Month: November 2006

Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/dictionaries and download your dictionary – then it will start working.

See

What kind of bugs are these Oracle bugs?

If there’s ways of breaking into the database, then fine, but first the attacker has to have broken into the systems and got behind the firewalls. I work for an Oracle shop and some of our customers got very excited about the security bugs.

What they had’t grasped was that in order to exploit them their entire infrastructure had to have been compromised as well. If people can break the Application Server and/or the Portal and get information they should’t then this is a serious issue, but vulnerabilities that involve messing with, say, SQL*Net, can only be exploited if everything else has been compromised first and an attacker can log into a machine or start looking at network packets. If this is the case, you really have more to worry about than you database.

Ah, Ecademy

I was a member years ago when it was new – and it was’t worth bothering with.

Could never find others local to yourself because it was a free-text string. I live in Merseyside so, you had to look for

Liverpool/Wirral/Merseyside – or even an area like, say, Childwall

No idea how London-based people managed. It was was a useless unsearchable pile of free text that was only of use if you had the time to scroll through everything. I gave up.

Even then you might see a village or area name that you know is local to you if you could be bothered scrolling down the long list of people.

I unsubscribed three or four times and then was sent an email every couple of weeks until I was rude to the sysadmin in a reply and that sorted it.

I’m amazed people still use it, last time I looked it was still a free text heaven with poor searching.

I’m writing a document that has numbering.

Chapters have numbers and each section is numbered using Roman numerals.

I wanted to swap chapters 1 and 2.

In MSW you can put the document in outline mode (which does’t seem to exist in OO), change the number of displayed levels to 1, and move the sections.

All of the numbering stays together.

OO, on the other hand, does’t have this view. OK, says I, let’s just cut and paste the chapters. It’s a bit 1980’s but hey OO is free.

The section numbering goes west. The pasted in chapter is numbered 1, and the sub sections carry on from the earlier numbering.

Joy.

I tried loading it into AbiWord (not yet used in anger) but it was too confused. Left it for a day and had another go. Discovered that you can press return at the beginning of the line and it will do the numbering on the new line. Go back up, set the style to Normal and remove the line – then the numbering is correct. I have since loaded the filter add-ons for Abi and will maybe have a go just to see if it can do it.

This is a pain – most technical documents have numbered paras and OO just does’t seem to get it. MSW can do this without much of an issue. Maybe I missed something. I don’t have time to try and fix OO. maybe I’ll put a test case together and see if the developers can sort it out.

In my hunting on the net I discovered Lyx , which I am looking at at the moment. What You See Is What You Mean – uses Latex and then integrates lots of O/S tools to glue it all together. I’m thinking that this would be by far the better way of producing camera ready copy if I could only find the time to learn it. No issues with WYSIWYG numbering either – it just does it. I did once use these markup languages in another life (before decent word processors) and don’t mind them at all. Lyx just hides the complexity from you.

Also using Firefox 2.0 spell checker – useful.  

My manager died in a car crash on Thursday on the motorway.

He was going to help me with some issues I’ve had and we were trying to overcome the problems. I was looking forward to the next few months of working with him and getting stuff done. Now, he’s not there.

I was very late to work this morning. I could’t get in my car. I was up at 6:15.

These things affect us all in strange ways. Bought a card for everyone to sign which has been sent on.

Nothing I can do. Nothing at all.

Puts all the upset and nonsense of the last few months into the irrelevant nonsense category they really belong. 

Excellent quote from here:  

Many people will opt to spend their time on work that has clear-cut outcomes over work that’s ambiguous. The more clarity around the part-timer’s contribution, the more productive the situation will be for everyone.

 Quite often this is why things don’t get done – how can you take responsibility for something when you don’t know what it is?