NESpresso: Archives \ April 6, 2005 Entry

Welcome back to NESpresso, where things are getting nice & warm in spring. Sorry about the 2-week delay between updates, but it's given me more stuff to post here.

First of all, I've been trying out Open Office 2.0 Beta (which is actually listed as 1.9.79 when installed) on my computer alongside Open Office 1.1.4 (which is the current release version). Despite their ackward product name (which is actually OpenOffice.org), Open Office is really becoming a rival to Microsoft Office. Even though Open Office 1.1.x is visually different from MS Office, Open Office 2.0 is really getting the look & feel down enough that I'm having difficulty distinguishing the difference! Open Office isn't as user friendly as MS Office, but Open Office includes some features that you have to pay for with MS Office, which includes a PDF converter that normally costs $50 extra with MS Word. On the flipside, MS Office does include more support extras (like clip art) that Open Office doesn't include

The entire MS Works (I don't have MS Office on my computer, even though I'd take it over Works) takes about 885 MB's of HD space while Open Office takes only 145 MB's (2.0 beta takes 185 MB's) with Java installed (35 MB's extra). You save around 700 MB's on your hard drive that can be used for other stuff. Open Office 1.1.4 includes Write (similar to MS Word), Calc (Excel), & Impress (PowerPoint) as well as Draw. Open Office 2.0 beta includes everything 1.1.4 has & adds Base (similar to MS Access) as well as Math to it's office suite. The best thing with Open Office, besides being totally free to download, is that it's totally compatible with MS Office! Just save your documents to the MS office format & you can swap the files between them. The installer for Open Office is an 80-85 MB download (Bit Torrent download supported), but you can buy an installer CD for like $10 / CD (compared to $1,000 for MS Office) & install it on as many computers as you like, which is something Microsoft doesn't allow you to do without paying them for additional licenses. Open Office is available for PC, Mac, Linux & a few of the lesser known OS's.

Second, I'm planning on picking learning an advanced web language. This has been something I've wanted to do for a while as I've done as much as I can with HTML. I'm looking at picking up a book that does teaches PHP (one of the Advanced web languages), MySQL (a database program/language) & Apache (a web server program to run PHP 7& HTML on). Toss in CGI-PERL with it & I can probably start up on own fully automated, dynamic website like Refugees or at least create my own Bulletin Board from scratch. The sad downside to all of this is that NESpresso will have to move onto another server, which will most likely be a private server online, which I'll have to pay for (costing around $130 / yr.) or I'll have to get another computer connected online to be my private server & host it myself, which will only cost me $10 / yr. for a the domain name only, but will cost around $500 for a reasonably equipped computer.

That's all I have for this issue of NESpresso's Daily Drip. It's been a long time since I've written an update this long, excluding my blogger (which I'll need to make an update). I hope to get some actual work done on my website later, but this will have to do now. I'll C'ya Latte!




		NESpresso:\> Archives \ April 6, 2005 Entry


		Welcome back to NESpresso, where things are getting nice & warm in spring. Sorry about the 2-week delay between updates, but it's given me more stuff to post here. First of all, I've been trying out Open Office 2.0 Beta (which is actually listed as 1.9.79 when installed) on my computer alongside Open Office 1.1.4 (which is the current release version). Despite their ackward product name (which is actually OpenOffice.org), Open Office is really becoming a rival to Microsoft Office. Even though Open Office 1.1.x is visually different from MS Office, Open Office 2.0 is really getting the look & feel down enough that I'm having difficulty distinguishing the difference! Open Office isn't as user friendly as MS Office, but Open Office includes some features that you have to pay for with MS Office, which includes a PDF converter that normally costs $50 extra with MS Word. On the flipside, MS Office does include more support extras (like clip art) that Open Office doesn't include The entire MS Works (I don't have MS Office on my computer, even though I'd take it over Works) takes about 885 MB's of HD space while Open Office takes only 145 MB's (2.0 beta takes 185 MB's) with Java installed (35 MB's extra). You save around 700 MB's on your hard drive that can be used for other stuff. Open Office 1.1.4 includes Write (similar to MS Word), Calc (Excel), & Impress (PowerPoint) as well as Draw. Open Office 2.0 beta includes everything 1.1.4 has & adds Base (similar to MS Access) as well as Math to it's office suite. The best thing with Open Office, besides being totally free to download, is that it's totally compatible with MS Office! Just save your documents to the MS office format & you can swap the files between them. The installer for Open Office is an 80-85 MB download (Bit Torrent download supported), but you can buy an installer CD for like $10 / CD (compared to $1,000 for MS Office) & install it on as many computers as you like, which is something Microsoft doesn't allow you to do without paying them for additional licenses. Open Office is available for PC, Mac, Linux & a few of the lesser known OS's. Second, I'm planning on picking learning an advanced web language. This has been something I've wanted to do for a while as I've done as much as I can with HTML. I'm looking at picking up a book that does teaches PHP (one of the Advanced web languages), MySQL (a database program/language) & Apache (a web server program to run PHP 7& HTML on). Toss in CGI-PERL with it & I can probably start up on own fully automated, dynamic website like Refugees or at least create my own Bulletin Board from scratch. The sad downside to all of this is that NESpresso will have to move onto another server, which will most likely be a private server online, which I'll have to pay for (costing around $130 / yr.) or I'll have to get another computer connected online to be my private server & host it myself, which will only cost me $10 / yr. for a the domain name only, but will cost around $500 for a reasonably equipped computer. That's all I have for this issue of NESpresso's Daily Drip. It's been a long time since I've written an update this long, excluding my blogger (which I'll need to make an update). I hope to get some actual work done on my website later, but this will have to do now. I'll C'ya Latte! ~TStodden


	© 1996 - 2005 TStodden, © 1999-2005 NESpresso Multimedia Entertainment All rights reserved