Office Archive

"Learning Python, Second Edition" was published only a few months ago by O'Reilly. We take a quick look at this promising book.

Virtual memory is one of the most important subsystems of any modern operating system. Virtual memory is deeply intertwined with user processes, protection between processes and protection of the kernel from user processes, efficient shared memory, communication with IO (DMA, etc.), paging, swapping, and countless other systems. Understanding the VM subsystem greatly helps understanding how all other parts of the kernel work and interact. Because of this "Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager" is a great guide in better understanding and working with the entire kernel.

The second in an ongoing series of articles about expanding the realm of your computing environment to encompass your whole home, this article covers my experience becoming a certified Home Technology Integrator. Though the internet is a great source of information for nearly every aspect of home automation, there's no substitute for a little formal education.

Nicholas Petreley takes a spin at the Java-based EIOffice office suite. I also tried this software 2-3 weeks ago but it has ugly dependencies in regards to its installation routine:

The world has changed due to the humble (and sometimes not so humble) creations in the past. It can be argued that NCSA Mosaic changed the world. Some would argue that it was actually Netscape, but whatever the actual case may be, the web browser has in some way changed the way we look at electronic information.

R. Kirk McPike wrote a comparison between Microsoft's Word and OpenOffice.org Writer based on his experience writing a term paper. It's an attempt to consider the end usability of both products, and how OpenOffice.org's challenge should be responded to by Microsoft.

Here's a review of Corel's new WordPerfect products: WordPerfect Office 12 for Windows, and WordPerfect for Linux. The latter is an improvement on their previous WP for Linux products that were discontinued some time ago. Could this be the start of big-name proprietary software for GNU/Linux?

On April 1, it was announced that Corel would start selling WordPerfect for Linux as a pilot project to assess customer demand. It is now available from the Corel store. This version is based on the WP8 for Linux series, which was alot more stable than the later winelib based versions. Linux Journal recently reviewed the updated WordPerfect for Linux. Editor's Note: The Corel site is a little misleading - as noted above, this is NOT Word Perfect Office 12 - it is an updated version of WordPerfect for Linux.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 is a new bug fix release. Release notes are here.

According to a Forrester Reserch study of 140 large North American companies (aired today in The Washington Post), 12 of them are using OpenOffice.org and an additional 8 are planning to use it. Read the full story at Consulting Times.

Although Microsoft's Office 2004 won't be on store shelves until the middle of this year, MacWorld got a sneak peek at its new features. And these additions -- from a command center for related correspondence, calendars, and files, to an audio recorder that gives your typing fingers a rest -- made quite an impression.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.1b was released not too long ago, so FlexBeta decided to take it for a spin and see how well it competed against MS Office 2003.

If all goes well, this summer I'll be building a new house. I've owned a few houses before, some of them built in the 1920s and 30s, and full of all the charm and quirks of an old house, and a couple that were pretty new, with the lack of craftsmanship and imagination that's typical in most new construction in the USA today. But this time I'm building a custom home, just to my specifications, so I can have whatever features I want, limited only by my imagination (and budget). I'd like to integrate some home automation features into the house, and include wiring for future expansion.

As I have recently discovered, with the right applications, ditching the GUI and using the console exclusively can be a pleasure. By knowing which console applications will suit your needs the best you can achieve efficiency in a console environment that rivals that of a GUI. With well designed ncurses interfaces many console applications are extremely usable and working in a console environment can not only free up precious resources it can also provide several other benefits that will be discussed later in this article.