Massachusetts OpenDocument Format Meeting

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From Groklaw – a blog of notes from the Massachusetts ODF Meeting where some pollies registered some displeasure of having not been involved, and sounded like they’d been reading too much misinformation from Microsoft. 🙁

There does appear to be at least one valid issue, and that is disability access, though sadly I’ve not seen details of what this exact problem is. Personally I would thought that to be an implementation issue rather than a document format issue, so I’m probably missing something there because Andy writes:


The disability issues are real, and the ITD seems to have been caught off guard on this. They should have been all over this issue a year ago, but seem to be going in the right direction now. Still, a bad tactical — and ethicall — mistake.
 (sic)

These two quotes in particular from Andy’s blog are quite telling:


Senator Pacheco doesn’t understand the difference between open source and open standards (and certainly doesn’t understand the difference between OpenDocument and OpenOffice). More than once, he indicated that he thought that the policy would require the Executive Agencies to use OpenOffice, not realizing that there are other compliant alternatives.


The hearing was stacked against the positive, in that although Quinn and ITD General Counsel Linda Hamel were given plenty of opportunity to speak and answer questions, no one else who was in favor of the new policy was permitted to give testimony (I know of at least one major, supporting vendor that tried and was refused), nor were any questions from the audience allowed.

Update: Scanning through Andy’s real-time notes shows another interesting little factoid:


the new policy applies only to the Executive Agencies. It does not apply to the Judiciary, although the Judiciary is actually way ahead of us, with over 2000 desktops already ODF enabled.

Two New Moons for Pluto ?

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So observers using the Hubble ST are reporting the possible discovery of two new moons of Pluto, for now called P1 and P2. As the ABC news report says:


“It’s … strictly coincidental that Pluto of course was named for the god of the underworld and we’re describing these Halloween moons,” Alan Stern of the South-West Research Institute said.

You can read the full NASA press release, and the comparison composite photos showing the movement within the Pluto system is below.

Composite image of the Pluto system from Hubble

Slippery Slope to a Police State ?

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The ABC is reporting that the Federal Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC – part of the Australian government) has said the unthinkable, that under coming anti-terror legislaton Australia is taking the the first step towards a police state. They quote him as saying:


“The defining characteristic of a police state is that the police exercise power on behalf of the executive and the conduct of the police cannot be effectively challenged and regrettably that is exactly what these laws are proposing,”

The report goes on to say that the judicial review of control and detention orders is illusionary and that the experience both in South Africa and in Australia is that when the government says “trust me” with respect to not abusing their powers that trust is all too often betrayed.


“Revelation of the Palmer report demonstrates how abuses of power can occur where there is no acceptable and realistic way that people can question what is happening to them.”

The Palmer Report (PDF) mentioned there is the report into the wrongful detention of Cornelia Rau and the wrongful deportation of Vivian Alvarez.

But we are not even to be trusted to see the legislation, we cannot talk about the latest draft because the Federal Government have tightened things up so that those in the State Governments can’t reveal them to us. The only reason I can think of is that they don’t want them discussed by the public, they fear what may be found.

Please, contact your state and federal politicians and ask them to open up these laws for discussion in the public domain, let us see what is proposed and work out whether we feel they fit the threat. Surely that’s not a problem if they’ve got nothing to hide – after all, that’s what they tell us..

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

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Well we’ve just come back from seeing The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, and I’ve got to say it’s a great little film.

It’s the story of Mark Bittner and his curiosity for, friendship with and care for a flock of wild cherry-headed conure’s who lived around and about Telegraph Hill in San Francisco over a number of years, as well as about his history and what happens to him during the making of the film.

I thought he held his own really well against the parrots, who occasionally tried to steal the show – especially Mingus who set up home under his fridge and oscillates between being very cute and attacking his shoes, forcing Mark to put him outside to cool down for a bit.

If you like birds, wildlife films, documentaries about interesting self-effacing people and a nice gentle warm feeling after a film then this is one for you.

Mark has also written a book about his experiences, and there is a FAQ about the parrots that you see in the film.

Annodex – multimedia neatness

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So James has written a very enthusiastic & spot on piece about Annodex, the open source technology from CSIRO that allows you to annotate and index multimedia files (using patent and royalty free codecs, though legacy non-free ones like MPEG-1 are usable in the short term).

I was lucky enough to be at both the presentation and fixit session for Annodex at LCA 2004 and have to say it sounded like an excellent technology, one that is long overdue and badly needed.

The ability to hyperlink into a given time range of a media file and then have just that segment sent to you (rather than having to get everything up to that range, or even worse, the entire file) is, I believe, perhaps its strongest feature.

I made a heap of notes in the presentation, but they’re at work and I’m not, so I can’t make any more comments about what occurred to me about it’s other possible uses..