Posted by John Patrick on Oct 28, 2005 in
Personal Computing 
Many people are already aware of the new free Open Office 2.0 productivity suite, but if you are not I highly recommend taking a look. You can find it at openoffice.org, I am quite impressed with what the team of collaborators around the world has done. The spreadsheet application, presentation tool, and word processor are elegant. I have been using Open Office for years and do not have a copy of Microsoft Office on my ThinkPad. I have not found any significant compatibility problems. If someone sends me a Microsoft Office file, I can open it and use it with no problem. Likewise, I have never had a complaint from someone saying they can’t read the Open Office files I send them and which they can read with Microsoft Office. The compatibility is surely not 100% but it is plenty good enough for me. More importantly I think Open Office is good enough for billions of children in schools around the world. Microsoft has done an incredible job of building their suite of programs, but for 99% of us the vast number of features are more than we can comprehend let alone use.
There are many other office productivity suites out there in addition to Open Office and Microsoft Office. Take a look at Nick Mudge’s list here. The more strategic issue is not which suite to use but the long term compatibility of the data — in other words the format that spreadsheets and other office documents are stored in. This is where OpenDocument Format comes in. As has been written here before, there is nothing to not like about ODF. That is why the 84 member companies of Oasis voted unanimously to adopt the new standard.
Open Documents – Part 1
Open Documents – Part 2
Open Documents – Part 3
Other patrickWeb stories about open systems
Posted by John Patrick on Oct 27, 2005 in
Blogging,
Healthcare 
The story about some possible future roles for blogging brought a number of comments from readers. Pito Salas at BlogBridge liked the hospital application I described and took it to the next level. He feels that aggregators (blog readers) do not have to be limited to displaying their results as a time-ordered series of posts. For example, BlogBridge recently introduced "Photo Feeds", where they display the results of a blog feed full of pictures not as posts but as a photo album. Taking this concept into the healthcare arena, Pito envisions the vital signs of a patient being taken every 15 minutes and placed into a blog feed. The aggregator would then display the information as a graph or chart. Seems to me this would have a lot of potential in the area of home healthcare such as the remote monitoring report I wrote about a year ago. Even beyond that, medications could be administered on an automated basis in response to an incoming feed of data from the hospital laboratory which in turn is receiving that data from automated samples taken at bedside.
Earlier this week, I got some hands-on experience with another healthcare solution which points to the future. Intuitive Surgical demonstrated their da Vinci® Surgical System in the Danbury Hospital auditorium. The emerging field of robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery has great potential to enable surgeons and hospitals to improve clinical outcomes and help patients return to active and productive lives more quickly after surgery. The da Vinci® robot has 10X 3-D vision and four mechanical arms. Those of us in attendance got to spend a few minutes at the console. It was quite an experience to operate the arms and pick up tiny pieces of rubber and move them around. Rather than traditional open surgery, the robot enables the surgeon to operate through four tiny incisions. It doesn’t replace the surgeon — it augments the surgeon’s ability. There is more precision and more flexibility. For the patient there is less bleeding and faster recovery. The surgeon would normally be seated at the console "operating" by manipulating the robot’s arms while looking through binocular-like lenses. Even the shaky hand of a coffee-drinking surgeon can be made steady as a rock. The surgeon could even collaborate with another surgeon who may be thousands of miles away!
Other patrickWeb healthcare related stories
Posted by John Patrick on Oct 23, 2005 in
Blogging,
Conferences 
The Copacabana Hotel in Manhattan is said to be an excellent place to enjoy salsa. This week it was also a place to enjoy a discussion about the past, present, and future of blogging as more than three-hundred people gathered at BlogOn 2005.
One of the ways that you can tell if a new Internet technology is going to be successful is to look for skepticism. When people begin to say the hype exceeds the reality, it means we are on the way toward the reality exceeding the hype. I am not referring to new business models that are going to make water run uphill, but rather to fundamental technologies such as the Internet itself, the Web, Java, Linux, WiFi, and others. All of those were discounted in the early days. Blogging has now entered the phase where it is in the category of a fundamental technology — one that is enormously profound and is altering how information is documented, distributed, syndicated, and archived.
As with all fundamental technologies, there are a lot of myths in the early stages — like "The Internet is free" or "The web is for documents, not for applications". Add to the list that blogging is a vanity tool for people to write about themselves or their hobbies. Sure there are many personal blogs. Someone may write a blog that is only read by the blogger’s mom. That’s ok. A volunteer parent on a school trip may write a daily posting for the other parents to read. Pundits may write a "column" that is read by very large numbers of people. All of these take advantage of the "diary" aspect of blogging, but there is a lot more to blogging than people writing their personal accounts or views. (read more)
Tags: blogging podcasting videocasting vidoblogs context content
Posted by John Patrick on Oct 15, 2005 in
Personal Computing The battle over OpenDocument Format has begun and Microsoft is using their traditional brass knuckles approach. It was revealed this week in some blogs that a recent article, "Massachusetts Should Close Down OpenDocument", which ran at Fox News, was written by a journalist hired by Microsoft. (See an interesting rebuttal). The stakes are high. The issue is who owns documents, the document creator or the software that was used to create the documents.
Let’s make it personal and down to earth. Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their children all have computers on the local area network at home. They recently had a busy weekend. Mr. Smith created a presentation which he will take to a conference and present using his ThinkPad. Mrs. Smith wrote a newsletter which will be distributed to dozens of members in a local non-profit organization she belongs to. The Smiths’ daughter completed a school term paper replete with graphical images, clip art, and photographs. The Smiths’ son is a graduate student in business and he developed a spreadsheet to reflect a ten-year financial plan for a new business idea. Who owns these four documents? (read more)
Tags: mainframe odf linux documents microsoft office
Posted by John Patrick on Oct 6, 2005 in
Personal Computing There are some questions people have asked me about the OpenDocument Format . The first question is what is the consumer benefit of ODF, in other words why should you care? Nice that the automotive and aircraft industries can benefit but does it mean to the average consumer?
The one-word answer is compatibility. How many times have you received a file attachment from someone and could not open it or you could open but it was unreadable? All of us have had that experience. The reason for such problems is that the file format was not compatible with your system in some way. The OpenDocument Format is designed to be "open" — any software developer who wants to write a program to read or write an ODF file has complete access to the details of the formats. Assuming all parties are using software that supports ODF, if someone creates a spreadsheet on a Mac and sends it to friend who uses Linux and another friend who uses Windows and a third friend at a major corporation who uses IBM’s Workplace software — they will all be able to open the spreadsheet file and both read it and make changes to it. Another way to say it is that the ODF document is compatible across all of these different software systems. (read more)
Posted by John Patrick on Oct 5, 2005 in
Hiking 
U.S. Route 7 reaches 309 miles from Highgate Springs, Vermont to Norwalk, Connecticut. Parts of Route 7 are quite scenic but much of the highway is used heavily by commuters. I am not sure how many of the nation’s 736,425 benchmarks are along the entire route but by doing some research using the Geocaching Swiss Army Knife — my favorite tool for storing and manipulating location data — I have discovered that there are two dozen marks along Route 7 within ten miles of where I live. The obvious challenge is to find them (the official term is "recover" them).
Overall, 69,932 of the nation’s benchmarks have been "recovered" as of today so my contribution will be a drop in the bucket — but hopefully a lot of fun. (read more)
Posted by John Patrick on Oct 3, 2005 in
Personal Computing The debate about the OpenDocument format is just beginning. Massachusetts put a stake in the ground with their decision to adopt ODF for all employees in the Commonwealth and for anyone doing business with them. This may go down in history as a bold and important move. But Microsoft, which opposes ODF, will not give up easily.
There was an OpenOffice.org 2005 conference in Koper-Capodistria, Slovenia last week at which a professor delivered a keynote speech
entitled: "Should I Adopt OpenOffice?". It is reported that after taking a few questions from the audience, a loud voice boomed out from the back of the auditorium saying "In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a Microsoft technical officer." The person then launched at attack on the professor about the information that had just been presented. The gentleman then claimed that the European Union had accepted Microsoft file formats as "sufficiently open" and finally, he directly attacked the new OASIS OpenDocument Format. It was further reported that the professor had not even mentioned the OpenDocument Format or Microsoft’s "Office Open XML". Needless to say, Microsoft is very defensive about the subject. Why? They have a monopoly and they want to keep it. Maintaining some degree of control over the details behind the formats gives a vendor more flexibility in developing their software and in deciding when and how to offer upgrades. Having to work with formats that are controlled by an outside independent third party is definitely harder. (read more)
Posted by John Patrick on Oct 1, 2005 in
IBM 
The month of September was really busy for IBM, with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services and corporate initiatives. Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
