Daily Archives: Tuesday, June 16, 2015

  • Microsoft sits in homophone corner

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

    This blog has discussed homophones before (posts passim). Homophone corner is a space to which people who cannot distinguish their homophones are banished to consider the errors of their ways – rather like the corner of the classroom to which misbehaving children were exiled during my primary school days.

    It now appears as though the curse of the homophone is spreading to the giants of the technology world, as shown by the following tweet from Nix Tran Stories.

    image text reads Dear Microsoft spellchecker, For the umpteenth time: No! I don't want to change Your Ref. to You're Ref.

    I’ve used Microsoft Word/Office since the days of Windows 3.1 and its spelling and grammar checking tools have in my opinion never been particularly good: I’ve always run rings around them; and now it appears that the spellchecker has been coded by an illiterate.

    I suppose the least I could do is pat the leader of the MS Office team on the shoulder and mouth the platitude “their, there, they’re!“. 😉

  • LibreOffice 2015 Conference – call for papers

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Social Media, Tech

    The call for papers for this year’s LibreOffice Conference has today been announced on Twitter by Collabara’s LibreOffice team.

    LibreOffice Conference 2015 logo

    Proposals should be submitted by 15th July 2015 in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference programme.

    The conference programme will be based on the following topics:

    • Development, APIs, Extensions, Future Technology;
    • Quality Assurance;
    • Localisation, Documentation and Native Language Projects;
    • Appealing Libreoffice: Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility;
    • Enterprise and Public Sector Deployments and Migrations, Certifications and Best Practices;
    • Open Document Format, Document Liberation and Interoperability; and
    • Building a successful business around LibreOffice.

    Aarhus montageThis year’s event will be held in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, from 23rd to 25th September inclusive.

    Venue

    The venue will be a completely new venue on the harbour in Aarhus called “Dokk1 – Urban Media Space Aarhus“.

    Urban Media Space is described as “a flexible and dynamic sanctuary for everyone in search of knowledge, inspiration and personal development – an open and accessible learning environment supporting democracy and community and is also going to be an example of the library of the future.”

    Conference communication channels

    The official communication channel during the conference will be the conference mailing list, conference@global.libreoffice.org. All participants will automatically be subscribed to that list, whilst the archives can be browsed at http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/conference/.

    Primary Danish conference contacts

    The primary conference contacts in Denmark have likewise been announced; they are:

    • Carsten Agger (Open Space Aarhus);
    • Line Dybdahl (Municipality of Aarhus);
    • Leif Lodahl (LibreOffice Denmark); and
    • René Lagoni Neukirch (LibreOffice Denmark).