Help!

Last Sunday it was raining heavily. In the night my daughter called my attention to an ant which was trapped in silken web. my initial thoughts were that it was a spider’s web which had trapped the ant. I could not see any spider around. It was dark and i was struggling to focus on the head and eyes of the ant in My Canon EOS 5D mark II using Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro under the modeling lamp of the Canon MT-24EX macro twin light flash. As I was shooting I noticed a small larva next to the ant. Then I realized that the web was the creating of this larva. You can see the larava at the edge of the picture. The ant must have attacked the larva which in retaliation spewed web all over the ant which had the ant trapped. You can see the web more clearly in this second photograph.

Trapped

As i took these shots it started raining heavily and Next day morning I could not trace either ant nor the larva.

Publisher 2007 flaw could allow attacker to take control of a system. EEye claims that the flaw could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a system at the same privilege level as the logged-in user.

Effectively this would allow an attacker to take control of a system running Windows XP. But it causes less of a threat to Vista because most users will not be running in administrator mode.

A Microsoft spokesperson said that the company had been notified about a potential vulnerability and is investigating the reports. Microsoft stressed that it is not aware of any attacks exploiting the flaw.

“Microsoft will continue to work with eEye to further understand this report as part of our standard Microsoft Security Response Center investigation process and will provide additional guidance for customers as necessary,” said the spokesperson.

As I posted earlier Microsoft just announced release of the promised ODF converter. Developers of the open source project to produce a translator between OpenDocument format (ODF) and Open XML document formats announced the completion of the 1.0 release of the technology. The completed Open XML Translator enables conversion of documents from one format to the other and is available for anyone to download and use at no cost. When plugged into Microsoft® Office Word, for example, the Translator provides customers with the choice to open and save documents in ODF rather than the native Open XML format. The Translator may also be plugged into competing word processing programs that use ODF as the default format to open and save documents in Open XML. Microsoft Corp. announced its support for the open source project to build a technical bridge between Open XML and ODF in July 2006 to provide interoperability between formats. Since inception, it has remained among the 30 most active projects on SourceForge.net and has been downloaded more than 50,000 times.

The 1.0 release of the Translator supports the current industry-standard document formats of both Open XML and ODF. It has been tested on Microsoft Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP and has been localized into Dutch, French, German and Polish. In addition, Novell has announced that the Translator will be natively implemented in its next version of OpenOffice.

The second phase of the translator project, including translators for Spreadsheet (Microsoft Office Excel®) and Presentation (Microsoft Office PowerPoint®), will begin in February. Regular customer technology previews will be posted to SourceForge.net beginning in May 2007, and the final versions are scheduled to be available for customers in November 2007.

The Microsoft-funded translator project is being developed by French company CleverAge and Sonata Software Ltd. of India, and tested by Dialogika of Germany and India-based Aztecsoft Ltd. The project will continue to be open source, developed on SourceForge.net (http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter) and freely available to all customers for development or use.

A Microsoft-sponsored open-source project is expected on Friday to release a translator that will convert file formats between Microsoft Office and rival standard OpenDocument, or ODF. Microsoft started the project at SourceForge last year, relying on three partners to develop the code that lets a user open and save word processor documents in two different formats. The Microsoft format is called Office Open XML (OOXML), which is the default document format in the company’s recently released Office 2007 suite. The other is ODF, which is backed by Microsoft competitors IBM, Sun and Novell.

The plug-in will work with Microsoft’s Word application, including the latest Office 2007 version as well the Office 2003 and Office XP editions, Microsoft said. Once installed, a person can open and save documents in the ODF format from Word. People can download the software, available under the open-source BSD licence, for free from SourceForge on Friday. Microsoft intends to make the software available from its own website as well, the company said.

Sorce: ZDNet

Not only Microsoft is disappointing users big time, by not releasing Live Messenger for Windows Mobile, but here comes another debacle: Microsoft’s own Office 2007 will produce files that will not be readable with Office Mobile that is pre-installed in Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC edition!

Apparently Microsoft has just confirmed, rather unofficially, that support for Office 2007 files will be provided in windows Mobile in the middle of 2007, what coincides with a time when first devices powered by Windows Mobile Crossbow (Windows Mobile 6.0) will go on sale! Interestingly Windows Mobile Crossbow offers Office Mobile also in MS Smartphone version of Windows Mobile, not just in Pocket PC version, so the support for new Office 2007 files may be provided in these both Windows Mobile platforms.

Conclusion: situation is fluid and if Office 2007 compatibility is crucial for you, you may end up buying a Windows Mobile phone now, that will not be upgrade-able to Crossbow… or to a version that can read Office 2007 files. Unfortunately once again end users of Windows Mobile are in limbo due to Microsoft’s strategy “to get new features buy new device with new operating system”. It would be only proper for Microsoft to state clearly (and officially) what is the road map for Office 2007 compatibility in Windows Mobile.