepared to bring my log into another year of glory, and urge you all to contribute with comments, questions and what else you come with. I have planned to make a new WordPress Theme and ofcourse it will be dark purple with sparkling anim-gif stars all-over!!! ( Coz that’s what a real theme is about! ) Or maybe it will be mind-blowingly cool in other ways, wait and see, hopefully I will be friendly enough to publish it in the CodePit.

The existing theme originated from my first edition of this blog running Moveable Type, but I decided to look for a system which was licensed under a true open source, and which was not written in Perl which I have little experience with. Then I found WordPress and hacked my existing look into it, improving on it as I went along. Finally this spring WordPress 1.5 was released which featured a real “Theme System API”, which allows you to easily switch the complete look and feel of a WordPress site.

On the personal side, no radical changes this last year. I got a new job at Valtech in may, so I’m back from the mobile Internet business into the good old Desktop Internet business with big screen systems and mozilla/firefox/safari etc. to play/mess around with, working on some large corporate website portals, that I couldn’t possibly mention here, but it’s Java Enterprise and Web Standards based so I’m basically a happy man on planet earth.

If you actually (omg!) read this far, well congratulations, now post a comment full of ideas and praise!