ShrimpWorks

I haven’t really seen a lot of news about the OpenOffice.org 2 Beta release. It seems to me like a pretty important thing :P.

Anyway I popped by the OO site recently and grabbed the beta (which is actually version 1.9.79). Anyway, first thing to note is the loading time has unfortunately not really changed much since the 1.1 range. Next thing you’ll notice is the look. It looks a few million times better than previous versions, and actually looks like a native Windows application now. The toolbar icons all look much clearer - I never really liked the previous version’s icons much at all, they were all very unclear as to what they did.

Next up, Calc now supports 64000 rows!! This was my biggest gripe with previous versions - they were limited to 32000 before, which pissed me off no end when trying to work with large chunks of data. For me, this is the biggest improvement I could have hoped for :). I also found defining custom number and date formats somewhat easier than before.

I can’t say I’ve used Writer all that much, so I can’t comment too much on that, but I did note that the Print Preview has been properly overhauled. The Print Preview seemed to have been an issue when trying to convert people :).

I can’t say I care much for the new Open Document Formats, since most of my work requires me to use Excel and Word files, so I just write to those formats whenever I save. Lets see if MS will start to support the format in Office now that it’s been recognised and approved as a standard.

Overall, I guess the real version 2 can only get better :).

I thought that it’s about time I messed around with proxies, so yeasterday I set up Squid on my server, xan.

The configuration looked like a bit of a mission for a first-timer such as myself :P, so I whipped out Webmin and slapped on the Squid module. I’ll take a look at the config options it generated some other time and do it by hand in future.

I must say the variety of options available is quite impressive. The access control lists are particularly exciting too, there’s a helluva lot that can be done with this stuff.

It’s only being used for HTTP at the moment, and is doing an excellent job. I’ve managed to get AWStats to do some basic reporting for it, so I can see who’s using how much bandwidth, viewing how many pages, what file types are being accessed, etc. I’m a bit of a stats junkie :P.

Overall I’m pretty impressed…