I hate Microsoft's Click-to-Run.

For the record, I hate Click-to-Run.

I bought Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student Edition two years ago. Taking advantage of the diskless download bargain prices, I bought just the product key and downloaded the bits, direct from Microsoft.

The thing ran fine, as far as I can tell, until this morning. This morning I really, really needed to type up some meeting agendas in a hurry. First, when I tried to open Word, it was very slow. It flashed a dialogue box at me that said something about Click-to-Run, which I didn't remember installing or activating, and the only option on the dialogue box was "OK". SO I clicked OK.

Once I was inside Word, every time I tried to do anything like open a recent file, or Save As ..., a message balloon appeared on the status bar, saying: "Microsoft Office is installing the required upgrades" and "Your office application may be unresponsive during this blahblah."

It turns out that Click-to-Run is meant for users on a broadband network, to get constant, unattended upgrades of their software. This is Microsoft taking control of my computer again. It makes no sense for a "Home and Student" computer to have this feature enabled by default. A corporate or office computer, perhaps, where a broadband connection can be assumed, but not home or student.

And there's no way to disable Click-to-Run. If you installed the software by clicking on the Download button, you've got it. The alternative to Click-to-Run is to install Office using the old-fashioned MSI installation package, and allow Office to inform you once it knows an upgrade is available. But Microsoft has very carefully hidden the MSI package so it's difficult to find.

I am following the instructions on http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/click-to-run-switch-to-using-an-msi-based-office-edition-HA101850538.aspx to delete my Click-to-Run version, but the MSI version is not there, in spite of what the instructions say.

If this doesn't work, and if I can't find an MSI package, I'm ready to dump MS Office and go with LibreOffice or OpenOffice. Microsoft loses again.

Another good "Out of Office" message.

Here's another good "out of office" message.

I’ll be characterizing the performance (simulated vs. actual) of laminated composite low-friction materials against a low-temperature crystalline dihydrogen oxide matrix on Friday the 28^th.  I expect to spend 7 to 8 hours performing a complicated series of temperature / altitude / insolation shmoos.  Back on Monday.

The location is Colorado. The date, in case you missed it, is February 28. The intended audience is 12 engineers. Two of them understood the message. Do you?

LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice

When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in January 2010, it inherited a collection of community-based  software projects, such as Java, VirtualBox, and OpenOffice.org. Free software and open-source software are both contrary to Oracle's way of doing business. Of the two named projects, VirtualBox flourished. But Oracle mismanaged both Java and OpenOffice.org so badly that it almost killed them.

Java seems to have recovered from the trauma. There was a while in 2010 and 2011 when it looked like Java had fallen out of favor with professionals, but that's another story for another time.

As for OpenOffice.org, Oracle decided to assert their control over the project, and did so in such a heavy-handed manner that the majority of the OOo community rebelled. In only a few months, the rebels re-created a free and open-source office suite called LibreOffice. LO's first production release was in January 2011. Unfettered by Oracle, LO flourished and soon replaced OOo as the default office suite in many Linux distributions. Oracle didn't do anything to make OOo competitive, and, for about a year, it looked like Oracle was going to let it starve to death.

But Oracle showed some good sense when, in late 2011, they decided to transfer "stewardship" of OOo to the Apache Incubator, a part of the Apache Software Foundation. The ASF is an organization dedicated to the care and keeping of some very powerful, free and open source, software tools - for example, the Apache HTTP Server, which is the engine behind a galactic buttload of websites all over the world.

Nine days ago, the ASF announced that OpenOffice.org is back. Apache Open Office (as it's now known) version 3.4 was officially released on May 8.

The big question is whether it will be able to regain the users it lost to LibreOffice. Like many LO users, I don't see a crying need to switch back from LO to AOO. The Document Foundation, stewards of LO, have done some really good stuff. I think it's going to require some competition from ASF to win me back to AOO.

The best "Out of Office" autoreply I've ever seen

You know how you can set your email to autoreply if you're going to be gone for a while? Well, this one made me smile. I'll bet it does the same for you:

I will be away from school (getting married!) until February 26th.  As such, I will be in a state of marital bliss and will not be responding to e-mails.  I will respond to you as soon as I return to reality.

Best,
Lori Dxxxx (Stxxxxxx!)

Microsoft BizSpark

I bought a new computer last year, and bought Microsoft Office along with it. As part of the installation procedure, MS Office invited me to subscribe to an online newsletter called Microsoft BizSpark.

After a couple of issues, I realized that the newsletter wasn't useful to me. I tried to unsubscribe. I have tried repeatedly to unsubscribe, and haven't been successful yet. BizSpark always responds to my Unsubscribe request with a question. No matter how I answer the question, my response is not acknowledged. I know there's still a live body at the other end of the line, because an ungrammatical period at the end of the question, a ".", has been quietly replaced with a dash. But they keep sending me this stupid newsletter.

I post this here in the hope that some poor contractor or intern at Microsoft, whose job it is to troll the Web on boring afternoons when there's nothing better to do, will see this posting and take care of unsubscribing me. Actually, since I truly did add BizSpark to my spam bucket, I may never know if it worked.

Here's the email trail for you to follow.

1. The newsletter

Subject:	Startup success with Windows Azure, Windows Phone 7 and Internet Explorer 9 announcements, Twitter news and much more!
Date:	Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:10:45 -0600
From:	Microsoft BizSpark
Reply-To:	Microsoft
To:

[... newsletter deleted ...]
Microsoft respects your privacy. Please read our online Privacy Statement.

If you would no longer like to receive this newsletter, please email bzsnews@microsoft.com with the word “unsubscribe” in the subject line.


(That "Reply-To" address contained enough alphabet soup for a competent server to figure out exactly which subscriber was sending the Unsubscribe request, especially if the subscriber forwarded the whole newsletter to bzsnews as part of their Unsubscribe request, with headers intact.)

2. My unsubscribe request

From: Xxxxxxx [mailto:xxx@msn.com]
Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 7:47 PM
To: BizSpark Newsletter
Subject: Unsubscribe

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:

Startup success with Windows

[... rest of newsletter deleted here, but it was all in my Unsub request, with headers intact ...]


3. BizSpark's response

From: bzsnews@microsoft.com
To: xxx@msn.com
CC: bzsnews@microsoft.com
Subject: RE: Unsubscribe
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:12:53 +0000

What is the Company Name you are registered under in the BizSpark Program – we need that info to process your unsubscribe request.

[... and they left my entire Unsub request intact, even the attached newsletter ...]

4. My response to BizSpark's response, this time

You tell me. You're the ones with the big database of subscribers and all. Besides, I've already told you three or four times. (Check your email records; you'll see.) Why didn't you pay any attention those other times?

At least this time you fixed the grammar in your canned response to my Unsubscribe request.

You know what? I'll do your job for you. From now on, anything from bzsnews@microsoft.com goes into my spam filter.

It's an MSN/Hotmail/Live spam filter.

Brought to you by Microsoft.

End note: I want to make it clear that I'm not badmouthing Microsoft as a monolithic entity. A lot of people do that, and it's not right. Microsoft is a huge corporation, with business segments and divisions you don't even know about. Some of them deserve praise, and some of them don't. I have praised them in the past, right here at Zyzmog Galactic Headquarters. But this group doesn't deserve praise.


UPDATE, Nov 9, 2011:  My Hotmail/MSN account dumps directly into my mail readers, and so I seldom go online to see what's in my online InBox, etc.  Today I was online and I noticed two pieces of mail in my online Junk folder.  They were two identical copies of the Microsoft Bizspark 11/02/11 newsletter.  Microsoft's Hotmail had detected them as junk mail, and treated them accordingly.  They will automatically be deleted in a few days.

LibreOffice: an update

I've enjoyed using Libre Office so far. The Document Foundation just released a minor update to version 3.3. Version 3.3.1 features several bug fixes and some new icons to differentiate it from OpenOffice.org, but that's about it.

To my amusement, installing 3.3.1 on my computer again brings up the "Thank you for using OpenOffice.org" webpage with Oracle's logo. I guess TDF will fix that in version 3.4 or 4.x.

I haven't noticed any difference between 3.3 and 3.3.1, other than the aforementioned new icons. So far I've only used the Writer module. It runs as smooth as silk, and it's a pleasure to use. I've opened and saved documents in several different file formats.

LibreOffice: the desktop version

Here are some quick notes about installing LibreOffice 3.3 on my PC's internal hard drive.

The LibreOffice Installer installed MS Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable on my PC. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially if it's required for LO 3.3 to run on a PC. By including it in the installation, the creators saved me the step of hunting it down and downloading it for myself. Other programs that use run-time executables don't do that. It was a nice touch.

But it does make me wonder what kind of run-time executable the Linux version uses. (I assume the OS X version uses the same RTE as the Linux one.)

At some point in the installation process, the Installer also opened a browser window with a link to http://update.services.openoffice.org/ooo/index.html?cid=920899 , entitled "Thank you for using OpenOffice.org" and with an Oracle logo on the bottom. I don't know how. I didn't do anything to bring it up. Seriously. It was a moment both surreal and humorous.

Reports from early, pre-release versions of LO were that it didn't play nicely with OpenOffice.org. If I recall correctly (which doesn't happen very often anymore), LO hijacked key elements of the OOo installation for its own use, so OOo didn't start up properly anymore. Well, they fixed that. I now have MS Office 2010, OOo 3.2, and LO 3.3 all playing together nicely on my PC.

As would be expected, there is little discernible difference in either the appearance or the, um, "gameplay" of OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. Users of OOo will feel instantly comfortable with LO.

And as for performance, the hard-drive version exhibits none of the hesitation I reported in the USB-drive version. Every keypress and mouse click/move gets an instant response.

Now here's an interesting feature: Help is a separate download. If you don't download it, Help works anyway: the online version can be found at http://help.libreoffice.org/. If you downloaded and installed Help on your hard drive, then clicking Help opens the local version; if not, then clicking Help opens the online version. They're identical.

I won't be able to comment on issues of stability or durability for a few months yet.

One of my favorite features of OpenOffice.org, carried over into LibreOffice, is the formula editor. MS Office and MathType have had a good working relationship for years, and the formula editor is OpenOffice's answer to MathType/EquationEditor. The cool thing about formula editor is that you don't have to take your fingers off the keyboard, if you know what you're doing. You can type this:

x = {-b +- sqrt{b^2 - 4 a c}} over {2 a}

and end up with this:






You gotta admit, that's pretty cool!

I'm sure that OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice will diverge in appearance and functionality as time goes on. Right now, it's pretty clear that they share the same origins.

One final note for this installment: I added a comment to my earlier post, regarding a "cloud version." Apparently, they did consider "the cloud" when creating LibreOffice.

LibreOffice: An Intriguing Alternative to Microsoft Office

Other than the cost, I have no objections to Microsoft Office. I've used it perforce for years, and I've gotten used to it. Like Xerox copiers and HP LaserJet printers, MS Office is the standard against which all other "office" programs are measured.

(And the cost is perfectly understandable. MS is in business to make money, and they charge what the market will bear. Entities who sell software deserve to make a profit doing it. Don't ever use pirated software, and always pay a reasonable price for software.)

I've also used and enjoyed OpenOffice.org for years. OOo, as it's called, is a "free and open-source" alternative to MS Office. It's very well put together. It's a little larger than MS Office, and it's a little slower than MS Office, but it does some things that MS Office doesn't do, and it does some things better than MS Office does. The user interface (how it looks on the screen and how you interact with it) are a little different from MS Office, but even the MS Office UI changes from version to version. You get used to the OOo interface quickly, and the Help function is very good.

When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems (who were the custodians of OOo), the future of OOo was suddenly called into question. Oracle didn't do anything to allay peoples' fears, and in fact said some things that aggravated those fears. So a movement was started to create another version of OOo, independent of OOo and Oracle's influence. The movement eventually took the name "The Document Foundation," and the name "LibreOffice" was chosen ("libre" as in "free") for the new version of OOo.

TDF embarked on a rapid effort to develop and release LibreOffice before OOo disappeared for good. This week, they released their first production version, called LibreOffice 3.3. (The latest public release of OpenOffice.org is 3.3, and LibreOffice 3.3 is a direct derivative, or fork, of the previous version, OOo 3.2.)

LO 3.3 has some great features. One intriguing feature is the ability to import, edit, and save SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files. SVG is an open format that is gaining respect, even popularity, among the graphics community for its power and portability.

Another great feature, and the one that excites me the most, is its portability. LO 3.3 can be installed on your hard disk drive, like any other software, but it can also be installed on a removable storage medium - the ubiquitous Flash drive. I installed it on a flash drive, just to try it out.

First, the minuses:
Flash drives aren't fast. Any time the program needs to do a "disk access," as it were, it hesitates. You will notice this when you're typing or mousing and suddenly things freeze for several seconds. You'll also notice that, once in a while, the letters appearing on the screen are a few keystrokes behind your fingers and trying hard to catch up.

I expect that the non-portable version of LO, installed on a hard drive instead of on a flash drive, will run faster. I'll keep you posted.

One area that LO hasn't explored yet is the cloud - the world of software that runs inside a Web browser. Microsoft has a web-based version of MS Office. Google, Yahoo and other big Web actors also have web-based office suites. Whether LO will go there remains to be seen.

Okay, that's it for the minuses. Now for the pluses:
It really, truly works! Please forgive the exclamation point. I was skeptical at first. I tried it on my home computer, an Intel i3 M330 64-bit running at 2.13 GHz with Windows 7, it works fine. I then tried it on my work computer, an older machine with an Intel Pentium D dual-core running at 2.8 GHz with Windows XP Pro, and it works equally well. I'll have to try it on some older machines and see how they do.

Okay, so the fact that it works is the only plus so far. I'm sure I'll be adding to the list as time goes on.

Cautions:
As one would expect, it eats up a lot of disk space. Installation on a flash drive takes 482 MB.

And be careful removing the flash drive! I don't know what tricks TDF did to make LO run directly from the flash drive, but because of those tricks, you must make sure that you have completely exited LibreOffice, and closed all of its windows, before you remove the flash drive from the computer. It's also a good idea to tell your computer you want to "Eject" or "Safely remove" the flash drive before you pull it out. If you don't know how to do this, you shouldn't be using the portable version of LibreOffice. Just install it on your hard drive, and you'll be happy.

Where to get it:LibreOffice 3.3 is available for free download from http://www.libreoffice.org/ . The portable version is available for free download from http://www.libreofficeportable.org/ . If that link stops working, then try http://portableapps.com/apps/office/libreoffice_portable/ .

PortableApps.com is an intriguing concept, the gist of which is that you put portable versions of all the apps (er, programs) you really need on a portable device such as a flash drive or MP3 player, and carry it around with you all the time. To run your applications, you plug the flash drive into the nearest computer, open the flash drive, and click on the program you want to run. It doesn't require you to install anything on the host computer, and it doesn't secretly install anything, either, or write any temporary files on the host computer. It's very clean, and very polite.

PortableApps.com has an entire suite of such programs, and they're proud to add LibreOffice Portable to their suite. At this time, LO Portable and PortableApps.com only work on Windows machines. But the non-portable version of LO 3.3 works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux machines.

End note 1, Nerd talk: Some people keep their Linux on a bootable flash drive as well. I guess you could install LO 3.3 on your bootable Linux flash drive!

End note 2, Money talk:
LO is free. So is OOo. In the phrase "free and open source," free means free, like the air you breathe. But they're always willing to accept donations. If you save $100 to $500 by using LO in place of MS Office, consider donating part of the money you saved to TDF. Your donation will help to keep it free.

End note 3, Truth in advertising:
Unlike that crap that passes for reviews of the ripoff known as ProFlightSimulator, this is an honest, original, and independent review. Nobody asked me to write it, and I don't get any compensation of any kind for writing it. I simply think that this is a good product, one that other people will want to know about. If you don't believe me, go read my article, "Blogging for Dollars". If you still don't believe me, I don't care.

UPDATE! MAY 17, 2012: OpenOffice is back! Who would have imagined? Oracle decided they didn't want it, but rather than kill it, they put it in a basket on the Apache Incubator's doorstep. Now it's been renamed Apache Open Office and it's ready to roll. Will you switch back?