Sonntag April 17, 2005
"Planet of the Apes" in Hamburg
Since the weather is currently beautiful here in Hamburg, yesterday my wife and I decided to do a little picknick in a close-by park. Unfortunately I did not have a camera with me. Therefore, I have to use some old pictures from other people to give you some impressions of what I'm talking about.
The park we went to is located here and scenery looks about like this, this and this.
For the first hour it was very nice and quiet. The birds were singing, and some kids were playing on the playground. Our peaceful picknick came to an noisy end when the first people arrived at the finish line of an event that is called "Bierathlon" (= beer-athlon). At a Bierathlon two people have to carry a crate of beer (24 bottles) and run some miles. There are different strategies. Either you drink all the beer right in the beginning, so that you have to carry less weigth, or you drink them later in order to avoid becoming drunk before you reach the finish line. Again, since I did not have a camera with me, I can only provide a few old pictures that I digged out by searching the web. Look here, here, here,here, and here.
In the beginning my wife and I still found the whole thing funny because the people yesterday were also dressed up in Halloween-type costumes. However, when more and more people arrived it became louder and louder. But what was much worse and disgusting was that more and more people used the bushes to do what civilized people do in restrooms. Some people even did not try to keep distance to us and even asked us to look in a different direction. You should know that small kids were around, too.
Maybe I am what they call "spiessig" here in Germany (something like narrow-minded), but yesterday I thought for the first time that the very strict laws in California (no alcohol in public parks) made total sense to me. I personally think it is ridiculous to be forced to wrap "picknick wine" in brown paper and to drink wine out of mugs, but it is definitely not nice to watch "drunken apes" during day light in a public park where most people just want to relax and where kids play on the playground.
( Apr 17 2005, 05:05:27 PM CEST )
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SpreadFirefox Light
I just cleaned up my home directory a bit and came across this old picture. It shows a German newspaper ad for OpenOffice.org that was published in a newspaper in the Munich area in January 2004. In case you can read German and are interested in the content, here is a PDF version of the ad.
( Apr 17 2005, 04:00:21 PM CEST )
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Just switch! - Doing useful things with StarOffice 8's BeanShell support
I just played a bit more with StarOffice 8's BeanShell support. When I thought about something useful to implement I remembered that at one of my former employers we had some document templates for faxes that asked via a dialog for the recipient's address when a new document was created.
The following screenshot shows the dialog that pops up when the document is opened:
... the same dialog with data filled in:
... and the result/output:
For my little exercise I picked the "Highlight" BeanShall example and merged some code from the "HelloWorld" sample into it. Then I added some code from the Developer's Guide in order to jump to a Bookmark. The following screenshot shows the bookmark code:
I also had to create my own dialog. One can get to the dialog editor via "Tools - Macros - Organize Dialogs ...":
As you can see, I created one dialog:
In order to auto-start the BeanShell macro I had to do the following steps. First, I went to "Tools - Customize ...":
In the "Customize" dialog I picked the "Events" tab, selected the "Open Document" event and clicked on the "Assign Macro" button:
In the "Macro Selector" dialog I picked my address macro.
The BeanShell editor could be more comfortable, but I find it pretty cool to write macros using Java technology.
( Apr 17 2005, 03:33:42 PM CEST )
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Just switch! - Who needs PowerPoint anymore?
I just opened up a few PowerPoint files in StarOffice 8 again with which I had quite a few problems in StarOffice 7 about one year ago. Back then I had to manually modify the slides after importing them in StarOffice 7 which took me several hours for about ten presentations. Now in StarOffice 8 I can just open the files like StarOffice 8 files. I did not notice any importing issues that would require manual changes.
Since I only tested a few files I can't say if StarOffice 8 can handle all PowerPoint files that well, but I think my first results are very promising.
If you look at the results below, who do you think needs PowerPoint anymore?
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StarOffice 7 |
StarOffice 8 |
Microsoft PowerPoint |
A Powerpoint presentation opened in different
applications
First Click = First Step of Animation |
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Second Click = Second Step of Animation
(notice the flow of the
animation) |
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Third Click = Third Step of Animation
(notice the flow of the
animation) |
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Final View
(notice the angles/directions of the lines) |
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Another slide from a different presentation
(notice the
"balloons") |
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And another one
(notice the "balloons") |
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( Apr 17 2005, 02:48:11 PM CEST )
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