There appears to be a “closing of ranks” by Microsoft/ECMA in relation to the administration, reading and checking of the comments for the forthcoming Ballot Resolution Meeting. [Not at http://www.dis29500.org though.]

Rob Weir has, in his typically articulate style, explained the situation thus:

Microsoft risks a repetitive stress injury from the recent frenzy of patting themselves on the back for responding to some of the ballot comments submitted in the failed OOXML ISO ballot of Sept 2nd.

They claim to be transparent and acting so that NB’s can easily review their progress in addressing their comments.

Well, let’s take a closer look.

First, Microsoft has managed to get JTC1 to clamp down on information. What was a transparent process is now mired in multiple levels of security leading to delay, denial of information to some NB participants and total opaqueness to the public.

Let’s review how things worked with ODF.

1. OASIS ODF TC mailing list archives are public for anyone to read
2. OASIS ODF TC public comment list archives are public for anyone to read
3. OASIS ODC meeting minutes, for every one of our weekly teleconferences going back to 2002, are all public for anyone to read.
4. The results of ODF’s ballot in ISO are public, including all of the NB comments
5. The comments on ODF from SC34 members are also public
6. The ISO Disposition of Comments report for ODF is also public for anyone to read

Short of allowing the public to read my mind, there is not much more we can do in OASIS to make the process more transparent. (And if you read this blog regularly you already have a good idea of what I’m thinking.)

But what about the OOXML process? Every single one of the above items is unavailable to the public, and in many cases cases is not available even to the JTC1 NB’s who are deciding OOXML’s fate.

Rob’s post has been forwarded to me twice now today. And just to re-iterate and to be absolutely clear, anyone can read all ~3500 comments on http://www.dis29500.org.

We (The Open Learning Centre) are running this site for anyone who feels interested in this subject. All the NB’s comments are available and sorted by country and are tagged with a unique ID. Individuals have been hard at work clarifying, and commenting on, these comments in an effort to sort “the wood from the trees”. In fact, at the time of me writing this, there are 742 classified comments on our site. Approximately 80 more than ECMA have managed to deal with

You can easily help by identifying the duplicate entries, and those which are not relevant to the BRM. You can also help by identifying the comments which should be classed as “Issues of Substance”. These are the hard ones. The things that we really want ECMA to rectify before it should become a standard. Areas such as Openness, Interoperability, Platform Independence, Accessibility, Freedom from Patent Restrictions etc etc etc.

Why not help your NB by looking for those comments and letting them know the comments they should be discussing at the BRM?

Tell Someone Else!

I have one web based service provider that requires me to use Internet Explorer - Parcelforce; the courier firm.

I have been using IE running on Wine up until recently - but I had never got printing to work quite right. You see, when I schedule a shipment for something, their software creates a barcode and label in PDF for me to print. But their system needs me to have IE and the Windows version of Acrobat installed so the label pops up in an IE with the Acrobat Reader plugin window.

I have asked them to support Firefox and Linux but they didn’t even have the courtesy to reply to my email…

Anyway - Wine and IES4LINUX worked for me very well, but I have had to save the pdf file to disk then open the Linux version of Acrobat and print it from there. I have recently moved partitions around on my PC and am running a new install of Ubuntu, so I decided to try a different route for a change…

I installed VirtualBox (the latest .deb from their web site which is 1.52) on my Ubuntu Gutsy desktop and then dug out my old CD of Windows XP and started the install.

What a palaver that was! I had forgotten how laborious the install is: I have an XP “upgrade CD” so had to go and find my Full version of Windows 95, show it that, then type in the stupidly long code and answer lots of questions. And it seemed to take so long to actually copy the stuff to the VM. Then you get the Activation question, registration and lots of network activity…

However, once I’d got it installed, it booted up just fine (In fact it boots much faster in a VM than I recall it doing natively) . After installing VirtualBox’s “guest additions for Windows” you get an improved Windows graphics driver and better mouse control too. The mouse just works when you move the pointer over the VirtualBox guest window or back to the Linux desktop. No need to switch mouse control between the two OSes.

The other nice feature is something they call “Seamless Mode”. This is really cool, it means your guest OS can appear on your desktop without having to be inside a window. By that I mean you can run application (say notepad) and it will appear as a single window on your desktop. Here’s a picture to show you what I mean…

It’s a bit of a chore just to get access to a barcode label from ParcelForce, but I can do it. It only took me about an hour and I haven’t had to go and buy any software (I already owned my old copy of XP Home and Windows 95) or have to dual boot my computer.

The virtualisation engine is Open Source, the host OS is Open Source. And if Parcelforce would wake up and smell the coffee perhaps they might even keep a customer.

Tell Someone Else!