Manipulating lists in OpenOffice.org Calc
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When asked to explain the purpose of spreadsheets, most people think of calculations first. And it's true that spreadsheets like Calcs have hundreds of different functions for performing calculations. However, probably the most common tasks in spreadsheets is manipulating lists.
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Spreadsheets are labor-intensive documents. Usually, their contents is entered carefully, one sheet at a time, at an input rate far below a text document. However, like most spreadsheets, OpenOffice.org has several tools for removing some of the drudgery from input. read more
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In part 1 of this entry, I discussed how to use Calc's page styles to control how spreadsheets print. However, although page styles are one of the most useful tools for the task, they are far from the only ones. How you setup pages for printing and the printer or export options are also part of the arsenal. None of these tools is useful on every occasion, and you may have to mix and match them to get the results you want, but, the more you know about them, the less of a nightmare printing a spreadsheet becomes.
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John Lim has posted about an interesting bug he's come across when working with the output of two strings that should look the same:   Someone reported a bug in ADOdb, the open source db library i maintain. I went crazy for half an hour until i realised the problem.   According to him, "if you expect the above code to produce the same values, you are sadly mistaken". His example gives an interesting result for the first echo statement - not echoing the 9 in the first character like it seems would make sense. Check out his post for the code and try it out for yourself.
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Microsoft-endorsed Open XML Translator project releases downloadable ODF converter.
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To fully appreciate the functionality of dltypeof(), you should be familiar with the JS operator it attempts to replace: typeof() and the frustrations associated with the limitations of the typeof() operator. By Peter Belesis. 0830
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How to calculate your investing returns for the year.
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Asymptote (http://asymptote.sourceforge.net) is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language for technical drawing, inspired by MetaPost but with an improved C++-like syntax. Asymptote provides for figures the same high-quality level of typesetting that LaTeX does for scientific text.   Problems with loading LaTeX packages and slide presentations were fixed. Non-static variables in every loop iteration are now allocated anew. Formatting under locales with nonperiod decimal separators was fixed, along with logarithmic tick labels near the machine epsilon.  Concatenation of nullpaths was fixed. New path markers were added and the perpendicular symbol in the geometry module was improved. The skeleton routines in the solids module were split to provide finer control.  Routines to facilitate drawing 3d contours were added. Reading portable XDR binary data into arrays works again; functions for reading and writing also in native binary formats were added. The TeX preamble is no longer output in inline mode. The TeX pipe is now aware of a previously generated aux file. Memory leaks were fixed. An inline limit is now imposed on old compilers to speed up compilation. Setlocale warnings are disabled unless debugging is on. A colorspace command for extracting the colorspace of a pen was added. An Asymptote introductory slide presentation was added and a user-written Asymptote tutorial is now cited in the manual.
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The OpenDocument Format (ODF) just keeps on getting stronger.  It is now an official ISO standard; there are numerous applications that support it, with varying degrees of fidelity, including Google's online word processor and spreadsheet;  there's an official Microsoft-funded plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows it to open and save ODF files, and a program that converts between ODF and the Chinese UOF XML office format; and the ODF community has largely sorted out issues of accessibility that threatened to de-rail its adoption by Massachusetts.
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OpenSwing is a component library that provides a rich set of advanced graphics components and a framework for developing java applications based on Swing front-end. It can be applied both to rich client applications and Rich Internet Applications.       In this release:   Added some utility methods to TreePanel: - expandAllNodes() and collapseAllNodes() to expand/collapse all tree nodes - get/setSelectionMode(int mode), to set the selection model (which must be single/contiguous/discontiguous) - get/setRowHeight(int rowHeight), to sets the height of each cell, in pixels - get/setShowsRootHandles(boolean showsRootHandles), to specify whether the node handles should be displayed - scrollRowToVisible(int row), to scroll the item identified by row until it is displayed - scrollPathToVisible(TreePath path), to sure all the path components in path are expanded (except for the last path component) and scrolls so that the node identified by the path is displayed - setSelectionRow(int row), to select the node at the specified row in the display - get/setSelectionRows(int[] rows), to selects the nodes corresponding to each of the specified rows in the display - get/setSelectionPath(TreePath path), to select the node identified by the specified path - get/setSelectionPaths(TreePath[] paths), to select the nodes identified by the specified array of paths - get/selectionBackground(Color color), to set tree selection background color - get/selectionForeground(Color color), to set tree selection foreground color - addPopupSeparator(), to add a separator to the popup menu - setMenuItemVisible(String menuName,boolean visible), used to show/hide a menu item in the popup - revalidateTree(), to update tree content, useful after deleting/renaming operations on nodes - addKeyListener/removeKeyListener(KeyListener listener), to add/remove key listeners to the tree - addMouseListener/removeMouseListener(MouseListener listener), to add/remove mouse listeners to the tree Updated "demo12" and "demo31" to show new features. Added new properties to ClientSettings class: TREE_SELECTION_BACKGROUND and TREE_SELECTION_FOREGROUND to set background and foreground colors for node selections in TreePanel. Fixed scrolling problem when dragging nodes in TreePanel. Fixed problem with check-box columns in grid: now when selecting check-box with mouse or space key, the value object attribute is automatically updated, without having to lost focus on the cell.  Moreover, ItemListener events are correctly fired.  The distribution includes also Jar file libraries, source files, javadoc, licence and readme.txt installation instructions.     OpenSwing is available at:     http://oswing.sourceforge.net/     OpenSwing last release is downloadable from:   http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=167774&package_id=190748&release_id=574648
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Keep paragraphs together, print on both sides, change the date automatically, fit more text on a page, and insert an object on its own page.
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OpenSwing is a component library that provides a rich set of advanced graphics components and a framework for developing java applications based on Swing front-end. It can be applied both to rich client applications and Rich Internet Applications.     In this release:   Added PropertyGridControl component: it can be used to edit properties, having different value types in a grid (see documentation for detailed info). Added "demo21" and "demo22" sample applications showing how to use the new PropertyGridControl class. Fixed problem when referring inner v.o. attribute in a grid or Form components. Fixed problem when referring the whole lookup v.o. to an attribute in the lookup container. Added "addLookup2ParentLink" method to LookupController, to set the whole lookup v.o. to an attribute in the lookup container. Added "createInnerVO" property to GridControl to define if an inner v.o. must be automatically instantiated when a setter method is invoked. Fixed a problem in NumericControl: now "minValue" property in NumericControl and in "numeric" columns  correctly support negative numbers, i.e. if this property has a negative value, then the user can digit a negative number  in the numeric component, by pressing "-" symbol as the first character at the left of the number. Fixed problem with ListControl when there is the same item description for more than one item. Fixed problem in Form when binding an inner value object to more than one input controls. Added new target "beaninfosign" to build.xml Ant file: it can be used to sign BeanInfo.jar file too. The distribution includes also Jar file libraries, source files, javadoc, license and readme.txt installation instructions.   OpenSwing is available at:  http://oswing.sourceforge.net/     OpenSwing last release is downloadable from:    http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=167774&package_id=190748&release_id=535881
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In a new blog entry today, Matthew O'Phinney talks about updates (and refactoring) that he's done to a PEAR package he's developed, File_Fortune.   Over the past few evenings, I've refactored File_Fortune to have it implement Iterator, Countable, and ArrayAccess -- basically allowing it to act like an array for most intents and purposes. As a result, I've eliminated the need for the File_Fortune_Writer package, and greatly simplified the usage.   The package is designed to make an interface between the casual PHP user and the fortune files common on most *nix machines. To illustrate he update, he includes some code that grabs the fortune file, parses it to grab a random one and echoes them out. Also included is the save() method so you can add your own to the list easily.
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In the last part of this series, we look at creating constants with the define() function, the constant() function, predefined and "magic" constants. By Ellie Quigley. 0129
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No more X11... soon A version of OpenOffice that will run natively under Mac OS X's Aqua user interface will be demo'd in public at Apple Expo Paris next month, the team behind the software have revealed.â¦
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The fact that OpenOffice.org Writer is more than a word processor is an open secret. Designed to write long documents, Writer is in many ways a document processor comparable to FrameMaker, suitable for designing books and dissertations while falling short of a complete desktop publishing solution. For this reason, it includes a number of tools for tweaking lines of text, including Tools > Language > Hyphenation and the tools for adjusting character width and letter space for individual characters. However, by far the least understood of these high-end tools is Writer's ability to adjust line-spacing.
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In his continuing effort to redesign his blog, Shiflett.org, he's been working on one of the things that really makes a blog useful - the commenting system. Specifically, he wants site visitors to be able to add their own code listings to the comments they post. He gives more detail in this new post.   I've been playing with this tonight. Feel free to follow along as I go. The first thing you want to do is create an ordered list from the code you want to format ($code in these examples).   He gives an example of a listing using his system and explains how it all works. It's a mixture of:  PHP for parsing the data inside the 'code' tags CSS to correctly style the information, whitespace and all Some ini settings to set parameters for... ...the use of highlight string on the PHP code contents  A little str_replace magic later and you have list items styled as code blocks on your page. Check out his demo for an example.