I’ve been using OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office for years now. In fact, I wrote my senior paper for college in StarOffice writer, in 2001. That was the predecessor to OpenOffice, which was released to the community by Sun.
I’ve found that OpenOffice has pretty strong file compatibility with Microsoft Office, which is nice, because I have a hard time bringing myself to spend hundreds of dollars for basic office productivity software.
One thing that can get annoying, though, is working with others who are unfamiliar with OpenOffice’s file formats. Because I’m the one bucking the mainstream, it’s up to me to save files as .xls, .doc, or .ppt if I want to share with others. Recently, I found that you can configure OpenOffice to use these formats by default, which is what I’ve decided to do, and is what I’ll show you here.
In any OpenOffice application:
- Go to Tools->Options
- Expand “Load/Save”
- Click “General”
- The bottom section is “Default file format”
- Select each document type on the left, and for each, select Microsoft 97/2000/XP (or if there’s a newer version that you prefer, pick that one)
- Click OK when you’re done
Now when you go to save an application, it will save in the Microsoft format by default. It would be nice if M$ knew about Oo.org’s file formats, and would just open them automatically, but I’m not going to hold my breath. Hope this helps!
Posted by Erik Mitchell on January 03, 2009, last updated January 03, 2009
Just out of curiousity, I decided to set up Google AdSense to display some ads. You should be seeing content related links soon.
Posted by Erik Mitchell on January 02, 2009, last updated January 02, 2009
You might notice now that if you try to go to http://www.28thavenue.net/ you’ll be redirected to http://28thavenue.net/ . There are several reasons to do this—I just like the cleaner look of the domain name without the “www”.
I had a bit of a tricky time getting this to work in lighttpd, though, and I wanted to mention how I got it to work. The standard configuration to make this happen in lighttpd.conf is:
$HTTP["host"] =~ "^www\.(.*)$" { url.redirect = ( "^/(.*)" => "http://%1/$1" ) }
This is what is indicated by a couple of sites I found just searching on Google. For some reason though, it wasn’t working for me. It turns out, I had another configuration which was getting processed beforehand:
$HTTP["host"] =~ "28thavenue\.net" { [...] }
This set of configurations caused the request to get processed before the 301 could be sent to the browser, so the “www” wasn’t getting removed.
To fix the issue, I changed “28thavenue\.net” to “^28thavenue\.net” so that this code would only get processed if there is nothing preceding the “28thavenue.net” part. That did the trick.
One other helpful thing was enabling debug.log-request-handling in lighttpd.conf. That gave detailed output to the lighttpd error log on what was happening with each request.
Posted by Erik Mitchell on January 02, 2009, last updated January 02, 2009
My local coffee shop, Tillie's Bean, is open again. Yay!
Posted by Erik Mitchell on January 02, 2009, last updated January 02, 2009
One of the important styles I want to try out, code:
erikm@linode:~$ pwd
/home/erikm
Hmm, how does it look?
Radiant offers several filters for inputting text. None of them turned out to be ideal for my little test here, I had to do some work to get this simple Bash command to look right. Oh well, I’ll keep working on it.
Posted by Erik Mitchell on January 02, 2009, last updated January 02, 2009
I am fairly confident now that I have my CMS app, Radiant, running correctly on my web server setup. For those of you who are curious, I’m using Radiant, which is a Ruby on Rails application, on Lighttpd using FastCGI.
One of my projects for this year (maybe not the whole year) is to learn Ruby and mess around with Ruby on Rails. I’ve read plenty of times that learning a new language is good for a programmer’s soul (or something) and it’s fun, too.
I’ll reiterate that you should check back soon, because you might see something resembling an actual web page design, which would be fun for both you and me. This plain jane look has got to go.
Posted by Erik Mitchell on January 02, 2009, last updated January 02, 2009
Are you coming here expecting to find 28thavenue.net? Well, you have! I’m starting anew with a different CMS.
I’ll be doing some blogging here but I’ll probably mostly be using the site for writing short technical posts on things that I’ve learned how to do, but end up having to relearn because I don’t do them often enough. I’m hoping that will make it a useful site for other people, too.
Obviously, there have been absolutely no styles or anything applied to the site. I’m starting pretty much from scratch, and designing a theme is not on tonight’s agenda. Check back later though, and see what I’ve been up to!
Posted by Erik Mitchell on December 31, 2008, last updated January 02, 2009