UNV Online Volunteering co-ordinates online volunteer efforts around the world. This isn’t about going to some developing or transitional country yourself. It is about sitting in your comfy chair at home and putting some of those hours you might have otherwise spent playing World of Warcraft to work for someone else. Whether your skills are website design and development or translation of documentation, there is plenty of opportunity to put them to good use. What a nice idea!
Archive for January, 2007
Rob Weir has posted a criticism of ECMA-376, the official standard name for Microsoft Office Open XML, the new XML standard based on the Microsoft Office file format.
The core of his criticism is that parts of the standard are defined, in terms of 12 or 16 year old pieces of software which are no longer supported, let alone sold by their vendor. Any third party implementation of ECMA-376 requires a reverse engineering of these pieces of software and duplicating of their behaviour, a technically challenging process which appears to be of dubious legality (I’m not a lawyer, but see “Contract case could hurt reverse engineering”).
Looking at the standard myself, another flaw becomes apparent: from a software engineering point of view the standard is a nightmare to implement and may be impossible to test against.
At 6039 pages the standard is huge, and rather than being as close as possible in presentation style to the standards on which it builds (a common and very useful trait among the IETF, W3C and ISO sets of standards), it bears little or no relation to the structure of the standards it builds upon (the W3C standards for XML).
Certain classes of testing against the ECMA-376 should be easy, particularly XML conformance and validation, but testing for the correct behaviour of applications is going to be next to impossible, particularly when the behaviour is specified as (example lifted from Rob Weir):
2.15.3.51 suppressTopSpacingWP (Emulate WordPerfect 5.x Line Spacing)
This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (WordPerfect 5.x) when determining the resulting spacing between lines in a paragraph using the spacing element (§2.3.1.33). This emulation typically results in line spacing which is reduced from its normal size.
[Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]
To be frank, I don’t see how even Microsoft can reliably test against such a standard, let alone third parties. That inability to test will inevitably undermine efforts at reducing bugs.
Ordnance Survey spends millions of pounds supporting and maintaining “MasterMap”, a very-high quality map of the UK. Unfortunately that money has to come from somewhere, and in this case, it comes from Ordnance Survey charging for the use of the map. There is ongoing tension over this because even a nominal charge for mapping data prevents wholesale exporting of the data to the web for the general public to use.
In a recent case the issue was town planning in London, but one can imagine any number of other uses where public bodies and not-for-profits are trying to engage with public.
It’s interesting to note that the recent surge in geographical computing (Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, geotagging, geocaching, satellite navigation, etc) is built on two types of largely government funded activity: GPS and satellite photography. In both cases, it wasn’t until the public had free access to acceptable-quality data that industries grew up around them.
Maybe the Ordnance Survey need to come up with a plan to boost sales of their very-high quality data by giving away their acceptable-quality data to build an industry. An alternative might be to devise a system by which various classes of end-users can contribute data back into the database, since many end-user now have survey-quality location devices.
A petition has been launched “to make software patents clearly unenforceable.”
The petition uses the new software in beta test from the office of the Prime Minster, and allows British citizens and residents to sign up to support the petition (but not against).
If I were composing a petition, I might have used less overtly loaded language.
Above are the XML-RPC details for the OSS Watch Team Blog, which were used to post this message. With appropriate (mainly the “oss-watch” part of the URLs below) modifications, these details should let you post to any JISC blog from flickr or any other remote blog system.
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cheers
stuart
