I had recently taken to reading Tom Beard’s WellUrban. Due to a new job he has stopped posting, which is a shame. WellUrban’s place has been filled by Eye of the Fish, which has also proved to be good reading, and I hope its authors continue to post regularly.
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People’s Palace, Cuba Street
I had to drop the beautiful VR6 off at the panelbeaters. While in Golden Bay an [idiot] left his handbrake off while he was at the pub, and his 4*4 instead used the back of our car to stop itself from rolling into a ditch. However, the upside of this was a pleasant walk down Cuba Street.
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Meraki Mini fun
So some fellows are keen to set up a Meraki network here in Wellington. Great idea!
I had a very brief play with one of the units on the weekend and it indeed is childishly simple to set up.
The signal wasn’t really strong enough for my wild garden and hillside terrain, but in an area that’s a little more densely populated this is going to rock. My plan had been to see if I’d be able to access my Meraki unit at the beach. I was dreaming, as the units only have a range of 50 metres (not 250 metres, about the distance to the beach). No great loss, what kind of nerd goes to the beach to access a wireless network?
The idea behind the “TheFreeNet – Aotearoa” is to provide free wireless broadband via a mesh network. This is a group of generous folks who share some of their bandwidth through a series of Meraki minis.
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Goodbye Canon A40
Selling my trusty Canon A40 on Trademe. *Sigh*, sad to see it go, I bought an Ixus in its place, and while smaller, it’s just not the same…
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Going to Golden Bay
Bird waiting to board the ferry to Picton:
Our new wheels (and Bird relieving himself in the background):
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Golden Bay
The Mighty, moored near Cousteau’s Calypso:
Toilet on top of the Tasman memorial in Golden Bay:
Ligar Bay, there was a penguin swimming near the beach:
Tash and Bird:
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Question: RTF is a standard, true or false?
Answer: False.
To be honest with you, I’m surprised. I’d never considered this before, I guess I have always assumed that RTF was a standard. In fact, it is not a standard at all. Rob Weir has an enlightening post that summarises the issues surrounding RTF and OOXML. Found on Slashdot, you can lose yourself for a while in the comments.
According to Wikipedia:
The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated to RTF) is a proprietary document file format developed by Microsoft in 1987 for cross-platform document interchange. Most word processors are able to read and write RTF documents.
Using Linux exclusively at home I’ve become really interested in (and frustrated by) standards for exchanging information other than HTML. The Webstock committee are constantly sending various documents around and trying various formats (we have three Mac users, two Windows users and moi on Linux). We use various tools (including Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Basecamp, Google docs, and so on), but there isn’t a decent non-proprietary way to share data. We are using RTF more and more as it’s light weight and it works for our documents. We’ll continue to use it, but I was amazed to discover that Microsoft can change RTF whenever they like.
Rob Weir again:
This should sound familiar. OOXML is nothing more than the preferences of Microsoft Office. Whenever Word changes, OOXML will change. And if you are a user or competitor of Word, you will be the last one to hear about these changes. ISO does not own OOXML. Ecma does not own OOXML. OOXML, in practice, is controlled and determined solely by the Office product teams at Microsoft. No one else matters.
