OpenOffice Impress

In two weeks I'll be giving a talk at the 2010 American Chemical Society National Meeting. Today, I started putting together slides for that presentation, so I opened up OpenOffice Impress to start making it. Now this is the first time I've used v3.0+ of the software, and when I opened it up I was initially encouraged by what I saw. One of my gripes about v2.4 was that it did not apply my system theme colors to the application window. I don't like bright things, so I use a dark theme:

So it's pretty nice that now Impress is pulling in my system colors. In fact, it's really cool because now my presentation by default starts with a dark background and light text! Just the way I like it. (Note: the following was done using OpenOffice 3.2.0.7 on openSUSE 11.2 x86_64 with KDE 4.4 using a modified Obsidian Coast color theme):

I've made the title, but I don't know if the font should maybe be a little bigger. To check this, I want to throw the presentation up in slideshow mode and move back about 10 feet from the screen. That should help me tell how large it is:

Wait, what? Now I have a white background, but the text is still gray! That is absolutely terrible! Now I could almost understand if it would change the background to white and the text to black. It would still be dumb, but to change the background color silently but not the text color is beyond worthless. The appropriate behavior here would be to make the actual presentation use the same colors that I see on my screen, no matter what they happen to be. So this sucks. No good. Instead, I'll change the text color to black:

Now I've highlighted the text and selected black as the text color. But the text on the screen is still light gray! What does the slideshow look like?

Oh, so now the text color is fixed, but that isn't reflected on the "edit" view. How is this acceptable behavior for any sort of supposedly WYSIWYG editor program? Especially a program that makes slideshows, which, by their nature, are intended to be aesthetically pleasing. How am I supposed to make a decent presentation if I can't see the colors? I suppose I could just keep opening the slideshow view every time I want to change an element of the presentation, but that's terrible from a usability standpoint. In case you're wondering, applying a presentation theme (or "Master Page" as it's called in Impress) doesn't help. The colors are not displayed in the "edit" view, only in the full slideshow.

Now you'd think that if the program is now trying to apply system colors, there would be some easy way in the program to disable this. Firefox, for instance, has a "Use system colors" checkbox that allows you to disable system colors from being used when no color is specified in the HTML. I have not been able to find a similar option in Impress. The colors dialog would task me with making changes to all of the colors used in the program manually:

With this sort of interface to the program, I find it unusable. I had to fire up my VirtualBox and use Microsoft PowerPoint (ugh), because it at least allows me to see what I'm actually doing to the presentation as I make edits. It really makes me sad, because I want to use open source software. And most of these things actually work quite nicely, but for some reason OpenOffice 3.0+ fails to properly handle system colors. I should not have to change my system color scheme or manually change application color settings to make the application usable.

OpenOffice Writer does something similar: it displays a normal text document as light text on a dark background. However, when printing the document, it prints as black on white, which is somewhat sensible. However, it should really just abandon the system colors when it comes to showing a WYSIWYG document on the screen, since failing to do so breaks the WYSIWYGness and confuses the user.

What I'm Reading and Watching

It's been an intense week. Everyone in my family (including me) has alternated being sick, and work this week was incredibly busy. So I haven't had much time or energy for blogging. But there have been a number of interesting links I've come across this week, and so I thought I'd share some:

• Slashdot: Ars Technica Inveighs Against Ad Blocking- The tech site Ars Technica recently implemented an experiment in which they blocked their site's content from users using AdBlock Plus for 12 hours. Comments on Slashdot are very interesting because they highlight the balance of economic interests in running an Internet publication. If you try to charge people to read your site, then people will go elsewhere. If you try to make money with ads, people won't click them and will block them. But somehow you've got to figure out how to pay your writers. Tough problem.
• The Cult of Originality- An illustrated article by artist and filmmaker Nina Paley discussing the nature of creativity. Her argument is that there is no such thing as originality, all artistic expression is derivative. It's a pretty interesting read, and really challenges the notion that anyone can "own" creative ideas. In turn, it challenges the nature of copyright, which seems to place a high value on the creation of "original" artistic works, and locks those up so that they cannot be freely shared.
• TechDirt: Utah Wants To Own State Microbes; May Demand Royalty On Any Products Developed- The title pretty much says it all. Apparently the state of Utah believes that it is owed money if anyone makes commercial use of products derived for microbes found in the state. Talk about a money grab....
• Raheem Brock Released by the Colts- It blew my mind when I saw Raheem Brock tweet a few days ago that Super Bowl XLIV was his last game in a Colts Uniform. I've heard that he asked to be released, in spite of the fact that his contract was not up. Maybe he thinks he can make more money in free agency during the uncapped year, or maybe something else was going on behind the scenes. It's sad though, because he is really great at connecting with football fans, giving us an inside look into the Colts locker room. He'll be missed.
• Google Gesture Search- This is a neat little application I put on my Droid. It allows you to draw letters on the screen to search your phone (and everything else that the phone searches- in the Droid's case, it will also search Google and nearby locations). Pretty handy to go long with voice search and the normal keyboard search.
• Tostito's "And Then There Was Salsa" Commercial- I just saw this commercial this morning. It's a really beautiful advertisement, and looks amazing in HD. I think it's a very effective ad because it's not annoying, has a lot of character, and (most importantly) makes me really want some chips and salsa! Edit: On Vimeo, this video is even more awesome! Lagged a bit for me, but was still cool.

Twitter Users Weigh in on NBC Olympics Coverage

NBC has failed hard at this whole Olympics thing. I, along with many others both locally and around the internet, have been vociferously complaining about their coverage the entire time it's been on. Why did they watse precious primetime on a feature of Mary Carillo going through Mounty training, especially while there were LIVE events going on? Why do they fail to realize that people want to watch the games, not NBC personalities sitting behind desks or in chairs? Why do they fail to realize that people want to watch the events LIVE, not on a tape delay? Why do they fail to realize that people want to stream more than just hockey and curling live online? Why do they fail to realize that no one wants to download and install yet another proprietary video plugin (from Microsoft, no less) and then be forced to turn over the account information for their TV service provider before being able to watch said meager online streaming offerings? I do not know the answers to these things, except that the company is completely out of touch with what its viewers actually want. It frankly insulting, It seems as if they're saying that they know how people need to watch the Olympics, and it needs to feature constant crappy feature pieces instead of the Games themselves. It's as if they think it's still the 1970's and families all sit down in front of the TV to receive the day's "truth" from the news station. I hope they never are able to broadcast the Olympics again. Moreover, I wish some other company would show them the proper way to do it.

Not only has the coverage been insulting to viewers this whole time, but tonight they apparently cut off the end of the closing ceremony to show off their program "The Marriage Ref" (I didn't see this because I actually wasn't subjecting myself to the masochistic exercise of watching their pathetic programming). Now the concept of that show is idiotic enough: to allow celebrities to act as arbiters of ordinary couples' ridiculous, exaggerated marital conflicts in some kind of bizarre parody/reflection of the average American's obsession with celebrity relationships. But they had the temerity to stuff this down the throats of the countless viewers who were forced to watch their miserable network in the first place because of the asinine "exclusive broadcast rights" concept surrounding Olympics coverage in this country.

The Twitterverse seems to agree:

And more:

Congratulations, NBC. You have capped your Olympics coverage with an action that represents the culmination of all of your failure during your Olympics "coverage." The only saving grace is that I no longer have any reason to watch their channel, at least until football season returns. How much longer before their contract for Sunday Night Football runs out?

Dinner Disappointment

Last night, Debra and I decided to cook a reasonably nice dinner. We had put a frozen whole chicken in the fridge a few days ago to thaw, and so we wanted to roast it with some potatoes and carrots for a nice dinner. Since she's a little squeamish about this for some reason, I pulled out the innards and removed the kidneys, then washed the whole thing inside and out with cold water. I coated the chicken inside and out with olive oil and a french herb rub. Debra cut up some onions and garlic, and we stuffed those inside the chicken to give it some more flavor. We then added chopped potatoes and baby carrots, drizzled those with olive oil and seasoned them with the same herb mixture. This all went into a roasting pan with a grating on the bottom. Then I covered it with aluminum foil, and put it in the oven at 350 degrees (F) at about 4:30.

It was a 5 pound chicken, and needed about 1.5-2 hours to cook all the way. The house smelled amazing, and since neither of us had eaten lunch, we were both salivating. At about 6:20, Debra had a bad feeling. She looked up online how long it takes a chicken to thaw and how long the meat keeps in the refrigerator after thawing. As it turns out, a whole chicken takes about 5 hours per pound to thaw in the fridge, and keeps for at most 2 days after being thawed. Thinking it would have taken much longer to thaw, Debra had placed the chicken in the fridge on Monday, and it was now Saturday. Everything we read suggested that after 2-3 days, the risk for food poisoning increased dramatically. It had been about 4-5 days.

So we couldn't eat the chicken we had worked so hard to make and that smelled so good. We took it out and threw it away, along with the vegetables that had come into contact with it. Thank goodness for Little Ceaesar's $5.00 hot pizzas. Debra picked one of those up, and we ate pizza along with our roasted potatoes and carrots.

Dinner fail.

Phone Search

Today, Debra and I went out in search of phones. Our contract with AT&T has recently expired, and we wanted to survey the current mobile phone scene and see what we could get. Basically, we decided that we wither want to get smartphones with internet access, or just get simple phones with a basic talk and text package. Being a grad student means that we don't have a whole lot of money to shell out, but if the smartphones are good enough, we can budget for a more expensive monthly bill. So basically, if we're going cheap, I don't much care about what phone I get. But if I'm going to pay a lot, then I want to make sure I get an awesome phone.

We looked primarily at three phones today: the Blackberry Bold 9700, the HTC Pure, and the Motorola Droid. The first two were at AT&T, and the Droid (of course) was at Verizon. The costs of all three phones would be the same: about $100 each after rebate. The service plans from AT&T and Verizon would cost about the same as well. I should mention that we inquired about the iPhone (not that I would ever buy one, but if Debra wanted it I would have winced and allowed her to have it), but rejected it because with the iPhone, we would not be able to use the 15% discount on the service plan that I get for being a University of Illinois employee. So forget that. The Nexus One seems awesome, but we didn't see anything about being able to buy a family plan with two of them and the cost was significantly higher.

Here are my impressions of each phone:

Blackberry Bold 9700

This phone seemed pretty solid. The keyboard is a little easier to use than the one on my current phone, the Samsung Blackjack II. Another big improvement over the Blackjack II is the trackpad: it felt very smooth and responsive. Scrolling was smooth and easy, although I imagine that it would still be annoying to scroll through a page that is very link-heavy. The model phone I used did not have a SIM card, so I couldn't test the browser or anything that required access to the network. I've heard that people who have Blackberries are pretty happy with them, but this phone didn't seem to have enough for me to really want to pay a lot for it.

HTC Pure

Ok, this phone was terrible. For starters, it runs on Windows Mobile 6.5. If you know me, you know that Windows isn't exactly my thing. My Blackjack II runs Windows Mobile 6.1, and it's nothing really to write home about. But this thing was miserable to use. I don't know if it was just that the phone takes 5 minutes to get going fully, but after it booted up the interface was so sluggish and unresponsive that I immediately disliked it. In the couple of minutes of using it, I had trouble trying to scroll the application bar from side to side to access the phone's functionality. The onscreen keyboard did not appear to rotate if the phone was held in landscape position, and I had a lot of trouble typing the letters I meant to hit. If there was text auto-completion, it didn't appear as I was trying to type in the "Notes" application. The touchscreen and UI responsiveness were so bad for me that I was already sour on the phone when I noticed the hideous flip-style clock on the homepage (clearly visible in the image above). Why would you waste processor cycles rendering that ugliness, when the UI is already sluggish as is? Ugh. No thank you.

Motorola Droid

Now this phone was nice. There's so much about this phone that I didn't get to play with, but in the couple minutes I had with it I was very impressed. The interface was intuitive and smooth. Touchscreen input was accurate, typing was easy (especially in landscape mode), and the auto-completion was a nice touch. In fact, the touchscreen keyboard was so nice, I forgot to try out the physical keyboard! The deep Google integration is excellent (probably second to the Nexus One) for someone like me who uses quite a few Google services. Since KDE 4.4's Akonadi personal information database plays nicely with Google services, I can keep my phone and laptop calendars synchronized via Google Calendar for instance. This is certainly a phone that I would be happy with.

From my limited testing of phones today, I've whittled my options down to 2: get Droid phones and pay the higher service plan rate, or give up on smartphones and go with a much cheaper service plan. Is the Droid worth it? Anyone have experience with this phone, or any advice in general on this?

NBC Olympics Rant

NBC's Winter Olympics coverage has been an epic failure, even moreso than their Summer 2008 coverage. I've been consistently frustrated with it during the games thus far, but yesterday's horrendously terrible excuse for a broadcast really put the icing on the cake.

So yesterday, I was watching throughout the day, and was entertained by the biathlon. Good stuff. Then, they show us the Russia vs Czech Republic hockey game. All right, whatever. It was a good hockey game. But at the same time, Bode Miller was winning a gold medal in the super combined. Yet, for some strange reason, I am not seeing this event on live TV. Why? Why?! Alpine skiing events are very exciting, and when you have an American competing in such an event with a legitimate shot at the gold medal, I should be seeing it LIVE! But no, instead I get to see a hockey game that I really don't care about.

Then, their evening news broadcast comes on, and I hear: "we're going to tell you how Bode Miller did during today's super combined event. Spoiler alert!" So I immediately ran to the TV and turned it off. You'd think that they would WANT people watching their television programming, but no. They refuse to show the live event, and then go ahead and tell you the results before they actually air the event. And it's not like I could have gone online to a streaming broadcast. More on this soon.

Fast forward to the evening, prime time broadcast. You know, that time when they're supposed to give us their best programming because everyone is supposed to be watching. Instead of giving us live events, they're showing the taped runs from the alpine skiing. And not even in their entirety; they only want to show you the Americans, the medalists, and a couple of other random people they decided to do stories about. Like watching the skiing? Too bad. You only get a few skiers. Then we go out to the bobsled event, but in the middle of the first run, Bob Costas breaks in and urgently informs us that they're taking us quickly to the end of the US-Canada hockey game. Wait, what was that? You mean the US-Canada hockey game is going on live AND WE ONLY GET TO SEE THE FINAL 30 SECONDS?!!!! WHAT ARE YOU THINKING????!!! Of course, they have Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth telling us how hugely important this game was, what a rivalry it is, and how electric the atmosphere was. AND IT WASN'T ON NBC?! No, it was on MSNBC, which those unfortunate enough not to have cable or satellite service can't even watch. I have MSNBC, but NBC wasn't kind enough to even inform me that the game was on MSNBC, so that didn't do me any good, now did it? In principle, I could have streamed it live on the computer. In practice, though, I could not.

Now, it would be great if the evening show was mostly a highlights program with some live events and feature pieces sprinkled in, but only if I could go online and stream events live! But no, they don't want to do that. They'll let you stream curling and hockey only. What? Why? Why not stream everything, or at least several different events a day? They say they think streaming will cannibalize TV viewers. Right. Because not letting me watch what I want to watch really makes me want to tune in to the broadcasts. But I guess they can do that if they want, since there is no competition! If I want to watch the Olympics, I have to go to NBC. Because of that artificial monopoly, they don't have to suffer for their refusal to let me watch what I want.

To top it off, they started the broadcast tonight with a completely pointless and irrelevant intro of Bob Costas flying into the Broadcast Center on a waterplane. Why are they wasting my time by showing his arrival? Since I'm forced to watch their miserable broadcast to get Olympics coverage kind of live, I want to see the games! Not Bob Costas talking to Al Michaels from an airplane, not stories about various athletes. The games! Ugh.

If there were some real competition, then maybe I could actually vote with my eyeballs. If CBS, FOX, and ABC were all broadcasting the Olympics, I could drop NBC in favor of better coverage (assuming any one of them would do better, which is questionable at best). Or at least they would all be trying to outdo one another, and likely one of them would do the radical thing and SHOW LIVE EVENTS!

Ah, it feels much better now that I've got that off my chest. Well, at least until I look at the TV and see yet another story about some athletes instead of live Olympics action. Like right now. Grrrr.

Windows World

For the last 2 years, I've been using Linux almost exclusively on my computers. I still have a Windows XP virtual machine for Igor Pro, which is software we use in my research group for data analysis and plotting (it runs reasonably well under Wine, but there are enough minor irritating bugs that I'd rather run it on Windows. I've also tried QtiPlot, but I haven't had the time to learn it well enough to replace Igor). But unfortunately, in the laboratory, our computers all run Windows. That's because in the early days of our group, when data acquisition software was being written, they did everything on Windows and in a platform-specific way. So I still have to revisit the world of Windows in the laboratory.

Today I came to the realization that my Windows IQ has dropped substantially since I quit using it a couple years ago. I received a piece of software from a company to operate a temperature controller from a computer. I installed the software, but when I tried to run the software, I got an error message about having the wrong version of a dll file. I assumed that the company had shipped the wrong version, and so I contacted them about it. They got back with me this morning and told me that their engineers had a solution: reboot, uninstall, and reinstall the software. Sure enough, that did the trick, and now the software works. It's been so long since I've needed to do such things to get a piece of software to work that it didn't even occur to me to try those things....