In the spirit (or snare) of capitalism, we often believe that the job interview is an opportunity to prove our worth to potential employers. As much as that is true to some degree, every interview should be a time set aside not only to answer questions, but to ask them as well. In order to increase the probability that you will find a rewarding position, you have to step beyond the subjects of salary, vacation, and benefits, and put companies in the spotlight.
These ten leading questions will help you to better understand the position and company to which you are applying. Leading or clarifying questions are the key to a successful interview. They require the interviewer to become expressive, and they alleviate the need to interpret how much truth is behind a curt yes or no answer. You may feel awkward asking for such detail, but you will find in time that any company uncomfortable answering probably has something to hide.
How many hours are in a typical work week?
Skip the pleasantries regarding business hours. You can find this information on a Web site, or in the job posting. You want to know how many hours are billed for the average employee in a work week. Is it truly 40, or do most employees hover around 45-50 hours? Is this overtime, or is comp (flex) time offered? What about summer hours? Get the whole scoop, and you will discover that the standard nine-to-five work day is a thing of the past, especially for Web developers. How much it varies will differ from organization to organization.
What are the expectations regarding travel?
Almost all companies will require some travel, either for training, conferences, or for client meetings. The amount of travel is usually specified as a percentage, but this is rarely an accurate representation of the actual time spent on the road or in the air. Be sure to ask approximately how often, and for what duration, you will need to travel annually. Employers may be hoping you gloss over these details, since above average travel is a great barometer for a bump in pay scale.
On average, how long does an employee remain with your company?
Avoid questions about turnover, unless the interviewer uses the terminology. It has negative connotations, and you may receive an arbitrary response, like, “turnover is low”. This does not help you to gage employee satisfaction, so you want to get a more detailed response. In our industry, if there is a small staple of employees who hover around five to ten years, then that is a good sign. If the company is young, or a startup, then asking this question may not be a benefit to you.
What kind of on-going training can I expect to receive?
For quite some time I was afraid to ask this question. I was fearful employers would speculate that I must need training because I was not qualified. I have since learned that employers want employees who demand a more diverse set of skills. The best way to get this training, is for a company to pay for it for you. You may be allowed to attend training during normal business hours, or you may be required to take evening courses for college credit. Also, be sure to ask about mentoring programs, and whether or not certifications are a covered expense.
Can you give me an overview of the development process?
This question is better directed toward an individual in technical services. Human resources may have a basic understanding, but to paint a more accurate picture of the development process, it will require an answer from your immediate boss or a peer worker. Ask how well this process is documented, and if there are supplemental training materials and example deliverables available. Will you be required to learn while on a project, or will your first few days be spent reading about operating procedures? It will almost always be the former, but if you have written guidelines that map to what you are doing, ramp up time can be significantly decreased.
Who is your largest client, and what can you tell me about the work you do for them?
This is an excellent question for determining stability, and there are two schools of thought. If the client’s name is spread all over the employer’s Web site, as in case studies, and almost every programmer has their hand in development, then that could be a bad omen. By placing all the eggs in one basket, the employer is risking a major blow to revenue and possible layoffs if the client seeks an alternate vendor. On the other hand, an ongoing relationship with a stable brand could mean a more stable position for you. If you are someone who craves variety, you should also ask if your work will be focused primarily around this client.
Can you discuss any growing pains experienced by the company in the last two years?
With this question in particular, the intention is not to get an in depth answer, but to discern the level of honesty with which the answer is given. If clarification is necessary, inquire about any difficulties with employee retention, client satisfaction, or project overages. You want to get the employer to disclose information that is not necessarily sensitive or private, but that does affect their day-to-day operations. If they are uncomfortable or unwilling to answer, then that may be a sign they are facing internal struggles.
How is a typical performance review handled?
Be sure that you understand all the details surrounding performance reviews. This is one area that can quickly become a source of contention if there is miscommunication. How often do formal reviews take place? Is there a peer review process? Are there quarterly or semi-annual informal reviews? Can you receive a promotion or a raise without a review? When you start, will you need to set aside goals to accomplish for your first performance review? Who makes the final decision regarding a raise or a promotion? These are all important questions.
What types of social activities are organized throughout the year?
Even if you are not interested in attending social activities sponsored by the employer, this question will help you to better understand how much they appreciate your work. Even if it is only an annual holiday party, or summer picnic, it demonstrates a willingness to help you relax. Some companies will even sponsor competitive sports, or a league team made up of employees. All of this is an indicator that employee satisfaction and retention is given a high priority.
Can you tell me if I have the experience you need?
This question should always be the last question you ask, and it serves a dual purpose. You want to know how interested the employer is, and generally speaking, you want to know what expertise you are lacking. If you find that several companies are concerned about skills that you do not possess, then you should take formal training, or work toward a certification. Even if an employer will not discuss where you stand comparatively, they are usually happy to provide you with some constructive criticism. If you are called back for a second interview, use this to your advantage. Politely illustrate why you are still the perfect candidate, even if you lack some skills. Be sure to communicate your desire to learn.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
JavaSpecialists Issue 146 - The Secrets of Concurrency (Part 1)
Welcome to the 146th issue of The Java(tm) Specialists' Newsletter. I am on my way to TheServerSide Java Symposium in Barcelona, where on Friday I will be presenting a new talk entitled "The Secrets of Concurrency". After many days of feverishly trying to come up with an outline for my talk, we ended up praying for inspiration. The writer's block disappeared immediately!
As mentioned in the previous newsletter, from July 2007, I will be offering Java code reviews for your team to get an expert's viewpoint of your Java system.
Secrets of Concurrency (Part 1)
Have you ever used the synchronized keyword? Are you absolutely sure that your code is correct? Here are ten laws that will help you obey the rules and write correct code, which I will explain over the next few newsletters:
- The Law of the Ritalin Child
- The Law of the Distracted Spearfisherman
- The Law of the Overstocked Haberdashery
- The Law of South African Crime
- The Law of the Leaked Memo
- The Law of the Corrupt Politician
- The Law of the Micromanager
- The Law of Greek Driving
- The Law of Sudden Riches
- The Law of the Uneaten Spinach
Introduction
After watching myself and those around me for 35 years, I have come to the conclusion that we are exceedingly dim-witted. We walk through life only half-awake. I have gotten in my car to drive somewhere, then arrived at a completely different place to where I wanted to go to. Lost in thought, then lost on the road.
There are some people amongst us who are wide awake. They will hear a concept once and will immediately understand it and forever remember it. These are the exceptions. If like me, you struggle to understand concepts quickly or to remember things for a long time, you are not alone.
This is what makes conferences challenging. I know that I risk exposing my own lack of intelligence by saying this, but most of the talks I have attended have ended up going completely over my head. The first quarter of the talk would normally be alright, but suddenly I would be lost, with no way of recovery. I have great admiration for those that sit through an entire talk without opening up their laptops.
Just to illustrate the point, here is a picture taken of me during the "Enterprise Java Tech Day" in Athens. The caption on the Java Champion reads "Heinz Kabutz busy preparing for his talk ..." Had the picture been taken from behind, the caption would have had to be "Heinz Kabutz busy playing backgammon on his laptop ..." In fairness, the speaker was talking in Greek, which I could not follow anyway.
To make my talk as simple as possible to understand, I have summarised the Secrets of Consulting in ten easily remembered laws. Here is a challenge. Try to forget the name "The Law of the Ritalin Child". Let me know if you manage.
Law 1: The Law of the Ritalin Child
Instead of suppressing interruptions, deal with the cause.
In some societies, it is considered abnormal for a testosterone powered boy to be naughty and to interrupt all the time, given the chance. Instead of dealing with the cause, the children (especially boys) are diagnosed as having ADHD and are then given Ritalin to calm them down.
My own son caused InterruptedExceptions continuously in class when he was five. In our case, the teacher caught the exception and notified us about the problem. We could deal with the interrupted status and since then the problem has gone away completely.
(Disclaimer: I am sure there are cases where ADHD is the correct diagnosis and where Ritalin has brought about wonderful results. I am not a child psychologist, just a father.)
How often have you seen code like this? I have even seen Sun Java Evangelists doing this in their talks!
try {
Thread.sleep(1000); // 1 second
} catch(InterruptedException ex) {
// ignore - won't happen
}
There are two questions we will try to answer:
- What does InterruptedException mean?
- How should we handle it?
The first question has a simple and a difficult answer. The simple answer is that the thread was interrupted by another thread.
A more difficult answer is to examine what happens and then see how we can use this in our coding. The thread is interrupted when another thread calls its interrupt() method. The first thing that happens is that the interrupted status of the thread is set to true. This interrupted status is important when we look at methods that put a thread into a WAITING or a TIMED_WAITING state. Examples of these methods are: wait(), Thread.sleep(), BlockingQueue.get(), Semaphore.acquire() and Thread.join().
If the thread is currently in either the WAITING or TIMED_WAITING states, it immediately causes an InterruptedException and returns from the method that caused the waiting state. If the thread is not in a waiting state, then only the interrupted status is set, nothing else. However, if later on the thread calls a method that would change the state into WAITING or TIMED_WAITING, the InterruptedException is immediately caused and the method returns.
Note that attempting to lock on a monitor with synchronized puts the thread in BLOCKED state, not in WAITING nor TIMED_WAITING. Interrupting a thread that is blocked will do nothing except set the interrupted status to true. You cannot stop a thread from being blocked by interrupting it. Calling the stop() method similarly has no effect when a thread is blocked. We will deal with this in a later law.
The interrupted status is nowadays commonly used to indicate when a thread should be shut down. The problem with the Thread.stop() method was that it would cause an asynchronous exception at any point of your thread's execution code. The InterruptedException is thrown at well defined places. Compare it to firing employees when they are idle, rather than when they are in the middle of important work.
Note that the interrupted status is set to false when an InterruptedException is caused or when the Thread.interrupted() method is explicitely called. Thus, when we catch an InterruptedException, we need to remember that the thread is now not interrupted anymore! In order to have orderly shutdown of the thread, we should keep the thread set to "interrupted".
What should we do when we call code that may cause an InterruptedException? Don't immediately reach for the Ritalin! Typically there are two answers to that question:
- Rethrow the InterruptedException from your method. This is usually the easiest and best approach. It is used by the new java.util.concurrent.* package, which explains why we are now constantly coming into contact with this exception.
- Catch it, set interrupted status, return. If you are running in a loop that calls code which may cause the exception, you should set the status back to being interrupted. For example:
while (!Thread.currentThread().isInterrupted()) {
// do something
try {
TimeUnit.SECONDS.sleep(1000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
break;
}
}
Sri Lanka under fire over Internet censorship
COLOMBO (AFP) - Media rights groups attacked Sri Lanka's government Thursday for blocking domestic access to a website favouring the Tamil Tiger rebels and for saying it would like hackers to disable the site.
ADVERTISEMENT
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Colombo should immediately unblock the Tamilnet.com website.
"Sri Lanka's Internet service providers have been blocking access to the website on the government's orders since June 15," RSF said. "The government must put a stop to this censorship and restore access to the site at once."
A local rights group, the Free Media Movement (FMM), also criticised government spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella over comments in which he said he would "love" to hire hackers to pull down Tamilnet.
The FMM said Rambukwellas statement was "tantamount to government sanctioned cyber-terrorism against websites that do not toe its line."
"The FMM seeks urgent clarification from the government as to whether Minister Rambukwellas comments are indicative of official government policy to shutdown, disrupt or censor content and websites on the Internet."
But Sri Lanka's Media Minister Anura Yapa insisted his ministry had nothing to do with preventing users of Sri Lanka Telecom, the country's main Internet service provider, accessing Tamilnet.
"It is unreasonable to level charges against the government," Yapa told reporters here. "We have nothing to do with this."
Military spokesman Prasad Samarasinghe said the security forces had not ordered the blocking of Tamilnet either.
"Security forces have not asked the Tamilnet to be blocked," Samarasinghe said.
Despite the denials, Sri Lanka Telecom's Internet service help desk told callers that the "government has asked to block Tamilnet."
"You can access any other site, but you can't access Tamilnet," callers are being told.
The government owns just under 50 percent of Sri Lanka Telecom, which is run by NTT of Japan.
A Colombo-based editor of Tamilnet, Dharmaratnam Sivaram, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in April 2005. The killing remains unresolved.
Some Internet service providers, who have their main offices abroad, still allow access to the website.
Tamilnet is an influential source of Tamil views on the island's separatist conflict, which has claimed more than 60,000 lives in a 35-year campaign by rebels for a separate homeland for minority Tamils.
ADVERTISEMENT
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Colombo should immediately unblock the Tamilnet.com website.
"Sri Lanka's Internet service providers have been blocking access to the website on the government's orders since June 15," RSF said. "The government must put a stop to this censorship and restore access to the site at once."
A local rights group, the Free Media Movement (FMM), also criticised government spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella over comments in which he said he would "love" to hire hackers to pull down Tamilnet.
The FMM said Rambukwellas statement was "tantamount to government sanctioned cyber-terrorism against websites that do not toe its line."
"The FMM seeks urgent clarification from the government as to whether Minister Rambukwellas comments are indicative of official government policy to shutdown, disrupt or censor content and websites on the Internet."
But Sri Lanka's Media Minister Anura Yapa insisted his ministry had nothing to do with preventing users of Sri Lanka Telecom, the country's main Internet service provider, accessing Tamilnet.
"It is unreasonable to level charges against the government," Yapa told reporters here. "We have nothing to do with this."
Military spokesman Prasad Samarasinghe said the security forces had not ordered the blocking of Tamilnet either.
"Security forces have not asked the Tamilnet to be blocked," Samarasinghe said.
Despite the denials, Sri Lanka Telecom's Internet service help desk told callers that the "government has asked to block Tamilnet."
"You can access any other site, but you can't access Tamilnet," callers are being told.
The government owns just under 50 percent of Sri Lanka Telecom, which is run by NTT of Japan.
A Colombo-based editor of Tamilnet, Dharmaratnam Sivaram, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in April 2005. The killing remains unresolved.
Some Internet service providers, who have their main offices abroad, still allow access to the website.
Tamilnet is an influential source of Tamil views on the island's separatist conflict, which has claimed more than 60,000 lives in a 35-year campaign by rebels for a separate homeland for minority Tamils.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Sri Lanka's youth programmers battle for Microsoft recognition
June 19, 2007 (LBO) – Sri Lanka's young software developers lack resources but not dedication or talent, says former winners of a students technology competition promoted by the software giant, Microsoft.
The Imagine Cup encourages young people to apply their imagination, passion and creativity to develop technological solutions to real world issues, say its organizers.
This year a team from the University of Moratuwa was chosen as the winner from six finalists this year.
The team developed a system to monitor and record a child's progress, health and performance.
A team from the University of Moratuwa also won last year in the Sri Lanka round with a project titled 'Panchayudha' which was designed to organize clinic-related activities of expectant women and mothers with infants.
'Panchayudha' is a gold charm worn by infants around their neck.
"If an international organisation is ready give us help on improving our resources, Sri Lankans will do much better than any European or East Asian country," Chathurika Sandarenu from the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Moratuwa said.
"The only problem is the lack of resources and access. It is not the knowledge or lack of dedication."
Resource Constraints
In countries like the United States, developers can tap into venture capital funding who make huge lose large volumes of money as many projects inevitably fail, but also make profits in the end from the few that give exponential profits.
But in Sri Lanka financial markets are not developed due to decades of restrictions and government control and a risk-averse culture.
The country also lacks basic infrastructure for widespread use of computers.
According to Sri Lanka's ministry of education, only 76 percent of schools and temple based schools have electricity, 26.2 percent have telecommunication facilities and less than ten percent have internet facilities.
Internet penetration in the island is lower than one percent. Most internet connectivity is concentrated in the western province and other major towns.
Out of the one million personal computers, only 15 percent have internet connections and only three percent have broadband connections.
To overcome low internet penetration among rural youth, the government's ICT body ICTA has launched 'Nanasalas' or IT kiosks all over the country especially in rural areas.
Helping Hand
Last year Microsoft helped teachers of rural schools to buy computers at concessionary rates to raise awareness among the academic staff since education ministry surveys showed that only a third of the teachers out of 200,000 are computer literate.
Imagine Cup is another Microsoft initiative to recognise skilled students and showcase them to the IT and software companies world wide.
"Last year's winning three teams immediately got jobs so that kind of opportunity is there and they can continue their applications," Wellington Perera of Microsoft told LBO.
"These students are getting recognition. The IT companies get to know who the skilled persons are,"
Six teamed qualified as finalists in the local round of which three teams were from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka's top engineering institution.
The team from private education institute, Informatics in Colombo presented an internet encyclopaedia which can be updated by users through mobile devices.
It also contained features to pin point a user's position in any part of the island. Other projects included distant learning systems and child care projects.
Perera says the six finalists were chosen out of 265 contestants from all parts of the island.
"I visited about eight universities and institutes sending the message to Peradeniya, Ruhuna and several rural universities. There were about 50 registrations from those areas also," Perera says.
"I think that is a good start for us and next year I am going to do more awareness raising in rural universities about imagine cup."
Begun in 2003, the Imagine Cup finals have travelled from Spain, to Brazil, Japan and to India. In 2006-2007 will be held in Seoul, Korea.
The Imagine Cup encourages young people to apply their imagination, passion and creativity to develop technological solutions to real world issues, say its organizers.
This year a team from the University of Moratuwa was chosen as the winner from six finalists this year.
The team developed a system to monitor and record a child's progress, health and performance.
A team from the University of Moratuwa also won last year in the Sri Lanka round with a project titled 'Panchayudha' which was designed to organize clinic-related activities of expectant women and mothers with infants.
'Panchayudha' is a gold charm worn by infants around their neck.
"If an international organisation is ready give us help on improving our resources, Sri Lankans will do much better than any European or East Asian country," Chathurika Sandarenu from the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Moratuwa said.
"The only problem is the lack of resources and access. It is not the knowledge or lack of dedication."
Resource Constraints
In countries like the United States, developers can tap into venture capital funding who make huge lose large volumes of money as many projects inevitably fail, but also make profits in the end from the few that give exponential profits.
But in Sri Lanka financial markets are not developed due to decades of restrictions and government control and a risk-averse culture.
The country also lacks basic infrastructure for widespread use of computers.
According to Sri Lanka's ministry of education, only 76 percent of schools and temple based schools have electricity, 26.2 percent have telecommunication facilities and less than ten percent have internet facilities.
Internet penetration in the island is lower than one percent. Most internet connectivity is concentrated in the western province and other major towns.
Out of the one million personal computers, only 15 percent have internet connections and only three percent have broadband connections.
To overcome low internet penetration among rural youth, the government's ICT body ICTA has launched 'Nanasalas' or IT kiosks all over the country especially in rural areas.
Helping Hand
Last year Microsoft helped teachers of rural schools to buy computers at concessionary rates to raise awareness among the academic staff since education ministry surveys showed that only a third of the teachers out of 200,000 are computer literate.
Imagine Cup is another Microsoft initiative to recognise skilled students and showcase them to the IT and software companies world wide.
"Last year's winning three teams immediately got jobs so that kind of opportunity is there and they can continue their applications," Wellington Perera of Microsoft told LBO.
"These students are getting recognition. The IT companies get to know who the skilled persons are,"
Six teamed qualified as finalists in the local round of which three teams were from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka's top engineering institution.
The team from private education institute, Informatics in Colombo presented an internet encyclopaedia which can be updated by users through mobile devices.
It also contained features to pin point a user's position in any part of the island. Other projects included distant learning systems and child care projects.
Perera says the six finalists were chosen out of 265 contestants from all parts of the island.
"I visited about eight universities and institutes sending the message to Peradeniya, Ruhuna and several rural universities. There were about 50 registrations from those areas also," Perera says.
"I think that is a good start for us and next year I am going to do more awareness raising in rural universities about imagine cup."
Begun in 2003, the Imagine Cup finals have travelled from Spain, to Brazil, Japan and to India. In 2006-2007 will be held in Seoul, Korea.
Spring Framework Introduction & Training
It's strange that the first post in this blog is about the Spring Framework, because I haven't been working with Spring for about a year...
The presentation is very technical in its nature. It includes a general description of the Spring Framework and the relevant technologies (AOP - Aspect Oriented Programming, IoC - Inversion of Control, etc.), but it's main focus is on real-life usage of Spring that makes the developer's life easier.
The presentation includes the following sections:
Like any presentation, the slides alone are not enough. A person that have hands-on experience with Spring is needed for giving a training based on it.
I worked intensively with the Spring Framework in a previous start-up company I was part of. After a previous experience with J2EE (before it was renamed to JEE), which involved the BEA WebLogic Application Server, we wanted to have a much lighter and flexible environment while enjoying the concepts of IoC and AOP. We've built our very demanding applications with the help of the Spring Framework. Actually, before using Spring (and before Spring had publicly known stable versions), we have found ourselves developing frameworks that tried doing quite the same as what Spring does. Those frameworks worked nicely, but it's always better to use a popular and strong open source product instead of developing your own...
Spring allowed us to concentrate on the business logic code only and easily transform our applications between being light standalone applications, unit-tests based on mock-ups, J2EE application server (JBoss) hosted services, multi-tier architectural systems and more. Spring also made our code (& life) simpler while using Spring's integration with Hibernate for OR/M, JDBC for direct SQL, JMS queues, remote HTTP web services, Quartz scheduling, Transaction Management, JUnit tests and others.
Spring, of course, is not perfect and it's hard to tell whether it's still the best option now that EJB3 and other new technologies are available. But I enjoyed preparing and giving this training session because I believe that the Spring Framework is very useful for any Java developer and that bringing AOP and IoC from academic publications into easy-to-use every day programming allows having better written and maintainable projects.
Recently I've given a one-day training for a group of young but powerful developers. It was a training of the Spring Framework 2.0 for Java.
There are many great presentations of Spring all over the Internet, but I couldn't find one that covers all issues as I wanted (I guess that it's a matter of taste...).
So I prepared a long Power Point presentation and some exercises for a hands-on training session. The presentation includes content from the reference manual of Spring, from a few publicly available presentations, from relevant Wikipedia articles and other resources. All resources are listed in the presentation.
I thought that the presentation and exercise might be useful for developers that want to learn about the Spring framework or want to start using it. It also might be useful for experienced Spring-based developers that need to train other developers and look for a technical presentation and an exercise.
So here you can freely download the presentation (which also includes the description of the exercises), a skeleton for easily starting to implement the exercise and an implemented solution for the exercise.
- Presentation:
- Excercise:
The presentation is very technical in its nature. It includes a general description of the Spring Framework and the relevant technologies (AOP - Aspect Oriented Programming, IoC - Inversion of Control, etc.), but it's main focus is on real-life usage of Spring that makes the developer's life easier.
The presentation includes the following sections:
Like any presentation, the slides alone are not enough. A person that have hands-on experience with Spring is needed for giving a training based on it.
I worked intensively with the Spring Framework in a previous start-up company I was part of. After a previous experience with J2EE (before it was renamed to JEE), which involved the BEA WebLogic Application Server, we wanted to have a much lighter and flexible environment while enjoying the concepts of IoC and AOP. We've built our very demanding applications with the help of the Spring Framework. Actually, before using Spring (and before Spring had publicly known stable versions), we have found ourselves developing frameworks that tried doing quite the same as what Spring does. Those frameworks worked nicely, but it's always better to use a popular and strong open source product instead of developing your own...
Spring allowed us to concentrate on the business logic code only and easily transform our applications between being light standalone applications, unit-tests based on mock-ups, J2EE application server (JBoss) hosted services, multi-tier architectural systems and more. Spring also made our code (& life) simpler while using Spring's integration with Hibernate for OR/M, JDBC for direct SQL, JMS queues, remote HTTP web services, Quartz scheduling, Transaction Management, JUnit tests and others.
Spring, of course, is not perfect and it's hard to tell whether it's still the best option now that EJB3 and other new technologies are available. But I enjoyed preparing and giving this training session because I believe that the Spring Framework is very useful for any Java developer and that bringing AOP and IoC from academic publications into easy-to-use every day programming allows having better written and maintainable projects.
My Favorite Firefox Extensions
Firefox is a great Web browser. It offers good Web standards support and is open source. As a Web developer who regularly creates templates/themes based on Photoshop designs, Web standards compliance is a very important aspect and one of the reasons I hate Internet Explorer. As a person who believes in the spirit of open source, it is also important that Firefox is open source software.
The speed of Web page rendering is not the biggest strength of Firefox, there are other browsers that render pages more quickly, but the most important aspect, that makes Firefox incomparably useful are the free extensions available.
Cool Firefox Extensions
Below I list the ones I am using for making my life as a Web developer easier and my browsing experience better.
Firebug
Firebug is an amazing extensions I can't imagine living without Firebug when developing Web applications. Firebug enables you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any Web page. I can't list all of the cool features Firebug comes with, but the ones that are most important to me:
- Displaying which CSS rules actually apply to the currently selected HTML element and changing the values to immediately see the effects.
- Debugging JavaScript, setting breakpoints, and testing code before adding it to a live site.
- Monitoring load times of the executed HTTP requests and their order of execution.
If you are a serious Web developer, Firebug is a must have extension.
Web Developer
The Web Developer extension was one of the first I used to facilitate my work. It adds lots of convenience features in form of a toolbar. The following Web Developer Toolbar features are most useful to me:
- Quick links to validation services for the currently displayed page.
- Resizing the browser window to customizable screen sizes.
- Disabling JavaScript, images, and CSS to see what a page looks like in a text browser or for robots.
- Disabling referrer information in HTTP requests.
- Disabling and clearing session cookies.
- Displaying various information for the currently displayed page, such as
DIVorder, ID and class details, and many more.
The Web Developer Toolbar is an extension I definitely would not want to miss.
ColorZilla
I use the ColorZilla extensions for retrieving the hex code of the color value I point my mouse cursor over on the page currently displayed. This add-on offers more features, but I only use the one mentioned, which I find very useful.
Link Counter
The Link Counter extensions allows you to copy all links as a plain text or unordered HTML list of the URLs displayed on a page. You can choose all links, internal or external links only. Very useful for writing posts on .edu-Domains.
del.icio.us Bookmarks
I use del.icio.us to manage and access my bookmarks from any computer that is connected to the Internet. The del.icio.us Bookmarks extension makes it easy to add and search my bookmarks without actually visiting the del.icio.us Website.
Download Statusbar
With the Download Statusbar I won't see the default download pop-up window that comes with Firefox. It offers more features that I don't use, mainly because I have not checked them out so far.
HTML Validator
The HTML Validator extensions tells whether the page currently displayed validates as HTML or XHTML when taking a look at the page source.
MeasureIt
MeasureIt adds a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any element or region on a Web page.
Save As Image
The Save As Image extension enables you to save a page, frame, or part of either as an image. You can use this extension to create snapshots of the full page from top to bottom.
SearchStatus
Last but not least I use the SearchStatus extension to retrieve SEO related information. SearchStatus displays the Google PageRank, Alexa rank (also affects it) and Compete ranking. SearchStatus comes with a keyword density analyzer, offers nofollow link highlighting, display of backward and related links, Alexa info, and much more.
Programming and Managing : Can you do both?
I have been getting quite a few emails recently asking me to post about certain topics. So today I start answering them.
Brendan Barber asks “I am a software development manager for a global recruitment firm. I was wondering if you have any blogs about how to juggle team leadership / management with programming tasks. I am finding it increasingly difficult to perform both the technical and the management aspects together. The nature of programming tends to require large blocks of focused time whereas management is sometimes the opposite especially when dealing with operational issues that have mostly have a lifespan of minutes. an it be done, should it be done, and if so how have you approached this?”
It is fair to say that trying to program and manage is not for everyone. In fact a large percentage of programmers are not suitable to management roles and most rightly see management as something which would require them to give up all morals and learn to speak a different language (e.g. say ‘pro active’ every other word). This is partly due to the fact that management (on the whole) positions get filled by people who understand social structures and a lot of programmers (especially some of the most talented ones) do not fall into this bracket.
But given that you are a programmer who now has management responsibilities how do you handle both?
As a starting point you firstly have to realize that as a programmer and as a manager you are never going to be as productive a programmer as you would be if you were dedicated to just programming. This seems obvious but I am not just talking about splitting your time. If you have a 50/50 split between programming and management that 50% does not equal 50% programming output. If you are just starting out trying to manage together you will be lucky to be getting 20% of your normal output.
What I hope in this article is to show you that it is possible to do both and to improve your efficiency of both and that the roles can be very complimentary.
Learn to refocus
Programming effectively is all about focus. If you are not ‘in the zone’ then your productivity tends to go through the floor because without focus it is easy for your mind to wander and get distracted by almost anything (email, RSS, YouTube, Dilbert, etc). For most programmers focus can take time to get back so each time you get distracted you lose time having to refocus.
For a programmer who also wants to manage the ability to refocus immediately and pickup were you last left off is absolutely fundamental. If you imagine a typical refocus time of 15 minutes and you get distracted by management issues 10 times in one day then you have immediately lost nearly 3 hours of work.
Improving your ability to refocus on your work is something that takes time and is not something easy to teach. But below I have listed a few tips on actions you can take to make it easier to manage.
Set out a strict daily timetable of when you try and program and when you perform your management tasks, by doing this you have a clear idea of what you should be doing at any point of the day and stops you switching tasks each time you get interrupted.
Use note taking software to keep track of your current thoughts. If you are thinking through a typical programming problem start writing them down. If you get distracted you can more easily understand what you were last doing.
If you are a typical programmer that spends the whole day with headphones on you have to change this habit fast. Although you can remove the headphones as required this means you are not learning to cope with distraction.
Make sure you have auto-save enabled in whatever development environment you have. If you have to bring up other ‘management’ tools at the same time you are likely to have your dev environment crash on you at some point. (Microsoft Project has been my main culprit in the past.)
If you have a meeting booked in an hour’s time try to fill that time with management tasks, programming is best done in longer blocks of time therefore always perform your management tasks during times of the day that you know your time is going to be split up most and programming tasks during those that will be split up least.
Become disconnected
Programmers tend to be extremely passionate about the work they do. In a dedicated programmer this is exactly what you want. As a manager you cannot view your own work in the same way. Managers need to make broader decisions than a typical programmer and this means taking in information from a range of sources and it is counterproductive to view your own work personally. Not only will it likely skew the decision but also be seen by your staff as favoritism to yourself.
In a similar vein it is often the case that programmer likes to think they are better than everyone else (you grow out of it as you get older) but as a manager you have to be objective about your own abilities and about those who work under you. Understanding your strengths as a programmer can help you focus on what tasks are best applied to yourself and to the rest of the team.
As a programmer/manager you must always take the following into account when assigning yourself tasks.
According to your schedule do any of your tasks put yourself in a position that you can delay other team members.
How difficult would it be for another team member to take over this task if you find you have less programming time because of other management responsibilities.
Are you creating any other dependencies that could be alleviated by not doing the work yourself
Are you taking the task because it’s the most interesting? (not a good idea)
It may seem that the list stops you from doing any work but in reality you cannot always remove yourself from the critical path and it may not always be the right thing to do. The aim as with any other part of management to create contingences for every situation so that when things go wrong (they will) that you have already thought through what the course of action should be.
The good news
The great news is that programmers can make some of the best managers. Here is my list of reasons why you would want to do both.
You have the ability to understand what your technical team members are telling you.
When scheduling tasks you can tell if your team members are telling you porky pies about how long something is going to take.
Building a schedule is still a nasty task but at least it may resemble reality (for at least a few days)
You can confuse other managers by talking technical (my personal favorite)
You tend to get respect from your team members rather than abuse.
I would like to hear from everyone on their experiences of either becoming a manager or your observations on the difference between technical and non-technical managers.
Management Programming
Brendan Barber asks “I am a software development manager for a global recruitment firm. I was wondering if you have any blogs about how to juggle team leadership / management with programming tasks. I am finding it increasingly difficult to perform both the technical and the management aspects together. The nature of programming tends to require large blocks of focused time whereas management is sometimes the opposite especially when dealing with operational issues that have mostly have a lifespan of minutes. an it be done, should it be done, and if so how have you approached this?”
It is fair to say that trying to program and manage is not for everyone. In fact a large percentage of programmers are not suitable to management roles and most rightly see management as something which would require them to give up all morals and learn to speak a different language (e.g. say ‘pro active’ every other word). This is partly due to the fact that management (on the whole) positions get filled by people who understand social structures and a lot of programmers (especially some of the most talented ones) do not fall into this bracket.
But given that you are a programmer who now has management responsibilities how do you handle both?
As a starting point you firstly have to realize that as a programmer and as a manager you are never going to be as productive a programmer as you would be if you were dedicated to just programming. This seems obvious but I am not just talking about splitting your time. If you have a 50/50 split between programming and management that 50% does not equal 50% programming output. If you are just starting out trying to manage together you will be lucky to be getting 20% of your normal output.
What I hope in this article is to show you that it is possible to do both and to improve your efficiency of both and that the roles can be very complimentary.
Learn to refocus
Programming effectively is all about focus. If you are not ‘in the zone’ then your productivity tends to go through the floor because without focus it is easy for your mind to wander and get distracted by almost anything (email, RSS, YouTube, Dilbert, etc). For most programmers focus can take time to get back so each time you get distracted you lose time having to refocus.
For a programmer who also wants to manage the ability to refocus immediately and pickup were you last left off is absolutely fundamental. If you imagine a typical refocus time of 15 minutes and you get distracted by management issues 10 times in one day then you have immediately lost nearly 3 hours of work.
Improving your ability to refocus on your work is something that takes time and is not something easy to teach. But below I have listed a few tips on actions you can take to make it easier to manage.
Set out a strict daily timetable of when you try and program and when you perform your management tasks, by doing this you have a clear idea of what you should be doing at any point of the day and stops you switching tasks each time you get interrupted.
Use note taking software to keep track of your current thoughts. If you are thinking through a typical programming problem start writing them down. If you get distracted you can more easily understand what you were last doing.
If you are a typical programmer that spends the whole day with headphones on you have to change this habit fast. Although you can remove the headphones as required this means you are not learning to cope with distraction.
Make sure you have auto-save enabled in whatever development environment you have. If you have to bring up other ‘management’ tools at the same time you are likely to have your dev environment crash on you at some point. (Microsoft Project has been my main culprit in the past.)
If you have a meeting booked in an hour’s time try to fill that time with management tasks, programming is best done in longer blocks of time therefore always perform your management tasks during times of the day that you know your time is going to be split up most and programming tasks during those that will be split up least.
Become disconnected
Programmers tend to be extremely passionate about the work they do. In a dedicated programmer this is exactly what you want. As a manager you cannot view your own work in the same way. Managers need to make broader decisions than a typical programmer and this means taking in information from a range of sources and it is counterproductive to view your own work personally. Not only will it likely skew the decision but also be seen by your staff as favoritism to yourself.
In a similar vein it is often the case that programmer likes to think they are better than everyone else (you grow out of it as you get older) but as a manager you have to be objective about your own abilities and about those who work under you. Understanding your strengths as a programmer can help you focus on what tasks are best applied to yourself and to the rest of the team.
As a programmer/manager you must always take the following into account when assigning yourself tasks.
According to your schedule do any of your tasks put yourself in a position that you can delay other team members.
How difficult would it be for another team member to take over this task if you find you have less programming time because of other management responsibilities.
Are you creating any other dependencies that could be alleviated by not doing the work yourself
Are you taking the task because it’s the most interesting? (not a good idea)
It may seem that the list stops you from doing any work but in reality you cannot always remove yourself from the critical path and it may not always be the right thing to do. The aim as with any other part of management to create contingences for every situation so that when things go wrong (they will) that you have already thought through what the course of action should be.
The good news
The great news is that programmers can make some of the best managers. Here is my list of reasons why you would want to do both.
You have the ability to understand what your technical team members are telling you.
When scheduling tasks you can tell if your team members are telling you porky pies about how long something is going to take.
Building a schedule is still a nasty task but at least it may resemble reality (for at least a few days)
You can confuse other managers by talking technical (my personal favorite)
You tend to get respect from your team members rather than abuse.
I would like to hear from everyone on their experiences of either becoming a manager or your observations on the difference between technical and non-technical managers.
Management Programming
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Comparison of OpenDocument and Office Open XML formats
Overview
The OpenDocument format was originally defined by StarDivision (later acquired by Sun Microsystems) for their StarOffice product and was brought to OASIS by Sun and IBM who wanted it ratified as a standard. OpenDocument was approved as an ISO and IEC International Standard in May 2006, designated ISO/IEC 26300. It has been a published ISO/IEC standard since November 2006.
Office Open XML is defined by Microsoft and was approved as a standard by Ecma International in December 2006[1], designated ECMA 376.[2] Control of the Ecma standard will rest with Ecma International. It has been submitted to ISO/IEC for adoption under the ISO/IEC JTC 1 process.
The OpenDocument format is the native format of both OpenOffice.org 2.0 and KDE KOffice 1.5, and is targeted as a native format for multiple applications. Office Open XML is the native format for Microsoft Office 2007. A compatible plug-in has been released for some earlier editions of the Microsoft Office suite as well. At least three different OSS plug-ins for Microsoft Office [1] [2] [3] are being developed that will add support for opening and saving files in the OpenDocument format.
[edit] Advantages of OpenDocument over Office Open XML formats
Alex Hudson, J. David Eisenberg, Bruce D'Arcus and Daniel Carrera of the OpenDocument Fellowship wrote an article published by the online journal Groklaw that argues OpenDocument has several technical advantages over Office Open XML (Hudson, 2005[3]). The article examined some problems based on the original draft of the Office Open XML standard (which has since been superseded), and claims the following differences:
OpenDocument uses a mixed content model,[4] whereas the Office Open XML format does not. "Non-mixed documents usually represent structured data; mixed documents are usually used to represent narrative. MS XML uses the non-mixed model to represent narrative (word processing). "This sort of mismatch leads to awkward markup [...] The mixed-content model makes more sense, and is closer to what a developer will be familiar to."
OpenDocument is similar to XHTML, while MS XML is not. OpenDocument uses mixed content and marks styles in a similar way. "This makes it easier to transform data accurately between OpenDocument and XHTML, and also simplifies the reuse of existing skills."
OpenDocument gives better separation of style and content. "Both formats give you some separation, and neither format gives you perfect separation. But OpenDocument goes much further in that direction."
OpenDocument hyperlink URLs are embedded in the main file, whereas in Office Open XML the URL is placed in a separate file.
OpenDocument reuses existing standards whenever possible. It uses parts of SVG for drawings, MathML for equations, XLink for linking, Dublin Core for metadata, etc. "This makes the format infinitely more transparent to someone familiar with XML technologies. It also allows you to reuse existing tools that understand these standards", whereas "MS XML re-invents the wheel" (date format incompatible with ISO 8601, language specification incompatible with ISO 639). ODF's use of SVG is limited to some attributes and SVG content as such is not supported, even though this is widely touted.
Since the article written by the OpenDocument Fellowship, Office Open XML specification now incorporates the Dublin Core metadata as well. However, OpenDocument still claims the advantage of using a mixed model similar to XHTML, as well as separation of content from presentation. Perhaps most importantly, OpenDocument continues to reuse more existing standards wherever possible (such as SVG, MathML, and so on), instead of recreating their own unique format, simplifying implementation and interoperability (as well as reusing significant work from each of those pre-existing standards).
Advantages of Office Open XML formats over OpenDocument
Proponents of the Office Open XML format have addressed some of the criticism due to comparisons with OpenDocument, and offered their own criticisms of the OpenDocument format. Much of this criticism has been offered by Brian Jones, a Microsoft program manager for Microsoft Office who works on the XML functionality and file formats in the Office product.
Microsoft has stated that a design goal for its formats was 100% compatibility with the existing base of documents and formatting used by its customers. In particular, Jones states that OpenDocument is not able to capture all the information potentially held by a binary Office file, whereas Office Open XML should be able to do that.[5]
Microsoft also states that the OpenDocument format lacks support for the complete set of functionality in Microsoft Office applications (such as VBA and OLE support, support for highlighting,[6] international numbering,[7], tables in presentations[8] and other features), so any converter that saved information from an Office file (either binary or OpenXML) into an OpenDocument format would potentially be lossy. Counter arguments raised on GrokDoc on this matter claim that such features are allowed as part of the OpenDocument format as namespace extensions therefore negating this argument.
Microsoft Excel has a well-known formula language that has been defined in its entirety in the new XML formats, whereas the OpenDocument TC has at this stage published the ODF OpenFormula specification as a draft which is expected to be incorporated in ODF v1.2.
It has been suggested that Office Open XML supports several non-western languages better than ODF - specifically, that it has better Arabicization and Internationalization.[9][10] These issues have probably arisen due to the comments of the Egypt ISO member as part of the OpenDocument ISO standardisation process. The OpenDocument TC has addressed these comments, though, and states "OpenDocument v1.0 has BiDi support, as well as support for text orientations, directions, numeric digits presentations and calendars [...] The TC intents to add a non-normative appendix which explains these features to a future version of the OpenDocument specification". Text for this appendix is available [11] and explains where the TC suggest this support is derived.
The OpenXML spreadsheet format appears to be much faster than the ODF spreadsheet format. George Ou at ZDNet has tested both XML formats in their native applications OpenOffice.org 2.0 and Microsoft Office 2003. Office Open XML takes a distinctly different approach to the storage of spreadsheet data to OpenDocument, and implements several optimizations (such as sparsely populating worksheets, and sharing strings). Microsoft's Brian Jones had added some information[12] on this subject as well. Note also that the native proprietary Excel XLS binary format appears to be much faster than both XML implementations.[13]
All external references, such as hyperlinks or linked files, reside in a single relationships XML file contained in the document archive. This allows for easy access to all external references in the document. This makes it much easier to do link fix-up if you are moving files from one server to another. Or if you want to remove all external references for security reasons, you just edit the relationships.[14].
Shortcomings of OpenDocument
OpenDocument has no macro language specification. Java applets are described in the specification, but a macro language is not compulsory for compliance with the ODF standard.
The specification is incomplete : no syntax description of spreadsheet formulas (this is due in ODF v1.2). No description of passwords hashing yet (password hashes in an XML format would seem to be pointless, since the password can be bypassed by using a text editor to read or alter the content).
No native support of tables in presentations (this is due in ODF v1.2)
ODF 1.1 has no digital signature, (this is due in ODF v1.2)
Shortcomings of Office Open XML
The specification is incomplete : some parts are referencing the (not publicly specified) behaviour of other software, like "autoSpaceLikeWord95", without further explanation. This may be an issue for applications like archiving, where some content may become inaccessible or some clarity lost in future due to content being locked up in undocumented proprietary formats or behaviours. It may also be an issue for cross vendor interoperability and interchange of data, since only Microsoft or Microsoft licensed applications can access/process the content in these undocumented formats in OOXML with full clarity. These tags are deprecated so implementations should not create new documents containing these tags. The tags can only be applied in documents created or mutated in the original application the tags is referring to, which are converted to OOXML. There are no proposals to remedy the incomplete parts of the OOXML specification.
In SpreadsheetML, a markup language for spreadsheets used in Office Open XML one of the two numeric formats used for storing dates interpretes the number 60 as 1900-02-29 as if year 1900 were a leap year. Any implementation of this date1900 format needs to skip the number 60 when interpreting the numeric datevalue. This issue originated from Lotus 1-2-3, and was preserved by Microsoft Excel for backwards compatibility.
The specification for OOXML has a covenant not to sue which states that all patent claims from Microsoft needed to implement the spec can be used freely however the patent grant does not include future updates/versions. This means Microsoft can influence the development of future revisions or fixes by Ecma of this standard, similar to what Sun can do for ODF, so that future versions will be kept compatible with prior MS versions and will support MS Office featureset. Not granting such use of patent claims for future versions would make it unlikely that a new version would be used as any current versions will then still be available free for use.
[edit] Cross-platform interoperability
Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows uses Office Open XML as its native file format. Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac OS X, scheduled for release in late summer 2007, will also use Office Open XML as its native file format.[15] An ODF converter plugin for Microsoft Office XP/2003/2007 for Windows allows one to open and save OpenDocument word processing (.odt) files.
Corel has indicated that the WordPerfect Office X3 suite will include support for OpenDocument Format as well as Office Open XML by mid-2007.[16]
Gnumeric has included support for OpenDocument spreadsheet and preliminary support for Microsoft Office Open XML spreadsheet format since version 1.7.
IBM announced that Lotus Notes will use OpenDocument as the native format for its office productivity editors in the next release, due in 2007. IBM Workplace 2.6 already supports OpenDocument format.
Google Docs and Spreadsheets supports OpenDocument word processing and spreadsheet formats.
AbiWord 2.4 supports OpenDocument word processing format.
Scribus 1.3.3, a multi-platform, open source, page layout application, supports import of OpenDocument word processing files.
OpenDocument Format is currently supported in several office suites and individual applications[17], including as the native file format for KOffice 1.5, OpenOffice.org 2.0 and StarOffice 8. Support for OpenDocument was implemented independently, first in the KOffice 1.4 suite[18] and later in OpenOffice.org 2.0. Office suites which natively support OpenDocument Format are available on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and Symbian OS.
Interoperability testing
The ODF Test Suite is a publicly available interoperability test suite developed by Intel and the University of Central Florida. Automated results are available for interoperability testing of KOffice and OpenOffice.org.
As of January 2007, no publicly available interoperability test suite exists for Office Open XML format. Since no currently released office suites provide native support for the format, it is not known to what extent documents saved in the Office Open XML format will be properly formatted in other office suites.
Example XML comparisons
First an example of the mixed vs non mixed examples as provided in the groklaw comparison of the two formats. Non-mixed documents usually represent structured data; mixed documents are usually used to represent narrative. MS XML uses the non-mixed model to represent narrative (word processing).
Secondly an example (provided by Brian Jones weblog) to support Microsoft's choice for smaller tagging. For this example, the top example is using SpreadsheetML from the Office Open XML format. The second example is using the OpenDocument format.
Short tag example (Open XML):
In the second example, it is important to note that the size of the document is only marginally impacted by the length of its tags, because OpenDocument files are usually compressed. However, according to Brian Jones, the length of tags does impact compression and parse time when manipulating big documents. A non-mixed content (such as in OOXML) is likely to be more compact than a mixed one.[citation needed]
Also noted that, in the second example, ODF holds extra two attributes about the value in each cell, attributes office:value-type and office:value, for cell's type and cell's value. Cell's type can be one of "float", "currency", "percentage", "date", or "time"[19]. These attributes explicitly describe the textual representation kept in element. These information are not captured by the OOXML tags shown in the example.
Example of ODF spreadsheet value vs its textual representation, a cell stored "45.6%":
The OpenDocument format was originally defined by StarDivision (later acquired by Sun Microsystems) for their StarOffice product and was brought to OASIS by Sun and IBM who wanted it ratified as a standard. OpenDocument was approved as an ISO and IEC International Standard in May 2006, designated ISO/IEC 26300. It has been a published ISO/IEC standard since November 2006.
Office Open XML is defined by Microsoft and was approved as a standard by Ecma International in December 2006[1], designated ECMA 376.[2] Control of the Ecma standard will rest with Ecma International. It has been submitted to ISO/IEC for adoption under the ISO/IEC JTC 1 process.
The OpenDocument format is the native format of both OpenOffice.org 2.0 and KDE KOffice 1.5, and is targeted as a native format for multiple applications. Office Open XML is the native format for Microsoft Office 2007. A compatible plug-in has been released for some earlier editions of the Microsoft Office suite as well. At least three different OSS plug-ins for Microsoft Office [1] [2] [3] are being developed that will add support for opening and saving files in the OpenDocument format.
[edit] Advantages of OpenDocument over Office Open XML formats
Alex Hudson, J. David Eisenberg, Bruce D'Arcus and Daniel Carrera of the OpenDocument Fellowship wrote an article published by the online journal Groklaw that argues OpenDocument has several technical advantages over Office Open XML (Hudson, 2005[3]). The article examined some problems based on the original draft of the Office Open XML standard (which has since been superseded), and claims the following differences:
OpenDocument uses a mixed content model,[4] whereas the Office Open XML format does not. "Non-mixed documents usually represent structured data; mixed documents are usually used to represent narrative. MS XML uses the non-mixed model to represent narrative (word processing). "This sort of mismatch leads to awkward markup [...] The mixed-content model makes more sense, and is closer to what a developer will be familiar to."
OpenDocument is similar to XHTML, while MS XML is not. OpenDocument uses mixed content and marks styles in a similar way. "This makes it easier to transform data accurately between OpenDocument and XHTML, and also simplifies the reuse of existing skills."
OpenDocument gives better separation of style and content. "Both formats give you some separation, and neither format gives you perfect separation. But OpenDocument goes much further in that direction."
OpenDocument hyperlink URLs are embedded in the main file, whereas in Office Open XML the URL is placed in a separate file.
OpenDocument reuses existing standards whenever possible. It uses parts of SVG for drawings, MathML for equations, XLink for linking, Dublin Core for metadata, etc. "This makes the format infinitely more transparent to someone familiar with XML technologies. It also allows you to reuse existing tools that understand these standards", whereas "MS XML re-invents the wheel" (date format incompatible with ISO 8601, language specification incompatible with ISO 639). ODF's use of SVG is limited to some attributes and SVG content as such is not supported, even though this is widely touted.
Since the article written by the OpenDocument Fellowship, Office Open XML specification now incorporates the Dublin Core metadata as well. However, OpenDocument still claims the advantage of using a mixed model similar to XHTML, as well as separation of content from presentation. Perhaps most importantly, OpenDocument continues to reuse more existing standards wherever possible (such as SVG, MathML, and so on), instead of recreating their own unique format, simplifying implementation and interoperability (as well as reusing significant work from each of those pre-existing standards).
Advantages of Office Open XML formats over OpenDocument
Proponents of the Office Open XML format have addressed some of the criticism due to comparisons with OpenDocument, and offered their own criticisms of the OpenDocument format. Much of this criticism has been offered by Brian Jones, a Microsoft program manager for Microsoft Office who works on the XML functionality and file formats in the Office product.
Microsoft has stated that a design goal for its formats was 100% compatibility with the existing base of documents and formatting used by its customers. In particular, Jones states that OpenDocument is not able to capture all the information potentially held by a binary Office file, whereas Office Open XML should be able to do that.[5]
Microsoft also states that the OpenDocument format lacks support for the complete set of functionality in Microsoft Office applications (such as VBA and OLE support, support for highlighting,[6] international numbering,[7], tables in presentations[8] and other features), so any converter that saved information from an Office file (either binary or OpenXML) into an OpenDocument format would potentially be lossy. Counter arguments raised on GrokDoc on this matter claim that such features are allowed as part of the OpenDocument format as namespace extensions therefore negating this argument.
Microsoft Excel has a well-known formula language that has been defined in its entirety in the new XML formats, whereas the OpenDocument TC has at this stage published the ODF OpenFormula specification as a draft which is expected to be incorporated in ODF v1.2.
It has been suggested that Office Open XML supports several non-western languages better than ODF - specifically, that it has better Arabicization and Internationalization.[9][10] These issues have probably arisen due to the comments of the Egypt ISO member as part of the OpenDocument ISO standardisation process. The OpenDocument TC has addressed these comments, though, and states "OpenDocument v1.0 has BiDi support, as well as support for text orientations, directions, numeric digits presentations and calendars [...] The TC intents to add a non-normative appendix which explains these features to a future version of the OpenDocument specification". Text for this appendix is available [11] and explains where the TC suggest this support is derived.
The OpenXML spreadsheet format appears to be much faster than the ODF spreadsheet format. George Ou at ZDNet has tested both XML formats in their native applications OpenOffice.org 2.0 and Microsoft Office 2003. Office Open XML takes a distinctly different approach to the storage of spreadsheet data to OpenDocument, and implements several optimizations (such as sparsely populating worksheets, and sharing strings). Microsoft's Brian Jones had added some information[12] on this subject as well. Note also that the native proprietary Excel XLS binary format appears to be much faster than both XML implementations.[13]
All external references, such as hyperlinks or linked files, reside in a single relationships XML file contained in the document archive. This allows for easy access to all external references in the document. This makes it much easier to do link fix-up if you are moving files from one server to another. Or if you want to remove all external references for security reasons, you just edit the relationships.[14].
Shortcomings of OpenDocument
OpenDocument has no macro language specification. Java applets are described in the specification, but a macro language is not compulsory for compliance with the ODF standard.
The specification is incomplete : no syntax description of spreadsheet formulas (this is due in ODF v1.2). No description of passwords hashing yet (password hashes in an XML format would seem to be pointless, since the password can be bypassed by using a text editor to read or alter the content).
No native support of tables in presentations (this is due in ODF v1.2)
ODF 1.1 has no digital signature, (this is due in ODF v1.2)
Shortcomings of Office Open XML
The specification is incomplete : some parts are referencing the (not publicly specified) behaviour of other software, like "autoSpaceLikeWord95", without further explanation. This may be an issue for applications like archiving, where some content may become inaccessible or some clarity lost in future due to content being locked up in undocumented proprietary formats or behaviours. It may also be an issue for cross vendor interoperability and interchange of data, since only Microsoft or Microsoft licensed applications can access/process the content in these undocumented formats in OOXML with full clarity. These tags are deprecated so implementations should not create new documents containing these tags. The tags can only be applied in documents created or mutated in the original application the tags is referring to, which are converted to OOXML. There are no proposals to remedy the incomplete parts of the OOXML specification.
In SpreadsheetML, a markup language for spreadsheets used in Office Open XML one of the two numeric formats used for storing dates interpretes the number 60 as 1900-02-29 as if year 1900 were a leap year. Any implementation of this date1900 format needs to skip the number 60 when interpreting the numeric datevalue. This issue originated from Lotus 1-2-3, and was preserved by Microsoft Excel for backwards compatibility.
The specification for OOXML has a covenant not to sue which states that all patent claims from Microsoft needed to implement the spec can be used freely however the patent grant does not include future updates/versions. This means Microsoft can influence the development of future revisions or fixes by Ecma of this standard, similar to what Sun can do for ODF, so that future versions will be kept compatible with prior MS versions and will support MS Office featureset. Not granting such use of patent claims for future versions would make it unlikely that a new version would be used as any current versions will then still be available free for use.
[edit] Cross-platform interoperability
Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows uses Office Open XML as its native file format. Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac OS X, scheduled for release in late summer 2007, will also use Office Open XML as its native file format.[15] An ODF converter plugin for Microsoft Office XP/2003/2007 for Windows allows one to open and save OpenDocument word processing (.odt) files.
Corel has indicated that the WordPerfect Office X3 suite will include support for OpenDocument Format as well as Office Open XML by mid-2007.[16]
Gnumeric has included support for OpenDocument spreadsheet and preliminary support for Microsoft Office Open XML spreadsheet format since version 1.7.
IBM announced that Lotus Notes will use OpenDocument as the native format for its office productivity editors in the next release, due in 2007. IBM Workplace 2.6 already supports OpenDocument format.
Google Docs and Spreadsheets supports OpenDocument word processing and spreadsheet formats.
AbiWord 2.4 supports OpenDocument word processing format.
Scribus 1.3.3, a multi-platform, open source, page layout application, supports import of OpenDocument word processing files.
OpenDocument Format is currently supported in several office suites and individual applications[17], including as the native file format for KOffice 1.5, OpenOffice.org 2.0 and StarOffice 8. Support for OpenDocument was implemented independently, first in the KOffice 1.4 suite[18] and later in OpenOffice.org 2.0. Office suites which natively support OpenDocument Format are available on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and Symbian OS.
Interoperability testing
The ODF Test Suite is a publicly available interoperability test suite developed by Intel and the University of Central Florida. Automated results are available for interoperability testing of KOffice and OpenOffice.org.
As of January 2007, no publicly available interoperability test suite exists for Office Open XML format. Since no currently released office suites provide native support for the format, it is not known to what extent documents saved in the Office Open XML format will be properly formatted in other office suites.
Example XML comparisons
First an example of the mixed vs non mixed examples as provided in the groklaw comparison of the two formats. Non-mixed documents usually represent structured data; mixed documents are usually used to represent narrative. MS XML uses the non-mixed model to represent narrative (word processing).
Non-Mixed (Open XML)
<w:p>
<w:r><w:t>This is a </w:t></w:r>
<w:r><w:rPr><w:b /></w:rPr><w:t>very basic</w:t></w:r>
<w:r><w:t> document </w:t></w:r>
<w:r><w:rPr><w:i /></w:rPr><w:t>with some</w:t></w:r>
<w:r><w:t> formatting, and a </w:t></w:r><w:hyperlink w:rel="rId4" w:history="1">
<w:r><w:rPr><w:rStyle w:val="Hyperlink" /></w:rPr><w:t>hyperlink</w:t></w:r>
</w:hyperlink>
</w:p>
Mixed (ODF):
<text:p text:style-name="Standard">
This is a
<text:span text:style-name="T1">very basic</text:span>
document
<text:span text:style-name="T2"> with some </text:span>
formatting, and a
<text:a xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="http://example.com">hyperlink</text:a>
</text:p>
Secondly an example (provided by Brian Jones weblog) to support Microsoft's choice for smaller tagging. For this example, the top example is using SpreadsheetML from the Office Open XML format. The second example is using the OpenDocument format.
Short tag example (Open XML):
<row><c><v>1</v></c><c><v>2</v></c><c><v>3</v></c></row>
<row><c><v>4</v></c><c><v>5</v></c><c><v>6</v></c></row>
Long tag example (ODF):
<table:table-row table:style-name="ro1">
<table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="1">
<text:p>1</text:p>
</table:table-cell>
<table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="2">
<text:p>2</text:p>
</table:table-cell>
<table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="3">
<text:p>3</text:p>
</table:table-cell>
</table:table-row>
<table:table-row table:style-name="ro1">
<table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="4">
<text:p>4</text:p>
</table:table-cell>
<table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="5">
<text:p>5</text:p>
</table:table-cell>
<table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="6">
<text:p>6</text:p>
</table:table-cell>
</table:table-row>
In the second example, it is important to note that the size of the document is only marginally impacted by the length of its tags, because OpenDocument files are usually compressed. However, according to Brian Jones, the length of tags does impact compression and parse time when manipulating big documents. A non-mixed content (such as in OOXML) is likely to be more compact than a mixed one.[citation needed]
Also noted that, in the second example, ODF holds extra two attributes about the value in each cell, attributes office:value-type and office:value, for cell's type and cell's value. Cell's type can be one of "float", "currency", "percentage", "date", or "time"[19]. These attributes explicitly describe the textual representation kept in
Example of ODF spreadsheet value vs its textual representation, a cell stored "45.6%":
Java problem -- Too many open files
| Written by Mike Noel | |
| Thursday, 23 September 2004 | |
| Recently I was working on a Java project. The program was intended to run for a long time (weeks at a time) and process incoming requests. I started the overnight test to see how it would do receiving requests over a 12 hour period. After five hours the program crashed with this message: java.io.IOException: Too many open files So I had to dig in and figure out what was causing this. First of all, the number of open files allowed is an Operating System dependent setting. This is a limited resource that is shared by all processes on the machine. The standard programming practice is to make sure to close all files that the program opens. On Unix systems this applies to socket connections as well. I inspected my code and looked for all open statements. I made sure that each open statement had the accompanying close. After looking over my code I was certain that everything was closed. But I was still seeing the accumulation of open files as messages were handled. Usually in these type of situations I turn to Google to see if someone else has dealt with this problem too. After a bit of searching I found the clue. My program uses the Runtime.getProcess() method to get a process and then exec() an external script. What I didn't know was that the API automatically opens three streams (stdout, stderr, stdin) each time the getProcess() is called. It is the responsibility of the caller to close those streams when done. I added the code to close those and everything was fine. Of course, after doing this I read the documentation for the Runtime class. Sure enough, it mentions the three streams... It's amazing what a little bit of knowledge can do. |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)