I created a skin for Opera 7 in October 2004, and I was shocked to find I had nearly 25,000. I uploaded it to My Opera and deviantART. It took me a day to make the theme, however, it’s a lot easier to do than Firefox skins – no code.
The more observant of you may have realised the link to Survey. Basically, I’m curious as to what you think of this blog, so I created a survey. I’d like it if you’d complete it. The survey is here.
I know many people believe that blogs are simply wastes of space, where people rant about meaningless rubbish no one could care less about. Though that can be said for many blogs, it is generalising a little too much for my liking. Not all blogs are as good as this blog however. Many have the most ugly layouts and the worst posts (namely MSN Spaces).
The most recent high-profile case of this is Jean-Remy von Matt, head of the Jung von Matt ad agency. A recent Jung von Matt campaign was Du bist Deutschland (you are Germany), which is one of the most popular Technorati search terms. As you may have guessed, Herr von Matt, doesn’t like blogs. He recently made a post, which nearest translation reads:
Weblogs, the bathroom walls of the internet. What gives every PC user the right to excrete* their opinions? Most bloggers simply excrete. This new low point in the building of opinions is clear when one searches for ‘Du bist Deutschland’ at www.technorati.com.
(thanks to PapaScott for translation)
It’s not just ad agents who oppose blogs though, many geeks do too. Not to name any, Dan.
Dare I say blogging has an image problem? No – it doesn’t. In my view, the people with the problem who aren’t open to change and a new format of media. If the first blog someone reads is a rubbish one though, it’s understandable to see how such a view would develop. Luckily for me, the first blog I read was Neil’s World, and I still read & like it to this very day.
This hack no longer works. If you need a file converted I might help if you email it to computerjoe (at) gmail (dot) com. PGP key here
Ubuntu user? Try this
DOCX is the format MS Office Word 12 uses by default. This format is XML based, however, with a little work it can be backwards compatible.
Like OpenOffice.org documents, DOCX is a bunch of files, mainly XML based, stuck together in a zip. However, DOCXs also contain a Microsoft Office 97-2003 compatible .DOC . In this guide I walk guide you through how to get this file, and the rest of the data from a DOCX.
I made this DOCX earlier. It is basically 5 paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum.
Once you’ve downloaded it, if you already have MS Office 12 or any program associated with DOCX make sure you are in the folder view which displays file extensions (you do this by going into Control Panel>Folder Options>View>And Unchecking Hide Extensions for Known File Types). Then, go into the folder containing test.docx. In the folder ensure it does have the file extension, if it doesn’t, please follow the above steps!
The first step is to change it’s file extension to zip, so the file becomes test.zip.
The file is now ready for you to open in WinZip, WinRAR, 7-Zip or any other ZIP program. I personally use, and suggest, WinRAR. You could extract them, though it’s not necessary, it’d just make life easier. For that reason, I’m extracting them.
This is everything contained within the zip:
To access the actual .doc what you need to do is to go into word. There, you have your .doc, and various XML files.
Oi Viola!
The XML through all of it is nifty too, so if you like that kind of thing, take a look.
Office 12 does a fantastic job at compressing it too. All the files, extracted, are a total of 105KB big. The DOCX/ZIP is only 21KB big! That’s one fifth the size of the original files.
