HerdingChaos

Our online document control system at work recently added support for all the open office file and mime types. There was a discussion on an internal mailing list. I got this choice quote out of the thread.

“Personally, I keep a copy of open office around even though I read all MS Word docs in MS Word. It seems that a significant, but small, fraction of MS Word documents created by MS Word on MS Windows have defects in them such that MS Word crashes on load or fails to load. I have retrieved such docs from doc control. I find that if I open them in OpenOffice and then save them in MS Word format using OpenOffices SaveAs feature, MS Word on Windows can then open them without crashing. Hmm. Makes you wonder.”

So I guess maybe instead of “upgrading” to the latest version of office to get document compatibility, now you just need OO.

I am really excited about the launch this morning of Space Ship One. The whole family flew out for the first time they launched all the way into space. This morning’s flight is the first of two needed to win the Xprize. I just wish the web cast would stop cutting out.

UPDATE [10:52am]: Just finished watching the rocket fire and the safe return of SS1. Congrats to all the engineers at Scaled Composites and to pilot Mike Melville!

I love it when you have a massive sweeping architecture change that touches a ton of files and it passes your regression test the first time you run it. All while listening to “Shoehorn With Teeth” by TMBG.

http://store.pepper.com/pepper_pad/

I bought a new hard drive. Mostly because it was 200G for $60. The very next day the hard drive on my linux box started puking up those drive seek errors that are a good sign you are about to loose a drive. Not really surprising. That drive was a 12G drive circa 90something.

It would appear that I have powers to see into the future and did a good job predicting this failure and had a drive now available.

Here is the rub. I do all my video editing on my windows box. And the 280G on that box was getting full. I had 16G left. The plan was to use the drive utils that came with the 200G drive and copy the partition from the 80G drive to the 200G drive. Then move my 80G drive to the linux box. And BAM I have 400G on the video editing box.

This plan worked exactly like all my plans that involve Microsoft software. It didn’t.

Read on for the details.
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