Category Archives: software

microsoft, software

Sun’s ODF converter

I had a quick look at Sun’s Open Document Format (ODF) converter for Microsoft Office.

This is aimed at users of Microsoft Office who want to open and save documents in ODF, an XML document format also used by Open Office and standardised by ISO. Why would you want to do this? The main reasons would be if you worked in an organization that mandates ODF as a standard, or if you need to send and receive documents from other organizations which use ODF as standard.

There is a curious twist here. On the face of it, one of the reasons you would send documents in ODF rather than, say, DOC or XLS, is to make it easier for users of Open Office to read your documents. However, this doesn’t necessarily apply, since this ODF converter actually is the same code used in Open Office to convert to and from Microsoft Office formats, so the recipient is really no better off. The new Open Office XML formats are a different matter but … the converter does not yet support Office 2007 (find out why here), or even Vista, according to the readme.

How good is the converter? On my quick test, pretty good, which I’d expect, given that Open Office is also pretty good in respect of Microsoft Office compatibility. It does not convert macros, but that’s not usually a problem since you rarely want to distribute documents containing macros. I managed to trip it up on one feature – there are probably others, but this is one that I found quickly. I tested the converter on my old Tablet notebook, since this still has Office 2003 installed. I created a new document and added an ink comment – a handwitten annotation written with a Tablet pen. Saved the document to ODT, reopened it, no comment. Not exactly a showstopper, but it illustrates the point that there are compromises if you choose to standardise on a non-native format.

Using the ODF converter in Word is more pleasant than with Microsoft’s ODF converter. It installs as an import/export filter, so that you can simply use Save As. You can even set Word to use it as default. There are also converters for Excel and PowerPoint, but these are not so deeply integrated.

Now for a few gripes. First, why is the download not digitally signed? This looks unprofessional these days, from a major software vendor.

Second, the converter installs itself in the system tray. What is a document converter doing in the system tray? I think this is ridiculous clutter. The only reason I can think of is to enable automatic or semi-automatic update; but I’d have thought this could be done on starting the add-in.

Third, the dialogs. Here’s what you get when you save a document as ODT:

The readme says of this dialog:

This warning unfortunately cannot be disabled and should be ignored.

I agree it is annoying; but should it be ignored given that, in fact, it might be true? If I’d been foolish enough to add lots of ink comments to a document, saved it as ODT, and ignored the dialog as Sun advises, I would be upset to have lost my work.

On the other hand, the real irritation of this dialog is that you do not know. Everything might be fine, or it might not.

Next, you get another dialog:

Sun’s readme says that this can be disabled, provided you have Word 2003 or XP, by setting a registry key. We are referred to KB 837011. But what does this KB say?

Word 2003 prompts you with the error messages that are mentioned in the “Symptoms” section when it is using file converters that have not been digitally signed. The prompt is expected and it is typical.

Right, so the real problem here is that Sun, again, hasn’t digitally signed its converter. If you read the KB article carefully, Microsoft does not recommend that you disable the warning. It is only intended for use if you have compatibility issues with legacy filters. Not, surely, something just released by Sun Microsystems.

Nevertheless, this is a decent converter. Would I use it? It will be handy for occasional import and export, but I would be most reluctant to use it by default on all my documents. If you are using Microsoft Office, it makes sense to use the Office native formats. If I’m sending a document and need the widest possible compatibility, RTF is good. At this point even .DOC and .XLS are probably more widely compatible than ODF, since they have been de facto standards for so long.

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software, windows

I broke Vista again

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Last time it was Windows Search. This time it was the Start menu. I don’t know what triggered it, but today I noticed something was wrong. When I clicked the Start button, the top level items had all disappeared. There was only a single entry, for All Programs, above which was a large white rectangle whether the other items should have been. After a short while, the Start menu stopped working completely. Clicking the Start button or pressing Ctrl-Esc did nothing at all. I also noticed that the explorer process was using 50% of my CPU time. This probably meant that one of the two available processors in a dual-core box was entirely devoted to some sort of useless loop. On a single processor system Windows might have frozen completely.

I tried a few things. Restarting Windows, of course, and restarting the Explorer process. Didn’t work; same symptoms. I tried the Customize button in Start menu properties, and clicking Use Default Settings. Didn’t work. I tried using Systernals Process Explorer to discover what was causing Explorer to go into a spin. That gave me a stack for the errant thread, but it wasn’t especially illuminating, except that it looked unlikely to be the fault of a third-party context menu handler.

At this point I had to do some other work. Did you know that you can use Task Manager as a crude shell manager?  Just use File – New Task to start an application, and Alt-Tab to switch between applications. Who needs Explorer?

OK, it is just a little clunky. I had another go. Logged on as a different user, and everything worked fine. So it is something in my user profile. Eventually I found the culprit, a registry entry called ProgramsCache at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartPage. Somehow this had got corrupted. When I renamed it, Explorer fixed itself. This registry key seems to store your list of frequently used programs. These are the shortcuts that appear above All Programs but below the pinned shortcuts on the Start menu.

Now, how come the Use Default Settings button doesn’t reset this registry key? Still, at least I can get back to work now.

internet, software, software development, web authoring

Adobe AIR security concerns

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Adobe’s Paul Robertson has a thoughtful response to my complaint about AIR security. The point I made is that any AIR application has the same access to the file system as the user. This includes local SQLite databases as well as other documents. Robertson’s response:

In order for a user to access an AIR application, he or she must first choose to install the application, including going through a security dialog that will describe whether the application was signed with a security certificate. In this way, an AIR application is comparable to any other desktop application, such as one written in C++. Since any C++ application could theoretically include the SQLite library, installing an AIR application is no different from installing any C++ application in the sense that, by doing so, a user opens himself up to possible abuses and security risks.

The security risks of desktop apps are well-known, and that’s why users have learned to be cautious about installing them. A possible concern though is that Adobe wants to make installing AIR applications really easy. Here’s the description in the docs for seamless install:

The seamless install feature lets you provide a link in a web page that lets the user install an AIR application by simply clicking the link. If the AIR runtime is not installed, the user is given the option to install it. The seamless install feature also lets users install the AIR application without downloading the AIR file to their machine.

I’ve seen how much kids love playing Flash games on the Web. Some of these games would be a natural fit for AIR: play the game from a desktop shortcut, option to save your game locally, no browser baggage. What if a lot of these games turn into AIR apps? Suddenly, instead of online Flash games being relatively safe, they become relatively risky. If users become complacent about passing the AIR install dialog, then all the bad guy needs to do is to create a whizzy game that does a background search of your computer looking for online banking passwords.

The risks will be mitigated if Adobe restricts AIR to signed applications. That’s not the case with the beta:

A further point is that despite the scary dialog, AIR apps are actually tightly locked down from a developer perspective, with no access to native code such as the operating system API, scripts, or native dynamic libraries. While that’s good in one way, it’s arguably the worst of both worlds: not secure (because of full file system access), and not extensible either.

The appearance of the words “System Access: UNRESTRICTED” in the above dialog suggests that Adobe has or is planning a richer security model. If the default were no file I/O, or file I/O isolated to the source domain of the AIR application, that would help considerably. Add compulsory application signing and it would look better still.

I’ll add that I’m most impressed with Paul Robertson’s willingness to enter into this dialog. I wish other software vendors were equally responsive. AIR is in beta so there’s time to fix problems.

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software

Don’t buy Open Office

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If you happen to search on eBay for Microsoft Office, you will likely notice ads like this offering a good value office suite:

Don’t buy it. Just head over to http://www.openoffice.org/ (more than 3 available) and download for free. Nevertheless, it is an amusing example of the free market at work. Go out looking for Microsoft Office, come back with Open Office, and judging by the guy’s 99.8% positive feedback, be content.

I’m surprised that there are enough people out there who can use eBay but not, apparently, Google. The other interesting question is for how long Microsoft can succeed with Office when for many people (not all) the free alternative is more than good enough.

software, software development

SQLite, test-driven development, and the inscrutable SQL standard

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I interviewed Dr D Richard Hipp, the main author of SQLite, for the Guardian Newspaper.

Among the things I found interesting is that he attributes the high reliability of his database engine to the extensive test suite included in the code. I’m not sure whether he practices test-driven development as such, but it is a great case study for the advantages of integrating tests with your code. One of the points he made was that the test suite enables him to replace entire subsystems and be confident that nothing gets broken. By contrast, I have heard of cases where key sections of code in large, old applications is marked “do not touch” because nobody dares to risk the consequences.

I also asked him about the importance of standards in software development. He gave me an answer that somewhat surprised me:

When I coded up SQLite I did not refer to any official SQL standard. I used the PostgreSQL documentation. That was my reference. If you’ve ever picked up a copy of one of the official SQL standards you will find it largely inscrutable. They are next to impossible to make sense of. Even for particular details of syntax you can study it, and they are so vague that you can’t really understand what they mean. So a strategy we’ve used when there’s some question about how something should work is we write a little test script and run it on lots of popular SQL database engines, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and try and find a consensus. Then we code to make SQLite work the same as everybody else does. Clearly that’s not the right way to do a standard, but in practice the implementations vary so widely that it’s the only practical thing to do.

Many companies boast about how they respect and observe software standards; sometimes the reality is more pragmatic than you might have thought.

microsoft, software

How Microsoft changed its mind about Office XML standardization

My interview with Microsoft’s XML Architect Jean Paoli back in April was not the first time I had spoken to him. I also talked to him in February 2005. At that time Microsoft had no intention of submitting its Office XML specification to a standards body. I thought it should do so, and asked Paoli why not:

Backward compatibility. We have today 400 million users of Office, which means billions of documents. So we went and did a huge job of documenting electronically all these features and we put that into this WordML format. Well we need to maintain this damn thing, and we need to maintain this big format, we have like 1500 tags. Who is going to maintain that? A standard body? It doesn’t know what is inside of Word. That’s the problem. So we said we are going to give you a license, open and free… [Jean Paoli, February 2005].

Microsoft was forced to change its mind, because important customers (mostly governments) indicated their preference for standardised document formats. The quote remains relevant, because it says a lot about the goals of Office Open XML, which is an evolution of WordML and SpreadsheetML.

While on the subject, I also want to mention Simon Jones’ piece in the August 2007 PC Pro (article not online), perhaps a little one-sided but he does a good job of debunking some of the common objections to OOXML and exposing some of the politics in the standardisation process. He adds:

I’m not saying there aren’t any problems with the ECMA-376 standard. Nor am I saying ODF is bad. I do, however, believe OOXML is technically superior to ODF in many ways, and I want to see both as ISO standards so people can have the choice.

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microsoft, software, windows

How to speed up Vista: disable the slow slow search

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What’s the biggest problems with Vista? Not the buggy drivers, which are gradually getting sorted. Not the evil DRM, which I haven’t encountered directly, though it may be a factor in increasing the complexity and therefore the bugginess of video and audio drivers. Not User Account Control security, which I think is pretty good. Not the user interface, which I reckon improves on Windows XP though there are annoyances.

No, my biggest complaint is performance. This morning I noticed that if I clicked the Start button and then Documents, it took around 15 seconds for the explorer window to display, fully populated. Doing this with Task Manager monitoring performance, I could see CPU usage spike from below 10% to between 55% and 60% while Explorer did its stuff.

Explorer gets blamed for many things that are not really its fault. Applications which integrate with the desktop, such as file archive utilities, hook into Explorer and can cause problems. I tried to figure out what was slowing it down. I opened up Services (in Administrative Tools) and looked at what was running. It didn’t take long to find the main culprit – Windows Search:

Windows Search in Services

You will notice that the above dialog shows that the service is not running. That’s because I stopped it. The difference is amazing. The Documents folder now shows in less than a second. When I click the Start button, the menu displays immediately instead of pausing for thought. Everything seems faster.

Looking at the description above, it is not surprising that there is a performance impact. The indexer gets notified every time you change a file or receive an email (if you are using Outlook or Windows Mail). The same service creates virtual folder views in Explorer, a poor man’s WinFS that should make the real location of files less important. Notice that the explanatory text warns me that by stopping the service I lose these features and have to “fall back to item-by-item slow search”.

I think it should say, “If the service is started, Explorer will take fifteen times longer to open and your system will run more slowly.”

Desktop search is a great feature, but only if it is unobtrusive. In Vista, that’s not the case.

This kind of thing will vary substantially from one system to another. Another user may say that Windows Search causes no problems. I also believe that the system impact is much greater if the indexer has many outstanding tasks – such as indexing a large Outlook mailbox, for example. Further, disabling Windows search really does slow down the search function in Explorer.

Turning off Windows search is therefore not something to do lightly. It breaks an important part of Vista.

Still, sometimes you need to get your work done. That fifteen seconds delay soon adds up when repeated many times.

In truth, we should not be faced with this decision. Microsoft should know better – it has plenty of database expertise, after all. There’s no excuse for a system service that slows things down to this extent.

By the way, if you have understood all the caveats and still want to run without Windows Search, until Microsoft fix it, then you must set the service to disabled. Otherwise applications like Outlook will helpfully restart it for you.

Update

See comments below – a couple of others have reported (as I expected) that search works fine for them. So what is the issue here? In my case I think it is related to Outlook 2007, known to have performance problems especially with large mailboxes like mine. But what’s the general conclusion? If you are suffering from performance problems with Vista, I recommend experimenting with Search – stop and disable it temporarily, to see what effect it has. If there’s no improvement, you can always enable it again.

It strikes me that there is some unfortunate interaction between Explorer, Search, and Outlook; it’s possible that there are other bad combinations as well.

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internet, software, software development, web authoring

Google’s new model of app development

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I was fascinated by this slide shown at the recent global developer day, which I’m reproducing with Google’s permission:

Four blocks captions Ads, Standards, Mashups, Open Source

The image doesn’t make sense without the caption, which I’ve used as the title of this post: The New Model of App Development. You can see the slide in context in this Register piece. Two things in particular interest me. One is the appearance of ads as an integral part of the development model. This makes sense for Google’s own development, but does it make sense for others? Given that much of the software industry is slogging away at internal business applications, that seems a stretch. It may be true for consumer apps. Ad-funded applications have not been a big success on the desktop, but we have somehow become tolerant of ads flashing round the screen when working on the Web.

Another issue is one we tried to capture in the caption for this image at the Reg. The main goal of developer day was to get developers to integrate Google services into their applications, by using Google Maps and the other APIs on show at Google code. The company is even keen to host your gadgets on its own servers. Google wants to be an indispensable building block in app development, even though it left itself out of the illustration.

How about open source? Google uses and sponsors open source software, and has posted the code for Gears, but where’s the code for Docs & Spreadsheets? Closed source is an important part of Google’s own app development model, as it is for most others.

internet, software, software development, web authoring

FireFox team not sure about Google Gears adoption

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During Google Developer Day I had the impression that Mozilla was right on board with Google Gears, the plug-in which which enables offline applications. Here’s Aaron Boodman and Erik Arvidsson from the Gears team:

We are releasing Gears as an open source project and we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera and other industry partners to make sure that Gears is the right solution for everyone.

It seems that things are not as clear-cut as Boodman and Arvidsson imply. LinuxWorld.com quotes Mozilla’s Mike Shaver:

We’re talking to Google engineers and looking at how these two models — ours and theirs — compare. This is in the open now, and going forward we’ll see what we can learn from each other,” Shaver said. “But there’s a lot of work that’s been done already [on Firefox 3.0], and we’re not planning to throw that work away.

According to the article, Shaver is particularly doubtful about using SQLite for persisting web application data locally, and is inclined to stick with the more limited DOM Storage API already planned for FireFox 3.0.

A related point is that Adobe’s commitment to Gears is not absolute. Here’s Adobe’s Michele Turner says, quoted by David Berlind:

…For example, they’re using SQLite and we were already incorporating SQLite into Apollo. So, now we’re aligning our efforts with Google on things like the synchronous and asynchronous calls that must be made to the SQLite database in order to enable the offline capability. 

My impression is that Adobe is aiming for a measure of API compatibility, but will ship its own build of SQLite rather than using one installed by Gears, with inevitable version and customization differences.

There is a world of difference between using a similar API on the one hand, and sharing common components and/or common source code on the other. It looks to me as if Apollo, FireFox and Google are going to provide three independent and isolated mechanisms for handling local storage.

Of course Gears installs into FireFox anyway, and there is nothing to stop Flash developers from using Gears.

I will quiz Adobe on this subject at tomorrow’s Adobe Live event.

internet, microsoft, software, Uncategorized, web authoring, windows

New Live Writer is out

Beta, of course. But since this is my favourite offline blog authoring tool, I’m taking a break from Google posts to mention it here. You can download it here – I’m using it to write this post. The official blog has a list of new features.

Do they amount to much? Inline spell checking (wiggly underlines) is great, except that it still seems to be hard-wired to US English. I like Paste Special, particularly as I’ve had problems pasting from Word in the past, with Writer inserting annoying font tags (something to do with using the embedded IE editor, no doubt). That said, I’ve just tried a paste from Word and it worked fine, so perhaps this is fixed too. Synch between local and online edits is neat – when you retrieve a post from Live Writer’s local cache, it updates it from the online version, so that it is now safe to edit in either location. Writer also exposes a richer set of properties, including Excerpt. There are a bunch of other changes that don’t matter much to me, such as Sharepoint support. Table editing? I don’t generally use tables in blog posts, but it could be useful.

On the minus side, Writer has sprouted an odd extra toolbar so that you now have three rows above the working area: menu, toolbar, and editing toolbar. That looks cluttered and unnecessary. There’s the spelling problem mentioned above. And as for this, words fail me:

 

Overall, a useful but low-key upgrade.

Update: Graham Chastney has a hack to fix the US spelling.