hebig.org/blog
Personal webnode of Haiko Hebig

BATTLE LINES DRAWN OVER XML OFFICE FORMATS
theregister / computerwire: "Battle lines are forming over Microsoft Corp's support for a Sun Microsystems Inc initiative to build a standards-based set of XML-based file formats for Office applications."

SELLING OPEN SOURCE TO MANAGEMENT
oreillynet: "Selecting and using an open source solution for a production application can be a challenge. It's not hard to choose established applications like the Apache Web Server or Linux, but there are other open source projects sprouting up everywhere. How do you know when they are ready for prime time? More importantly for some of us working in big companies, how do you sell them internally so you can use them?"

LINUX ON DESKTOP
Mandrake 9.0, Red Hat 8.0, SuSE 8.1, Libranet 2.7, Lycoris Desktop /LX, Lindows 2.0 and Xandros Dekstop 1.0 are those distributions extremetech.com considers "desktop linux distributions". They reviewed each distribution from an consumer's point of view and compiled A Summary of our Desktop Linux Reviews, containing links to the reviews itself. Via ITW. In related news, Ximian Revolution 1.2 and Ximian Connector 1.2 are out and extremetech.com has a review.

OTHER READINGS
Not exactly new, but still wonderful: How To Write Unmaintainable Code. Gareth's Tips on Sucks-Less Writing seem to be one of the more intensively linked to items these days.

In serious news:

25 THESES
Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture: "The emergence of Porn Architecture (IA) as a formal discipline has gathered key areas of expertise together to provide a framework for the rational design of content-rich sites. [...] Without IA, both users and creators of porn-intensive applications are likely to suffer from wasted resources, time and effort; even worse, they won't know where to start to make things better the next time."

And finally from the A World Losing Focus department:

CENSORWARE IRONY
Lockergnome: "The Library Director of Flesh Public Library in Ohio attempted to show the library staff their new web site, and was surprised to find the Net Nanny censorware they were using had blocked the library's site. Yeah, it's funny, but it gets better: Did the library decide to fix Net Nanny, so it wouldn't block its own site or any other useful sites in the future? Nope, they opted to change the library's address instead (apparently Net Nanny didn't like "flesh" and "public" in the URL)."