Monday

After a weekend of being slightly ill and not sleeping because of that, as well as the hot and wet wheather, I get up at 7am on Monday morning. I have to get to a meeting at the other side of The Netherlands about the OOXML standardization track in ISO, which starts at 10. Traffic was pretty Ok and I actually get there 5 minutes early! After some 10 minutes with most of the people having arrived we learn that the time mentioned in the Agenda was incorrect and the meeting is actually starting at 10:30. As mentioned in another communication. Well, that explains the confused and surprised looks from the organizer when most of the people arrived around 10 :)

This meeting is about finding out wheather we, as a voting country, agree with the proposed specification and we can vote yes or no. And give some comments on why we did so. The discussions in the meeting range from the MS representative stating that ODF is obviously not big enough for usage in Office to requests for details on objections. These objections were officially filed (with loads of details) months earlier by various voting countries and apparently just mentioning their name is not enough for the members of the committee to know what this is about.

We also had some rather amazing discussions about how to do backwards compatibility. The position of Microsoft basically was that you should be able to pour a spreadsheet which is known to have an off-by-one bug in its date counting into OOXML and mark it as 'has a bug'. The reason for doing this is that if you convert it back to the original fileformat you don't loose any information and thus you are able to round-trip data. In theory that sounds like a good way to do backwards compatibility, but in practice that just doesn't make any sense. If you convert an old file but keep a tag that specifies behavior specific for one years old application you have to ask yourself why you converted the thing in the first place. What is the use if you need to alter every application that reads that file to at minimum be aware of that old off-by-one date problem? Since if its not, it can't use that data except maybe for displaying. It also brings up questions that if I alter the spreadsheet if then the conversion back will not just break anyway.

So, this kind of conversion is just fooling yourself that you 'rescued' your data from an old closed fileformat as you are now not able to edit the data OR convert it back. At the same time you are not capable of loading the file anyway in an application that is not Excel since no other application has all those exceptions coded in.

Naturally, I could argue all I want, even if the representative of Microsoft or other companies that side with MS are actually persuaded by my arguments, they will never change their opinion to the extend to support changing the specification. Lets hope for the impossible anyway.

After that meeting I got on the train towards Amsterdam. A train just travels soo much easier when going to the center of a city like Amsterdam. I went to the Holland Open conference. The speech I watched was rather surprising to me where the Dutch government currently stands with open source and open standards. I got invited as being the expert (hate that word) on open source and open standards. That morning at least was really focused on government at least, and organized by the left party "Groen Links" which is pro open source very much. The vibe I walked away with was that in many Dutch cities open standards and ODF are very much on the radar and increasingly becoming more so. The ICT people in Amsterdam visited Munich for information exchange and there is an open source project that aims to make all databases available using web services and open standards to allow step by step migration of each principal to more featurefull and cheaper services. A pretty cool example was when the presenter showed how he could query the public information of things like fire hydrants, police and fire fighter locations and overlay them all on a Google Earth GUI. Exciting times, for sure.

It certainly felt good to visit Amsterdam again, its a city that has a really positive and strong vibe. For old time sake I walked into a music shop that has loads of alternative stuff that at least some years ago you can't find anywhere else. I immediately got excited with some nice Cd's I listened to (Bobs choice of the week) but got seriously turned off by the ridiculous price of 25,- Euro for one CD. Lets see if one of the online stores have it for a decent price.

ps. In this blog I mentioned "The Netherlands", "Holland" and "Dutch". Which people may find confusing ;) They are all pointing to the people and the country I live in. The Dutch people just want to think big because we are such a small country ;)