[Preston] Hello

[Andrew King]

Matthew said:

>>I've made do with Abiword/OO/KWord/vi and a canon BJC-4200 and survived,
>>but admittedly get away without having to use office software that often
>>- mostly just for CV's and when management need something in writing.
>>Hoping to get away with TeX when I get back to uni, but things might
>>have changed by then anyway. I can see how it could be a hard time
>>persuading someone who uses Office 2000 a lot to switch to any of the
>>other open source alternatives - there's no way it's going to happen
>>here in the next couple of years at least.
> 
> 
> I think I'll just have to wait and see when Gnopernicus is released how
> useful it actually is...
> I have Office 97 Pro here and have been very happy with it.  Office 2k is
> bloated beyond belief (600MB+ for a full install as opposed to about 150-200
> for 97) and XP, again, does little more than 97 and has the terrible new
> interface/patronising nature about it.

Office 2k is a lot more bloated isn't it - but I was surprised to find 
that it loads a lot faster - well under five seconds, I'd say, on just 
about all our workstations (PII-350, 64MB, and up). Which surprised me, 
since Windows doesn't seemed to have followed the same trend - 98 would 
crawl on things that ran 95, and 2000 would crawl on things that ran NT, 
etc.

> I really must learn vi after my exams...

Good luck with it - I'm definitely glad I learn't it. Very worthwhile. 
The colour (syntax highlighting?) is great especially. Still haven't 
really tried emacs.

>  I hear that Perl is very good for sysadmin / monitoring / anything to do
> with text or list processing, etc.  Maybe you don't need a fully-fledged
> database.  But if you do then StarOffice 6 is reputed to have a good
> Access-like DB (but it is not GPL, of course).  Maybe PHP and PostreSQL
> would work ok but I imagine it would take *a lot* of setting up.

OK. I'm wondering whether to make this a kind of project for learning 
about PHP/*SQL, but then if that's the case, it should probably be done 
out of paid hours, and there's the issue of whether it can be written up 
and simplified enough that the next person can carry it on.

Thanks,

Andrew