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.
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A Mac called Kate
So Kate the Mac has come to live at our house. I like the Mac packaging and make a special point of getting a photo taken with it. That’s how much it impresses me.
Later, I begrudgingly acknowledge that I also quite like the Mac.
But wait, what’s this? Larry the IBM (who looks rather unimpressed with Kate the Mac) can always connect to the wireless router. While Kate looks cool, she’ll have to endure having a poxie Dick Smith Electronics USB wireless adapter sticking out of her as OSX can’t reliably connect to the router like every other wireless enabled device in the house (that’s a Linux laptop, and two mobile phones, and various other random laptops that turn up wanting to bludge our bandwidth).
