open office

A few years back, we went from what had been a virtual office to actually having a real office. Yet, since the company had been virtual for a while, we've maintained something of a hybrid between a virtual office and a real office.

Not everyone goes into the office all the time (some of our employees aren't local, though the majority of them are).

Some rarely go into the real office at all. Still, there are days when we do try to make sure that everyone's at the office, and that can be quite useful.

We see various software companies and their representatives like the BSA complaining constantly about the damaging impact of piracy on their business, but reader Jon sent in an article that explores how piracy of proprietary software often does just as much, if not more, harm to open source alternatives.

The Channel Wire: "In summary, it looks as if Open Office is continuing on its path as the would-be Microsoft Office killer."

Intranet Journal: "9. OxygenOffice Professional -- Think of it as Open Office with all of the bells and whistles.

Clip art, extra fonts, templates, and all of the little extras you wished a standard install of Open Office might bother to come with."

In a recent blog post Zoe Slattery took a look at opcodes in PHP, specifically related to performance increases.

For most of the last three months I have been keeping myself busy working on a project that's related to PHP and has involved looking at PHP performance.

It's been interesting and led me to try to understand a lot more about how the Zend engine works.

I spent a lot of time reading some sections of the code, and using my favourite technique (yes, I'm sorry - it's printf()) to understand how things work.

ZDNet: "I should also mention that a lot of them are very angry that Microsoft has changed the default document format in Office 2007 (again), such that it is incompatible with previous Office versions."

Computerworld: "Software is Linutop 2's strongest suit. It comes with Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (a.k.a. Hardy Heron), Open Office 2.4 and enough utilities to work well out of the box.

In five minutes, I was nosing around the Web, playing YouTube videos, listening to Internet radio and viewing Adobe Acrobat files.

Plus, the system can use and save in Microsoft Office .doc, .xls, .ppt and other popular formats."

LinuxWorld: "The OpenDocument Format has benefited from the two-year battle over the ratification of Microsoft's rival Open Office XML standard, which is native to its Office 2007 suite, Microsoft's national technology officer said Thursday..."

The Internet Super Hero blog has posted about a preview release of the PDO_MYSQLND and a connector for MySQL to Open Office that have both been announced at this year's MySQL Conference.