Erehwon Notebook

9:48:48 PM I think I could use one of these, too. I don't watch a ton of TV, but often that's because I can't get my schedule and the network's schedule to match up. Even better, it runs on Linux.
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7:46:04 PM Deepleap is cool. I mean, really cool. You need this. Seriously.
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7:34:02 PM I broke down and bought WordPerfect® Office 2000 for Linux® today. Specifically, I bought Deluxe, rather than Standard, mostly becuase I wanted the additional fonts and the like.

My motivation for the purchase was the problems I've been running into with StarOffice at work. I'm doing a lot of recruiting right now, which means looking at a lot of resumes, writing letters, etc. Beyond that, outside of my group of IT people and software engineers, everyone else uses NT and MS Office 2000. Since about 75% of the time I seem to have at least some sort of minor trouble opening or editing all the MS Office documents I get, I needed some other solution. I'd heard good things about WP Office for Linux, so I thought I'd give it a try.

After messing with it for a few hours, I'll have to give this product a qualified thumbs up. Frankly, getting it to work isn't for the faint-of-heart. While it installed on my RedHat 6.2 system without a hitch, none of the application would run at first. Rather, WINE kept generating all sorts of annoying page faults, which are only obvious if you run the application from a xterm. Corel's tech support and customer service aren't open on a Saturday, making my 30 days of free support pretty worthless to me. It took over an hour digging around in Corel's support newsgroups to identify someone with a similar problem and a solution, which involved exporting a code page variable to the shell. A simple fix, but not at all obvious. Someone new to Linux would probably have boxed the entire thing up and taken it back to the store, which I nearly did once my frustration level hit the roof.

Once running, the applications are suprisingly responsive on my AMD K6-2 300, considering that they're running under WINE. I understand why Corel elected to port the suite using WINE, and it did get the product out faster. I'm not sure I completely agree with this approach, however. It adds an additional layer of complexity, not to mention a performance hit. Lower end or memory-poor systems will probably struggle with this.

For test purposes, I opened up MS Office files using WordPerfect, QuattroPro, and Presentations, and had good luck importing all of them. Aside from some font issues, these documents came across just fine. Unfortunately, it appears that a document edited in StarOffice and saved as an MS Office 97 file isn't recognized as such, however. This isn't strictly Corel's fault, but is does complicate things a bit for someone converting from StarOffice like I am. Finally, I still haven't managed to get anything to print, and I had to reconfigure my system to access my file server via SMB, since there appear to be some issues opening files across NFS mounts.

Overall, WP Office 2000 appears to be a solution to my problem of having to work in a mixed-platform document authoring environment, but not without some annoyances and compromises. This software has the feel of a beta product, and while I wouldn't gripe if this was GPL'd Open Source software, the reality is that it isn't. This is commercial software, and Corel has rushed to ship something that really isn't quite ready for prime-time. It crashes as often as MS Office does. It's difficult to get working. It isn't running native Linux code. Even with all these caveats, there's no doubt that WP Office 2000 is the most feature complete Linux office suite available. I can only hope that Corel keeps up their development effort, and delivers an upgrade soon that addresses some of the more glaring defects. The little stuffed penguin, however, is pretty cool.
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1:13:23 AM The End of the Beginning? That's the main story in this week's Industry Standard. Now ZDNet has a report from Forrester claiming that there's a huge shakeout in e-tailing coming.

The gloomsters will try and get everyone shaken up about this, but I remember the months right after Yahoo and Netscape went public. For quite some time, subsequent 'net IPO's fell flat. It was time for a bit of a market correction. I have no doubt the same will happen here, and there'll be some strong consolidation among the older e-commerce players, particularly in B2C. A B2B consolidation is probably coming shortly thereafter. It sure won't be doomsday, though. It'll just be the end of those companies that never really had a sound business plan, never really had any real way of generating a profit, and never would have been successful over the long-haul, anyway. Sure, it's a new economy. But it's still an economy, folks, and you have to have a sound business if you want to be around past your first couple of rounds of VC funding, you know?

So, if you're one of those slick types who thought you'd make a killing by building something shaky, cashing in on the markets, and then flipping the damn thing, guess what? It looks like you may end up holding the bag. Building strong companies is still what it takes. The New Economy may have sped up the process a bit, and created a few new avenues for doing it, but you still have to have some business sense, ya know? I have no doubt that the economic engine will still chug along, and we'll be seeing a whole new wave of fast-movers show up as we see new technologies show up. It might be time to take a look at companies like Cisco, though, before you write those business plans. There's a bit more to this than just having a mediocre idea, a web site, and a pile of somebody else's cash.
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11:06:39 PM Infolets - Internet Innovations Explored is a great source for news on new 'net technologies. I found a number of news items here that I hadn't seen anywhere else, something pretty unusual these days.
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10:06:48 PM A message to people who stand in line in front of me buying Lottery tickets: Look, if you're going to waste the money anyway, why not just give it to me? You've got about the same chance that I'm going to give you a multi-million dollar prize. Not to mention that you significantly reduce the chances that I'll be forced to smack you in the back of the head for annoying me while you select 25 different tickets for different "Instant Win" games, and then stand there and scratch the damn things off.
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11:42:02 PM Blogger's been having some serious problems the past couple of days, so I haven't been able to post much. Hopefully that's all resolved. I had several things I was going to post, but damn if I remember them now!
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8:00:46 PM Corel buys MetaCreations products. Included are Painter, Bryce, Kai's PowerTools, and KPT Vector Effects. I'm glad to see that these products are going to go somewhere and live on. Even better is the possibility of them being ported to Linux.
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11:59:33 PM I've spent much of the day playing with Zope, a cross-platform, Open Source web application server. This thing is great! I wish I'd taken the time to look into it a few months ago; it could have been very useful for a couple of projects I've been involved with. Right now I'm prototyping some stuff as a home Intranet, but I think we may end up deploying it at work, soon. Very easy to use, very fast. I may very well end up replacing this page with a Zope-driven weblog, eventually.
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11:43:37 AM This is appalling. If Microsoft's business practices were unfair, then what Fair, Issac is doing is at least as bad, if not worse. The way credit reporting is handled these days is really criminial. Forcing open disclosure can't happen soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. Where do these boobs get off claiming they have the right to amass information on me, influence decisions about my financial future, and then claim thjat they aren't obligated to disclose this information to me or answer questions about it? Financial types: first against the wall when the revolution comes!
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GeoURL

Saturday, April 15, 2000

Thursday, April 13, 2000

Wednesday, April 12, 2000

Tuesday, April 11, 2000

Monday, April 10, 2000

Sunday, April 9, 2000